Paul Rudnick on Jeffrey, Jersey, & His New Novel.Artistic Throwback or Feminist Pioneer?.Asexuals Are Here, and They’re Organizing.John Singer Sargent’s Hidden Inspiration.Steven Reigns Retries an AIDS-Era Scapegoat.Robert McLane’s Trip to A Very Natural Thing.Richard Taddei on His Mentor, Edward Melcarth.
Calling the Media on Trans Representation.The Lighter Side of a Capitalist Hellscape.Daniel Heath Justice, Indigenous Gay Scholar.Gutsier, and Ten-Plus Years before ‘The Well’.Men at Sea in the 19th C.: The Case of Fryer.Perhaps it was similar to the amused cognitive dissonance of the middle-class matrons who were fans of Liberace’s campy performance while still believing he was straight. Although the medical literature of the 1870s had begun describing “sexual inversion” and the popular press was critical of foreign performers with “unnatural passions,” Hindle’s and Wesner’s personal lives were overlooked even as their stage act was wildly popular for its transvestism and its parody of gender-bending masculinity. One critic described the swell as “an idler with a snap, a butterfly with some virility.” For the popular, largely male audience, this dandy was simultaneously a figure of humor and of emulation, with his fashionable clothes and wealth that could attract beauties. Hindle and Wesner specialized in the song and banter role of the “swell,” who was a wealthy man of leisure. Her male impersonation act, with song and quick costume changes, was billed as “à la Hindle” and was successful from the East Coast to Texas. She diversified her performances as she grew older to include blackface minstrelsy.
Ella Wesner was a Philadelphian who, like many male impersonators, had an early career as a dancer.