Laurence Trimble | Billy the Kid / 1911

an early example of gender dysphoria

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward J. Montagne (screenplay), Laurence Trimble (director) Billy the Kid / 1911|| Lost Film

 

Laurence Trimble’s 1911 film titled Billy the Kid is a lost film. But from its synopsis in the “Moving Picture World” makes clear it has nothing at all to do with the famous outlaw, although several film sources still declare it as the first “Billy the Kid” cinema biography.

     Rather, its plot evolves a sheriff, “Uncle Billy” (played by Ralph Ince, who at the time of this film had just become the major director for Vitagraph Studios) who rounds up a posse in pursuit of outlaws. One of the members of the group is his son-in-law, who is killed by the villains. Soon after a daughter is born to his widow and the child is left as an orphan. 

     Never learning the gender of his grandchild, Uncle Billy is charged with raising the kid, whom his Spanish servant, knowing of his desire for a male heir, presents to him as a boy named Billy. Billy, “the kid,” (Edith Storey) is brought up by his grandfather, accordingly, as a young cowboy, the elderly man not noticing any difference except, perhaps, for what he describes as a bit of “timidity,” as the synopsis postulates, “not at all becoming a boy.”

    When “the kid” turns sixteen, Uncle Billy plans to send him off to the town school. Billy has become a close pal to the foreman of the ranch, Lee Curtis (Tefft Johnson), who accompanies the kid to the crossroads to meet the stage, neither of them happy about the possibility of losing one another’s close friendship. Indeed, Lee has grown so fond of the boy that he has a hard time covering up his emotions as Billy gets on the coach.

    Word soon comes that the stagecoach has been held up, and the Kid taken captive. He will be returned by the outlaws only if they are granted immunity. Terrified that the captors will discover the boy’s true gender, the servant tells Uncle Billy about her lie and why she hid the child’s true gender from him. The foreman, Cutis, overhears the servant’s admission, and finally feeling free to admit his love for the Kid, rushes out to form a posse to save Billy.

      Billy, however, escapes the outlaws and meets up with the Sheriff and his posse. The Sheriff loses no time in returning his granddaughter home and dressing her up in female attire, insisting that he will personally take her to a female seminary.

      But Billy insists that just wants to continue being “Billy the Kid” living on with Lee for the rest of her life. When not long after, Billy changes his name to Mrs. Lee Curtis, the grandfather no longer has any say in the matter.

      Actor Edith Storey played numerous female roles, but also was well-known for her male impersonations beginning as early as age 17 in J. Stuart Blackton’s Oliver Twist (1909), in which she played Oliver; continuing in Eugene Mullin’s and Charles Kent’s cinema version of Twelfth Night (1910); in A Florida Enchantment (1914); and, in the same year as Billy the Kid, for her portrayal of a cowboy in Billy and His Pal. Discussions of all of these works are included in this volume.

     A seasoned horseback rider, Storey had been nicknamed “Billy” when she worked for the Méliès film company at the Star Film Ranch in Texas, where, according the Wikipedia entry, she earned the good will of the seasoned cowboys for her ability to "ride anything with hair on it.” Evidently, like child actress Edna Foster, she also referred to herself as “Billy” off screen.

     What’s interesting in this film, as opposed to Billy and His Pal where she still remains a boy secretly in love with the cowboy Jim at film’s end, in Billy the Kid, the boy for whom the confused foreman has strong feelings is revealed by movie’s close to have been a girl all along, thus justifying his queer feelings. This pattern of gender confusion and mis-placed love is at the center of several early films, including A Range Romance, also of 1911, Paul Czinner’s The Fiddler of Florence (1926), and, of course, in numerous comic works in which males dressed in drag or female impersonators attracted male admirers, the situation corrected before the final blackout.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).