Le Freak, C'est Chic: The Twenty-First Century Freak Show as

Theatre of Transgression
Michael M. Chemers
Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 285-304 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2003.0056
For additional information about this article
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.2.chemers.html
Le Freak, C'est Chic: The Twenty-First
Century Freak Show as Theatre of
Transgression
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
I don't think politics matters spit if there's a dollar to be made.
- Dick Zigun
In hi s 1996 article "The 'Careers' of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The
Problem of Volition and Valorization" David A. Gerber, a hi storian of
disability and an outspoken advocate for disability rights, manifestl y resists
any hi storical exploration of the freak show that is not grounded in outright
condemnation:
Today it is difficult to avoid responding to the existence of the traditional freak
show from anything but a moral standpoint, reinforced perhaps by aesthetic con-
demnation,I ... ] To us the freak show appears nothing but vulgarity and exploitation.
A barbaric legacy of the past, we are well rid of it. So what is there left to discuss?
(43)
At first glance, Gerber's disgust seems to articulate the sensible, laudable
desire of most scholars to write histories that are receptive to narratives of
oppression and inclusive of subaltern voices. What profit to theatre history or
theory could this "barbaric legacy" have to offer?
Gerber directs his condemnation towards Robert Bogdan's reportage of the
Baskin/Jordan controversy, in Bogdan's seminal 1988 sociological work,
Freak Show: Preseflling Human Oddity for Amusement and Profit. In 1984,
Otis Jordan, an African-American performer, with severely stunted arms and
legs, who was then advertised as "The Frog Man," was a professional freak with
Sutton's Sideshow, one of the, perhaps, five freak shows remaining at that time
in America. The Sideshow had, at that time, become the target of disability
rights activist Barbara Baskin. According to Bogdan, Baskin led a media cam-
paign to ban freak shows from the New York State Fair, mainly targeting Jor-
Modern Drama, 46:2 (Summer 2003) 285
286 MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
dan's perfonnance. Baskin's effons had indeed incited the fair to move
Sutton's show, "The Incredible Wonders of the World," off the midway, to the
back, away from the prime business real estate. Sutton, furlhennore, was under
pressure to remove the tenn "freak" from any presentations referring to Jordan.
Bogdan interviewed Jordan for hi s opinion of the controversy:
(Jordan] thought the woman who was complaining about hi s being exploited ought
(0 talk 10 him about it. He would tell her there "wasn', anybody forcing him to do
anything." As he pul it, "I can't understand it. How can she say I'm being taken
advantage of? Hell , what does she want for me - to be on welfare?" (280)
Jordan felt that he was entitled to choose his own career path, whatever it
might be. Jordan told Bogdan that in the freak show he had found companion-
ship, personal satisfaction, and sufficient compensation to live a lifestyle he
desired.
The professional freak show personnel I have personally encountered over
five years of research unanimously contend that the business of freak perfor-
mance itself cannot be properly understood until the historian is prepared to
accept that it is possible for an actor to choose the freak show from a variety of
plausible options and actually to find it to be a meaningful outlet for anistic
expression, as well as an enjoyable means of making a living. The prejudices
against the freak show make professional freak perfonnance more difficult
with each passing year, but performers of the bizarre continue to work; many,
rather than feeling exploi ted or coerced, actually feel empowered by their
choices in the freak profession.
For example, in a 2001 interview, Tony Torres, a Coney Island dwarf per-
fonner, confessed,
It's not easy because some people put us down and say that we're hurting ourselves
just because we feel like it. But us as performers, we do it b e ~ u s e that's the type of
work we Jove. That's what we enjoy. We enjoy doing this. We're not trying lohurl
nobody, we're not trying to make nobody dislike us with this lype of work (Torres).
Jennifer Mill er, a radical lesbian juggling anist, theatre director, actress, and
clown, said of her perfonnance at Coney Island in the late 1990s,
I am the Bearded Lady. I grew up from 20 10 30 as a woman with a beard and
therefore I have been defined as this thing which is other. People are always looking
at me. Coming on stage and being introduced as the Bearded Lady ended up not
being any different at all as a perfonning experience, almost easier (Juggling
Gender).
"Jolly Daisy," a Fat Lady of the 1930S profiled in Daniel Mannix's carnival
memoirs, reportedly told the author,
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
On a carny lot, everybody is different from ordinary people. And I guess you get a
kick out of doing anything you can do real well. I'm a real good freak and I know
every night there's hundreds ofpeopJe willing to pay money to see me. I bring in
more people than any ordinary act and I know it. The other carnies appreciate it.
Instead of being a freak, I'm somebody important. That's a good feeling (69).
There is a mountain of favourable testimony like this from freaks, stretching
all the way back to the 1840S. There is also silent testimony: a great number of
professional freaks continued performing long after they had acquired great
wealth and security, although not every freak became wealthy. This testimony
does not suggest, of course, that every freak was happy, uncoerced, or
wouldn't have chosen to do something else given the opportunity; only that
for many professional freaks, the freak show was more than a means to an
end: it was a chosen way of life.
Gerber's argument is unswayed by testimony of this kind:
I cannot claim to feel strongly that the issue animating my concern is exclusively
whether, in a limited sense, human exhibits actually freely chose to be in freak
shows and found value in doing so. Beyond the question, "Is this choice voluntary?"
or the surmise, "this choice is so bad, it could not be voluntary," another point
asserts itself just as insistently in my mind: "this choice is so bad, I don't care if it is
voluntary." (40).
To be certain, personal testimonies from those who participate in unusual
behaviours are not always to be trusted. With this single stroke, however, Ger-
ber attempts to erase the history of the freak show and the testimony of those
who willingly participate in it: the favourable testimonies of the professional
actors above are dismissed without critical analysis under Gerber's rubric. The
strategy employed by Gerber here to criticize the freak show does not, further-
more, allow for the possibility that his own opinion of the freak show is a
social construction. In effect, by moralizing his argument, Gerber links his
own essentialized opinions to an absolute that transcends sociohistoric forces
and human emendation. The freak show is, simply, "bad," and that should be
the end of the inquiry.
If the freak show is "bad," it is because it is, according to Gerber and
Baskin, "exploitative." The assertion requires a historical evaluation to deter-
mine to what extent freak performers could exercise free choice in their
careers as exhibited humans: in this moralized framework, however, the testi-
mony of professional freaks, which in many cases (although by no means all)
denies the assertion, is eliminated from the evaluation. In addition, the fact
that many freaks were mentally subnormal, or were children further compli-
cates the issue of free choice. Gerber correctly points out that an act of consent
is not the same as an act of choice: in other words, willing participation in an
activity does not amount to evidence that the choice to participate was a free
288
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
one. Gerber's fear that the historian is in danger of "ethically compromising
himself by sitting in judgement of [sic] the choices made" (42) by some partic-
ular individual is alleviated, in his model, by six criteria which must be satis-
fied before an individual's choice may be considered to be fully voluntary:
I. One makes a free choice not only when one is uncoerced, but also when one has
a significant range of meaningful choices. One must have freedom, in other
words, to make choices from a number of options as well as freedom from the
necessity of choosing only one course of action.
2. Such freedom is greatest in societies in which the social environment fosters the
opportunity for individuals to playa number of different roles that do not
excessively limit one's choices to take on other roles.
3. One must have occasions for choice- that is, times when one may exercise
independent agency rather than have things done for one.
4. One must have the physical and mental capacity to make choices and carry out
the course of action they suggest.
5. One must have inforrt}ation about the alternatives one needs to evaluate.
6. One must have sufficient time and physical and mental security to evaluate
options (Gerber 42).
In an ideal universe, these six criteria would certainly be useful for forming
an evaluative strategy for determining consent. In reality it falls short: only the
very privileged few in a given society who have the political and economic
wherewithal to enjoy such freedom are granted validation for their choice in
this model. Gerber speaks of "physical and mental security," but he does not
discuss political and economic security: in what Panglossian universe are
these securities extricable one from the other?
Such an evaluative system, then, is vulnerable to the critique of cultural elit-
ism that has traditionally dominated historical research. Disabled persons have
consistently been among the most marginalized, most systematically disen-
franchised individuals in American history. Gerber's criteria do not serve their
"subaltern" history well; the critical lens ought to be turned upon those social
and historical forces that engender marginalization of the subaltern, rather
than condemning the subaltern for making "immoral" choices within that par-
adigm.
Barbara Baskin's crusade against Sutton and Jordon, Bogdan points out,
seriously damaged the ability of one disabled person, Otis Jordan, to make a
living in his chosen profession. Bogdan nevertheless identifies Baskin's
efforts as part of an ongoing struggle of disability activism in the 1980'S to
separate disability history from that of the professional freak:
The freak show is to disabled people as the striptease show is to women, as "Amos
n' Andy" is to blacks. Individuals who exhibit themselves on the sideshow platform
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
2
8
9
present a message to the world that disabled people are freaks, freaks in the most
pejorative sense of the word .. . To end freak shows is a symbolic struggle closely
lied to the very transformat ion of America that disability activists seek. (Bogdan
285).
But Baskin' s desire is not merely to eradicate the freak show: with thi s
approach, she wishes to erase the history of the freak show as well , replacing it
with back-planted noti ons of how a "freak" performatively read in its hi storical
context. Activists seek to reject what Daryl Michael Scott, speaking of Afri-
can-American rights movements. referred to as "damage imagery," and often
that means rejecting. or at least fe-envisioning. the hi stories that a TC seen to
create this imagery, as if the victims of exploitati on are blamed for thei r own
degradation any time the degrading system is described (see Baynton 33).
This methodology seems, at the very least, to encourage the kind of hi story
in which the conclusions guide the research rather than vice-versa. Attempts
to erase the history of the freak show on moral grounds make the critical error
of denying any agency of the very persons they intend to liberate. Attempts
to historicize the freak show in the absence of testimony from freaks
skirts the same abyss. However, a careful review of the available hi storical
material about the freak show' s polymorphous history suggests an alternate
hi storiography one that is neither automatically condemnatory nor uncriti -
cally sentimental, and which can provide more plausible subjectivity for the
performer.
The importance of Robert Bogdan's work regarding the hi story of the
American freak show cannot be overestimated: Bogdan's 1988 book Freak
Show, the first major scholarly work to admit the testimonies of professional
freaks as historical evidence, created a new matrix for discussing the issues of
this history. It is not, however, a work overtly or explicitly grounded in the
history of di sability in America, although Bogdan's positive impact on dis-
ability culture in his life's work has been very substantial. Gerber's critique of
Bogdan is, although prejudicial, apparently influenced by a desire to ground
Bogdan's work in the history of di sability, a history that is punctuated by terri -
ble human ri ghts abuses and the neglect or wholesale disenfranchi sement of
American individuals. Gerber believes Bogdan to be suffering from a mi s-
pl aced desire to resurrect the freak show traditi on, and in that desire, Gerber
finds valid grounds for critique.
This is not Bogdan's goal, however. Bogdan seeks to explore the 1984
Baskin-lordan controversy in order to present Sutton's Sideshow as a relic of
a bygone era, an era for which he feels no little nostalgia, but which, in his
view, is ultimately doomed to fall, as our culture continues to be unwilling to
support such a tradition. Baskin called the freak show an intolerable "anachro-
ni sm," and Bogdan, despite nostal gia or perhaps even because of it, seems
reluctantly to agree. Bogdan's goal in Freak Show is not to advocate the resur-
290
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
rection of the tradition but rather to uncover a forgotten history and demon-
strate its immense complexity and to liberate freaks from the prejudice that
they were powerless victims of an exploitati ve tradition feeding off a degener-
ate culture. He articulates this position through Jordan:
The issue as [Jordan] sees it is his right to make a living. to live a particul ar li fe-
style, not the negative imagery or the harm that might be done to future generati ons
of disabled people by the symbolism of the freak show platfonn. Otis has hi s own
life to get on with; he is not interested in, and in fact does not identify with. disability
rights. He may be unaware of the rich history of his profession, but he still sees
himself as a showman: independent and proud. (28 I)
Despite his love of the freak show's hi story and his remarkable sympathy for a
stigmati zed universe, Bogdan's attitude towards Jordan is a mi xture of admi -
ration and condescension. Despite his historical research both deep and broad,
Bogdan, like Gerber, seems reluctant to part with the assumption that many, if
not all , freak performers ~ in some essential way coerced into their careers.
The difference between the two authors can be boil ed down to where each of
them places the blame for exploitati on. Gerber unhesitatingly accuses the freak
show promoters as the chief benefactors of the freak ' s exploitation; Bogdan,
on the other hand, in light of historical evidence, beli eves the coercion is
authored not by individual agents but by a society primiti vely insensitive to
issues of di sability rights. Bogdan rightly turns the lens of criticism away from
the freak show and towards the social matri x that, he believes, eliminated
options for the disabl ed, until the freak show was the best choice remaining,
and then condemned the freaks for parti cipating and taking pride in it. But he
seems ambivalent about the actual freak show as a happy career path.
Few writers in the hi story of the freak show, disabled or not, have gone to
the trouble necessary to track down and interview working freaks. Bogdan
impressed his audience with this openness. He sought out Sutton's freak show
and sat down to grant what voice he could to Jordan. There were witnesses to
thi s interview, however. Bruce Snowden (Fat Man "Harold Huge") was
present when Bogdan interviewed Jordan, and he told journali st James Taylor:
" Bogdan looked like if you touched him he was gonna explode right out of his
clothes. He was terrifi ed. The whole time he was talking to Otis it was like he
could hardly beli eve he was even looking at him. He came with an agenda.
Trying to get an idea through to him was li ke trying to put your finger through
a centerpole" (qtd. in Taylor, " Welcome"). The "agenda" that Snowden iden-
tified in Bogdan was a perception that the profession of freak had never been a
noble one: Bogdan seemed to associate it with an element of society somehow
alien to, and beneath, his own stati on. In the book, for instance, Bogdan
describes a chance meeting with one of his graduate students whil e vi siting a
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
291
freak show, at which he experiences acute embarrassment and a desire to jus-
tify his presence at the show in the context of research (x). Snowden's testi-
mony and Bogdan's own reticence suggest that although Bogdan understood
the social construction of freaks as artificial, he nevertheless retained a hesi-
taney, even a fear of the abnormal body or of the freak show profession, which
seems to have colored his exploration. Bogdan looked into the freak show as a
social phenomenon. a performative outpouring of human expression, a the-
atre. But he, for the most part, neglected to consider that it was, like all profes-
sional theatre, a business.
Dick D. Zigun, for the past two decades the manager of the Coney Island
USA Freak Show, has little patience for arguments like Gerber's and
Baskin's. which he describes as "nonsense":
Like any form of theatre, whether it's Elizabethan drama or sideshow the question it
comes down to is whether you're putting on a good show. So yeah, some people were
exploited. some people were not. The form in and of itself is not inherently bad, and
intelligent people can always adapt in new directions. It's morc of a question of who is
the inside talker, how good a show was, whether the audience was being ripped off or
highly entertained [ ... ] It'sjust a question of the particular operation as to whether the
performers are being gawked at and being exploited or whether they are well-treated
and in on the joke, laughing under their breath at the audience.
Zigun's position is that an analysis of exploitation in the freak show must be
made on a case-by-case basis and that condemning all freak shows categori-
cally, as Gerber does, is, in Zigun's words, "throwing the baby out with the
bathwater." Like all theatrical jobs, Zigun says, freak performance has its ups
and downs. No doubt, certain freaks were exploited by unscrupulous manag-
ers; no doubt, some freaks had to choose between the freak show and a life of
isolation in an institution. But as in all theatrical businesses. there are good
and bad managers. competent and clumsy; some seasons are profitable. some
scanty. Some freak actors made lucrative livings but lost money in bad invest-
ments or unwise film deals; others settled into comfortable lifestyles. Some
performed all their lives, long beyond any financial need; some performed
only a few seasons and retired. To assert that no freaks were capable of mak-
ing conscious decisions is a totalizing strategy that flies in the face of histori-
cal evidence.
Such totalization, however, characterized most of the political opposition to
the freak show's history in the latter part of the twentieth century in America.
This misconception caused some disability activists to ignore the voices of the
subalterns they were ostensibly trying to empower. The freak is, according to
historical evidence, a person with a great deal of personal and professional
agency.
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
The freak show's sudden decline in popularity in the [950S was not, con-
trary to popular opinion, due to an advance in an American ethical conscious-
ness that could no longer tolerate exploitation of the disabled. In fact, a variety
of emergent trends, not only in philosophy and culture, but also in economics,
technology, and some very mundane exigencies, contributed to the transfor-
mation, not decline, of the freak show.
THE OLD SCHOOL
I exhibitedfreaks and exploited themfor years. Now you are going to exploit them. The
difference between authors and the news media, and the freak show operators is that
we paid these people.
- Ward Hall, in a letter to Robert Bogdan (Bogdan 268)
Coney Island in a gray March of 2001, during a cold nor'easter, seems a
desolate and forsaken place. Compared to the crush of bodies in the everlast-
ing noon of Manhattan, the empty space between the abandoned rides and
along the strand of beach seems luxurious and almost palpable. The slick
streets are strewn with tumbling trash. Colorful signs and flags struggle
weakly against the gray sky and rain. The occasional incongruous tourist scut-
tles from awning to awning, pretending not to see any of the carny games that,
against all reason, remain open and staffed by frozen but cheerful old men,
and pretending not to hear the few men and women who approach the touri sts
for change. It is the turn of a new century, and the di strict has changed much
since the tum of the last one, when Coney Island was the sparkling jewel of
New York City, weekend and vacation destination for the whole country.
Now, the boardwalk is surrounded by the low-rent, high-ri se projects that
repl aced the old neighborhoods. McDonald's and Taco Bell have stamped the
boardwalk with their ubiquitous branding. The immigrants of this community
are black and Hispanic, not Jewish and Italian as they were in 1901. But
there's still a Nathan's Famous on the corner of Stillwell and Surf, you can
still get a kosher dog and a knish there, and you can still get grifted out of a
few bucks by local schills. And there' s still a freak show.
Zigun, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama's Master of Fine Arts in
Playwriting program, came to control the Coney Island side show in 1985, just
as Lyle Sutton's show was closing down for good, one year after the Baskin-
Jordan controversy. Unique in the freak show's history, Coney Island USA is
a non-profit professional sideshow, which receives federal grants for its oper-
ation and employs an organizational structure more or less identical to that of
any non-profit professional theatre in America. In the summer, when the tour-
ists come for the beach and rides. it is a stunning performance event that owes
its survival to its ability to draw an audience off the street.
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
293
Like hi storical sideshows, Zigun's offers a bally platform, where a "Talker"
attracts passers-by to the show while performers tantalize the crowd with a hint
of what they'll see inside. Also like historical sideshows, Zigun 's runs continu-
ously all day. However, like a conventional theatre show, Zigun 's provides a
performance space similar to that of a black-box theatre. In a traditional side-
show, the audience remains standing, wandering at the.ir own pace through a
series of spaces in which freaks of all types continually perform, until the gawk-
ers are ejected at the "blow-off," a section of the space configured to motivate
the customers to exit to make room for new ones. At Coney Island, spectators sit
on bleachers while acts parade, variety-style, on a small stage in front of them_
After the show, the audience walks through a blow-off that nostalgically recalls
a nineteenth-century Dime Museum, complete with "The Really Real Fiji Mer-
maid" (now called "Bambi") and historical exhibits about Coney Island.
Zigun's stationary and permanent version of the old-style freak show repre-
sents a far more theatrical approach to audience-performer relationships than
the approach adopted by more traditional sideshows, which remained mobile.
Two touring freak shows modeled on those of the late nineteenth century do,
in fact, still exist in America, both headquartered in Florida (see Gubernick).
They are Christ Hall' s World of Wonders, operated by Ward Hall and featur-
ing Harold Huge, the fat man, Pete Terhune, the dwarf fire-eater, and a
museum of oddities; and Bobby Reynolds' International Circus Sideshow,
featuring a nine-foot-tall sword swallower and another "Really Real Fiji Mer-
maid." Zigun, for admission of five dollars, provides a sit-down show: Rey-
nolds and Hall , men both in their sixties, operate according to a traditional,
"get 'em in, get 'em out" attitude towards their patrons and charge one dollar
for a walk-through exhibit. "The point is to get their money, give 'em enough
of a show so that they aren't pissed off that you took their money, and blow
'em the hell off," historian and museum proprietor James Taylor told me. Tay-
lor concedes that in order to survive with a show that, unlike Hall's or Rey-
nolds' , cannot "hit the road" as soon as the audience begins to "beef," Zigun
has adapted a viable platform, one no less viable than Reynolds' or Hall's
quick turnover would be in the same space. "Charge five bucks and get twenty
people in, or charge 'em a buck and get a hundred people in. You gotta make
that call as you see it," says Taylor_
Unlike the traveling freak shows of Reynolds and Hall , Zigun's is part of
the culture of the neighborhood in which it lives year-round, through the
chaos of the summertime and the desolation of the off-season. Everything
about Zigun's show, about the Freak Show Museum, and about Zigun himself
indicates a sense of identity inextricably associated with Coney Island and its
long and colorful hi story. It's a family-oriented show: Bearded Lady Jennifer
Miller, who performs topless in her small-scale circus acts to emphasize her
biological femal eness, keeps nudity and profanity out of her Coney Island per-
294
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
fonnance, for instance. Partially because of this consciousness, Zigun's show
has become a thing unique even in the history of the freak show, where the
bizarre quickly becomes commonplace.
Otis Jordan
In the 1980s, Coney Island USA was in the fortunate position of being
ready to accept the veteran sideshow perfonners who had been with Sutton
when the "Incredible Wonders of the World" group disbanded. The legendary
Melvin Burkhardt and Otis Jordan finished their careers at Coney Island USA,
under Zigun's management. Burkhardt, who passed away only last year, per-
fanned feats of tremendous muscle control and "pain resisting," but hi s per-
fonnance, like that of a tattooed man, is viewed as that of a "made" or "self-
infli cted" freak and novelty artist, while Jordan's configuration as "The Frog
Boy" classifies him as a " born" freak. These differences, of course, are purely
henneneutic and are established and conditioned by the freaks in perfonnance.
But certain politicians who opposed the freak show for creating illusions of
the di sabled could be fooled by subtle manipulation of those very illusions.
Jordan, who had been the subject of the Baskin controversy the previous
year, presented a problem for Zigun, who relied on grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, at that time, was coming under increasing
pressure from the right wing of American politics to refonn itself according to
conservative values, values that were ironically gaining mainstream popular-
ity by styling themselves "politically correct." Zigun, himself at that time a
site reporter for the NEA, felt this pressure even in his small outfit:
When Jesse Helms slarted jumping up and down about Robert Mapplelhorpe and
Karen Finley, we had not proved to be a controversy, but when they cut the budget
fjfly percent and started imposing decency standards there was a civil war within the
arts community. A lot of the staff on panels of the NEA resigned. New panels were
brought in. Anything that might prove to be controversial later on is what got
cut I ... J Certain elements of the arts community found a compromise that was
acceptable to keep their funding going. and that was a stigma, but what are you
going to do? You're gonna cut something like the Coney Island Sideshow. You
don't want Jesse Helms yelling about having money going to pay Michael Wilson
[Eek the GeekJ to put another tattoo on his face.
Zigun's capitulation to the tide of public opinion may have been forced, but
he handl ed it with a kind of aplomb and showmanship that echoed Barnum's
efforts when his exhibits were criticized:
At that time we scrupul ously avoided the word "freak," and we insisted we were
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
295
a sideshow and not a freak show, because we were opening up a Pandora's box.
Nobody had done it I .. . J The allIer concern is that the decision was made that for a
institution, Coney Island certainly is the right place to establish a national
center of Americana Bizarro. If there is going to be a place that keeps the ten-in-one
alive then Coney Island is certainly the right place. What is the game plan? The
game plan is to keep alive a specific dramatic formallhat only somebody with an
MFA in Playwriting would understand. But it is wrong to keep it frozen in Ihe way it
would have been in the 19505. The plan is to do a ten-in-one in 2001, 35 if it were
still going. So that means having freaks but not exploiting them.
"Having freaks but not exploiting them" meant that Zigun's sideshow
would be, as he put it in a 1992 New York Times interview, "performance-
oriented rather than gawker-oriented" (Martin CIS; see also Dennett t38).
Otis Jordan would not be presented as "The Frog Boy" but would be subjected
to reconditioning in performance:
[Jordan] probably had been exploited in previous jobs, but we changed his name to
the Human Cigarette Factory. We didn't suggesllhat his body was deformed like a
frog, and since we weren't claiming he was froglike we didn't have to keep him
hidden back of the tent. He had a motorized wheelchair and if he wanted to ride
around on the boardwalk he was welcome to. We did a sideshow banner that showed
a handsome black man in a wheelchair with cigarettes flying around him, not
something on a lily pad. (Zigun)
As Bogdan noted, all freakery is part of a process he names "social con-
struction" (2): changing Jordan from a frog to a factory was merely a bit of
meta-theatrical sleight-of-hand. If Jordan's cigarette trick was foregrounded,
and his anomalous body, downplayed, Jordan could occupy the role of a
"human marvel," that is. a novelty act and not a "born freak" act. Coney
Is1and, therefore. was not a freak show. the audience was not patronizing a
freak show, and the NEA was not funding a freak show. Against all expecta-
tions, this formula protected the federal grants of Coney Island USA during
those politically difficult times.
All of this opposition and controversy indicates that one thing, at least, has
changed since the Golden Age of the Freak Show. The gaff has been blown,
the jig is up, and the "normal" audience cannot pretend to patronize the freak
show, as it once did, for edifying or educational reasons. By no stretch of the
imagination could any viewer believe the freak show to represent the great
hopes of the American project and the tastes of the democratic majority, as it
was made to do in the Barnum era. The motives are laid bare: the freakish
body is sought out to indulge one' s personal urges, to confound or reinforce
one's relationship to the intrigues of nonnality, or to wallow in one's own
29
6 MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
dark side. The recognition of these changes, however, represents a new dawn
for freak performance: an opportunity to make manifest some of the most
ephemeral visions of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.
For Bakhtin, the ambiguity of the freakish body is foundational to the free
expression of thought and action, in the political as well as personal spheres.
For Bakhtin, the ambiguity between self and other that "hideous" bodies, red-
olent with swellings, clefts, protuberances, gashes, and dismembered limbs,
engender is deeply positive (Bahktin 25). It is the body element in its most
utopian aspect, an ecstatic union of separate selves into a single grotesque
communal entity of multiple bodies, represented, perhaps, by conjoined twins:
a single body housing two complete people, four arms, four legs, two heads.
This physi,,-al utopia could be represented, for example, by the swelling of a
hunchback, seen to resemble a pregnant belly. For Bakhtin, the "unfinished
and open body," that is, the freakish one, "is not separated from the world by
clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with
objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its ele-
ments. It is an incarnation of this world at the absolute lower stratum, as the
swallowing up and generating principle, as the bodily grave and bosom, as a
field which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to sprout"
(27). What Bakhtin means by "the absolute lower stratum" is the dissolution
of vertical hierarchies, in which the privileged minority reigns over disem-
powered multitudes, and the establishment of total equality on a horizontal
plane, emphasizing a shared humanity. This quality may be considered a sort
of "lowest common denominator" linking all humans, a quality more funda-
mental than rank, race, gender, body type, or even morality.
Bakhtin held that vertical hierarchies depend on one characteristic of the
bodies they control: that they are unchanging. "[AJ hierarchy," he writes, "can
determine only that which represents stable, immovable, and unchangeable
being, not free becoming" (364). For this reason hierarchies require normate
bodies, which are quantifiable, classifiable, and stagnant. The norm ate form
represents a "closed individuality," a finished body as restricted in its actions
as it is in its shape. The normate body is capable of producing only norms of
speech and behavior; any possibility of growth or dissent is categorically
absent from the norm ate (320).
The grotesque body, on the other hand, is unclassifiable, sportive, unique,
and above all, transforming into something else. The grotesque body seems
to transcend its own individuality, accessing, in its swellings and protuber-
ances, parts of other bodies, unpredictably morphing into new identities and
new shapes. The hierarchy cannot contain or explain this wonder and so is
rendered false, "suspended," by the extraordinary form: "Such concepts as
becoming, the existence of many seeds and of many possibilities, the free-
dom of choice, leads man towards the horizontal line of time and of historic
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
297
becoming. Let us stress that the body of man reunites in itself all the
elements and kingdoms of nature, both the plants and the animals. Man,
properly speaking, is not something completed and finished, but open,
uncompleted" (364).
The "historic becoming" Bakhtin stresses here is a sense of the individual's
role not merely within his immediate community, but within the whole epic
story of the human species, past and future. This sense is engendered by the
dismantling of the norm ate hierarchy, when the individual body is seen not as
a closed system but as part and parcel of a much larger corpus mysticum
including all humanity.
In Rabelais, the freakish body's transgression, which Freud and Grosz
behold with a mixture of titillation and fear, is welcomed by Bahktin with
open anns, as the same transgression present in social revolution, of liberation
from oppression, from fear, even from death itself, when the individual sees
all human bodies, including all those now dead and all those yet born, as one
body, his body. By transcending the limits of the individual, falsely inscribed
within normate hierarchies, the grotesque body incites a sense of the great and
uncontainable wonder of humankind, eliminating terror of death and the
unknown and replacing it with a renewed awe at the glorious possibilities of
the cosmos and humanity's rightful, happy role within it.
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body was a triumph over the stupidity of repres-
sion and an explosion into a realm of free thought and action, made possible
by confrontation with the artificiality of barriers to those activities. If normal -
ity is a hegemonic force that dilutes and represses free thought and action,
then eliminating the ideal of the normal is for Bakhtin the gate to real, quanti-
fiable, political freedom.
Bakhtin is concerned with more than the effect of the abnormate body on
normates. For Bakhtin, who was disabled and who therefore may have been
more inclined to a positive view of theabnormate, the benefits of confronta-
tion with the unusual human fonn are real, measurable, and communal and are
of equal value for the gazer and the gazed-upon. In Bakhtin's model, the expo-
sure and elimination of "normality" and its hierarchies, binaries, and privi-
leges will release everyone, freaks and normates alike, from the stultifying,
selfnegating conformity narratives central to all oppressive hegemonies.
Below are three examples of freaks who continue to perform at the time of this
writing, freaks who employ their own extraordinary bodies to performatively
challenge, not reify, normative hierarchies.
Jennifer Miller
By the 1990s, partially as a result of politically slippery positioning, Coney
Island had developed a reputation as a place where avant-garde theatrical
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
experimentation combined strangely with nostalgia for the nineteenth century,
which was becoming increasingly kitsch for the New York performance art
scene. Zigun's stage was a place where Jennifer Miller, a radical lesbian per-
formance artist and bearded lady, could experiment with her own complex
negotiations of normative sexual identity politics in performance.
The freak show tradition was not a forum to which Miller was initially
attracted. In her freak character of Zenobia, Miller intersperses her juggling
and acrobatic acts with harangues and challenges to her audience, encouraging
thei r objectifying gaze while simultaneously exposing and criticizing that
gaze. "Historically," says Zenobia, holding four gleaming machetes in her
hands, "hair has been a symbol of power. That's why the men don't want the
women ha1Ling too much of it in too many places, you get it? Well FORGET
IT!" At other points in her performance, she criticizes women for not seizing
that power:
The world is full of women who have beards, or at least, women who have the
potential to have beards. If only they would live up to that potential, as I have done,
instead of spending the time, the money, the energy on the waxing, the shaving,
the electrolysis, the plucking. I mean we all know someone like this who's out
there every day with the pluck plUCk pluck! I'm talking about my mother, my
grandmother, every day with the pluck-pluck-pluck-pla-pluck-pla-pluck-pla-pluck
pluck pluck! As if they were 'chicken." (Juggling Gender)
Miller understands clearly the tenuous line she walks as a professional
freak, that there is a level of complicity in her own exploitation in her perfor-
mance, and that no matter how skillful her juggling, her beard is always
already a major performative element of her act. Rather than shy away from
this conundrum, she capitalizes on it, effectively transforming her anomalous
body into a politicized text of which she herself guides the reading (Miller; see
Fraser).
But freak performativity is never so simple. In a traditional ten-in-one, such
as those operated by Reynolds or Hall , the standing audience could merely
walk away from the political tirades which comprised much of Miller's act
and thus avoid the more powerful political and sociological implications of
her work. The theatrical structure of Coney Island USA permitted Miller to
exploit a more confrontational performance style. " I didn't really find any
sense of validation at Coney Island," she told me in a May 2003 interview. "I
didn' t get exploited, but I don't feel fine about it. In a sense, I feel as though I
was exploiting Coney." Regarding her own performance, Mill er's assessment
is likewise complex: "As a folkloric form I really like the freak show, inas-
much as it is a ' people's theatre.' But when I performed at Coney, my banner
was up outside the theatre, and other women who have beards feel horrible
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
299
when they walk by. Performing at Coney was a pretty amazi ng experience,
with that set of colleagues, for sure, but it didn't really affect my understand-
ing of the way that other women with beards are made to feel" (Miller).
Miller' s emphasis on her own anomalous body in performance capitalizes on
the history of the freak show to tease out, as the freak show always has, the
objectifying, othering gaze. Unlike the old-style shows, however, Miller's then
subjects that gaze to a withering critique, striving for an eventual normalization
of the female bearded body as the performance progresses. A bearded woman
passing on the boardwalk would see only the gaudy publicity banner, without
the filter of Miller's multifaceted performance to condition that freakish herme-
neutic. For Miller, who is motivated in large part by a desire to spread informa-
ti on about female beardedness, the concern is how widely and how well that
knowledge is di sseminated. Zenobia's onstage reception is at once liberated
and complicated by her contextualization, at Coney Island, as a freak.
Tony Torres
In 2003, Coney Island USA openly styles itself a Freak Show. Its status as
an experimental performance zone and as a community instituti on has earned
for it some respectability within a changing tide of national
that seems to be willing to take itself less seriously than it did in the 1980s.
The headliner at Zigun's show (the freak with the most seniority at Coney
Island) is Tony Torres, a short-statured star of stage, screen, and television,
better known as "Koko the Killer Clown." Zi gun describes Torres' back-
ground:
If you gave a couple of facts to your average do-gooder and dido't mention dwarves
and you didn't mention Coney Island and you didn't mention freak. show. And you
told him there was a guy with an MFA from the Yale Drama School who started a
non-profi t theatre in a poor community. He mel with someone who grew up in the
neighborhood, who had a troubled childhood. whose parents were alcoholics and
crack-heads. This young individual was a gang member. he had been in trouble with
the law, he had an attention-deficit problem, he had never held down a steady job.
He got involved with this non-profit theatre company, started getting a regular
salary, learned how to hold down a job, got married, had children, got write-ups in
the newspaper, became famous. Your do-gooder would think of that as a very good
thing. Now you take that exact ci rcumstance and explain it was a local neighborhood
dwarf who grew up in Coney Island who now works as Koko the Killer Clown.
Nobody would question that it was a good opportunity for this young man until you
added those last few details.
Koko' s version of the story is more sedate: "Mr. Dick D. Zigun, my boss,
300
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
when I was young he used to hound me. I was born and raised in Coney
Island. When I was real young he used to bother me to come here and I would
tell him no. But I was a young kid, my deal was to hang out and have fun. But
then I went to the [Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey] circus and became
Koko, and when I came back I was a little more mature and I was like, all
right, lemme give it a try." Torres does not have Miller's educational back-
ground, nor is he as concerned with political issues surrounding his perfor-
mance as she is. Like Miller, however, Torres capitalizes on the reactions of
his audience to advance his aesthetic, personal, and financial concerns.
Children read Torres' four-foot high body as a child's body: this gives him,
in his words, an "edge to get in there and talk to them." Children largely moti-
vate Torres' work as a freak: neglected and impoverished in his own childhood,
he actively seeks to protect other children in his community of Coney Island
from the circumstances that led to his own criminal history. For Torres, these
circumstances are not bound to his anomalous body but to a social predilection
for violence, arising from an inability to accept difference. He recounts a story
in which he and a friend encountered a little girl in a park. Torres' friend
attempted to goad the little girl into ridiculing Torres, but the little girl categor-
ically refused to do so on the grounds that it would displease her mother. "Did
you know a tear dropped out of my eye?" said Torres: "I've never heard a kid
say that. People don't teach their kids that, that not everybody's the same, the
same skin complexion, for instance. We do have people who do teach but that's
not enough. When I see parents yelling at their kid because they're making fun
of me, I go to the parent and say, 'Thank you, that's good teaching.' I would
yell at my son if I ever seen him making fun of somebody. 'Cause ifhe's gonna
make fun of somebody he should look at me."
Although Torres encourages the teaching of tolerance in his personal life
and his professional interactions when performing for children, he does not
attempt to "normalize" his own difference. Rather, like his professional prede-
cessor Tom Thumb, he capitalizes on it:
One time I did a bar and I got paid very well and walked Qul with 200 extra dollars
[ ... J Girls were looking, "Oh, you're so cute, here's money." You think I'm gonna
say no? I put it right in my pocket [ ... ] ] know how to make [balloons into] flowers
and lovebirds. You gotta know how to hit thal, how to make that hookup. Some girl
looks at you and you come up with a nice balloon, and they melt. I'm lhinkin. cha-
ching! They're like, "Honey, throw him something." He may pull out five dollars.
She's all. "No. give the homeboy the ten dollars."
At twenty-seven, Torres in his off-season studies social work, in prepara-
tion for his retirement from the freak show. Torres' act is physically demand-
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
301
ing, invo]ving some acrobatics. and like many dwarves he can expect arthritis
early in life_ For Torres, the freak show has been a path chosen willingly, a
satisfying career that provides fame and financial security and which Torres
himself has made into a platform for other pursuits_ "My hit was working
here," he says, noting that his appearance at Coney Island has led to television
appearances on the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, MSNBC,
RuPaul, Strallge Ulliverse, and Maury Pavich, and to an appearance in the
Spike Lee film, He Got Game_ "I like my living, I like my lifestyle," says
Torres_ "My heart will always be here because this is what I love to do_"
Hellery Homosex
In Seattle, one colorful figure of the "drag king" community (a group of per-
formers, mostly homosexual women, who perform hypermasculini zed charac-
ters) is " Hellery Homosex_" A lesbian and self-defi ned radical feminist, Hellery
lost both her legs at the knee to a train accident in 1996. After months of depres-
sion and isolation foll owing her accident, Hellery was invited to a fancy dress
party and found herself unable to conform her new anomalous shape to the
model offeminine beauty she was expected to adopt. Instead, she took the ban-
dages she normally used to bind the stumps of her legs and wrapped them
around her chest, fl attening her breasts. She dressed herself as a man, slicked
back her hair, painted on a moustache, and, in her own words, "exploded": "My
body image was .fragile [due to the amputations] and I was really confused
about my gender. But as soon as I painted that facial hair on and wrapped those
ACE bandages around my chest it was like this humongous part of me that had
been bottled up inside was finally able to come out" ("Why" 2 1).
Hellery used cross-gendered drag performance to transform her loathing for
her own mutilated body and an inability to think of herself as sexually desir-
abl e into a powerful form of self-validation. For Hellery, amateur perfor-
mance of maleness was a form of self-guided therapy, in the process of
coming to terms with her own leglessness. When I met Hellery in 2000, she
was the picture of confidence: dressed in pseudomilitary garb, with platinum
hair, her clothing covered with symbols of "queer activi sm," Hellery wore
shorts exclusively. Her cut-off denim shorts always exposed the hollow super-
structure of her steel legs, which she had painted with yellow li ghtning bolts
and shoved incongruously into sneakers. Her dexterity wi th the legs was so
advanced that, had she worn long pants, her disability would have been com-
pletely invi sible. "Too many people hide their prostheses," she told me.
"You' d be blown away if you knew how many people walking around on the
street are secretl y amputees" (Personal interview). The forefront of di sability
activi sm regards hiding disability as a form of "passing," a pejorative term
302
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
coined to describe African-Americans who masqueraded as whites, and "com-
ing out" as a disabled person has been likened to "coming out" as a homosex-
ual: an act of self-validation and political consciousness (Tepper 105).
As a performance artist, Hellery moves into the domain of "freak perfor-
mance" only when her absent legs become a chief element of her performativ-
ity. In a rare performance as a drag queen ("queening" in Seattle is now a
performance tradition based more strongly on hyperfeminized characteriza-
tions than on the biological gender of the actor), Hellery, in a beautiful gown,
lip-synchs a song about abandonment. A male actor, her partner, ties her to a
chair. As she pleads for her lover not to leave her, he removes her prosthetic
legs and walks off stage with them, leaving her tied up, stumps waving in the
air, a powerful image of loss and helplessness, which, Hellery is eager to point
out, could not easily be duplicated by a normal-bodied actor.
For Hellery, Torres, Miller, and Jordan, the freak show represents much
more than a degradation chosen only in the absence of better choices. For each
of them, freak performance became a way of life and a lifestyle in which they
found significant self-empowerment and validation. Further, freak perfor-
mance became for each of them a form of artistic, theatrical self-expression,
over which they themselves maintained a great deal of control and agency. No
~ o r or less exploitative than any other form of theatrical entertainment, tra-
ditional forms of freak performance gave these four individuals a means of
profitably capitalizing on their own unusual bodies in a particularly theatrical
manner. But the freak show's modem popularity is in many ways undimin-
ished: it has simply transformed itself into new venues that are not so easily
. distinguished as freak shows.
THE NEW BALLYHOO
I will never, ever exploit YOII. Now punch that meat skewer through your fucking face!
-Jim Rose to the Torture King. in performance (Taylor, "Welcome'')
For some disability activists, the nineteenth-century practice of making
profit from freaks must be replaced by an "awareness of society's responsibil-
ity toward people with disabilities" (Dennett [37). For Dick Zigun and Torres,
as well as many other freak show practitioners, hostility towards the freak
show is a political gambit to put limits on what a person with an abnormal body
should be allowed to do. Dick Zigun succinctly attributes this judgment to "a
horrible, Puritanical, racist, uptight tradition in our culture. " Ironically, this is
the same accusation made by anti-freak disability activists. who see in the con-
tinued existence of a freak show the perpetuation of narratives of exclusion of
the worst kind, along lines of race and gender, as well as of body shape.
The Twenty-First Century Freak Show
303
I cannot pretend to know which motivation is more or less racist or ableist,
which more or less perverse. However, despite the mainstream rhetoric of
inclusion in this country, only the most jaundiced eye could fail to perceive that
racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and all other fonns of bigoted
hatred known to human history are still with us. Harmful racial and sexual ste-
reotypes still dominate the mainstream mass media. Hateful rap lyrics gamer
fortunes and international honors for their producers, reinforcing Zigun's
observation that politics don't matter "spit if there's a dollar to be made." His-
torically, the freak show's facility with mythologies of othering found a place
within a society desperately in need of self-definition. It continues to do so.
In fact, as multiculturalism has liberated narratives of oppression, the white,
middle-class, male body, recognized as "nonnal," has become, at least at
many American colleges, a site of antipathy. For political reasons as wen as
personal ones, many have sought to distance themselves from that nonn,
increasingly seen as oppressive and conformist. As museum curator Sage
Blevins observes, many individuals in American culture are becoming
revolted by the "vulgarity of their own nonnality" (Blevins). These individu-
als sometimes compensate for this vulgarity by engaging in the controlled
self-mutilations of bodybuilding, body piercing, tattoos, and implants.
In any case, the performance of "abnormality," personal or theatrical, con-
tinues to hold a powerful attraction. The attempt to erase, ignore, or falsely
denigrate the freak show's history, to serve the disability rights movement,
represents a prejudice against disability in performance that is not consistent
with historical evidence and may ultimately prove hannful to the movement.
On the contrary, an open and critical historical analysis, which is cognizant
both of theatre history and disability rights issues, will prove invaluable to
both disciplines. The pursuit of historical understanding is no enemy of the
pursuit of human rights. Although bizarre and possibly even painful at times,
this history must be confronted without fear or prejudice if the disability rights
movement is to be best served.
As for theatre history, the impulse to exclude the freak show is not one
grounded in a sensitivity to issues confronting the marginalization of disabled
persons; in fact, it is a symptom of essentialist and positivist ideologies that
only further that marginalization. If theatre history does not continue to
increase its receptivity to the history of non-mainstream American popular
entertainments in general, and the freak in particular. it courts stagnation and
elitism. In fact, the omission of freaks from American theatre history unduly
privileges the able-bodied perfonner, by erasing the history of disability in
perfonnance and replacing it with the notion that any disabled body in perfor-
mance must necessarily be the subject of degenerate exploitation, indeed, of
pornography. As Torres noted, this notion is grounded in an impulse to restrict
the types of behavior an abnonnate body should be allowed.
MICHAEL M. CHEMERS
The work begun by Bogdan strives to provide a historiography for the freak
show that avoids as ahistorical both knee-jerk condemnation and sentimental
nostalgia. The degree to which it succeeds in this endeavor can be measured
by its usefulness in the further demystification of the freak, in the service of
both theatre history and disability activism, as both discourses strive to
reclaim a lost past.
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