Omar Kingsley

"Miss Ella". The picture is in the Musée des Civilizations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille

Omar or Olmer or Olmar Kingsley (* 1840 in St. Louis , † April 3, 1879 in India or in the 19th century in Cincinnati ) was an American equestrian who kept his true gender secret for years and appeared as a woman.

Career

Kingsley joined Spencer Q. Stokes, an entrepreneur who owned a circus in Philadelphia , at a young age . Various rumors were circulated about his origins, including the version that he was a gypsy child and the only survivor after a shipwreck off Mexico . Another version was that he was an Indian girl and had acquired his riding skills from the Apaches , and another version landed him as the illegitimate daughter of a rich Turk in Mexico, where he was supposed to have been sold as a slave.

Stokes trained him to be an art rider and let him appear under the stage name Ella Zoyora or Zoyara, often just as "Miss Ella"; Kingsley's true sex was kept secret. Kingsley accompanied Stokes to Europe - he had his first appearance in Berlin in 1854 - and also to Moscow . Several competitors like Kätchen Renz , Louise Loisset and Irma Monfroid competed with "Miss Ella", whose series of jumps could not be beaten by balloons or paper-covered tires.

reception

With “Miss Ella” there was at times a real cult: “Who hasn't heard of that“ Miss ”Ella-Rummel, whose illustrious name roared through Europe at the beginning of the 1950s, of the fanfare of that mysterious Ella Zoraya, who suddenly appeared as Very young but furious rider stood in front of the audience, [...] who literally sparked a frenzy of enthusiasm. Kings and workers paid homage to her ”, was to be read in 1910 in The Art of Art and Its History , and Stephanie Haerdle reports:“ A real Miss Ella fashion is emerging. Miss Ella's hairstyle is imitated, her way of laying her curls is adopted. The waist is decorated with trimmings as »Ella Taille«, »Ella combs«, »Ella fans«, »Ella bags« and »Ella jewelery jewelry« are bought. "

But there were also more critical voices: “Since Barnum , the humbug has made infinite progress. You can already divide it into categories and differentiate between its individual varieties, ”wrote the author of Theater-Chattel , Volume 1, in 1860, and then, under the category“ Art-Humbug ”, led directly to Kätchen Renz, the kidnapping have staged to draw attention to themselves, also their competition on: “Mr. Olmer Stokes, who delighted everyone as Miss Ella, and then suddenly became a strong-boned boy ”.

As a rule, however, Kingsley's appearances were apparently enthusiastically celebrated: Influential personalities fell in love with the supposed young woman several times; Kingsley and Stokes had to leave Moscow in a hurry because a rejected lover threatened with murder. Allegedly, Vittorio Emanuele was one of the admirers of the fake "Miss Ella". He left a magnificent stallion to Kingsley for his demonstrations. Kingsley later resold this horse in Spain when he was in financial difficulties.

Exposure

At the beginning of the 1860s, due to the emerging male characteristics, the first doubts arose as to whether Zoyara was a woman at all. In April 1860, on the occasion of appearances at a Broadway theater called "Niblo's Garden" (the theater existed from 1823 to 1895), his real name appeared on the posters along with his female stage name. When he ran away with a circus employee named Sally Stickney six months later , Zoyara also disappeared from the announcements. This fed the doubts. After his marriage to Stickney, he then appeared - now separate from Stokes - alternately in women's and men's clothing and capitalized on the rumors about his true sex, as well as the attraction this question brought with it, for another year or two .

He also toured Australia and Asia.

According to some press reports, Kingsley died of smallpox in East India in 1879 , but other reports said he lived four years longer and died in Cincinnati.

Kingsley in art

The sculptor Anton Lußmann created a bust of Kingsley in 1886 with the title "Miss Ella" on the plinth . The work of art, cast in bronze , shows Kingsley with a jockey hat and curly hair. He wears replicas of a horseshoe and a riding crop on the neckline of his - presumed - dress .

The stage name "Miss Ella" was the model for the " Ella-Polka " (op. 160, 1855) by Johann Strauss (son) .

Ella Zoyara clones

Shauna Vey explains in her essay The Master and the Mademoiselle that the idea of ​​Ella Zoyara has been copied several times in the USA. In addition to Omar Kingsley, who was managed by Stokes and who was the original Zoyara, she said there were at least four other actors - mostly, but not always, male - of this character. In particular, Vey explains, Ella Zoyaras were assigned different biographies, but their appearance was always "problematized around gender", i.e. had something to do with gender roles. Rumors about Kingsley's real gender had lingered for a long time before the manager himself put an end to the speculation on January 28, 1860. The peculiarity of Kingsley compared to other male female actors was that he embodied an atypical "strong" woman. Somewhat different from the reactions of the European recipients, Vey comes to the conclusion for the American audience: “Zoyara transgressed the limits of audience expectations by violating the perceived conventions of both genre and feminity [...] So, although Zoyara's performances sold tickets, Kingsley and his imitators were never accorded the adulation of the - primarily male - press. Master Eugene [a female actor who is said to have acted "typically female"] remained the master. "

Gender change in the circus and its reception

Kingsley was not the only circus artist who appeared under the wrong gender, but apparently became so well known that in the ADB article about Emile Mario Vacano the term "Miss Ella" was used for his appearances as an art rider.

A contemporary of Kingsley was “Mademoiselle Lulu”, a male trapeze artist from the Farini troupe. And the snake dancer Voodoo was one day, as the magazine Der Artist read, in her “capacity as masculinum for the military, infantry”. In her essay Cocteau au cirque , Jennifer Forrest also proves that such gender changes were quite common in Kingsley's time and deals with the after-effects of this phenomenon in art and literature. She attests that the circus of the 19th century has a “playful tradition” and widespread “toying with race and gender”, citing Kingsley's appearances as “Miss Ella” as examples.

literature

• Stephanie Haerdle, do n't be afraid, that's our job! Artistic riders, trainers and other circus performers , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-932338-29-8 , pp. 37–41
• Manfred Herzer , Miss Ella. The transvestite legend of the nineteenth century , in: Capri 35, 2004, pp. 2-6
• Magnus Hirschfeld : The transvestites: an investigation into the erotic disguise instinct: with extensive casuistic and historical material . A. Pulvermacher, 1910, p. 453.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ There are different details about Kingsley's life dates; the information on birth in St. Louis in 1840 and death from smallpox in India can be found in the Morning Bulletin from Rockhampton on August 14, 1879 ( digitized version ). Haerdle, on the other hand, reports that the Vossische Zeitung also adopted this version, but four years later it once again published an obituary for Kingsley, who should have died in Cincinnati after a fulfilled life as an artist.
2. ↑ According to Magnus Hirschfeld, he was only eight years old at the time: Magnus Hirschfeld: Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress . Prometheus Books, 1991, ISBN 978-0-87975-665-9 , p. 344. Other sources even report that he left his parents' house at the age of six.
3. ↑ Artism and its history . International-Artistischer Literatur Verlag, Willy Backhaus, 1910, p. 61.
4. ↑ Stephanie Haerdle, Don't be afraid, that's our job! Art riders, trainers and other circus artists , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-932338-29-8 , p. 39
5. ^ Theater chats: The world of the coulisse without lamplight . Reinhold Schlingmann, 1860, p. 24 f ..
6. ↑ The horse was one of the subjects of a court hearing in 1861 that arose from a dispute between James R. McDonald, Spencer Q. Stokes, and others. A description of the animal can be found in the report The King of Sardinia - Appearances are Sometimes Deceitful in the New York Times of November 30, 1861 ( digitized ). See also the reproduction of a report in the Kreuzzeitung in Carl Eduard Rainold: Memories of strange objects and incidents, combined with amusing stories. Edited by KE Rainold . Haase, 1862, p. 62 f ..
7. ↑ Gregory Barz, William Cheng: Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology , Oxford University Press 2019 in the Google book search
8. ↑ According to www.familycentral.net , this connection resulted in a daughter. The life dates of Kingsley, which are given here, differ somewhat from those of other sources.
9. ↑ On www.picturehistory.com ( Memento of the original dated November 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. there is a photograph from around 1863 showing Kingsley in men's clothing. 
10. ↑ Description of the bust on lot-tissimo.com
11. ^ Shauna Vey, The Master and the Mademoiselle. Gender Secrets in Plain Sight in Non-Text Based Antebellum Performance , in: Scott Magelssen, Ann Haugo: Querying Difference in Theater History . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, October 2, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4438-1499-7 , pp. 53-60. , here p. 53
12. ^ Shauna Vey, The Master and the Mademoiselle. Gender Secrets in Plain Sight in Non-Text Based Antebellum Performance , in: Scott Magelssen, Ann Haugo: Querying Difference in Theater History . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, October 2, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4438-1499-7 , pp. 53-60. , here p. 59
13. ^ Shauna Vey, The Master and the Mademoiselle. Gender Secrets in Plain Sight in Non-Text Based Antebellum Performance , in: Scott Magelssen, Ann Haugo: Querying Difference in Theater History . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, October 2, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4438-1499-7 , pp. 53-60. , here p. 60
14. ^ Ludwig Julius Fränkel:  Vacano, Emil (e) . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 39, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1895, pp. 451-454.
15. ^ Gillian M. Rodger: Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century . University of Illinois Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-252-07734-0 , pp. 44 f ..
16. ↑ Quoted from: Stephanie Haerdle, Don't be afraid, that's our job! Art riders, trainers and other circus performers , Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-932338-29-8 , p. 41
17. ↑ On the subject of crossdressing in the circus, see also Peta Tait: Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance . Routledge, November 16, 2005, ISBN 978-1-134-33121-5 , pp. 68 f ..
18. ↑ Jennifer Forrest, Cocteau au cirque. The Poetics of Parade and "Le Numéro Barbette" , in: Studies in 20th Century Literature 27, 1, 2003, p. 9 ff., Here p. 27. ( digitized version )
19. ↑ It is perhaps no coincidence that in Theodor Fontane's novel Irrungen, Wirrungen , which is set in Berlin in the 1870s, a circus performer named Ella is mentioned, whose masterpiece it is to jump through the hoop, just as Kingsley does its serial jumps through hoops and balloons. One of the officers in the casino reacts to the news that Ella is going to marry with regret: "She can then no longer jump through the tire." However, his interlocutor considers the fear of pregnancy superfluous - but not because he assumes that Ella is actually a man. Rather, he assumes that circus performers have a special relationship to sex: "All these circus people are secret Gichtelians [...]" Katharina Grätz examined this scene, of course without going into the choice of the name "Ella". See Katharina Grätz, "Four o clock tea" - "pour la canaille" - "error in calculo". Polyphony and polyglossy in Theodor Fontane's social novels , in: Komparatistik Online 2014.2 , pp. 1–24, here p. 10 (download as PDF at www.komparatistik-online.de ).