“From Gay Paree”: Exploring Representations of Cross-Dressing and Male Impersonation in the Pages of Female Mimics, 1963-1970

In the first issue of Female Impersonators, published in 1969, a letter to the editor noted that within the letters section, “there has not been a letter or picture of a male impersonator.”[1] To rectify this exclusion, the writer includes a description and photograph of their roommate “Pat” who had been working as a male impersonator for eight years at that point (fig. 1).[2] The letter mentions frequenting the “82 Club” (Club 82), which was a venue in Greenwich Village first featured in the sixth issue of the magazine.[3] Although the venue is discussed frequently in the magazine, alongside mentions of the female impersonators that performed there, the club’s male impersonator waiters are not ever discussed despite being a major feature of the location. A souvenir program from 1969 of the club features a “Miss Waiter” page with photographs of the dining room staff along with their names (fig. 2).[4] This, and the famous Jewel Box Revue’s inclusion of figures such as Stormé DeLarverié and Micky Mercer, show that male and female impersonators worked with one another, at least within the same spaces, but that the cross-dressing periodical effectively excludes male impersonators from their narrative.

Figure 1

Letter from ‘B.P’ featured in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section about their friend ‘Pat’ (in photograph).

Prompting critical examination from ethical and socioeconomic perspectives, this body of work highlights the historical and contemporary impacts of captive labour, specifically incarcerated shoemaking within North America. While the government’s intention for prison labour programs was to reform and educate incarcerated individuals, these programs have consistently benefited those already in positions of power, while simultaneously disempowering marginalized populations. The historical experiences of incarcerated individuals in North America mirror the continued exploitation of their contemporary counterparts. The current article explores the evolution of captive labour within the Canadian Penitentiary system, focusing on the evolution of the ideology and structure of labour programs in the Kingston Penitentiary, a federal facility in Ontario that operated between 1835 and 2012, revealing foundational cracks within the framework of 20th-century reform programs that persist in today's vocational training. Through exploring the historical evolution of captive labour within Canada, the article unveils parallels between the systemic inequalities, racism, and classism that continue to manifest within both incarcerated settings and broader Canadian society.

By analyzing and critiquing text alongside photographs, the constructed reality of dress for the individuals mentioned can be explored. The notion of DIY (Do It Yourself) as characterized in Isabelle Held’s analysis of the history of falsies and padded foundation wear as essential elements in trans-feminine, self-fashioning is particularly relevant here.[6] The same DIY approach applies to the performance costume and dress discussed in Female Mimics, and how impersonators or other cross-dressing individuals made or collected garments themselves or worked with other creatives “to affirm their gender identities and transform their bodies.”[7] As a case study, the representations of lesbians, gender non-conforming individuals, and male impersonators or drag kings in 1960s Paris will serve as an introduction to the invaluable queer, and trans historical record present in publications such as Female Mimics.

The same article notes that Female Mimics was published for sixteen years, starting in 1963, and is an important resource in the study of LGBTQ+, specifically transgender, history.[9] Although the magazine was not always produced by members of the community, it contains valuable information regarding the lives of trans and otherwise gender non-conforming people at the time and “any researcher would be justified in saying that [the] community supported this publication and, therefore, it reflects much about [them].”[10] Queer people contributed to the publication even if they weren’t employed as editors or publishers. Articles were occasionally written by performers or members of the profession and the Letters to the Editor feature, which became an essential element of the publication, included both photographs and letters contributed by readers.

Female Mimics provides information on female, and some male, impersonators in New York and Paris, primarily, but also venues in cities across Canada, Germany, Mexico, and more. Articles range from profiles of specific performers to those focused on balls, events, and venues, as well as “how to’s” and histories of cross-dressing going back to antiquity. A typical publication would feature a colour front and back cover with two to three pages of coloured inserts, usually of the cover star or related to the cover story, and the rest presented in black and white. The overwhelming presence of photographs in the magazine offers a crucial, and mostly under-researched, image source for the study of cross-dressing. The images range from staged photographs in apartments, on sets, those taken at specific venues, publicity shots, and those sent in by readers.

As this article focuses on the publication Female Mimics itself, the most important primary source for this study are the issues produced in 1963 and 1970, which are available on both the Digital Transgender Archive and Internet Archive. For this article, digital versions of the magazine and other supporting primary documentation were viewed online at the Digital Transgender Archive in combination with physical versions of the periodical and other contemporaneous cross-dressing magazines in the collection of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive, located in New York, as well as in the collection of the New York Public Library archives. Many, if not all, of these periodicals focus on female cross-dressing during the period under consideration. Dedicated male impersonation periodicals either did not exist or have not been valued, collected, or digitized for ease of access.

This article follows in the footsteps of numerous recent studies on cross-dressing and its history. Seminal sources on the history and theory behind cross-dressing, such as author Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992) and sexologists Vern and Bonnie Bullough’s Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (1993), are starting points for understanding the meaning behind cross-dressing, its reception in society, and its varied practice not only geographically, but also aesthetically. Theories on gender and performativity, such as gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), are used to analyze the meaning of gender and the revolutionary act of drag in critiquing and highlighting societal expectations of gender roles, expressions, and identities. Clare Sears’ Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2014), Gillian M. Rodger’s Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage (2018), Meredith Heller’s Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending (2020) and Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City (2023) are more recent examples that make use of developments in gender, queer, and transgender studies. Qualifying papers by Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) alumni Deirdre M. Morgan and Donald J. Jackson are also relevant in their discussion of cross-dressing from a dress historical perspective.[11]

As this paper's focus is on male impersonators, I draw from Elizabeth Droubaugh’s chapter on the Jewel Box Revue in the previously mentioned book Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, edited by Lesley Ferris.[12] Understanding cross-dressing in relation to women, drag kings, and male impersonators is an integral part of this article, that is informed by gender studies scholar Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), and drag king Diane Torr, and performance historian Stephen Bottoms’ Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance (2010).

Cross-dressing and impersonation are utilized in the title and throughout this article which is in keeping with the language used at the time under investigation. To use the term “drag” would be a partly inaccurate descriptor for the period since, as journalist Elyssa Maxx Goodman notes in Glitter and Concrete, the term drag queen in the 1960s, and before, implied a level of “amateurness” whereas the term impersonator was used to describe cross-dressing done professionally.[13] Similar to Goodman’s approach, the terminology used to refer to specific performers best reflects how they themselves described their profession or practice as, which could range from a female/male impersonator, drag queen/king, drag artist, drag performer, and more.[14]

In their analysis of cross-dressing and law in nineteenth century San Francisco, Clare Sears similarly follows the “historical subjects’ lead and uses pronouns and names (when known) that correspond to their self-identifications.”[15] When such information is unavailable, Sears utilizes ‘s/he’ and ‘his/her’ as an alternative.[16] For the sake of readability and to avoid the “presumption of gender” or the limitation of gender possibilities, this paper will follow a method utilized by the trans historian Kit Heyam of using they for figures who haven’t explicitly stated their desired pronouns.[17] For instance, Stormé DeLarverié, mentioned briefly in the introduction to this article, has often been referred to using she/her and they/them pronouns, and some friends and contemporaries also used he/him. For the purposes of this study, “they” will be used for the sake of consistency and to honour their gender nonconformity.[18]

Cross-dressing, though, is not a term without its problems. Sears notes that the term is perhaps too broad, obscuring the variations of the very practice it attempts to describe.[19] Importantly, “the term cross-dressing erroneously assumes that the type of clothing that “belongs” to each sex is easily agreed upon, when in fact such determinations are subject to fierce social debate as well as to change over time.”[20] Finally, the ‘cross’ in cross-dressing implies that people are jumping between two modes, reinforcing the idea that gender is binary and nothing more.[21] However, Sears notes the problems with the term cross-dressing do not mean that it is not a useful descriptor, but that it should be interrogated and understood as something “politically loaded” rather than neutral.[22]

Writing about gender-nonconforming people presents difficulties for the researcher attempting to bring their history to light. As Eleanor Medhurst notes in Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion, these subjects are real people who “are ultimately not ours to label, but only to try and understand.”[23] Yet, at the same time, a pervasive cis and heteronormative bias among historians is present. Heyam notes that “historians tend to interpret people from the past as, effectively, cis until proven otherwise.”[24] A trans gaze is effectively “no less objective than any other kinds of history: in fact, in many cases it might be more so.”[25] Although there have been many studies on the history of cross-dressing, few have analyzed the topic through the lens of dress history and even fewer shine a light on male impersonators.

Save for a few examples, such as the recent work by Eleanor Medhurst and Isabelle Held, there is a lack of scholarship within the discipline of dress history exploring this area.[26] Although the period of the 1960s has been studied extensively, both within the field and beyond, how impersonators and other cross-dressing individuals interacted with different trends and changing aesthetics of the time has yet to be thoroughly analyzed. Additionally, erotica and magazines of a similar vein to Female Mimics are often neglected in academic research due to their ‘taboo’ themes or pornographic content. This article serves only as an introduction to the benefit of looking into, and critiquing, these periodicals and the insights they can provide not only to dress historians, but also those in the fields of cultural studies, queer studies, gender studies, and beyond.

As mentioned previously, the majority of venues highlighted within the magazine are located in either New York or Paris. Le Carrousel, a famous Parisian venue for female impersonators, is highlighted as early as the first issue of Female Mimics pointing to the vibrant cross-dressing community that flourished within the European city.[27] As a New York-based magazine, the editorial descriptions of Paris come with a sense of fantastical otherworldliness.[28] Although certain articles highlighted the fact that performers often would work across European cities, it also was not unusual for American performers to appear in European venues, or vice versa.[29] Such a discussion, though, is often limited to that of female impersonators as opposed to their male impersonator counterparts. Overwhelmingly, the discussion of male impersonation is limited to venues located in Paris, despite performers working in New York in many of the spaces frequently highlighted in the magazine. As such, the remainder of the article will focus on male impersonation, butch presentations, and gender nonconformity within these Parisian spaces.

They may embellish their look with various pieces of jewelry or neckwear such as a small bowtie, a cravat, or a more traditional long tie, pointing to a level of individuality rather than uniformity when it comes to how patrons dressed within such spaces.

Le Monocle is perhaps best known as a club that flourished in Paris in the 1930s. Australian-American actor Errol Flynn in his autobiography described the attendees when he visited in the late 1930s as “masculine females, ready to please,” and all “dressed in tuxedos, like men.”[38] The French-Hungarian photographer Brassaï, known for his provocative images of the bar, wrote in 1976 that it was “one of the first temples of Sapphic love.”[39] Much like how Female Mimics discusses the club and others like it he noted, “the women were dressed as men, and so totally masculine in appearance that at first glance one thought they were,” a sentiment similar to that featured in Female Mimics where gender presentations of club attendees are often thought of as poor impersonations of ‘real’ masculinity seen as inherent in cis, heterosexual, male bodies.[40]

The second establishment discussed in the 1963 article is Frede's Carroll's Club, presided over by Frede Baulé, seen smoking a cigarette and “smartly dressed” in a suit in the first page highlighting the club.[41] Much like Le Monocle, Frede's Carroll's Club is described as less an establishment for tourists and more a location frequented by artists, writers, and other creatives.[42] Similar to Le Monocle, despite the many pictures of attendees, few are named other than the owner Frede and the club's secretary Michele Berger, who can be seen in conversation in various photos, both dressed in skirt suits (fig. 6). Both Frede and Berger are depicted with short hair, cigarettes in hand. Frede wears a double-breasted herringbone style suit with a white pocket square tucked into their breast pocket, whereas Berger opts for an all-black ensemble with smaller lapels on the jacket finished with what looks like a pin on her lapel and a white pocket square. Compared to the images from Le Monocle, neither woman wears a tie underneath their slim suits. A photo on the top right corner introducing the club shows Frede with short, cropped hair, cigarette at their lips, and wearing a men’s shirt and blazer with a thick chain bracelet at their wrist (fig. 7). Underneath the photo the magazine notes that “her clothes are made specifically for her by a Paris couturier.”[43] Their coiffed style of hair is almost Elvis-like and the contrast of the photo emphasizes their cheekbones as they draw on the cigarette at their lips.

In describing mid-century lesbian bars Eleanor Medhurst discusses the butch and the skirt:

“Butch lesbians continued to be butch lesbians when dressed in skirts. There were certain ways of dressing that, while appropriately feminine for the eyes of the law, had butch connotations when seen by other lesbians. In the bars, butch and femme identities often came with strict dress codes. This was specifically butch fashion, not general masculine fashion, and it drew on a thread stitched and tugged by previous generations whose lesbian masculinity was not diluted by a lack of two-legged garments…”[44]

Alix Genter, in her analysis of queer legibility in post-war New York, describes the butch favorite of the pencil skirt.[45] Considered “more tailored and less feminine,” the pencil skirt allowed for butches to finish their outfits with masculine garments like a collared shirt and suit jacket, as shown in images from bars like Le Monocle, whereas if they wore a dress such expressions of identity would be harder to portray.[46]

To Medhurst’s earlier point, butch figures in history wearing skirts that were understood by other queer people as masculine was certainly nothing new. Images of the writer Radclyffe Hall and their partner Una Troubridge, understood as both representing a sort of lesbian dandyism in the earlier twentieth century, depicted Hall, more often than not, wearing a slim skirt with a shirt, tie, and jacket, whereas Troubridge would wear a dress (fig. 8). The contrast between their two gender presentations is understood as representing a sort of continuum of lesbian fashion where Hall can be read as more butch whilst wearing a skirt because Troubridge presents more femme in a dress.

The final club mentioned in the article, Chez Moune, appears again in a later issue, unlike the aforementioned Le Monocle and Frede’s Carroll’s Club that are both only highlighted once over the total run of the periodical. Chez Moune was owned and operated by Moune “who dresses and acts like a man.”[47] The first photograph (fig. 9) introducing the club shows Moune sitting at a bar with waiters and customers in their finest menswear.[48] Moune’s light hair is slicked back and they wear a black suit jacket with a white shirt underneath and a geometric patterned tie that pops against the stark light of the shirt. The figures standing slightly behind those at the bar are likely the waiters, all wearing some semblance of a uniform which, in the case of Chez Moune, appears to be a white shirt with a black overcoat and small black tie at the neck.

It’s important to note how much the magazine harps on the masculine-presenting waiters at French clubs like Le Monocle and Chez Moune but completely negates their presence at venues such as Club 82; spaces where female impersonators are more recognized at least in the magazine's context. Alix Genter notes that “the dominant symbol of postwar lesbianism resided in legible butch bodies.”[49] In comparison to femmes, butches were more visibly queer, especially if they wore their hair short and favored more traditional menswear garments like a suit jacket and tie. Much like Frede and Berger from the previous profile on Frede’s Carroll’s Club, Moune is also shown in a skirt suit, seen in full in a photo on the following page (fig. 10) of the owner dancing with a woman who is “one of the rare ones dressed like one,” in attendance at the French club.[50]

figure 9

Moune (center, front) with waiters and guests sitting at the bar of the French venue Chez Moune. “Torrid Three from Gay Paree,” Female Mimics Vol. 1 No. 3, 1963, 60. Digital Transgender Archive.

Figure 11

Moune (center with blonde hair) at Chez Moune, surrounded by customers. At the far left is a headshot of Moune, much like those of male impersonators at Elle et Lui, hung on the wall. “From Gay Paree,” Female Mimics Vol. 1 No. 11, 1968, 20. Digital Transgender Archive.

Maxine and Jacky appear again in the eleventh issue of the magazine where Elle et Lui is highlighted in conjunction with Chez Moune. Placed next to a series of images from both of the clubs, we see a photo of a figure on the top right wearing a tailored ensemble, cigarette in hand, with the promotional photograph of Maxine and Jacky (fig. 16) hung on the wall behind them (fig. 17). This same unnamed figure appears in numerous photos representing the bar, three total times on the one page either alone or side by side with other guests. Additionally, the figure who first appeared in the Elle et Lui advertisement modelled off of Le Carrousel from issue eight (fig. 13) of the magazine is also shown at the club.

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Author Bio

Article Citation

Frederick, Nico. “‘From Gay Paree’: Exploring Representations of Cross-Dressing and Male Impersonation in the Pages of Female Mimics, 1963-1970.” Unravelling Fashion Narratives, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2026, pp. 1-31. https://doi.org/10.38055/UFN050203