On June 6, 1886, Kerr B. Tupper, a Baptist minister in Grand Rapids, Michigan, presided over the marriage of a young couple. The groom gave his name as Charles E. Hindle and listed his profession as “actor” on the marriage license. The bride’s name was Anna Ryan. The marriage was not the first for the groom, although there was no indication on the license that he had been married before. There was also no indication that Charles Hindle was, in fact, not an actor, but rather British-born actress Annie Hindle, who by that time had performed on the American stage for close to 20 years as the country’s first male impersonator.

Unsurprisingly, Hindle’s union with Ryan was soon breathlessly revealed in the pages of a local scandal sheet after a reporter hounded the newlyweds, first in a restaurant and then at the hotel where they stayed. Hindle strung the reporter along with feints and denials but the report, published the morning after the wedding, caused a furor in Grand Rapids and beyond. The scandal marked a collision between two segments of American culture with very different standards: respectable, church-going 19th-century townspeople, and the theater performers who entertained them—a group that maintained its own standards of decency, centering on a shared sense of professionalism and kinship, and a greater tolerance of behavior that would have caused scandal in wider society.

Notably, though, Annie Hindle’s marriage to another woman didn’t end her career—she would go on to perform for another 20 or more years, and even married another woman later in her life. Protected by fans who flocked to her shows and by theater colleagues who prized her talent and professionalism above all else, Hindle thrived in an America that, even in the 19th century, had at least some room for diverse views and values. Then as now, the theater was a community of artists that quietly hummed along—making audiences laugh and making money—as it challenged the moral climate of its time.

Hindle’s remarkable life was enabled by the particular characteristics of the lives of theatrical performers in the 19th century—whether they did high theater or low comedy, many were itinerant, traveling from town to town, either alone or as part of a troupe. This was as true for stars of the dramatic stage, such as Edwin Booth or Kate Denin, who took leading roles in upper-class theaters all over the United States and the world, as it was for variety and circus performers such as Hindle.

The audience for variety shows was working-class men, who were then thought of as disruptive and sometimes violent. Variety shows filled their entertainment needs, offering a broad range of singing, dancing, and comic acts depicting an equally broad range of characters drawn from the world of working-class Americans. The shows offered social critique and inscribed social order through humor and parody. The characters in the shows included caricatures of racial and ethnic groups, the old, the young, male and female, working-class and upper-class. The reputation of these rowdy male audiences might have been exaggerated, but it’s clear that these men expected entertainment that engaged them and spoke to their experiences, desires, and aspirations.

And they were among Annie Hindle’s biggest fans.

Hindle was the first male impersonator in American variety entertainment. She began performing songs in both male and female character in the early 1860s in British music hall, a popular form of Victorian entertainment. Each of Hindle’s songs centered on a different character, and she performed rapid changes of costumes in the wings between songs. She emigrated to the United States, along with her mother, in 1868.

Once in America, Hindle eliminated the female characters from her English repertoire. While young women performed both male and female characters in British music hall, this was not the case in American variety entertainment, where women portrayed young, attractive female characters. In choosing to exclusively portray male characters, Hindle created a unique act. Hindle was only around 20 years old, but she impersonated mature men, singing songs about courtship and advising the men in her audience on matters of love and marriage. She also performed songs that encouraged class solidarity and sharing scarce resources when the times were tough. In between songs, as she had in England, she performed rapid changes of costume in the wings. And her costumes represented the finest in men’s fashions, particularly when she depicted an upper-class man-about-town who could enjoy the finest wines, cigars, and other expensive leisure goods.

Hindle was an immediate hit with American variety audiences, who were astonished at the realism of her act. She sang in a low alto range, and she could improvise comic monologues that interrupted songs in a manner similar to male comic singers of the era. She appeared to perform some kind of magic on the stage, transforming herself in ways that made her indistinguishable from male performers. In a period in which women were seen as being fundamentally different from men, Hindle blurred gender lines, causing confusion and wonder. She exploited the public knowledge that she was a woman when she performed upper-class characters, depicting them as effete and failing to meet working-class standards for manhood.

Carte-de-Visite of the male impersonator Ella Wesner in one of her identities as a “sporting” young man, circa 1872-75. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hindle quickly became one of the highest paid variety performers, joining a small group of men and women who could demand $100 a week for their services in a period when typical performers made less than half that. She was so successful that several actresses who had begun their careers as dancers, including Ella Wesner and Augusta Lamareaux, adopted her specialty.

Within two months of arriving in the United States, Hindle met and married the English comic and ballad singer Charles Vivian, now best remembered as one of the founding members of the fraternal order, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Hindle and Vivian both performed comedy and sang similar repertoire, though she was better known for her comic characters than her singing, and he was renowned for his fine voice. After the wedding, the pair began to work and travel together, with Vivian acting as Hindle’s agent. Their marriage lasted only about a month. Hindle later claimed that Vivian, who was a heavy drinker with a hot temper, had beaten her.

Hindle found a new agent and pursued a career in variety as a solo act, traveling alone. In November and December 1868, while performing an extended run at the Opera House in Baltimore, she met the jig dancer Nellie Howard, and in late December the pair traveled to Washington, D.C., where they were married. The record notes that Hindle gave the name Charles. The women traveled and worked together for the next six to eight weeks, performing at the Varieties Theater in St. Louis during February 1869. There is no evidence that they ever performed together again. It is not clear when their marriage ended, although Hindle published a poem in June 1870, “Parted,” that could be interpreted as a commentary on the end of a relationship.

In November 1870, records show that Hindle traveled and worked with a young female singer, Blanche Du Vere, whom she married in Washington, D.C., when both were performing at the Metropolitan Hall in that city. Once again, Hindle used the name Charles E. Hindle. Du Vere soon married James Porter, the business and stage manager at the Metropolitan Hall, in August 1871. By 1872 she had launched a career as a male impersonator using the name Blanche Selwyn, with Porter acting as her agent.

Hindle’s record of failed marriages, and the deceptions she was willing to commit in order to marry, may reflect the loneliness and dislocation of life on the road for an immigrant performer. By the time she married Anna Ryan in 1886, Hindle was completely alone in the country; her mother, who had lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, had died in 1884.

Even after the short-term scandal of Hindle’s marriage to Ryan, theater managers continued to book Hindle because they knew that she was a reliable performer whose skills on stage pleased her audience. The marriage scandal did not even disrupt the troupe’s tour. Indeed, Hindle’s popularity with audiences meant that, despite her colorful personal history, she was able to remain steadily employed into the early 20th century. When actresses in her troupe were asked by the press about her marriage or her gender, they denied any knowledge of it but expressed shock that such a thing could happen. And yet they continued to work with her on the stage, suggesting that they gave the newspaper reporters the reaction they knew that readers expected.

Hindle and Ryan were married for five years; when Ryan died in 1891, the New York Sun covered her funeral, and a number of theatrical professionals attended. Hindle almost immediately sold the New Jersey home they had shared and went back on the road. Within a year, newspapers carried reports of her marrying another young woman, Louise Spangehl, in Troy, New York. Hindle’s new wife took her last name, and the two performed together in small-time vaudeville, sharing the stage in Virginia in 1894. As had been the case even in the 1860s, Hindle’s private life was not an issue in the world of theater as long as it did not interfere with her on-stage act. Her offstage life, and who she chose to make a family with, was none of their business.

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No one, the Spokesman argued, objected to a reputable variety performance. The trouble came with the boxes, where “women employ their sensual charms” to entice “young men for whom this feverish life has a peculiar fascination.” Other Western cities had abolished this “hurrah” element, the newspaper continued, and prospered accordingly. Spokane enjoyed a beautiful natural setting; plainly put, “if the dives and the hurdy-gurdy resorts were suppressed,” the city would be altogether attractive.

On the surface, the newspaper’s critique was a matter of morals and prudishness, but in fact it was also part of what would become a decades-long debate about Spokane’s ability to control its own future. By the final years of the 19th century, Spokanites could proudly claim that their booming city was the urban hub—the center of transportation, commerce, and culture—of a large area of the Northwest they called the Inland Empire. Ministers, newspapermen, and reformers longed for Spokane to become a settled, cultured city, one they described lovingly in promotional brochures as graced by churches, middle-class homes, respectable theaters, and music clubs. But their vision faltered against the reality of entrenched business interests, who catered to the resource extraction industries that kept the town afloat.

Spokane’s dilemma was a problem that echoed throughout the American West, where towns yearned to come into their own, but remained economically dependent on the East. Spokane began its career as did many American hamlets: inconspicuous but ambitious nonetheless. The falls of the Spokane River were a gathering place for Native Americans, and a fur trading post existed in the region in the early 19th century. With the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1881, and the mineral discoveries in the Idaho panhandle that began in 1882, the town became a mining headquarters. Railroads made Spokane the supply and distribution point for the rich wheat farms of the Palouse. By 1888, rail lines stretched east, west, and south from Spokane, connecting Northwestern mines and farms with Eastern markets. The region’s population mushroomed from 350 in 1880 to 19,922 in 1890, a nearly 6,000 percent increase that was accompanied by a feverish building boom.

None of this development could have occurred without financing, markets, and transportation systems that Spokanites, in large part, did not control. The improvidence of the situation became clear with the Panic of 1893, when a burst railroad bubble and a precipitous drop in the gold supply plunged the U.S. into depression. Seven of Spokane’s ten banks closed in the panic, and, as the crisis progressed, 25 percent of Spokane’s buildings passed into the hands of a single European bank. But by the late 1890s, investors had recovered, and the city was again experiencing great growth.

Another important source of income for the town were the thousands of migratory, unattached young men, who worked in the mines, logging camps, and farms and came downtown, eager for diversion and companionship after months on the job. In the area between the Spokane River and the railroad tracks, these men found a carnival of saloons, brothels, lodging houses, gambling joints, dance halls, and variety theaters.

It was emblematic of the city’s resource-driven economy that the kingpins of Howard Street were Jacob “Dutch Jake” Goetz and Harry Baer. Goetz and Baer had staked early and lucrative claims in the fabulous Bunker Hill and Sullivan silver mine of northern Idaho, cashed out, and come to Spokane in the late 1880s. In time they built the deliciously ornate Coeur d’Alene resort, which catered to the fast crowd and to the laborers who poured into town. By May 1899, Goetz could brag to the Spokesman-Review that the Coeur d’Alene had a weekly payroll of $1,400, more than the electric and streetcar companies combined.

A vocal element in Spokane rejected the idea that the city had to accept an unbridled atmosphere in order to remain prosperous. In 1897 and 1899 they launched morality drives, aimed at the Howard Street establishments. These efforts followed similar paths: ministerial outrage, political promises, public debate, temporary victory, and ultimately, quiet failure.

Reformers wondered whether Spokane’s vice district marked it as a place outside the pale of decent American life. If Spokane could not lay claim to solid, Victorian decency, why would good families move there? How could the city enjoy above-the-board growth if it felt like the setting of a cheap western novel? As one Protestant minister put it in January 1897, his neighbors had to recognize that theirs was a hometown, “not a mining camp on the border of civilization.”

But even as Spokane’s reformers railed, its fortunes roared along and Howard Street became even more depraved. Slot machines proliferated in the red light district, the seedier saloons had introduced cubby holes—the purpose of which was obvious—accessible from side doors, and the boozy carousing in the private theater boxes had surely not abated. Worse yet, violations of the law occurred with the winking consent of some authorities. By 1899, only two years after its earlier exposé, the Spokesman-Review was still targeting the Coeur d’Alene resort—with its theater, bathhouses, and gambling halls right next door to City Hall—arguing that it would be shut down anywhere else in the U.S. Men fresh from the Klondike, the newspaper opined, had seen nothing so wicked in the wilds of Dawson City.

Things escalated that fall, just days before the opening of the Industrial Exposition, a fair promoting the products of the Inland Northwest. Great numbers of visitors were expected, many of whom considered variety theaters amongst Spokane’s most attractive diversions. At the last minute city fathers engaged in a battle royale over the renewal of business licenses for the Stockholm, Comique, and Coeur d’Alene resorts.

On paper, Spokane’s 1899 city council looked like a group that could agree with itself: white, Republican, middle-aged businessmen who had lived in Spokane for some time. Yet they split evenly on the question of variety theater licensing. At one point, after the reform crowd had momentarily gained the upper hand, councilman James Omo rejoined with a gambit, a set of “shut tight” resolutions that would align Spokane to a strict moral standard: Variety theaters closed, gambling laws enforced, Sunday closures instituted. The choice between profits and morality was at the heart of Omo’s bluff, though he claimed that the $30,000 the city gathered annually from vice district licenses and fines on gamblers and prostitutes was immaterial to him. Remarkably, Omo’s resolutions passed.

But that lasted only for one day. A large group of wholesalers, retailers, property owners, and community giants immediately submitted a petition requesting licenses for decent variety shows. With all of their investments in Spokane, these merchants did not want to hamper the “growth of natural prosperity in the community.” The petition contained an important caveat: the variety theaters must abide the law; more to the point, the private boxes, with their obvious sexual purpose, must close. Perhaps the theaters did present mindless, romping shows, but if their worst features—namely, sex and gambling—were eliminated what, precisely, was the problem?

Local clergymen tried to shame the bourgeoisie into accepting reform (was money their god? an Episcopal bishop asked), but with proposed revenues in the offing, the city council rescinded the “holiness” resolutions and licensed the three theaters just in time for the Exposition. With this conclusion to the 1899 affair, Spokanites showed themselves to be more concerned with the immediate realities of the bottom line than with staid, Victorian ideals, or some future Spokane that only existed in their dreams.

The town continued to boom along with extractive industries—especially lumber—in the first years of the 20th century, when its population rose from 36,848 in 1900 to 104,402 in 1910. This growth meant real power for the Howard Street kingpins, heightening the variety theater dilemma. The municipal elections in 1901, 1903, and 1905 yielded administrations friendly to the vice district.

It was only in 1908, after years of morality campaigns, that a coalition of ministers, temperance advocates, civic boosters, and progressives mustered the political will needed to enforce the anti-vice laws. They did so, in large part, by convincing their fellow Spokanites that more sustainable growth would come through building a “home city” than a place that capitalized on the fluid lives of migrant laborers.

On January 10, 1908, the chief of police notified downtown resorts that either the liquor or the women had to go. Honest application of the law spelled the end of Spokane’s variety theaters, which gave their final performances on January 11, 1908. After all, as Dutch Jake remarked, there was no money in it without the women. With that, middle-class Spokane cast its lot with bungalows and schoolhouses rather than flophouses and honky-tonks. The market for sin did not, of course, entirely disappear, and neither did the city’s dependence on outside investment. What changed was the willingness of the bourgeoisie to accept a reputation for frontier revelry in the name of profits.

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