Sideshow Royalty Find
I first saw Tod Browning’s 1932 film “FREAKS” when I was very young - maybe four or five, too young to understand what an impact it would have on me. I believe it was on TCM, a station I always tuned into late at night in the hopes of catching some of the classic Universal Studios Monsters movies, or a Joan Crawford picture.
The film instantly pulled me in: the captivating cliff-hanger of an opening, the sideshow setting, the colorful cast of characters. Even as a child, the background performer who I was drawn to the most was the half man/half woman, Josephine-Joseph; I found myself transfixed every time they were on camera! Being a young child who already had a firm sense of my identity, the androgynous blurring of masculinity and femininity spoke to me in ways that I had never encountered before.
As I grew older and watched the movie time and again, I began to understand it in new ways and found myself fascinated by the subversion of expectations that the film delivers: the true villains of the piece are the scheming Cleopatra and Hercules, so-called “normal” people with dark ambitions hiding behind their physical beauty. And yet, their mistreatment of those who are different results in brutal consequences exacted by the very people they humiliated and ridiculed, showing that the capacity for twisted deeds can be found within us all if the right motivations are appealed to.
In my early teen years, I began writing a novel set in a sideshow with a half-and-half narrator - what would eventually become Sprezzatura: The Rise & Fall of Venus Moonchild. For reference material, I rewatched “FREAKS” and found that Josephine-Joseph fascinated me now more than ever; I saw them as a mirror representing my own gender dysphoria, and began to expand upon that in my own work using my protagonist as a proxy for my own complicated feelings of identity.
Over the years, I have done a great deal of research on sideshow performers, with a special focus on half-and-halfs. The library I have amassed is considerable, but my favorite items are the half-and-half memorabilia pieces I have collected, spanning from the 1920s to the 1960s. Most are pitch cards or cabinet portraits of different performers, and I always love seeing how gender diversity has been depicted through the sideshow lens throughout the years: these performers have a sense of glamour, power, and dignity about them in their images that I hope they were able to manifest in real life during a time when trans and queer awareness was painfully low. Since most half-and-half performers were either trans women or female illusionists, examining these depictions provides insight into the evolution of queer representation during the last century. However, Josephine-Joseph was likely a cisgender woman, making her even more unique among her peers and to me.
While there have been several half-and-halfs I have become enamored with over the years (particularly Paul-Pauline LaPage, whose pitch card that I discovered as an early teen inspired Venus Moonchild and all of Sprezzatura), Josephine-Joseph has remained a constant inspiration for me since childhood, having been my introduction to this staple of sideshow history. Whenever I scour the internet for sideshow memorabilia, I try to find something related to them. Up until recently, I had been completely unsuccessful. Although I did find an incredibly well-researched website dedicated to uncovering details about their life, including a scandalous court case where they were prosecuted for faking their act, actual ephemera from their reign as sideshow royalty evaded me until last week when a random impulse told me to check the pages of sideshow memorabilia vendors that I follow. There, waiting for me on the first results page, was a genuine pamphlet sold at Josephine-Joseph’s shows in the 1920s (above image), before her appearance in “FREAKS” ever happened. You can imagine my shock! I snatched it immediately, and it arrived yesterday in remarkable condition for a century-old piece of paper. Some people truly do not know what they are selling!
After so many years of searching, it feels like an amazing connection to finally have something that at one point belonged to someone who has ultimately been lost to history, but who has been a huge influence to my creative life.
