Royal Defiance
Royal Defiance
The image on this issue's cover is one of a series of photographs—another picture from the same series appears on the cover of C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity1—of a Black couple in a variety of poses. The postcards on which they appear identify these gestures as part of the cakewalk.2 The image has often been associated with William Dorsey Swann, one of the most prominent drag queens / transgender women of late nineteenth-century Washington, DC.3 Channing Joseph's article in the Nation in January 2020,4 describing his own discovery of Swann via an 1888 Washington Post report of a raid on a "Negro dive" at which "thirteen black men dressed as women [were] surprised at supper and arrested,"5 was illustrated by this photograph, strongly implying that the image was of Swann. In fact, the image—part of the Wellcome Collection, a museum funded and maintained by the pharmaceutical giant of the same name—is of two vaudevillians, Charles Gregory and Jack Brown, who were credited with bringing the cakewalk to France (indeed, the photograph is, as the caption suggests, one of a series of French postcards produced to publicize their act).6 Brown was famous for his performances in drag, and the pair's interpretation of the cakewalk was so well known in Paris that the Lumière brothers, inventors of the first movie projection technology, filmed them dancing (in the same costumes they are wearing in these photographs) in 1902.7
I'm interested in the desire to identify this picture, and the others from the series, as being of Swann. Almost all the articles that discuss him, from Joseph's original Nation piece to stories in Pink News (a British queer news and lifestyle website), the Georgia Voice ("The Premier [End Page 219] Media Source for LGBTQ Georgia"), the Oregonian, Black Enterprise, and Yahoo News, either implicitly or explicitly identify the person in drag in these photographs as Swann.8
At a moment in which the histories of African Americans and the lived experiences of transgender people (and particularly those who occupy both subjectivities) are under concerted attack, it is not surprising that Swann's story and the photographs of Gregory and Brown are so often conflated: queer and trans people want visible evidence of Swann's remarkable life. Their trajectory from enslavement in Maryland to emancipation in 1862, when the Union army marched through their hometown, to settling in Washington and hosting drag balls on a regular basis (and enduring a number of arrests in the process) cuts across the intertwined histories of Black Washington, DC, cross-racial socializing in the face of Jim Crow, same-sex desire, and gender nonconformity.
Unlike Gregory and Brown, Swann did not make a living appearing in drag. Rather, they crafted an interracial (although mostly Black) community of gay men and trans women in Washington, DC, hosting parties large and small. Newspaper reports of raids and arrests give us a taste of the rich and joyous phenomena that were Swann's drag balls. A story in the April 13, 1888, National Republican describes in detail (however mockingly) the grandeur of Swann's outfit and demeanor in the face of police harassment:
The queen stood in an attitude of royal defiance. Her arms hung by her side. On her head was a black wig. The long white-buttoned kid gloves reached up almost to the shoulders and the (he) queen seemed bursting with rage. The ten-foot trail for her low-cut and short-sleeved white silk dress, with the lace overdress, stood out its full length . . . [A]dvancing her right foot, which was encased in a gold-embroidered black slipper, she said with a haughty air, "You is no gemmen [sic]."
Swann's dressing down of police authority, and their later physical altercation with the officers attempting to arrest them, evinces a sense of entitlement to being treated like a (white) lady as well as the self-possession to fight "like a man." Indeed, the shifting gender of the pronouns in this article underscore the writer's...
