I’m guessing our Texas reps, ever eager to get drag queens out of their ball gowns and...
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Scanning Billboard magazine not long after finishing high school early, the teenager noticed a help-wanted ad for an aerialist. The Alfaretta Sisters, a noted circus act from Italy, needed a tightrope walker, since one of the sisters had died unexpectedly. The surviving sister would be holding auditions in San Antonio of all places. I’m assuming the young Texan saw fate beckoning. He must have caught a southbound bus or train immediately, his impossible dream suddenly within reach.
Barbette made his European debut in 1923, when the William Morris Agency sent him to London. Reviewing his high-wire performance at the Hippodrome, the Guardian raved, “It is scarcely enough to say in praising Barbette that Barbette is incomparable.”ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild via Getty Images In 1926, Cocteau wrote an essay about the nature of art, observing that Barbette “transforms effortlessly back and forth between man and woman.” In one translation of Cocteau’s words, “the young performer’s femaleness is like a cloud of dust he throws into the eyes of the audience to blind it to the masculinity he needs to perform his acrobatics.”
“He asked me for the poison, an overdose of Quaaludes,” his nephew told me. “I thought about it, but then I thought, 'I know what he’s going to do! '”
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