When Charlotte Cushman took the stage in 1837, she did something that few American actresses today can get away with: She played a man. Cushman, whose gender-bending portrayal of Romeo preceded public awareness of homosexuality, escaped most history books. The reason for her erasure from record and her place in LGBT history were subjects of a March 10 Chicago History Museum (CHM) talk by Professor Lisa Merrill.
"Cushman performed identity throughout her life," said Merrill, who authored When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators, a critical biography of the actress. Merrill explained that while Cushman had many female lovers, lack of knowledge about homosexuality allowed the public the hold her up as moral and chaste.
Cushman, who performed during the mid 1850s, was not the first woman to play male characters, but she was the most famous. But while other women did it to titillate men (men's clothing at the time showed more skin than women's clothing), Cushman did it because she wanted to.
She enjoyed unprecedented success because of it. "Before Cushman, no American performer had achieved this kind of fame in Britian," Merrill said. According to Merrill, many critics wrote that Cushman's Romeo was superior to those played by men. One reviewer for the People's Journal remarked that "had I not known the part was played by a woman, I would not have suspected her sex."
After reading this quote, Merrill showed the audience at CHM a picture of Cushman as Romeo. The audience burst into laughter. Cushman, in her tights and smock, looked much like one might expect Susan Boyle to look if you dressed her as Romeo—buxom but feminine. In short, Cushman would not likely pass as male today. Merrill, who also laughed at the image, told the audience that "we need to historicize the way people saw during that time."
Cushman played male roles in her personal life, too. Merrill said Cushman and her partner, Matilda Hays, often called each other "Charlie" and "Max." Seeing the two women together, writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to her sister and said, "they live together, dress alike. They have a female marriage."
Cushman worked hard to conceal her identity offstage. She told her lovers to burn her letters in fear the wrong eyes would find them. But it was not her letters that would cast her out of the history books. Cushman lived before Freud, before gender transgression was seen as gay. Once the public was able to place Cushman, her legacy was largely lost.
Letters that escaped burning eventually ended up in the hands of Lisa Merrill. They have also been passed along to Leigh Fondakowski, the writer of The Laramie Project who is currently writing a play about Cushman.
Fondalowski and About Face Theatre Director Bonnie Metzgar joined Merrill on stage for a panel discussion at the end of the evening. The three fielded audience questions on whether or not Cushman may have been transgender, the significance of Cushman's climb to wealth and how it was that Merrill had deciphered letters to uncover that she was gay.
The lecture was the second of three installments in the "Out at CHM" series leading up to the unveiling of CHM's LGBTQ exhibit May 21. More information is available at www.chicagohs.org/planavisit/upcomingevents/special-events/out-at-chm.
