Carte de visite photograph of Ella Wesner, circa 1872

The newspaper report stated: One June night in 1886 a Grand Rapids “minister of the Gospel” pronounced “Annie Hindle the husband of Annie Ryan.”[1] The “jolly Gilbert Saroney, who, oddly enough, was a female impersonator,” was best man.[2]

According to that New York Sun 1891 article, Hindle was the “first out and out ‘male impersonator’ New York’s stage had ever seen.”[3] The first to imitate Hindle was Ella Wesner beginning in 1870. Both performers were popular and well paid. Wesner, like Hindle, grabbed media-attention–in 1872 with her same-sex “elopement . . . to Europe with Miss Josephine Mansfield.”[4]

Sources

1. Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity ([Durham]: Duke University, 2000), 147, http://books.google.com/books?id=ino_gj6djj8C&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=annie+hindle&source=bl&ots=twtRcfT8MR&sig=Nz3JOiqrzzAMEpP5ut7hyatXNfw&hl=en&ei=FUS5ToKDBqjW2AWArMW1Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13&ved=0CGMQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q=annie%20hindle&f=false.

2. Duggan, 147.

3. Duggan, 146.

4. Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century ([Urbana: University of Illinois], 2010), 145,