Queer Reads: Andrew Erdman drops new book on the first superstar drag celebrity
Meet Julian Eltinge, America’s most successful and highly-paid female impersonator from the 1900s to the 1920s. Enter a forgotten world of musicals and burlesques where men from college to the boardroom to the military enthusiastically dragged up for lots of applause and little retribution.
Visit backstage vaudeville, discover a blossoming Hollywood, and rub elbows with silent-film royalty. Author and psychotherapist Andrew Erdman highlights the first wave of drag and its biggest star at the time in the United States with Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America’s Greatest Female Impersonator by Oxford University Press released last month.
Rich with detail, this immersive biography about a gender-bending vaudeville celebrity will appeal to history and theater buffs alike.
Eltinge’s story offers complex insight into cultural attitudes about masculinity and femininity, reminding us that humans have always contained multitudes.
