So successful was Hindle that in August 1868, she journeyed to the US to take on the variety stage – not before hyping herself as “Miss Annie Hindle, serio-comic and the greatest male impersonator in the world” in a number of newspaper adverts before her arrival. It was here that the expat really found her footing as the first male impersonator in American variety, and before long was booked seasons in advance.

However, Hindle’s act soon inspired competition. By the mid-1870s, when the term ‘male impersonator’ first came into use, other stars such as Ella Wesner, another British music hall expat, were exciting the New York theatre scene with their masculine performances. Wesner too was from the school of theatrical realism, deftly switching between characters, from flashy, upper-class “swells” and dandies, to working-class men with whom she found favour by empathising with their struggles. So convincing was her style, that a review in the New York Clipper following her debut declared, “She might easily walk Broadway in male attire without her sex being suspected.” Wesner was so devoted to her craft, that she actually even left instructions that she be buried in male attire when she died.

Given the strict social mores of the era, it’s no mean feat that Hindle and Wesner managed to establish male impersonation as an art form, not least win the admiration of both men and women in their audiences. In fact, as it’s noted in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, newspaper reviewers “gave no indication that any portion of their acts or their appearance as any type of character was seen as transgressing standards of decency,” and even treated them in the same way as the male performers that they performed with. And though their appeal, as Gillian Rodgers asserts, “lay in the commentary they provided on manhood in this period, and their ability to both celebrate and denigrate different constructions of masculinity,” it seems no less remarkable that women whose livelihood lay in teasing the very currency of power and privilege, were sitting at the heart of showbusiness.

Drag kings, the gender rebels that history forgot: The fascinating legacy of male impersonators