Earlier this summer, I was focused on writing a paper for the Feminist inter-Modernist Association conference in Oxford, MS. I proposed a panel along with colleagues Victoria Lafave and Alex Goody titled “Complicating the Chorus Girl.” One thing that Victoria’s and Alex’s paper shared was a focus on early 20c men performing in chorus girl drag. Victoria discussed the all-male chorus lines of college dramatic societies like Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club or Penn’s Mask and Wig. Alex’s paper dealt with female chorus girls for the most part, then moved into a different register for a drag performance of soldiers going into battle in World War I. (Here’s a story about soldiers in drag in WWII.)
The only information I’ve found that deals directly with queer performers at the Hippodrome comes from a memoir titled Circus Queen and Tinkerbell written by Tiny Kline. Kline was a remarkable performer whose varied experience included equestrian performance in circuses, burlesque dance, and the chorus of the Hippodrome show Hip! Hip! Hooray! This is a photo from her dressing room at Disneyland where in the early 1960s she dressed as Tinkerbell and slid from the Matterhorn to Cinderella’s castle to mark the beginning of the evening’s fireworks.
Kline becomes familiar with her fellow chorus members, which include gay chorus boys and lesbian chorines who room together. Most of what she says about the chorus boys adheres to the kind of old-school embrace of gay men by straight women that I remember hearing from my mom: they’re high-strung and effeminate, very artistic, they’re fun to talk to, “charming” and “fascinating.” One detail I enjoyed is the feminine nicknames she heard chorus boys use for one another, such as “Venus,” “Spring Breeze,” and “the names of candy bars, of all things.” (Kline 67) Kline finds a space for community and conversation, even while onstage during huge ensemble numbers like the “March of the States.” While “buried in the crowd,” she made conversation with the “gorgeous hunks of men” surrounding her, their socializing invisible to the audience and inaudible over the strains of John Phillip Sousa (Kline 72). Here’s a few chorus groups from that number, without the chorus boys who escorted them. The top group is supposed to be New York (maybe looking Dutch?) and the bottom is “Dixie Girls,” I think from Georgia because they’re holding baskets of peaches.
Kline doesn’t talk as much about the lesbians in the chorus, though she does indulge in a little gay panic. A better source I found for thinking about lady-loving chorus girls is an excellent article by Anastasia Jones called “She Wolves: Feminine Sapphists and Liminal Sociosexual Categories in the US Urban Entertainment Industry, 1920–1940.” It’s in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and you should be able to get to it on JStor even without university library access. Jones points out that the best sources from the time period for finding evidence of queer chorus girls is the gossip rags and “sporting pages” of the era like Broadway Brevities. Even though the stories they tell are more scandalous fantasy than biographical fact, they tell us that readers of that time period had a fairly wide “range of urban female homosexual identities that were startlingly rich, surprisingly feminine, and notably racially diverse” (294). I got the same feeling reading this article that I first did when reading Mae West’s “gay plays”: even though I know this is supposed to feel cheap and tawdry, it’s pretty cool that it’s even there in the first place.