Photograph of “Female Impersonator” Julian Eltinge, Taken c. 1920

Unknown location, 1920. Approximately 10 x 13 inches. Some tears and chips at edges, very good contrast, editorial overpainting on recto, overall very good. Marks on verso reading “Julian Eltinge Hippodrome March 12”. Very good. Julian Eltinge (1881/1883–1941) was an American actor and “female impersonator”—in today’s terms, a drag performer—from Newtonville, Massachusetts. Eltinge’s drag career began at age ten, and by the early 1900s he was touring internationally, performing a vaudeville act wherein the “audience was completely deceived as to Eltinge’s sex until he removed his wig”[1]. This portrait shows Eltinge seated in costume. On the reverse is written “Julian Eltinge Hippodrome March 12”, and the front is signed “Herold Brown” (this signature does not appear to belong to commercial photographer Harold M. Brown). A stamp is legible that dates the photograph to the 1920s, though the exact year is not legible. Eltinge has been described as “without question, the most famous female impersonator of all time” (ibid.).

[1] Slide, Anthony, “Julian Eltinge,” in The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers (Westport, Connecticut: Arlington House, 1981), 46.