Once Upon a Time

By Mikki

Once upon a time, there were female impersonators all over the place. It was a mainstay of burlesque. There was even a Broadway theater named for Julian Eltinge. 

Female impersonator establishments displayed hundreds of ads for female impersonators in regular newspapers. But as more people were turning to television for entertainment, burlesque died except for Milton Berle and a few burlesque veterans who crossed over to television. 

Likewise female impersonator nightclubs... a few of the venerable ones like the 82 Club lasted a while longer and several television variety shows would have female impersonator acts – Dinah Shore was probably the last of TV shows to have them on, circa 1960. I was in the DC area and we had a bunch of clubs, including the Golden Key Club in North Beach, Maryland. We still have a few clubs, but not even close to what we had in the “olden days.”

I found out about 82 Club (aka Club 82), my favorite by far, from friends at the Golden Key Club, and when I went to work in LA, that same friend told me about the Queen Mary Nightclub. “The Queen” was large and had a back bar that was very CD/TG/Drag-friendly. And when I went to work in San Francisco, the venerable Finocchio’s was there waiting for me. My great surprise there was that the beauty I saw (and fell instantly in love with) in the Jewel Box Revue when I was 13, LaVerne Cummings, was the star of the show. 

The 82 Club lasted until 1978. Finocchio’s and the Queen Mary hung in there until 1999 and 2003, respectively with “The Queen” devolving from live into lip sync. Today, you have to go to Vegas or Bourbon Street in New Orleans to find a dedicated female impersonator club. 

Female impersonation just faded into the background, but RuPaul is responsible for exhuming it in a public way. Of course, there are bars all over the country that have drag on occasion, but RuPaul put it back in the open. 

Now I’d probably be hard pressed to find a town of a moderate-to-larger size that doesn't have some sort of drag brunch. Here in Baltimore, we have a very active drag scene. And the closest thing to a Jewel Box Revue we have are those RuPaul’s drag queen contestants on tour. The two I've been to were in large venues that were packed. The audiences were way more "civilian" than our community. My friend and I were the only two “ladies” at the shows. 

Drag/female impersonation has gone from ubiquitous to dedicated show bars, back to local bars and now back out in the open, if differently, thanks to RuPaul. But dedicated clubs are still as rare as hen’s teeth. And maybe the audience has reverted a bit toward the people who went to see female impersonation back in burlesque, not surprised to see it and comfortable with it when they do see it. 

And the RuPaul tours play to largely packed houses. So watching this “evolution” makes me think that drag and female impersonation will be around for a long, long time. And it’s probably going to creep onto television bit by bit until it and we are going to be hardly noticed. And we won’t have to be nearly as concerned about acceptance.

Wearing Bella Dahl

Postcard from Club 82/82 Club in New York City

Someday Funnies

Wearing Bella Dahl

Harry Langdon gets forcibly-crossdressed in the 1927 film His First Flame,
which you can view on YouTube.

Please Support Femulate

Femulate is 100% free to read with no forced subscriptions, no advertisements and nothing hidden behind paywalls. 

Readers have asked to reinstate the Femulate flickr website that hosted the thousands of womanless beauty pageant images that Starla Trimm culled from online high school yearbooks. Rebuilding that website would be a major effort and I am willing to do that, but I am less willing to pay the annual $70 fee that flickr charges. 

If you value our daily content and would like to see our flickr website up and running again, you are welcome to contribute $5 or $10 or whatever to Femulate by clicking Coffee Break! image in the sidebar of the blog. 

By the way, if you contribute via PayPal, please select the “Sending to a friend” option, otherwise, PayPal deducts a fee (for example, Femulate only receives $4.37 of your $5 contribution). 

Sincerely,

Stana Horzepa

About Out and About

Doing outreach at Southern Connecticut State University

I was planning to go out en femme this Thursday to the monthly Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways, which restarted in July after shutting down during the pandemic. However, the way things have been going downhill pandemic-wise, I wondered if the Cocktail Hour would be cancelled or at a minimum, require masking and social distancing. 

I received an email last week informing me that the Hour had indeed been cancelled with hopes of restarting it in September.

Darn it! I may go out anyway.

When out and about, have you ever run into a friend or acquaintance from your male life, who is unaware of your female life?

I have, but I managed to avoid being caught with my pants down (and my panty girdle up).

First time it happened, I was shopping in Macy’s and saw the receptionist from my office strolling down the aisle. I believe that most people who know only my male side would never recognize me en femme, but in this case, the receptionist had seen me in my office girl costume on Halloween. So I quickly ducked down a side aisle and avoided the confrontation.

Second time, I was doing outreach for a Human Sexuality class at Southern Connecticut State University. After class, I exited the classroom and saw a family friend, who was a student at the University, hanging out with some other students. Nowhere to hide, I girded my loins, walked down the hall and passed unnoticed.

Which reminds me of my favorite question received during outreach Q & A:

Student asked, “Are you married?”

I answered, “Yes.”

The student followed up with, “...to a woman?”

And so it goes.

Wearing LIKELY

Grayson Perry

Please Support Femulate

Femulate is 100% free to read with no forced subscriptions, no advertisements and nothing hidden behind paywalls. 

Readers have asked to reinstate the Femulate flickr website that hosted the thousands of womanless beauty pageant images that Starla Trimm culled from online high school yearbooks. Rebuilding that website would be a major effort and I am willing to do that, but I am less willing to pay the annual $70 fee that flickr charges. 

If you value our daily content and would like to see our flickr website up and running again, you are welcome to contribute $5 or $10 or whatever to Femulate by clicking Coffee Break! image in the sidebar of the blog.

By the way, if you contribute via PayPal, please select the “Sending to a friend” option, otherwise, PayPal deducts a fee (for example, Femulate only receives $4.37 of your $5 contribution). 

Sincerely,

Stana Horzepa

Someday Funnies

Wearing Wynn Hamlyn

Eddie Cantor femulating in the 1931 film Palmy Days

Origin of Womanless Beauty Pageants

Womanless weddings, often staged by men’s civic and fraternal groups, were popular entertainment in the U.S. southern states prior to the advent of television. They consisted of a mock wedding in which males crossdressed in the roles of the entire wedding party, including the bride, mother of the bride, bridesmaids, flower girl and female guests. These events were often fundraisers, since many in the community were more than willing to pay admission to see their male neighbors in female attire. (Sources: Wikipedia and NCpedia)

Womanless weddings predated womanless beauty pageants. 

Schools, always looking for ways to raise funds and to keep the student body busy (idle hands are the devil's workshop), noticed the popularity and success of womanless weddings and were inspired to do something womanless in the educational realm. And mid-20th Century, someone came up with the idea of holding beauty pageants with boys crossdressing in the roles of female contestants. 

The earliest womanless beauty pageant that I can find was in 1947, a “Boys’ Beauty Contest” put on by Cradock High School in Portsmouth, Virginia (photo above). Evidently, the Boy’s Beauty Contest was popular and it became an annual event at Cradock High School through the early 1950s. [Note that there were earlier school events in which boys dressed like girls (e.g., Halloweens, plays, fashion shows, follies, burlesques, musicales, etc.), but as far as womanless pageants per se, the 1947 Cradock High pageant was the earliest.]

Eventually adults got into the picture and womanless beauty pageants replaced womanless weddings as surefire fundraisers. Inexplicably, just like womanless weddings, womanless beauty pageants are more popular in the U.S. southern states than anywhere else.  

My research is dependent on over 4700 womanless pageants that Femulate contributor Starla Trimm tirelessly culled from online high school yearbooks, so it is possible that there were earlier womanless pageants that are not documented online. If you know of an earlier womanless beauty pageant, please let us know what you know.

Using those 4700 pageants, I calculated the popularity of pageants between 1947 and 2019. Growth was slow in the 1950s (55 pageants) and began to pick up speed in the 1960s (310 pageants). The heyday for pageants was the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with 1145, 1709 and 969 pageants respectively. The next century saw a dramatic drop-off in popularity with only 437 pageants in the 2000s and 44 pageants in the 2010s. 

Mine is not a precise calculation because not all high school yearbooks are accessible online and some pageants may not have been documented in any yearbooks at all. But even my imprecise calculations illustrate the rise and fall of womanless beauty pageants’ popularity.

Transphobia and homophobia (on the right) and political correctness (on the left) probably account for the drop. 

And so it goes.

Wearing Boston Proper

The 1950 installment of the Boys’ Beauty Contest at Cradock High School in Portsmouth, Virginia

Someday Funnies

Wearing BGL

British professional femulators Colin Ross and Terry Bartlett, circa 1940

My Louboutins

Before

As a fashionista who loves high heel shoes, I am well aware of high heels from Christian Louboutin with their signature red bottoms. Louboutin shoes are beautiful, but their price ($750 and up) match the height of their stilettos... much too high for my femulating budget!

I got the bright idea to paint the bottoms of my own more reasonably priced high heels to emulate Louboutins. 

I did a little research on the Internet and discovered that I was not the first girl to make fake Louboutins. Some girls used red nail polish and other girls used various brands of red paint. One paint job that impressed me used the Angelus brand of acrylic leather paint.

Angelus has a few shades of red, so I did some more research to find a shade that matched Louboutin’s red. Pantone-18 Chinese Red is what Louboutin uses and Angelus’ Fire Red looked to be a good match.

I ordered a bottle from Amazon and it arrived the next day. (I just love Amazon Prime’s instant gratification!)

After

With paint and paint brush in hand, I needed a candidate to paint. I selected my new black patent Nine West Alison sling-back pumps.

It took less than five minutes to do each shoe. I kept a paper towel handy in case I slipped up and painted a part of the shoe that wasn’t its bottom. The dry paper towel cleaned up any mishaps thoroughly. Your mileage may vary with shoes that are not patent leather.

I checked back about four hours later to see if I needed to apply a second coat and I did. Two coats were adequate and I wore my new Louboutins out and about the next day.

Wearing New York & Company (Post-op)

“Mom Catches Son CrossDressing!!” is the title of this short and entertaining video that I found on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it!

Someday Funnies

Wearing Bella Dahl

Heather out and about in Utah

The Name Game

Bette Davis as “Stanley”

My sister mentioned to me that in the 1942 film In This Our Life, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy, respectively. According to IMDB, “The film never hints that there is anything unusual about their names, nor does it offer any explanation.”

IMDB also mentioned, “In David Maraniss’ 2012 biography of President Barack Obama, titled Barack Obama: The Story, he reports that Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, was named ‘Stanley’ not after her own father, Stanley Dunham, but after the Bette Davis character in this film. Maraniss says that Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, saw the movie while pregnant with Obama’s mother, and she thought the name sounded sophisticated for a girl.”

I like that!

In 2012, Bradford High School produced a better than average womanless beauty pageant. Mostly civilian boys in evening gowns, one contestant, Number 8 (photo above), was outstanding and in my opinion, not a civilian. As soon as I saw how he walked across the stage, my trans-radar alarm sounded. He exuded femininity and should have won the pageant hands-down. See Number 8 for yourself by clicking here to view the pageant on YouTube (his appearance begins at the 4:50 mark).

Wearing ESCADA pants

Joey out and about (above and beyond) donating blood.
Read all about it on Joey’s blog.

Someday Funnies

Wearing Boston Proper

F1nn5ter aka Rose is a young British femulator with a huge following on YouTube