This story begins at the end.
From the face of a paramedic who arrived too late: Billy Tipton is on his deathbed, in the arms of his son William, in a shabby trailer down in that hole called Spokane.
The paramedic doesn't look around, doesn't see the remnants of a life—which, after all, was not an insignificant life—piled up in that piece of metal on wheels that Billy called "home."
A life of music and failed marriages: the photos of his three children, his musical instruments, a diamond ring, his records.
And no documents.
No, that paramedic sees something else. And he nearly has a heart attack.
Billy Tipton is not Billy Tipton!
But—in reality—that little doctor doesn't really know what he actually saw! To understand, he would have needed to read Plato's "Symposium," and I doubt he had done that.
If he had read it, he would have known that there was a time when men had four arms and four legs, and two faces on one head. They were all double: men-men, women-women, and then there were the androgynous ones.
The ἀνδρόγυνος were the most perfect, formed by one male part and one female part, and were round (because the woman is a child of the moon), and they were powerful.
They were so powerful that they decided to attack the Sky.
And the Gods got scared.
So Zeus decided to cut them in half. One by one.
Dorothy Lucille Tipton began her ascent to the Sky—still a teenager—in the thirties.
It was the jazz music she listened to in the clubs of Oklahoma City and the long legs of Non Earl, who was already thirty and worked as a dancer, that took her away from Kansas City and her aunt (to whom she was entrusted after her parents' divorce when she was only 4 years old) who dreamed of a future as a classical pianist for her.
Instead, Dorothy discovered the sax and the music of black people (and Non's legs), but she also discovered that no one wanted someone like her.
These are the years of the Great Depression; let alone if someone is willing to risk hiring a female saxophonist!
So Dorothy becomes Billy.
She wraps her chest in elastic bands, cuts her hair very short, stuffs her pants, wears a man's suit, and everyone falls for it.
The impresarios who hire him, the audience that comes to listen to him at the Cotton Club in Missouri, where he moves; Bill Pierson and Lou Raines, with whom he forms a trio in 1950, and also Ron Kilde, who joins the group four years later, all fall for it.
But so does the young June, who is only eighteen when she falls in love with him, and also Betty Cox, who actually marries him and goes with him to Portland.
Betty doesn't find it strange that Billy doesn't undress in front of her; she even accepts not being able to make love: Billy told her he had a serious genital accident as a boy and that, because of that same accident, he has to wear those bands on his chest.
Meanwhile, the quartet is doing well. Gigs, concerts, and even a recording contract come along. In the meantime, Betty has left because Billy is always away playing, and she got tired of that vagabond life. But it doesn't matter much: Billy records two albums, "Sweet Georgia Brown" in '55, and "Billy Tipton plays Hi-Fi on the Piano" in '56.
The time is ripe for the big leap; the train of success is about to stop at Billy's station.
It's 1958, and Billy's group is the attraction at Allen's Tin Pan Alley when he's offered a contract for a series of prestigious concerts down in Reno, alongside a star of Liberace's caliber.
But Billy refuses.
It's hard to attack the Sky. The price to pay is a life of lies and fear. If they find out, they'll come to get him and separate Dorothy from Billy. The gods are no longer there, but those perfect beings still cause fear and scandal.
Because there are people who will never be able to reach the Sky.
But the boys in the band don't know this, so they get mad and leave B.
No big deal: Billy continues to play alone in small clubs. He also starts working as a talent agent. Then he meets Kitty Oakes, the "Irish Venus," who is tired of being a stripper and wants to become a true lady.
It's 1962, Billy and Kitty get married and move to Spokane, buy a house and even adopt three children.
The Tiptons are a true American family: Billy is an exemplary citizen and father, actively involved in the children's education and the public life of his community. The Tiptons are respectable people.
It lasts twenty years, then arthritis hits, and Billy can no longer play. Billy can't even seek medical treatment: he's afraid of going to doctors, and even his fake documents could be discovered. It's the end, slow and inexorable, Billy can't work anymore, debts consume the house, Kitty leaves, and Billy ends up in that trailer where we met him, now seventy-four, in the arms of his son William, in the throes of an untreated ulcer, under the astonished gaze of that paramedic.
Who was Billy/Dorothy Tipton?
When the scandal breaks, reactions are varied: some swear they always knew, some fall from the clouds, some get angry, some try to profit, some defend him like sweet Betty, and some want nothing to do with it.
Even his ashes will be divided into two parts.
"Billy was a good father," his children will say.
Billy was a jazz musician.
Who was Billy/Dorothy Tipton?
I doubt the answer to this question lies in the grooves of this "Billy Tipton plays Hi-Fi on the Piano," nor in the previous "Sweet Georgia Brown." But perhaps it's worth listening to them even just because—now—those tunes take on stranger contours. And also because a story like this could only happen in the World of Music, where reality and Myth still intertwine.
I don't know who Billy/Dorothy was, but I know what he/she wasn't: he/she wasn't a freak, a bizarre oddity, nor a transgender, nor a lesbian, nor anything else you might think of.
He/She was one of the last survivors of a mythical, ancient race so powerful that it thought it could attack the Sky.
And he/she was a Jazz musician.
However, perhaps it's worth—at this point—asking another question: who is (still) afraid of Billy/Dorothy Tipton?
Why did Billy/Dorothy have to run for her entire life, and there had to be a reason. Who is afraid of the ἀνδρόγυνος, these perfect beings, beloved by Eros, the oldest of the gods? Who wants them to pay for their insanity of trying to attack the Sky?
An answer to this question could be found in a little book from a few years ago translated in Italy by Rubettino (Dale O'Leary "The Gender War"). If you find the time (and the stomach) to read it, you will find wonderful "pearls" of refined intellectual subtlety. It will explain to you that there is a "sexual left" coordinated by radical feminist movements with Marxist inspiration, pro-abortion organizations, and groups pushing for demographic control. That there are groups (dangerous ones!) pushing forward an assault on life and family conducted in the name of pseudo-scientific theories, to promote the interests of lobbyists acting unscrupulously with the complicity of media and intellectuals.
There are people who will never be able to reach the Sky, and they hate and fear those beings who want to attack that Sky.
(-Dr. O'Leary, why is the issue of "gender" so important? Why so much negative emphasis on the fact that the term "gender" replaces the word "sex"?
-Because it is the key around which, for the past twenty years, the whole attempt to overturn the natural order of the world revolves, without letting it show. Adopting a gender perspective, a document from Instraw, an institution that is part of the UN, explains, means "distinguishing between what is natural and biological and what is socially and culturally constructed, and renegotiating the boundaries between the natural and its inflexibility, and the social." In simple terms, rejecting the idea that sexual identity is inscribed in nature, in chromosomes, and asserting that each person constructs their own "gender," freely floating between masculine and feminine, transitioning through all intermediate possibilities.)
Exactly, darling, and hopefully, it will happen as soon as possible!
For @odradek
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