Although Deuteronomy 22.5 expressly forbids cross-dressing as an “abomination unto the Lord,” San Franciscans have adored transvestite performance since the earliest days of the Gold Rush. Like many other admonitions ignored by residents then, and since, no one objected at the time to violations of this particular scripture, at least when it came to the theater. Instead, they embraced the cross-dressing performances of Adah Isaacs Menken, Ella Wesner, and their peers, in both serious productions and vaudeville turns, finding these not always virtuous women “more precious than rubies.”
Possibly the earliest male impersonators to appear in San Francisco were the Bateman sisters, who during the 1850s crisscrossed the United States in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Ellen, nine, wearing a pasted on mustache, played the title role. Kate, 11, appeared as Richmond. Already seasoned troupers, they first performed in the City at the Metropolitan Theatre on April 10, 1854. Audiences, reported the Alta California, were “struck dumb with amazement.” They retired as child actors in 1856.
Local audiences found Adah Isaacs Menken even more sensational. A true bohemian spirit, she wrote poetry, championed Whitman, praised those who defied social conventions, and followed her own inner guide. Her first performance in San Francisco was on August 24, 1863, playing the title character in Mazeppa, the story of a young Cossack who is banished for adultery by being tied naked to a wild horse. It became her signature role and ultimate “pants parts.”
During the play, her publicity proclaimed, “Miss Menken, stripped by her captors, will ride a fiery steed at furious gallop onto and across the stage and into the distance.” Of course, the horse was more docile than demonic, and Menken was not actually naked—she wore flesh-colored tights—but no one cared. She simply mesmerized everyone, including Charles Warren Stoddard, the City’s lavender “boy poet.” She was, he wrote, “a vision of celestial harmony made manifest in the flesh.” By the end of her engagement, more than half of the City’s population had seen her perform.
Adah’s behavior and her bohemian friendships generated endless questions, scandal, and gossip about her sexual self. Married five times, she also was amorously linked with both Alexandre Dumas père and Algernon Swinburne. Her “romantic friendships” with women were discrete. “Do you believe in the deepest and tenderest love between women? Do you believe that women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men?” she wrote to poet Hattie Tyng in 1861. “I have had my passionate attachments among women…scorching me with a furnace blast, but generally only changing and renewing my capabilities for love.”
Some performers expressed onstage who they were offstage. Diva Felicita Vestvali–known as “The Magnificent” for her masculine figure, vigorous bearing, and deep contralto voice–first specialized in operatic roles previously reserved for men, including Tancred, Orfeo, and Figaro. She then turned to “pants parts” in serious dramas, especially Shakespeare’s Romeo, a signature role that she debuted in San Francisco in 1865, and Hamlet. Rosa von Brauschweig, who also played male characters, believed Vestvali’s later success was due to her friendship with a German actress. That relationship lasted until her death in 1880.
Ella Wesner, the most successful American male impersonator of her generation, first appeared on stage in San Francisco in August 1871. The San Francisco Chronicle, calling her “inimitable,” praised “her unapproachable portraiture of Male Character.” Because the only entrance to the theater was through a saloon, her performances were for men only. One reviewer regretted that “ladies can’t go to the Bella Union, they would all fall in love with [her].” At the height of her success, her “rapid changes and songs” earned her as much as $200.00 a week.
Wesner never married, but after the murder of notorious Robber Baron Jim Fisk, she and his former mistress, Josie Mansfield, eloped to Europe, where they presided over a louche salon at the Café Americain in Paris. When she died in 1917, members of the Actors’ Fund made sure her wishes to be interred dressed as a man were honored.
Of course, Wesner was only one of numerous male impersonators to entertain the public between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Annie Hindle, her mentor, was the first to capture the public’s affection—and inspire countless imitators—although she did not appear in San Francisco until 1878. Six years later she made national headlines when she married Anna Ryan in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I know all the circumstances,” the minister stated.” I believe they love each other and that they will be happy.”
Indeed they were. When Ryan died in 1891, Hindle declared that “the best of her life is gone.” The next year, however, reported the Chronicle in a page one story, she became “the lawful husband of Miss Louise Spangehl” in a ceremony performed in Troy, New York. “Miss Hindle has three times been married,” the paper explained. “Once she had a husband and twice she has had a wife, once she was a widow, once a widower, and now she is a husband again.” Both onstage and off, she lived her life authentically, “as nature intended.”
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
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