Enter to win Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator!

Enter to win Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator! To enter the contest, fill out the form below between Tuesday, August 20, and Tuesday, September 10.

From the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, female impersonation was a hugely popular performance genre. Long before today's popular television shows, men in colleges, business, and even the military formed drag clubs and put on musicals and variety shows of all kinds with little fear of negative judgment. But no female impersonator was as famous, successful, or highly-regarded as Julian Eltinge (1881-1941). Eltinge, born William Dalton just outside Boston, started playing female characters and imitating women with his mother's encouragement as a child while his father shuttled his family around the Americas in search of a mining fortune that never materialized. The future drag star returned to Boston in his late teens where he quickly rose through the ranks of semi-amateur all-male musicals, then transitioned to vaudeville, and eventually starred in hugely successful musical comedies such as The Fascinating Widow (1910).

For decades, the Julian Eltinge Theatre on West 42nd Street bore testament to his stature. But Eltinge longed to play serious roles which did not require him to impersonate women; it was a lifelong struggle. He constructed a hypermasculine offstage persona-- a cigar-loving former Harvard athlete who beat up anyone who questioned his manliness--most of which wasn't true. But Eltinge's efforts were essential in a culture increasingly focused on separating "real men" from "inverts" and "perverts," demanding men define themselves in new ways during a time of economic and cultural upheaval. During his heyday, Eltinge published a beauty and advice magazine for women, launched lifestyle-brand makeup and skincare products, and became a paid spokesperson for corsets and women's shoes, all without a hint of irony. Julian Eltinge's success with mainstream audiences, ever avoiding suspicions and scandal, says much about the emergent middle-class white heteronormativity of the era and what we have come to think of as the social construction of gender. Beautiful pays tribute to Eltinge and gives rich insight into his unique contributions to the transformation of cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity.

Praise

"A once-legendary but now nearly forgotten female impersonator from the early twentieth century may seem like a quaint curiosity, far-removed from our gender- fluid, modern age. But as Andrew Erdman demonstrates in Beautiful, Julian Eltinge's convincing portrayal of women on the stage made him not just admired, but hugely successful-the most famous practitioner of his day, doing what we might call 'precision drag.' In an age before TikTok filters, he created his own analog illusion, which Beautiful makes colorfully clear."

Mary Birdsong, actor/comedian (Succession, Reno 911, The Daily Show, The Descendants)

"Andrew Erdman delivers a resounding, king-sized answer to the vexing question that stalks our modern culture: just what is, or isn't, 'masculine,' anyway? And who gets to decide it, sweetheart? Beautiful is not just a biography, it is a profoundly immersive, compulsively readable tale told with rich and decadent accuracy, a bite into a Big Apple long gone by, loaded with juicy, eye-popping characters you can hardly believe were real, but wow were they ever. This hilarious and neatly detailed exhumation of the origins of modern drag, told wittily and lovingly through the lens of one of America's most fascinating and rebelliously gender queer superstars, will leave you obsessed with Julian El tinge long, long after the final curtain drops, and Erdman's last delectable page is turned."

Andy Corren, comedian, essayist, and author of Dirtbag Queen

Author Bio

Andrew L. Erdman is the author of Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator, and Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay. He has also written comedy for the stage, TV, and online platforms. With a doctorate in theatre studies from the City University of New York and a master's in social work from Yeshiva University, Erdman's books connect the sweep of entertainment history to our inner lives. In his work, Andrew seeks to uncover misunderstood aspects of our cultural past and how they relate to misunderstood parts of ourselves.

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