Queer, There, and Everywhere

by Sarah Prager

  Ma’s personality and energy made her famous, and in some ways those characteristics have endured more than her music. There was just something about Ma that couldn’t be captured or contained—and it’s that special something we see echoed in the music of modern female artists who might not even know how bravely Ma Rainey blazed the trail before them.

  LILI ELBE

  1882–1931

  tl;dr One of the first people to attempt gender reassignment surgery

  Famed Danish painter Einar Wegener couldn’t stop looking at his reflection in the mirror. To his surprise and delight, a beautiful woman stared back. The dress and stockings he wore felt beyond natural, as if he’d been wearing women’s clothes his whole life. Einar’s wife, Gerda—also a painter—stood by squealing with joy at her husband’s newfound beauty.

  Gerda’s subject for a portrait had been running late that day, so she’d asked Einar to briefly model for her so she could paint the draping of the dress around the subject’s legs and high-heeled feet. Einar refused at first, but after some begging, Gerda got her way. Even though she only needed to paint the legs, Gerda had had fun putting a wig and makeup on her husband in addition to the heels. Now, stepping back to admire her work, she said, “You look just as if you had never worn anything but women’s clothes in your life.”

  The actual model arrived soon after and was equally overjoyed by what she saw, saying to Einar: “You were certainly a girl in a former existence, or else Nature has made a mistake with you this time.” She even stopped Einar when he went to change out of the clothes, saying she couldn’t bear to see him as a man again after witnessing the fabulous woman he’d become. She also suggested a new name for his feminine alter ego: Lili.

  The name—and the identity that went with it—stuck.

  Lili Is Born(ish)

  * * *

  Lili might not have been physically born that day, but her spirit certainly was. And until Lili’s physical transition about twenty years later, the male Einar and female Lili would share a body. Einar didn’t feel like a woman trapped in the wrong body; he felt as if a woman completely separate from him had been born into his body and that woman didn’t want to share.

  Einar was happily married to Gerda, who proved herself Einar’s perfect partner in the truest sense of the word, encouraging Lili’s full emergence after that day in their studio. The couple had fun “creating” Lili and playing dress-up, but Einar’s cross-dressing and alter ego quickly became much more than that. Lili took on a life of her own; before Einar knew it, he was spending more and more nights as Lili, dressed in his wife’s clothing.

  Eventually Einar and Gerda realized that only Einar or Lili would survive. They couldn’t share one body and one mind; they were completely different people and neither could live half a life. Lili and Einar each spent time being suppressed, wishing they could have their own body and life. Einar loved and hated Lili at the same time. He truly cared for her and wished she could be let out, but he also recognized that his life as he knew it would cease to exist if she were.

  Decision and Transition

  * * *

  In the 1920s there weren’t any resources out there for transgender people—at least not any accessible ones. Einar couldn’t just Google “gender dysphoria” and find a Tumblr community devoted to positive messaging about what he was experiencing. That very same German doctor who coined the term “transvestite,” Magnus Hirschfeld, had also coined the term “transsexualismus” in 1923 and created the first clinic for sex and gender transitions in Berlin. But Einar didn’t know about Dr. Hirschfeld; instead, he went to regular doctors, who told him he was completely insane. They said there was nothing they could do for someone so “disturbed” besides lock him up in an asylum.

  Einar made a decision: he would kill himself on May 1, 1930, just a few months away. He felt better knowing an end to the torment was in sight, because living this double life had indeed become a kind of torture. Lili was desperately trying to be her own woman, and Einar didn’t want to stand in her way any longer. Einar was ready to give up even if it meant Lili would also die with him.

  Thankfully, in February 1930 Einar met Dr. Kurt Warnekros. Kurt was different. He understood Einar immediately. Einar wept with relief as Kurt told him that he likely had underdeveloped ovaries in addition to his external male genitalia (which turned out to be true, making him intersex) and that he could help. “I understand you. I know how much you have suffered.” More beautiful words were never spoken. Lili might survive after all!

  Lili Is Really Born

  * * *

  Physical transition would entail a series of dangerous, mostly experimental procedures beginning with eliminating the original external sex organs and ending with adding internal ones. Einar’s first surgery—castration—was a success. Incredibly painful to recover from, but a success. A couple months later, Einar underwent two more surgeries to get a vagina and fully developed ovaries. Gerda was there to hold Lili’s hand as she recovered. The clinic where the operation was performed was located by the River Elbe in Dresden, Germany; Lili would consider this her birthplace, and the month of the surgery—April—her birthday. Einar was gone by May first, just as he had planned.

  Lili was like a brand-new child. She didn’t see herself as ever having lived in Einar’s body and didn’t see his experiences and memories as her own. She was a new person, part of the world for the first time. Even her handwriting was different. Only Gerda remained a consistent part of her life after she left Einar behind. They went out shopping for dresses together, arms linked like affectionate sisters. Besides Gerda, Lili had almost no one to rely on.

  Sometimes Lili felt like she had murdered Einar, and she felt guilty for taking the place of a talented artist. She wasn’t a painter and would never try to be. Many of Einar’s friends didn’t warm to Lili; they just couldn’t wrap their heads around what had happened.

  Gerda and Lili found themselves in a unique situation. While their bond was intense, they certainly weren’t husband and wife (and “wife and wife” was hardly an option, because one, same-sex marriage was not a thing in Denmark yet, and two, both women only were interested in relationships with men). The king of Denmark granted a special decree making Einar and Gerda’s 1904 marriage null and void, since technically the man who married Gerda no longer existed. The divorce became official on October 6, 1930. It was one of the first times a government gave legal recognition to someone like Lili as the woman she was. She also received a Danish passport recognizing her as a female with the name Lili.

  Meanwhile, people started to wonder what had happened to the famous painter Einar Wegener. So Lili and Gerda decided to go public. A newspaper article was published explaining the transition and announcing Lili Elbe. The news was received relatively well. The Danish people were a little scandalized, but they didn’t label Lili’s transition as sick or wrong. Crowds flocked to buy Einar’s paintings, allowing Lili to live off the income.

  Trying for Another New Beginning

  * * *

  Gerda remarried in 1931, and Lili was overjoyed when an old friend, Claude Lejeune, proposed to her. But something held her back from saying “I do.” She had only been alive for fourteen months and there was one thing that still felt unfinished: getting a uterus so that she could give birth.

  Lili returned to Dresden for that final surgery, so excited about life afterward and the possibility of having a baby. But she died three months later of complications from rejecting the new organ. She had written to a friend from the clinic before her final surgical procedure: “It may be said that fourteen months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life. . . . If sooner or later I should succumb physically, I am quite reconciled. I shall at least have known what it is to live.”

  FRIDA KAHLO

  1907–1954

  tl;dr A bisexual Mexican woman paints her pain and has the world’s most famous unibrow

  On a Thursday after school, two teenagers in M
exico City were sitting together at the back of a bus. Frida had always told her parents that Alejandro was just a friend, even though they’d been a couple for a while. (And, actually, they were on their way to his house to hook up like they did most afternoons.) Carefree and in love, neither had any idea that life for one of them was about to change forever.

  The streetcar careened toward them out of nowhere, and the bus split into a thousand pieces on impact. People and splinters of wood sailed through the air. A passenger’s pouch of gilding powder—finely powdered gold used to make paint—exploded, sending the gold dust flying; the hazy afternoon sparkled.

  When Alejandro, mostly unharmed, got out from under the rubble, he found Frida in the debris. She was naked, her clothes having been torn off by shrapnel. And her body . . . well, it wasn’t at all the same as when Alejandro had last seen it: the angles looked painful, and she was covered in blood that glittered gold.

  Still, it was going to be all right. At least all her limbs were intact, and she was conscious, and she was breathing.

  Then Alejandro saw that part of the debris wasn’t just lying on top of her, it was going straight through her.

  An iron handrail from the streetcar had pierced Frida’s body from one side to the other. Entering her back, it had exited through her vagina. When a fellow survivor wrenched the bar out of her, Frida’s screams were louder than the sirens of the incoming ambulances. Later, she would say this was how she lost her virginity.

  Recovery

  * * *

  Frida (well, Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón . . . Frida for short) hadn’t been a typical high schooler before the accident in 1925. Her friends had been a group of mostly boys who hung out talking about philosophy and revolution. They devoured books and pulled off legendary stunts, like the time they set off a small bomb next to one of their teachers during class to protest his refusal to teach them about Marx.

  The short-haired girl didn’t care that it wasn’t ladylike to run and play sports. And she didn’t care that she embarrassed her parents, even once showing up to a family portrait dressed in a man’s suit. She also didn’t mind the limp that polio had left her with. Frida was content to march to the beat of her own drum.

  Everything changed after the accident.

  While eighteen-year-old Frida’s spine, ribs, pelvis, right leg, and collarbone were all fractured in multiple places, she had survived. But in the years to come, she would often wish she hadn’t. She spent a month in the hospital lying on her back in a full-body cast, mostly alone and completely immobile.

  Frida underwent thirty-six surgeries in her remaining twenty-nine years of life. She suffered daily pain as each fragmented bone and shredded organ tried to stitch itself back together. And though her pelvic area healed, she was told she couldn’t have kids. Her spine was never the same, and as an adult she had to wear metal corsets to keep her upright.

  Back at home after her hospital stay, Frida stared at the wall, stared at the ceiling, stared at Alejandro’s back as he left forever. And so Frida began painting out of sheer boredom. Well, boredom and necessity, given that her arms and hands were some of the only body parts she could use. It was no surprise that her subject was the person she spent the most time with: herself. She fastened a mirror to the top of her canopy bed so she could look up at her model and complete dozens of self-portraits.

  Three years after the accident, when she was healed and able to walk again, Frida lugged her paintings through the streets to someone she thought could give her some artistic direction: the world-famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Diego was as well known for sleeping with his girlfriends, lovers, and wife as he was for his politically motivated art.

  Diego was creating a mural in the middle of Mexico City when Frida called him down from the scaffolding. “I didn’t come here for fun,” she said. “I have to work to earn my livelihood. I have done some paintings, which I want you to look over professionally. I want an absolutely straightforward opinion, because I cannot afford to go on just to appease my vanity.” He told her honestly that her paintings were good enough to make herself a career. Diego later said of that moment they met: “I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life.”

  The Other Accident

  * * *

  Frida said that she had two accidents in her life: the bus and Diego Rivera. Both Frida and Diego quickly forgot that one of the first things she ever told him was “I have not come to flirt.” Moving fast for 1920s Mexico, they shared their first kiss a few days after they met.

  Frida wasn’t the typical fangirl flitting in and out of Diego’s life, and he knew it. When he began to court her, her parents were relieved that someone who could afford her medical bills had taken an interest (even though he wasn’t exactly their ideal son-in-law). Despite Diego’s being twice Frida’s age and having a well-earned reputation as a “woman chaser,” her father seemed more concerned for the muralist than for his daughter:

  “I see you’re interested in my daughter, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is a devil.”

  “I know it.”

  “Well, I’ve warned you.”

  When they married a year later, Diego was a three-hundred-pound forty-two-year-old and Frida was a ninety-eight-pound twenty-two-year-old. People said it was a union between “an elephant and a dove.”

  And boy, were the elephant and the dove dramatic together. They didn’t set out to have an open marriage, but they did each hit the double digits in the number of people they slept with while married. And every new fight outdid the last. She would throw a vase against a wall, he would slash a painting with a knife, and they would both yell as loud as they could. They lived separately in side-by-side houses connected by a bridge, but Diego often found the entrance to Frida’s on the other side locked.

  Just when Frida thought she could handle his casual dalliances with models, she discovered his long-term affair with her own younger sister. This time, it felt as if the streetcar’s handrail had stabbed her through the heart. She was so used to pain—both physical and emotional—that she buried the feelings of betrayal and continued on as a better wife than ever. She put Diego’s career first, bringing him lunch each day while he worked on one commission or another. She traveled with him for months through the United States as he painted murals, even though she hated “Gringolandia” and sorely missed her beloved Mexico.

  Halfway through their twenty-five years together, they divorced for one year. But eventually they were drawn back to the marriage, to each other. Frida and Diego were opposing magnets that always ended up passionately joined no matter the force of the resistance.

  Her Own Mistresses

  * * *

  Frida’s affairs with men made Diego wildly jealous, but he didn’t seem to mind her liaisons with women. Her life’s motto was “Make love, take a bath, make love again.” Everything from lying still to having sex brought more pain, but Frida wanted pleasure too, and she didn’t stop pursuing it.

  Frida reportedly bedded prominent artists like American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, Mexican actress Dolores del Río, American-born French performer Josephine Baker, Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, French painter Jacqueline Lamba, and American artist Isamu Noguchi. She even slept with the American actress Paulette Goddard—after Paulette had had an affair with Diego.

  And through it all she painted. She painted the pain of her body and of her marriage to the elephant. The public began to see her as the painter Frida Kahlo instead of the wife of Diego Rivera. The surrealists of Paris thought she was one of them, but she insisted that she painted her reality (her world was just surreal to outside observers).

  Twenty-nine years after the bus accident, Frida’s health began fading more rapidly. She had lost a leg and a few toes in some of the thirty-six surgeries she’d endured, and she was once again bed bound. Her marriage with Diego was as calm and happy as it had ever been, and th
is time he took care of her instead of the other way around.

  Though her work already hung in the Louvre, Frida was particularly determined to attend the first exhibition of her own paintings in her home country of Mexico. Her doctor had ordered her to stay in bed, but Frida had never been one for following rules. She decided to bend them instead of breaking them this time: she had herself delivered in her four-poster canopy bed to the gallery as a piece of performance art. It was the final show of her life.

  MERCEDES DE ACOSTA

  1893–1968

  tl;dr A magnetic writer sleeps her way through Old Hollywood’s A-list

  Rafael couldn’t throw a ball as well as the other boys, and their taunts about him throwing like a girl stung like needles. The tension among the group was growing and the New York City playground was starting to feel like a battlefield. Eventually, Rafael challenged the leader of the half-pint group to a fight.

  Instead of putting up his fists, the boy dropped his pants and showed Rafael his penis. “Have you got this?” he asked.

  Rafael was horrified at the sight of something so . . . strange. “You’re deformed!” Rafael said.

  “If you’re a boy and you haven’t got this,” the boy taunted, still holding his junk, “then you’re the one who’s deformed.” Other boys pulled out theirs as further proof that a penis wasn’t an abnormality.