Misplaced Pages

Alden Garrison (1908–1938) was a prominent black female impersonator from Washington, DC. He performed at various nightclubs along the Atlantic Seaboard, and the national black press covered his life in detail.

Garrison was the child of Rosa Keeling and Will Garrison. He was born on June 4, 1908, and grew up in Washington, DC. At twelve years old, he debuted in a popular local variety show, The Rosetime Revue. Although he danced in costume, he likely did not begin performing as a female impersonator until adulthood.

Writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, Ralph Matthews noted that Garrison “hiked off to New York and almost became a Gene Malin or a Karyle Norman before he returned to Washington” where he had “unusual success as a night club entertainer.” By 1934, Garrison had won more than twenty “best dressed” prizes at drag balls in Baltimore and Washington, DC. He reportedly favored squirrel or mink wraps with accessories. Louis Lautier said that Garrison's “female impersonation almost perfect.”

Amid an increase in policing of gender nonconformity and waning popularity of female impersonators, Garrison had little employment in the last year of his life. Upon his death, the Baltimore Afro-American printed that he “had been melancholy and subject to brooding since the death of his god-mother, who reared him from a child.” Further, he avoided friends and “drifted around the city during the past few months ill and undernourished.” He had been found lying “prostrate in a vacant lot” and later died in Gallinger Hospital.

In 2018, Kim Gallon, a historian at Purdue University, published an extensive account of Garrison's life in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Gallon's archival research is the most significant source for this Misplaced Pages entry.

References

1. ^ "No Tears for Alden: Friends Desert Famed Glamour Boy in Death". Baltimore Afro-American. December 31, 1938. ProQuest 531206120.
2. ^ "Noted Female Impersonator Buried in D.C.". Pittsburgh Courier. January 14, 1939. ProQuest 202059335.
3. ^ Gallon, Kim (September 2018). "'No Tears for Alden': Black Female Impersonators as 'Outsiders Within' in the Baltimore Afro-American". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 27 (3): 367–394. doi:10.7560/JHS27302. S2CID 150142050.
4. Matthews, Ralph (February 4, 1933). "Looking at the Stars". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531005629.
5. Matthews, Ralph (September 27, 1930). "Sex Appeal Not Needed to Be Stage Success". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 530895339.
6. Matthews, Ralph (March 3, 1934). "Clothes Make the Woman as well as the Man, but the Modistes Play Queer Pranks Sometimes, Pansies Prove". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531042239.
7. Lautier, Louis R. (January 28, 1933). "The Capital Spotlight". Baltimore Afro-American. ProQuest 531006035.

• 1908 births
• 1938 deaths
• American drag queens
• Ball culture people
• Entertainers from Washington, D.C.
• Entertainers from Baltimore
• LGBTQ people from Washington, D.C.
• African-American male actors
• African-American drag queens
• Burials at Columbian Harmony Cemetery
• 20th-century African-American people
• 20th-century American LGBTQ people