The Isolation And Bravery Of The Bearded Lady

    As a gay man I liked bearded men well before I was able to say that I liked them, and make personal the reasons why I liked them. When I was growing up the accepted markers for masculinity, when I was growing up were the ability to be drunk and demonstrate to the credulous, particularly yourself, that you were sober. 

  As 'an out gay man', aged thirty, I regrew the beard that I first grew as a teenager, and with the 'coming out' came feel that my beard was integral to me, an active expression of my character. The beard has remained an active part of my character over the three decades of 'being out' in which my character has changed.  

  When blogging and Tumblr came along two decades later I started a beard blog. Here it is. Over the ten years plus since I have never stopped putting more beards up. I have never given Tumblr's digital censor much work to do. If what I had was 'a fetish' then it was a remarkably polite as a fetish. I never saw the point in getting pushy about what I liked. I preferred to let the accumulated oddity of the large and singular collection of images explain me, and let any fetish labelling quietly put itself in lower case before appearing to be relatively normal; nothing to frighten the right wing 'normals' with.

  But one minority area to do with my appreciation of beard culture always always confounded me. Generally I am blind to the attractions of women. Their appearance does nothing for me. I like how women are more oriented more consensus than men often present themselves as being, but being fair is not the same as being fun. I was, and am, the same with women as I am about men, including bearded men, in drag. Drag only seemed okay to me if it was done uncompetitively and just for fun. And yes I have been there and it was not a T shirt that I got after and kept either.

  I was blind to that rare handsomeness that happens in bearded women. Allow me to correct that blind spot, somewhat. The above image is from that most celebrated and notorious of films, Todd Browning's 'Freaks' (MGM 1932) where a troupe of real circus actors acted in a horror film that looked all too real, and blurred too many lines between reality and fantasy to be a mere entertainment. Bearded women have to brave in ways I never had to be when I grew my beard as part of my renewed public identity; their beard 'outs' them in a way that they have to be careful how to own the resulting public profile. 

  It is not surprising then that historically they often became circus attractions. They got an income, had somewhere to live, and had their community with the circus troupe, who were self contained and in spite of being midgets and having all sorts of physical differences from normal full height human beings were adults with capable adult minds who valued their autonomy. That they played up their physical differences in public for show and for money, well they had to. How else would they survive outside of being institutionalised by a misbegotten science which mangled the public understanding of mental health, and lied about what genetics actually were to grotesque degree? Such mental health experts and geneticists as there were would have locked up all the dwarves etc without looking at them, and labelled them 'defective' based what other people said about their appearance.

  Finally, Empress of The Blues, Bessie Smith, who I had a voice, a skin tone, physical strength, and an appetite for life that was much fuller than any beard man I could imagine, did the same as those circus troupes of dwarves and other human misshapes, if you will pardon the expression. When she had earned enough she bought her own luxury railway carriage in which she travelled to avoid the outright racism of hotels, who would refuse her entry and where they let her play would have humiliated her by making her play to white only audiences. 

  The road is fine place to live and work if you are an outsider, long may it be there for outsiders who need the income, and the space it gives them away from 'normal' society, particularly for outsiders like bearded ladies.