For World Beard Day: On Women with Beards

Today is World Beard Day!

Many, I suppose, will be celebrating beards in general, which is all well and good. I think right away of ancient Greeks, men of the 19th century, men of the 1960s and early ’70s, and certain dandyish millennials. But such have never been extraordinary enough to constitute a performing arts category in and of themselves. However, women with beards have. I’ve written about around a dozen of them in the “Bearded Ladies” category of Travalanche, most of them historical sideshow performers. We use “Bearded Lady” strictly as a historical term of art here. It’s what they used to be called, and it’s what readers register as a discrete and familiar topic in their minds. But today’s post is to update you on the very different reality we are living in now.

Jennifer Miller of Circus Amok, perhaps my only living hero, long made it part of her spiel that “women with a beard” should be the preferred term, reminding us that many women (I have no idea the percentage, but it’s a large one) COULD cultivate and grow beards if they chose to. Most women, I feel, would have weak and scraggly beards if they did that, but that doesn’t prevent certain men from wearing them. Due to centuries’ old standards of beauty, they choose not to grow hair on their chinny-chinny-chin. But in any case, Miller’s one woman crusade was to re-jigger people’s brains to stop regarding certain kinds of people as “freaks”. They’re people, in this case women who have a thing on their face. They’re not, like, agents for carrying facial hair around for you to gawk at.

Anyway, Jennifer is one of the key founders of the modern sideshow revival, and has been active since the 1980s. She found a way to rehabilitate traditional forms and use them to enlighten contemporary audiences. She also represents the confluence of TWO movements I revere: the gender bending drag performance of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre, and the neo-sideshow world. She not only juggles, eats fire, tumbles, clowns, sings, and dances, and all the rest, but she’s also an award-winning playwright and a performance art professor. She is a pure creature of the theatre. She started out at Coney Island, but also built up a troupe that toured parks throughout the city, giving free shows. In certain circles she is world famous, someone who is taught in queer studies and performance departments at institutions of higher learning around the globe. It’s been my honor to present her through my American Vaudeville Theatre several times. She’s gracious and generous and hilarious and a genius.

But in preparing this post, I learned something else. She has changed the world. For years, I thought of her monologues as sort of very commendable routines. Great message! And I knew she had had some influence, because I was aware through social media of one or two younger women with beards in the sideshow world. And that’s where I thought the historical clock was at. But, do yourself a favor, and google the various combinations of “bearded women”, “bearded ladies”, “women with beards”, etc. There are more of them out there now than you can count. At first I considered profiling some as I had the historical women in our “bearded lady” section. But there are simply too many, and for some, it is now it is merely a style, a choice, and not necessarily connected to performance in any literal way. As with tattooing and body modification, we are now leaving the time (if we haven’t already left it) when women with beards are no longer extraordinary enough to be a sideshow attraction in and of themselves. Obviously, there will always be an association, but women with beards who perform in sideshows had better have some additional skills to buttress their appeal. Being a mere “spectacle” just won’t cut it anymore.

Obviously the trans movement has played a central role in all this — I have just as many formerly male friends who’ve chosen to identify as female to one degree or another, and vice versa, or many who have chosen to live in the nether realm in between. That, too, used to be rare, and considered worthy as spectacle by itself. But make no mistake. I was paying attention. Jennifer Miller was a pioneer of this world we’re living in now. She boldly went where no woman had gone before. There ought to be a statue to her. And what a beautiful statue it would be.

For related reflection, please see my books No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and Rose’s Royal Midgets and Other Little People of Vaudeville