Photograph of Charlotte Cushman, circa 1870

Acclaimed actor Charlotte Cushman specialized in “breeches parts.”[1] She played over thirty male roles. As Romeo she had a “convincing masculine stride . . . and . . . showed to advantage in a doublet.”[2]

Off-stage, she companioned with women. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning understood that Cushman and writer Matilda Hays “made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike . . . it is a female marriage.”[3] But Emma Stebbins, sculptor of Central Park’s angelic Bethesda Fountain, replaced Hays as Cushman’s “wife.”[4]

Sources

1. Carolyn Gage, “Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876),” in Gay and Lesbian Almanac, ed. Neil Schlager (Detroit: St. James, 1998), 470.

2. The History Project, compiler, Improper Bostonians (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 57.

3. Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2011), 71-72.

4. Gage, 470.