…That’s the question, plain and simple. I just happened to find these photos — really, I’m not fishing for photos about cross-dressing — when I was searching through the Chicago Historical Society’s terrific archive of old Chicago Daily News photos, which is posted at the Library of Congress Web site. Some of the photos, including these particular images from 1906, come without much in the way of explanatory information. This is apparently a man named Julius Duc, who was sitting at a police station, wearing a dress. He doesn’t look too happy. And if he had been trying to pass as a woman, that mustache must have been a dead giveaway. Or was this just some sort of police prank? Hmmm. (Click on the photos for larger images.)
Overheard Conversations
So I was in one of those “Golden” restaurants in Chicago. You know, those places that serve pancakes and, well, just about everything else. And even though they don’t seem to be owned by the same restaurateurs, they’re all known as the Golden Something-Or-Other.
The voice of a woman sitting at the opposite end of the room carried through all of the other chatter and clatter, and I couldn’t help hearing what she was saying. This was an older white woman, wearing a cowboy hat, a bolo tie and a red plaid shirt. I later noticed that she was sitting in a booth with a black woman and a Chinese woman.
Three times, I heard the woman in the bolo tie utter important-sounding pronouncements:
“Five hundred thousand years ago, humanoids did not exist.”
“The intelligentsia don’t have a clue because the intelligentsia are in the middle of it.”
“And what about the boy child?”