Bruz Fletcher

Bruz Fletcher born 12 March 1906 (d. 1941)

Bruz Fletcher was an American singer, songwriter and novelist who enjoyed brief success during the so-called Pansy Craze in the 1930s.

After a successful career as a songwriter and nightclub performer in Hollywood in the 1930s the police began a clampdown on gay performers and venues which made it increasingly difficult for Bruz Fletcher and similar artists to find work or perform; it is widely believed that this frustration contributed to Fletcher's suicide in 1941. As a songwriter he was a master of writing coded lyrics concealing a queer undercurrent.

He left behind a catalogue of intelligent and witty songs and a few records. There is an excellent detailed biography of Bruz Fletcher, his life and career at the Bruz Fletcher Project - link below.

Bruz Fletcher Project: Remembering A Gay Voice

Parker Tyler

Parker Tyler born 6 March 1904 (d. 1974)

Harrison Parker Tyler, better known as Parker Tyler was an American author, poet and film critic. Tyler lived with filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse (1926-1994) from 1945 until his death.

Born March 6, 1904, in New Orleans, the son of an insurance salesman, Tyler lived a childhood on the move, living in larger cities all over the eastern United States. He completed high school but refused to enter college, determined to continue his education as a poet on the streets of New York, where he arrived in 1924.

By the time he began corresponding with Charles Henri Ford a few years later, Tyler had already published scores of book reviews and hundreds of poems, many of which received their first public hearing in the basement clubs of Greenwich Village, where Tyler lived. Tyler was known in the neighbourhood as a dandy, going about in mascara and attired in cast-off clothing from the second-hand shops of the Lower East Side.

Tyler's letters apparently ignited in Ford a similar desire for the bohemian life, and in January 1930 he set out for New York. Tyler was waiting at the pier when Ford disembarked.

Ford had arrived in New York at a curious moment in time. With the stock market crash of 1929 only a few months in the past, the Depression was beginning to deepen. Nobody, it seemed, had any money or prospects, certainly not Ford or Tyler. Prohibition was still in full swing, though it was openly flouted by many, including New York's mayor Jimmy Walker.

Out of Prohibition came speakeasies, illegal quasi-private clubs, a number of which in the Village were sufficiently sheltered from scrutiny to become some of the first specifically gay and lesbian gathering places in North America. The more visible congregation of gay men in public places led to a vogue among New Yorkers for these 'strange brothers' - the so-called pansy craze.

He co-authored The Young and Evil (Obelisk Press, 1933) with Charles Henri Ford, an energetically experimental novel with obvious debts to fellow Villager Djuna Barnes, and also to Gertrude Stein. Tyler and Ford co-edited the Surrealist magazine View until it folded in 1947.

A writer for the journal Film Culture, Tyler is one of the few film critics to write extensively on experimental film and underground film. His Screening the Sexes (1972) is thought to be the first book-length study of homosexuality in film. Other books of film criticism by Tyler include The Hollywood Hallucination (1944), Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947), Classics of Foreign Film (1962), Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (1969), and The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building (1973).

Pictured: Parker Tyler and Andy Warhol photographed by Gerard Malanga - worth clicking on for the larger image

Tyler's books became popular - and some old titles reissued after being out-of print for years - after he was mentioned several times in the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal.

Parker Tyler died of prostate cancer in New York in 1974.

Bert Savoy

Bert Savoy born 7 January 1880* (d. 1923)

Bert Savoy was an influential early American drag performer.

Bert Savoy - born Everett McKenzie - began his drag act 'doing a hootchie-kootchie dance at freak shows in Boston and polished it in the wilds of Alaska'. He nearly hit the big time in 1914 while understudying for James Russell of the Russell Brothers (known for their 'bitch' act: a pair of Irish servant girls) in Maids to Order when Russell dropped dead.

Savoy found greater success in 1915 when he begun a partnership as comedic partner to 'straight man', Jay Brennan (allegedly after Savoy had picked up Brennan on a streetcar). The team was a huge success; they headlined in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. Savoy & Brennan are pictured left.

Savoy was one of the first of such acts to clearly be associated in the minds of the viewing audience as being overtly homosexual in theme and content. Most other female impersonators of the day, such as the international sensation, Julian Eltinge, went to great lengths to let you know that they were engaged in painstaking artifice. Eltinge's career was accompanied by a pull out the stops public relations effort to show him in any number of traditional 'virile male' activities, when off stage.

Although drag had always been a main staple of vaudeville, it was not really performed as or perceived as 'gay' until the appearance of Savoy, who was pure camp on and off the stage. The two routines which gave rise to Savoy's catchphrases 'You Don't Know The Half Of It, Dearie' and 'You Mussst Come Over' were preserved for posterity on a rare 1923 Vocalion recording made shortly before Savoy's untimely demise.

The story of Bert Savoy's death is legendary and, by all accounts, absolutely true: on June 26, 1923 Savoy, his half-brother and two friends were walking along the shore at Long Beach watching an upcoming storm when a thunderclap prompted Savoy to squeal, 'Ain't Miss God cuttin' up somethin' awful?' or something similar. He was immediately struck dead by a bolt of lightning. How camp is that? In fact, the lighting focused on a bath house locker key around Savoy's neck. One friend, whose hand was resting on Savoy's shouder, was also killed and the other left paralysed. His half-brother survived.

Brennan continued the act quite successfully for a while with Stanley Rogers, owing much to the fact that Rogers copied Savoy's mannerisms and catchphrases to a tee. Brennan later became a scriptwriter in the movies and died in 1961 at the age of 78.

Mae West is alleged to have based much of her act on Bert Savoy.

Bert Savoy at Queer Music Heritage

*Musicals101.com list his birthdate as 1876 but most sources agree on 1880.

Ray Bourbon

Ray Bourbon born 11 August 1892 (d. 1971)

If a good deal of mystery surrounds the life and career of Ray Bourbon so many years after his death in 1971, it is probably due to the fact that Bourbon excelled at generating numerous conflicting stories about himself.

He claimed, at various times, to have been born Hal Wadell in Texarkana, TX in 1892, Ramon Icarez in or near Chihuahua, TX in 1898, and the son of Franz Joseph of Austria and Louisa Bourbon. Many 'facts' regarding Bourbon's early life­, his claim to birth of Bourbon royalty, his claim to an education at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans, his claim to have been Pancho Villa's notorious 'Señora Diablo'­ are all unsubstantiated and probably products of Bourbon's own active imagination.

He claimed to have begun in the theatre in England in 1913, and this may well be true. He returned to the US by 1917 and, as Rae Bourbon, supposedly won a Photoplay contest and was awarded a studio contract as first prize. He would say later that he worked in several silent films, and it is reported that he appeared under the name Ramon Icarez as a fire dancer at the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923.

By the mid-20s, Bourbon was working with Bert Sherry as the vaudeville team of 'Bourbon and Sherry' and later toured with the Martin Sisters. In 1932, he was working full-time as a female impersonator at such clubs as Jimmy's Back Yard in Hollywood and Tait's in San Francisco. (At this last club, in May 1933, his Boys Will Be Girls review was raided by police during a live radio broadcast.)

In the later 30s and early 40s he headlined at the Rendezvous in Los Angeles and starred in his own revue, Don't Call Me Madam. His Insults of 1944, which began at the Playtime Theatre in Los Angeles in January of that year, caught the attention of Mae West during its New York production in May, 1944 at La Vie Parisienne. She cast him in her 1944 production of Catherine Was Great and in her 1948 production of Diamond Lil.

Throughout the 50s and 60s Bourbon entertained at hundreds of clubs throughout the US and released dozens of albums, certainly the most prolific female impersonator to have done the latter. His appearances are still fondly remembered by many who saw him when he toured in big and small towns all over the country, providing many isolated gay men with a glimpse of the loose-knit urban Gay community of the pre-Stonewall era.

Ray’s comedy was, at once, highbrow and lowbrow, overtly gay and covertly subversive. There is evidence that he had relationships with both men and women, was married twice, and fathered at least one son. In his memoirs, Ray discusses his sexual attractions and relationships to both genders with equal enthusiasm, but never called himself gay or bisexual. He worked on stage in and out of drag. Bourbon was probably cashing in on the news of Christine Jorgensen when he claimed to have had a sex change in 1956 (almost certainly not true).

After a once quite successful career, by the late 1960s Bourbon had fallen on hard times. In 1968, Bourbon was barely eking out a living, travelling through Texas and working at the Jewel Box Revue in Kansas City. During this time he was implicated in the murder of the owner of a Dog Kennel where Bourbon had lodged a collection of some 70 dogs. The circumstances alone beg many questions, but Bourbon was convicted as the mastermind of the killing along with two conspirators. The 78-year-old Bourbon was given a 99-year sentence. He died a short time later, on January 19, 1971 in the Howard County Texas prison, while penning his unfinished memoirs Daddy Was a Lady.

Don't Call Me Madam - The Life and Work of Ray Bourbon

Gene Malin

Gene Malin born 30 June 1908 (d. 1933)

Gene Malin was an American actor, emcee, and drag performer during the Jazz Age. He was arguably the first openly gay performer in Prohibition-era Speakeasy culture, and started the so-called Pansy Craze.

Gene Malin, also known by his stage name Jean Malin, was born Victor Eugene James Malin in Brooklyn to working class Polish/Lithuanian parents. He had 2 brothers and 2 sisters. One brother became a police officer, and the other worked for a sugar refinery, but Gene had other inclinations early on. As a teenager, Gene was already winning prizes for his costumes at the elaborate Manhattan Drag Balls of the 1920s. By his late teens, Malin had worked as a chorus boy in several Broadway shows but was considered too effeminate. Around the same period, Malin worked at several Greenwhich Village clubs as a drag performer, most notably the Rubaiyat.

Several columnists noted his talent and in 1930 (at age 22) Malin was booked at Louis Schwartzs' elegant Club Abbey at 46th and 8th Ave. It was at this point that Malins' career and fate took a most interesting turn. Although Malin was at times assisted by 'Helen Morgan Jr', a popular drag artist of the day, he did not appear in drag himself. The crux of his act was not to impersonate women, but to appear as an openly gay male. Here he moved on stage and amongst the audience members as a Tuxedo clad, elegant, witty, wisecracking Emcee (the Master of Ceremonies). He still often resorted to a broad exaggerated swishing image and the many other such 'Pansy acts' that followed often had a tone of a straight Vaudeville man doing an exaggerated impersonation of an effeminate 'Pansy'. Perhaps the joke had several levels - as the performer was often a gay man doing his impression of a straight man doing his impression of a gay man. In doing so, Malin and other such performers as Karl Norman and Ray Bourbon ignited a 'Pansy Craze' in New York’s speakeasies and later in other cities as well.

Malin became the top earner of Broadway for a time. After headlining numerous New York Clubs, he took his act to Boston and ultimately to the West Coast. While in Hollywood, he appeared in several films, usually as the stock character of a witty limp-wristed sales assistant.

In the early hours of August 10, 1933, Gene Malin was killed in a freak accident. He had just performed a 'farewell performance' at the Ship Cafe in Venice, California. He piled into his sedan car with roommate Jimmy Forlenza and comedic actress Patsy Kelly. It seems that Malin confused the gears and the car lurched in reverse and went off a pier into the water. Malin was instantly killed (pinned under the steering wheel) the other two were seriously hurt, but miraculously survived. Malin was only 24 years of age at the time of his death.

Although many in his audience probably saw him as one more oddity, in a short span of time Gene Malin had made history. Alas, little survives beyond a couple of recordings, and a very few film appearances and photos.

Malin left behind two recordings, released posthumously and pressed in a single royal blue shellac 78, That's What's the Matter With Me and I'd Rather Be Spanish Than Mannish; the latter can be heard here.

Strangely, he was married briefly; his wife was Lucille (or Fay) Helman who was later a notorious madam in Manhattan who was convicted in 1936 and 1942 of sending prostitutes across state lines.They married in Los Angeles in 1931 and applied for a Mexican divorce the year he was killed.