Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton [Paperback] Review

When Billy Tipton died in 1989, the world rushed in and gave him, briefly, the larger fame he had once nibbled at as a jazz musician and entertainer.But in June of 1958, after 20 years of chasing the brass ring, when the door to the big time world of popular music opened and beckoned Billy in, he backed away from the spotlight, settling for playing the hotel ballrooms and clubs of greater Spokane, Washington. In Suits Me, Stanford University English professor Diane Wood Middlebrook explores both the geography of jazz and swing in the heartland of America, and the geography of gender in the middle of the 20th century.Because underneath his dapper suits and corny comedy routines, Mr. Billy Tipton concealed the body of a woman, and when he died, his sex revealed by paramedics and the coroner's report, he left hundreds of people who knew him, and millions more who heard the news, astounded by his "deception..."
Professor Middlebrook's research has been thorough, and she has spoken with most of Tipton's living relatives, former wives, business partners and many other musicians of the era.What she reveals to her readers is a fully textured portrait of an era and a man who worked hard and earned every privilege he received.She lets us almost hear the music, taste the dust from the roads Billy and his bandmates and partners traveled.She lets the people who knew him comment on whether they thought he was a man or a woman.She lays out the mystery of how others perceived and ignored or challenged Billy's gender presentation, and the l! engths to which Billy went to protect his secret, which sometimes wasn't all that hidden.
Suits Me is an amazing story filled with strange reversals: Billy had a male cousin named Bonnie, his mother's nickname was Reggie, his first "wife" had left her husband, Earl, for a life on the road and was known as Non Earl.And there were enough female musicians on the circuit in those days that cross-dressing to the extent that Billy did should not have been necessary to maintain a career, as many people have conjectured to justify Billy's behavior.
Billy's death and the revelation of his "true sex" led various groups to claim his memory as a symbol of their own cause: lesbians said he lived as a man to safely love women; feminists said he lived as a man in order to have a career; transsexuals said he lived as a man because he was a man-he just didn't avail himself of the medical technology to make himself legal.Because Billy never declared himself any of these things (although he did declare himself a man), it seems presumptuous for any group to claim such an independent spirit as their own.But Billy also acknowledged to some family members that he remained a woman in body; to one female cousin he intimated he would one day go back to living as a woman once the kids he had adopted with his last wife, Kitty, were grown and out on their own, and to another female cousin he declared that he had made a conscious choice to live as a man and that he was a normal person.It is only respectful to refer to Billy with masculine pronouns, using the male gender he so completely inhabited.Middlebrook skillfully interweaves masculine and feminine pronouns to reflect the understanding of the people Billy interacts with, and to acknowledge the reality of Billy's body.In this way, she creates a striking sense of the incongruity of gender and body that Billy lived with, and others like him still live with every day.
There is only one point of contention where I take exception to Middlebrook's analysis of Tipton'! s motivations. She assumes that the absence of breast bindings or genital prosthetics (pants stuffers) from Billy's body at his death, and from his personal effects, was an indication that he was anticipating discovery.I contend this can't be known.He may have simply grown weary of the apparatus, seeing no need for it since he had retired from public life. Perhaps he felt he had earned the right to be a man in his own skin, regardless of its shape.Perhaps it was with relief that he discarded those accoutrements years earlier.And I suspect that, unless diagnosed with a terminal illness, most of us don't realize the finality of our own death even when the moment is upon us.It is dramatic and appealing to conjecture that he staged the conditions of his discovery as consciously as he had staged the presentation of his gender identity, but I contend that the simple reality of Billy's life is more appealing: he was socially a man and physically a woman.That dichotomy fascinates us, and we struggle to rationalize it, to explain it, to defend it or to tear it apart. Depending on our allegiances, we rush to invalidate either the body or the soul that informed it.But I think both are real and valid, and that Billy Tipton's life simply illustrates one person's adaptation to his situation.Without a definitive statement from Tipton, which he never gave, his life is open to any interpretation, whether insensitive or informed.In spite of this one logical flaw in her analysis, I think Middlebrook has composed a fine portrait of an artist, one that will ultimately give readers some insight to the reality of what we now call the transgendered experience as it was lived before the modern transgender movement had established itself.
This is an important book, both for the history in it, and for its vivid depiction of the brave determination of Billy Tipton that his talent, energy and love sustained.Some transpeople may be put off by the pronoun inconsistency, feeling that the only way to treat Billy i! s as the man he wanted to be and was-the way others perceived him, for the most part, in his vibrant life.Some transpeople may find the reflection of the very real challenges Billy struggled with in his female body to be a welcome reality check for their own experience with incongruous gender and bodies.Non-trans people should find this study a stimulating, evocative read, one that pulls back the curtain just enough to expose the tantalizing mystery of a very American life.

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