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In the 1940s and 1950s, Madam Tirza’s Wine Bath was one of the most famous performing acts in Coney Island.

Madam Tirza herself was a fascinating woman. According to another of her dancers, Mary Hood, Tirza was “a he-she, she-he . . . she’ll either fall in love with a man or a woman.” If Tirza was out late the night before with a girl, Hood recalled, she or another of the backup girls would be Madam Tirza for a day, shimmying beneath a many-headed fountain of red-dyed water, surrounded by a phalanx of mirrors that turned one dancing girl into five.

Tirza had invented her wine-bath routine shortly before the war. While contemplating the beautiful Bethesda Fountain in Central Park one day, she realized how fabulous her act would look set inside it. So she hired an architect, who developed a prototype that weighed so much it was impossible to move.

Frustrated, Tirza took a sledgehammer and refashioned it herself, just in time to get sponsored by a Chicago wine company and present her act at the 1940 World’s Fair in New York (the same one that featured Gypsy Rose Lee).

After that, Tirza was on the road for years, dragging along her twelve-hundred-pound wine fountain. The tank required a lot of setup and maintenance, and the ranks of skilled workers had been badly depleted by the war, so Tirza became a member in good standing of the plumbers union, as well as a licensed trucker. She summered at Coney Island, where her act soon became a well-known draw. Later, Tirza would recall this time as the “best run” she ever had.

After the war, however, Coney Island quickly began to hit the skids. In 1945, for the first time ever, its summer crowds were bested by Rockaway Beach, which had twice the number of visitors. In June 1946, Tirza’s Wine Bath—along with two other Coney Island burlesques—was temporarily shuttered by the city license commissioner, Ben Fielding. Tirza’s mother, who helped with the show, told the press, “Maybe we went a little further than we meant this time, thinking it was a Democratic administration and a little gayer somehow. But we guessed wrong.” (Gay was already being used to refer to homosexual men by this time, and it still retained echoes of its earlier slang meaning, referring to female sex workers, but it’s not clear in what sense Tirza’s mother meant it here.)

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What is one important fact you learned about Tirza and the way she lived? Why is this fact an important thing to know?

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What prevented Tirza from having wide social acceptance during her lifetime?

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How would Tirza's life been different if she had lived in our current society?

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Jane Barnell (January 3, 1871 – died 1951) was an American bearded lady who worked in circus sideshows, dime museums and carnivals. A trapeze artist and commercial photographer, who used various stage names including Madame Olga.

Barnell was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to George Barnell, a Russian Jewish itinerant wagon maker, and his wife, a woman of Irish and Catawban ancestry. By two years of age, she was capable of growing a beard. Her mother took her to hoodoo doctors and other folk healers to remove her condition.

In 1875, Barnell's mother sold the 4-year-old Jane to the Great Orient Family Circus and Menagerie while her father was away on business in Baltimore. Jane toured with the circus for several months around the South before the circus went to New Orleans, left for Europe, and took her with them. In Europe the circus toured with a German circus.

In spring 1892 she met a circus performer Professor William Heckler who talked her into stopping shaving and got her employment with John Robinson's Circus. At that time her beard was 13 inches long. She went back to North Carolina every winter until her grandmother died in 1899. She worked with the Robinson circus for fourteen years.

At some point during her life, Barnell worked as a trapeze artist before having a railroad accident that ended her career. She then became a commercial photographer. She was married several times.

Barnell toured for a time with a number of circuses, including the Ringling Brothers circus, and later joined Hubert's Museum in Times Square, New York City. She appeared in Tod Browning's 'Freaks' (1932) which left her unhappy with the overall portrayal of the sideshow performers in the film.

In April 1935, she was working at the Ringling Brothers' sideshow at Madison Square Garden.

The exact date and place of her death is unknown. Her date has been erroneously reported online as October 26, 1951.

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What is one important fact you learned about Jane and the way she lived? Why is this fact an important thing to know?

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What prevented Jane from having wide social acceptance during her lifetime?

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How would Jane's life have been different if they lived in our current society?

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Lashon- I learned that Tirza was bold because of her association with dating men and women. I think this is important because it shows that she has a flamboyant attitude and she doesn’t care what people think about her.

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Ella Wesner (1841 – November 11, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York) was the most celebrated male impersonator of the Gilded Age Vaudeville circuit including performing shows in Coney Island and her own nightclub in downtown Brooklyn.

Wesner began her career at the age of nine as part of a family of vaudeville and musical-stage dancers. By her mid-twenties, she was playing both male and female roles.

Wesner's career was closely linked to the vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor, for whom she was the featured male impersonator, performing at Pastor's theater and touring in traveling shows he organized.

Wesner's career was briefly derailed in 1873 when she abruptly left Pastor's shows to elope to Paris with the notorious Helen Josephine "Josie" Mansfield, who had been the mistress of Gilded Age Robber Baron "Diamond Jubilee" Jim Fisk as well as the mistress of his murderer, Edward S. Stokes.

The event evoked considerable scandal; it was discussed in most of the major metropolitan newspapers and journals in New York, Chicago, and other major American cities. After the romance cooled, however, Wesner returned to the United States and resumed her career with Pastor, winning even wider audiences.

Her most celebrated era was the 1880s; her act included not only songs celebrating the "sporting" life and skits such as her popular rendition of a drunkard getting a barber's shave, but also monologues containing advice for men about how to court, treat and satisfy women.

Wesner's career stumbled as styles changed; she shifted routines to become a "quick-change" artist, and then faded from vaudeville.

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What is one important fact you learned about Ella and the way they lived? Why is this fact an important thing to know?

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What prevented Ella from having wide social acceptance during her lifetime?

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How would Ella's life have been different if they lived in our current society?

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Historically, some of the most visible queer people in Coney Island and in America have been performers, particularly male and female impersonators. On the vaudeville and variety stages of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, performers that transgressed the gender binary were a common sight.

Florence Hines, a Black singer and drag king who got her start on the stage sometime around 1891, when the Paterson Daily Caller called out Hines in particular for being an “excellent male impersonator.”

The Creole Burlesque was a standard minstrel show, featuring all Black performers, led by a white manager, giving skits, songs, and scenes that featured standard variety acts (everything from clog dancing to drag) set in a pre-Civil War Southern plantation fantasy. But within a few years, Sam T. Jack would launch The Creole Show, an important milestone in Black performance in America. For the first time, an all-Black revue was presented as a modern, staged performance — not as an “authentic” recreation of Black life. The Creole Show was “a major outlet for Black artists interested in… developing a comedic tradition that was racially grounded but not riddled with stereotyping.”

In another important departure from tradition, instead of hiring a man to play the traditional lead role of master of ceremonies, they hired Florence Hines. As a drag king, Hines performed a routine that made mock of the “dandy” — flashy, modern, young men who drank and dated openly, and wore the latest clothes. Black performers, taking on a dandy role was also a way of resisting degraded depictions of Black people that were common on stage at the time.

By 1904, The Indianapolis Freeman would report that Hines “commanded the largest salary paid to a colored female performer.”

Hines’s career seems to have lasted about 15 years — at least, her career as a male impersonator did. Hines became a preacher, now that her home city of Salem, Oregon had gone dry.

Today, Florence Hines deserves to stand in the long line of queer, Black, stud performers, from Gladys Bentley all the way up to Lena Waithe, whose incredible talent has won them acclaim from audiences all too ready to dismiss them for their race, their gender, and their queerness.

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What is one important fact you learned about Florence and the way they lived? Why is this fact an important thing to know?

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What prevented Florence from having wide social acceptance during their lifetime?

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How would Florence's life have been different if they had lived during our current society?

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Please be sure to answer this exit ticket even if you may not have completed the padlet.  THE PADLET WILL CLOSE AT MIDNIGHT. 

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Please be sure to answer this exit ticket even if you may not have completed the padlet.  THE PADLET WILL CLOSE AT MIDNIGHT. 

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Draw on inferences you have been making about Coney Island and the four women performers, what kinds of things could society have done to better support, honor or integrate these women into mainstream society?