Death of Transgender Jazz Musician Billy Tipton

Billy Tipton, who was named Dorothy Lucille Tipton at birth and who lived the first nineteen years of his life as a woman, lived fifty-five years as a man. He had a career in music, was married five times to women, and adopted and helped raise three sons. His assigned sex was revealed at his death.

Date January 21, 1989

Locale Spokane, Washington

Key Figures

• Billy Tipton (1914–1989), jazz musician

Summary of Event

When Billy Tipton died of hemorrhaging ulcers in 1989 at the age of seventy-four, a paramedic revealed something very few people knew—that Tipton had been assigned female at birth. Only Tipton’s first wife knew that he was transgender. As he left no will, diary, or letters articulating his reasons for why he stopped living as Dorothy at the age of nineteen and started living as Billy for the rest of his life, others have since spoken for the musician in articles, a biography, plays, an opera, and a novel.

After the divorce of his parents, neither of whom wanted custody of Tipton or his brother, the children were sent from Oklahoma City to live with two aunts in Kansas City. Tipton already had shown talent for playing piano by ear, but it was Aunt Bess who saw to it that he received formal instruction in piano, violin, and saxophone starting at the age of fourteen. After graduating from high school, Tipton moved back to Oklahoma City to live with his mother, single again after a divorce from her second husband.

The Depression made the couple desperate economically, so Tipton set his sights on making a living in the music world. Oklahoma City in the 1930s was full of dance halls and honky-tonks that needed musicians, but nineteen-year-old Tipton could find work only at seedy dives. After taking on the name Billy and beginning to present publicly as a man, Tipton found greater success.

At first, Tipton presented as male in his professional life but continued to live as a woman in private. A shaping influence on his new identity was a veteran of dance marathons, a bisexual woman named Non Earl Harrell. Although the exact nature of Tipton’s relationship with Harrell remains unclear, it is known that they lived together in Oklahoma City and registered as husband and wife when they rented a house. When Tipton got his first real job in 1935, going on the road with the Banner Playboys—an eight-piece band—Harrell’s presence helped to confirm for others Tipton’s heterosexuality and masculinity. Fifteen years older than Tipton, Harrell had life and business experience that proved instrumental in her young companion’s maturation as a performer.

Tipton continued to get better jobs, and, even after Harrell moved on in 1943, Tipton—now presenting as male in all aspects of his life—was not without a companion for long. Later that year, he married a female singer named June, who sang with many of the bands that he played for until 1946. During World War II, Tipton would explain to others that a lingering injury from a car accident made him ineligible for the armed services. He also used this story to explain to his wives and girlfriends why he wore bandages constantly around his chest and groin, thereby masking his female anatomy.

Eighteen-year-old Betty Cox met the dashing thirty-two-year-old Tipton in 1946. Even though they had no official ceremony, Betty changed her driver license name to “Tipton,” and the couple presented themselves as husband and wife for the next seven years. Cox said she had seen Tipton shave every morning, and told biographer Diane Middlebrook that Tipton would toss a condom out of bed after they made love.

In 1951, Tipton formed the Billy Tipton Trio with two men in their early twenties. The trio successfully played in Elks clubs and at Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, and resorts, traveling constantly throughout the western United States. Cox left Tipton, however, when she got tired of life on the road.

The Billy Tipton Trio recorded an album in 1956, followed by Billy Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on the Piano, which earned them a four-week gig at a Reno, Nevada, hotel, where stars such as Liberace were booked year-round. The trio’s slick professionalism prompted management to offer them the position as house band. Much to the surprise of his partners, Tipton said no to the lucrative offer, explaining that he wanted to take a day job in a musical booking agency and settle down. Middlebrook suggests that Tipton was wary of too much visibility in a place such as Reno, where any number of acquaintances from his gender-bending days in Oklahoma City, or indeed his past as Dorothy, might unravel the elaborate persona he had developed. After twenty years in show business, Tipton not only had proved his musical talent but also was well-regarded as an entertainer, artistic director, and business manager. As much as Tipton wanted to perform, perhaps he feared exposure and recognition as well. In 1958 he set his sights much lower and headed for Spokane, Washington, with his new wife, Maryann.

In Spokane, Tipton became a successful agent, continued to play music at night locally, and maintained his masculinity by peppering his act with antigay slurs and by avoiding Spokane’s gay nightclub. He and Maryann split when Maryann discovered he was having an affair with a stripper named Kitty Kelly, “The Irish Venus.”

Tipton and Kitty Kelly were married with a forged marriage license in 1962, and they adopted three sons. At Kitty’s insistence, the couple never had sex, but she reported later that the marriage was a good one until pressures resulting from raising teenage boys and Tipton’s reduced earnings resulted in the couple’s separation in 1980. Slowed down by age and arthritis, Tipton lived out the rest of his years in a mobile home with his youngest son.

Significance

Billy Tipton’s name lives on not only in biographies, plays, operas, and novels but also in the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet. Featuring five female jazz artists who blend jazz, punk, funk, and world music, the group issued four albums before reconfiguring itself into the Tiptons in 2003 but retaining its identity as an all-female saxophone quartet.

Scholar Marjorie Garber suggests that the only thing remarkable about the Billy Tipton story is “that it caught the fancy of the media and the public,” noting that history contains scores of accounts of people who were discovered only at their deaths to have been presenting as a gender that did not match the sex they were assigned at birth. Garber rejects various versions of the “progress narrative” theory of transvestism, which argues that Tipton (and others in similar situations) lived as a man to secure employment, succeed in a patriarchal world, or realize some deep-seated personal goal, such as, in Tipton’s case, becoming a jazz musician. Arguments against the progress narrative point out that Tipton abandoned his professional music career in 1958 at the age of forty-four: why, then, such arguments ask, would it be essential for Tipton to continue to live as a man (publicly and privately), to marry a woman, and to raise his adoptive sons to know him as “dad,” if he did not identify as a man in the first place?

Bibliography

Brubach, Holly. “Swing Time.” Rev. of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, by Diane Wood Middlebrook. New York Times Book Review 28 June 1998: 7, 9. Print.

Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Print.

Ellingwood, Brook. "Writing His Own Tune: Billy Tipton's Secret Surprised Even Those Who Knew Him Best." KCTS9. KCTS Television, 24 Feb. 2012. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Hadleigh, Boze. Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World. New York: Barricade, 1997. Print.

Halberstam, Judith. “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography.” Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. Ed. Maria Carla Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg. New York: New York UP, 2001. Print.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: New American Library, 1988. Print.

Kay, Jackie. Trumpet. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Park, Chris. "Billy Lee Tipton (1914–89)—Jazz Musician." LGBT History Project. LGBT History Project, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

Smith, Cinitia. “One False Note in a Musician’s Life.” The New York Times, June 2, 1998, p. B1, B4.