As I have commented before, there is now so much trans history, that a universal timeline is futile, and most that I encounter are badly done. I have already discussed which are the better universal timelines.
Which brings us to regional timelines. The rough story is the same everywhere: initial oppression, some resistance, some success, more success. But the details and the persons involved are quite different, and the local issues can also be very different. Some months back I did an Atlanta-Savannah timeline.
Now here is what happened in Oregon and Washington. Apologies for the lack of native two-spirit content. It should be included, but I was unable to find a summary of such.
The early years are dominated by pioneer trans men and female impersonators. Of the trans women discussed in Part I only Alice Baker and Hotcha Hinton passed well off stage. Trans women as we today think of them, will appear in Part II. In the circumstances before the mid-1950s, those with the yearning to be trans women settled for stage performance or the occasional private party - that was all. Of course many others yearned but suffered in silence.
The significance of Albert Ellsworth will become apparant in Part II.
Part I – to the closure of The Garden of Allah, 1956.
Part II – to the Buckwater & Kotala decisions 1996.
Part III – to now.
Part I – to the closure of The Garden of Allah, 1956
1579
1811
British explorer David Thompson conducted overland exploration. In 1811, while working for the North West Company, Thompson became the first European to navigate the entire Columbia River. Stopping on the way, at the junction of the Snake River, he posted a claim to the region for Great Britain and the North West Company.
Thompson who had met Kaúxuma Núpika/Manlike Woman in the upper reaches of the Columbia River, now met him and his wife at Fort Astoria. Kauxuma had been passing, but Thompson outed him. Kauxuma’s prophesies on the downward journey had so scared the Lower Columbia River inhabitants that the locals were intent upon killing Kauxuma, who now approached David Thompson to seek his protection during the journey upriver.
1812
1818
1843
1846
1850
Settlement increased with the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 and the forced relocation of the native population to reservations in Oregon.
1853
Washington became a US state.
1859
1866
1886
1894
1898
1900
1901
1902
1903
1906
1909
1911
Ray Leonard, now 62, was found wandering at night and was disoriented. He was taken to the state hospital, where, on being stripped for a bath, was declared to be a woman. Ray recovered and returned to Lebanon, but the authorities made him wear dresses (although he wore trousers underneath). The men no longer gathered in his shop.
1912
It just so happened that while Harry Allen was in jail, Miriam Van Waters, a Portland native, an anthropology student at Clark University, Massachusetts and a future prison reformer was in town doing research on female inmates at the city jail. Waters perceived Allen to be an energetic and independent woman for whom modern society (unlike many aboriginal tribes) had no place.
November 8: 19-year-old Benjamin Trout was arrested in Portland for only petty theft. But was so frightened that he confessed to participation in local homosexual culture. The story dominated local newspaper headlines for several weeks, over 50 men were implicated, those who fled to California, Washington and British Columbia were arrested there. Most charges were dismissed due to lack of evidence, however seven pled guilty or were convicted, and one committed suicide in his room at the YMCA. The newspapers contained numerous lists of suspects along with spicy details about drag parties, men with female names, secret codes of communication, male brothels, nationwide networks of perverts, and local sites where men met for sex.
December 12: physician Harry Start was charged with sodomy, and convicted. The prosecution entered into evidence accounts of drag parties.
Julian Eltinge’s Vaudeville Review played the Metropolitan Theatre in Seattle.
Oregon suffrage extended to women on the 6th attempt.
1913
The Oregon legislature, responding to claims during the 1912 trials that fellatio was not forbidden by the 1853 Sodomy law, broadened the 1853 law to forbid both oral sex and “any act or practice of sexual perversity”.
Harry Start appealed on the grounds that it had been improper to introduce evidence regarding activities for which he had not been charged. The prosecutor argued that this was to establish that Start was a congenital invert. In May 1913 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that “To admit testimony...making it appear that the accused has the bent of mind adapted to such actions, would cloud the issue and confuse the jury” and overturned the conviction. However Start had lost his Oregon medical license. Start moved to Hong Kong, his wife Mary to follow later, but she died of a drug overdose. Start moved on to the Philippines, where he was still working as a urologist during the Japanese occupation after 1941. After WWII he returned to the US and died in a mental hospital in California in 1946.
1915
1916
1917
Alberta Hart, the only ‘woman’ in her class, graduated from the University of Oregon Medical Department in Oregon (now the Oregon Health Sciences University School of Medicine) with the highest honors in her class, and consulted a physician-psychiatrist, Dr J. Allen Gilbert of Portland, Oregon. Dr Gilbert established that the real problem was connected with her sex. He had initially tried hypnosis to get her to accept a conventional female role, but she had refused to continue in that.
1918
1919
1920
- Joshua Allen Gilbert. “Homosexuality and its Treatment”. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 52, 4. Oct 1920: 297-322. Identified the patient, Alan Hart, only as ‘H’. The article is a mix of the patient’s and the doctor’s writing. In line with the practice of the time, the patient’s condition is labeled ‘homosexuality’.
1921
1923
1925
1926
The teenage Francis Blair already has a trunk full of female clothing, and passed easily on Seattle streetcars.
1928
1929
1930
18-year-old Vilma arrived in Seattle. While he had previously done quite a bit of female impersonation, he desisted as he grew older.
1930s
Hanna Banna had come to Seattle with the Alaska Gold Rush in the late 1890s. Sometimes dressed as female, but not always, Banana was often found at The Casino, where she was the local gay historian.
Chicago Marge was one of the few who always wore female clothing. She also hustled. One night she was chased by a policeman, but got away. The next day the local newspaper ran a cartoon of the incident and complained of police wasting time and money,
The Spinning Wheel cabaret featured female impersonators.
Female impersonators were also featured at the State, Rialto and the Palm. The public were not told which dancers were trans.
Francis Blair was in the chorus line of the Rivoli Burlesque. Her gender was known and her dressing space was separated from that of the cis women by a screen. She sometimes played the organ for the show.
1942
1946
The Garden of Allah, previously a speakeasy and then a tavern, re-opened, this time as a gay cabaret. It was Seattle's most popular gay cabaret in the late 1940s and 1950s and one of the first gay-owned gay bars in the United States. Acts were primarily female impersonation, though some male impersonators also performed. The opening night act was the Jewel Box Review. Local performers included Wanda Brown, Michael Phelan, Francis Blair, Jackie Starr, Robin Raye, Hotcha Hinton, and Paris Delair. Unlike the female impersonator nightclub, Finocchio’s, in San Francisco, local gay men and lesbians were encouraged to attend.
Hotcha Hinton, raised as a circus performer, worked each winter at the Garden of Allah and did many of the costumes for the show until it closed. Her act involved live snakes to the consternation of the other performers. In summer she would leave to work in carnivals. She lived as a woman full-time, was quite pleased to be taken as a woman, and she would get upset if she failed to pass on the phone, or if show-biz rival like Ray Bourbon or Liz Lyons referred to her as a man. She had electrolysis but apparently did not take the new hormones.
Jackie Starr, previously with the Jewel Box Review, was signed as the headliner at the Garden of Allah.
Francis Blair was known for her singing, but also danced, stripped, produced shows and designed costumes. Syndicated columnist Walter Winchell wrote about Francis as ‘the boy with the million-dollar legs”.
Bernie Carey (born 1922) was an impersonator at the Garden of Allah, on and off, 1946-1952. Later he became a hairdresser.
1947
Bill Plant/ Peewee Nattajon (born 1929) won the amateur night at the Garden of Allah several times. The older performers encouraged him, and he took the name of Nattajon in homage to an older performer who helped him and others. Bill was mainly a dancer, but later also a stripper.
Skippy Larue started going to the Garden of Allah, Jackie and others encouraged her to perform, and helped with costumes, makeup and how to a do a gaff. She sometimes performed as Madame Fifi.
1948
Robin Raye came to the Garden of Allah. With the help of a female friend, entered the amateur night as a stripper, and won. Later he worked with Lee Leonard before she became Liz Lyons. Start of a 20-year career. He later performed at Finocchio’s and with the Jewel Box Revue. He married a female stripper in 1958. And the marriage lasted 30 years,
Lee Leonard from Seattle also performed at the Garden of Allah as an impersonator. The act was more raunchy than most. Later Leonard likewise performed at Finocchio’s in San Francisco, and toured with Robin Raye.
1950
Jackie Starr married preacher-trucker Bill Scott.
1952
1954
1956
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The following were consulted in compiling this section of the timeline.
- Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977
- Peter Boag. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. University of California Press, 2003.
- Peter Boag. “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History”. Western Historical Quarterly, 36, 4 (Winter, 2005): 477-497.
- Peter Boag. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, 2011.
- Mara Dauphin. “ ‘A Bit of Woman in Every Man’: Creating Queer Community in Female Impersonation”. Valley Humanities Review, Spring 2012.
- Ross Eliot. Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth. Heliocentric Press, 2014.
- Joshua Allen Gilbert. “Homosexuality and its Treatment”. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 52, 4. Oct 1920: 297-322. Identified the patient, Alan Hart, only as ‘H’. The article is a mix of the patient’s and the doctor’s writing. In line with the practice of the time, the patient’s condition is labeled ‘homosexuality’.
- Chrystie Hill. “Queer History in Seattle, Part 1: to 1967”. History Link, April 2003. http://www.historylink.org/File/4154.
- Don Paulson with Roger Simpson. An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle. Columbia University Press, 1996.
- Don Paulson and Skippy LaRue photograph collection, 1903-2000. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv08840#ID2IKKWE2WIFAHGDYOPTQOQJOI2D1SP3S3E5IWOL1ZA01PAY42LBE.
- Danni/y Rosen and Ampersand Crates. “Oregon Trans Timeline”. The Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest (GLAPN), 2017. www.glapn.org/6031TransTimeline.html. Lists Alan Hart in 1917, but then no other transsexual until the 21st century.
I couldn’t find which years Liz Lyons was in Oregon/Washington.
Who was the elder Nattajon? Bill Plant says that he was in 13 Hollywood movies, including Beauty and the Beast and The Picture of Dorian Gray. However there is no Nattajon listed in IMDB. He is probably listed under another name – but which?
This timeline places Washington statehood at 1853. November 11, 1889 is the correct date.
ReplyDeleteLiz Lyons -
ReplyDeleteSeattle Washington 1949
Eureka California 1952
Idaho Falls 1952
Greenly Colorado 1953
Fairbanks Alaska 1953
Spokane Washington 1954
Fairbanks Alaska 1954
Phoenix Arizona 1954
Spokane Washington 1955
Yuma Arizona 1956
Spokane Washington 1960
Spokane Washington 1964
Minneapolis Minnesota 1964
Spokane Washington 1965
Winnipeg, Canada 1968
Minneapolis 1971
Ontario, Canada 1980
Calgary, Canada 1984
Detroit, Michigan 1985
Winnipeg, 1990
You have put this in the wrong place. I have copied it and placed it in the article on Liz Lyons. I will remove it from here after a few days.
Delete