Alden Garrison

Alden Garrison
BornJune 4, 1908 (1908-06-04)
DiedDecember 22, 1938(1938-12-22) (aged 30)
Gallinger Hospital, Washington, DC
Resting placeColumbian Harmony Cemetery
OccupationFemale impersonator
Years active1920s and 1930s

Alden Garrison (1908–1938) was a prominent black female impersonator from Washington, DC.[1][2] He performed at various nightclubs along the Atlantic Seaboard, and the national black press covered his life in detail.[3]

Garrison was the child of Rosa Keeling and Will Garrison. He was born on June 4, 1908, and grew up in Washington, DC. At twelve years old, he debuted in a popular local variety show, The Rosetime Revue.[3] Although he danced in costume, he likely did not begin performing as a female impersonator until adulthood.[3]

Writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, Ralph Matthews noted that Garrison “hiked off to New York and almost became a Gene Malin or a Karyle Norman before he returned to Washington”[4] where he had “unusual success as a night club entertainer.”[5] By 1934, Garrison had won more than twenty “best dressed” prizes at drag balls in Baltimore and Washington, DC. He reportedly favored squirrel or mink wraps with accessories.[6] Louis Lautier said that Garrison's “female impersonation [was] almost perfect.”[7]

Amid an increase in policing of gender nonconformity and waning popularity of female impersonators, Garrison had little employment in the last year of his life.[3] Upon his death, the Baltimore Afro-American printed that he “had been melancholy and subject to brooding since the death of his god-mother, who reared him from a child.” Further, he avoided friends and “drifted around the city during the past few months ill and undernourished.”[1] He had been found lying “prostrate in a vacant lot” and later died in Gallinger Hospital.[2]

In 2018, Kim Gallon, a historian at Purdue University, published an extensive account of Garrison's life in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.[3] Gallon's archival research is the most significant source for this Wikipedia entry.

References

  1. ^ a b "No Tears for Alden: Friends Desert Famed Glamour Boy in Death". Baltimore Afro-American. December 31, 1938. ProQuest 531206120.
  2. ^ a b "Noted Female Impersonator Buried in D.C.". Pittsburgh Courier. January 14, 1939. ProQuest 202059335.
  3. ^ a b c d e Gallon, Kim (September 2018). "'No Tears for Alden': Black Female Impersonators as 'Outsiders Within' in the Baltimore Afro-American". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 27 (3): 367–394. doi:10.7560/JHS27302. S2CID 150142050.
  4. ^ Matthews, Ralph (February 4, 1933). "Looking at the Stars". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531005629.
  5. ^ Matthews, Ralph (September 27, 1930). "Sex Appeal Not Needed to Be Stage Success". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 530895339.
  6. ^ Matthews, Ralph (March 3, 1934). "Clothes Make the Woman as well as the Man, but the Modistes Play Queer Pranks Sometimes, Pansies Prove". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531042239.
  7. ^ Lautier, Louis R. (January 28, 1933). "The Capital Spotlight". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531006035.

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