Cross-dressing in Amateur Theatre
Boulton and Park had identified the theatre as the one place in society where it was acceptable to cross-dress and had taken advantage of this possibility in amateur theatre to experiment with their gender and sexual identities. By the second half of the nineteenth century, amateur dramatic clubs and societies could be found in almost every city, town and rural district of Britain. I propose that by looking sideways at other men who exploited the opportunity to cross-dress in amateur theatre, a whole range of new queer histories may come into view.
One example I have discovered through this approach is Orlando Bridgeman, who performed female parts in the University of Cambridge’s amateur theatricals in the 1890s. It was thought that there were two ways for men to perform female roles, either sending up the characters—by contrasting them with visible masculine features, such as muscles or beards—or by playing them effeminately and realistically, as Bridgeman did.
After the Boulton and Park case, concerns were raised about this approach. In May 1870, a journalist in The Times writes that "extreme care" should be taken "to exclude those boys from acting who, from peculiarities of character or other causes, were likely to be injuriously affected by" dressing in female clothing.
While taking the female roles in university amateur theatricals may not be enough alone to suggest a lost queer history, by widening the scope of the investigation around individuals of interest, other clues may come to the fore. It is perhaps not insignificant that in a production of Jupiter in June 1894, involving characters from Greek mythology, Bridgeman chose (or was cast as) the role of Ganymede—a figure who had come to be associated with homosexual love in the visual and literary arts since the Renaissance.
Another young man who performed female roles in amateur theatricals was Charles George Cotsford Dick, whom Joseph Bristow, from the University of California, has recently found embroiled in a homosexual blackmail network in the 1890s.