Drag History: Partially Identified Early Gender Nonconforming Cross Dressing in American Vernacular Photography, 1900s-30s

Early Gender Nonconformity

Photograph

Gender nonconforming dress and cross dressing photo archive, 1900s to 1930s, documenting Americans using clothing and pose to move between the sharply differentiated masculine and feminine appearances prescribed during the early twentieth century. Across 22 photographs, cisgender women appear in trousers, ties, waistcoats, jackets, caps, and other masculine clothing, while cisgender men appear in dresses, bridal clothing, nurses' uniforms, and other feminine attire, sometimes within groups in which several participants exchange or deliberately exaggerate gender roles. Many handwritten captions occasionally describe these transformations in the participants' own language, referring to people appearing “as women” or “boys” rather than leaving gender variance to be inferred solely from clothing. The photographs preserve the historical practices of cross dressing and gender nonconforming self presentation now central to the study of queer and transgender history.

Photo archive of 22 silver gelatin photographs and real photo postcards, ranging from approximately 1½ x 1½ to 4½ x 6½ inches, United States, 1900s to 1930s. The photographs range from private snapshots to formal and theatrical group portraits. Women pose in masculine suits and hats, ties and waistcoats, trousers, work clothes, and other combinations that depart from conventional feminine dress; one confident outdoor portrait shows a woman standing with hands in trouser pockets, wearing a vest, patterned tie, rolled shirt sleeves, cap, and short hair. Another snapshot shows two trousered figures seated together beneath the handwritten question “Who are the boys?” Group photographs extend this play with gender into social and theatrical settings, including women reclining arm in arm on the grass, costumed ensembles, women in nurses' uniforms posed beside figures in masculine clothing, and a staged group surrounding a desk in an apparent amateur theatrical production. Two photographs mounted on a black album leaf captioned “Bohunks 1935” identify Newton Russell, Bud Forsythe, Ross Callison, and Tom Davis, with Forsythe and Davis appearing in women's clothing beside their conventionally dressed male companions. Elsewhere, a woman poses behind the wheel of an automobile, and another photograph places a masculine presenting figure seated alone in an open field, dressed in dark trousers, jacket, and hat. Numerous marginal and verso inscriptions identify participants by name or describe their appearance and circumstances, including a real photo postcard that carefully identifies women dressed in masculine attire. These inscriptions preserve the language through which the photographs circulated among friends and acquaintances, attaching names, jokes, relationships, and gendered descriptions to appearances that might otherwise survive without context.

The photographs date from a period when clothing could carry legal consequences as well as social meaning. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the period represented here, more than forty American cities enacted ordinances restricting public appearance in clothing deemed inappropriate to one's sex. At the same time, theatrical performance, costume parties, collegiate entertainments, amateur theatricals, and private joking created socially permissible settings in which people could cross established boundaries of masculine and feminine appearance. The archive records a mix of subjects appearing theatrically costumed, while others adopt masculine or feminine clothing in ordinary outdoor and domestic settings, and several captions make gender transformation itself the joke, subject, or remembered fact of the photograph. The surviving names and contemporary annotations are especially important because they return these images to particular social relationships rather than leaving them as anonymous examples of unconventional dress. Light to moderate surface wear, toning, occasional creasing, edge wear, staining, and small losses; several photographs with manuscript captions or inscriptions on margins and versos. Overall good condition. A record of how Americans participated in and preserved departures from conventional gender presentation during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Item #23758

Price: $2,400.00