BOOK REVIEWS

Esther Newton, MOTHER CAMP: FEMALE IMPERSONATORS IN AMERICA (New York: Prentice Hall, 1972), 136 pp. illus, $6.95.

Esther Newton was a rather naive young woman when she saw her first drag show, the first time she “had seen a man dressed in full female attire," and she became so fascinated that she wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject at the University of Chicago. This book is a revision of her dissertation. Since she is an anthropologist the attempt is not to understand what causes female impersonation but to explain the cultural milieu of female impersonation and to allow the female impersonators to speak for themselves. Some ten impersonators were interviewed in depth.

For transvestites her findings, I think, will not be unexpected but they will nevertheless be disappointed. She found that all the professional impersonators were homosexual although there were rumors of one or two big names who were not. These rumors were discounted by the im- personators as a group. The impersonators themselves make a distinc- tion between transvestism and impersonation and deny they are trans- vestites, and in fact look down upon transvestites. Transvestites, accord- ing to the impersonators, want to be real women, to think and feel like a woman, while the impersonator does not want to be just an ordinary wo- man, but to imitate a glamourous one, or failing that to don a fright wig and make fun. She reported that one young impersonator was found to be wearing rather lacy and frilly underwear as part of his costume and he was made fun of for being "transy." The impersonators denied that they would wear any item of feminine apparel under a male costume like the "transvestites" do and what they wanted was an illusion of feminin- ity, not real femininity. Some admitted to having some sexual stimula- tion when they first began their act, but all denied they did at this point in their career.

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