Rebels, Criminals, Pioneers

Abstract

With the purchase of this black-and-white, 5 × 8 in. newswire photo of Jack Starr in 2017, I began my journey into creating my small but very cool QPA—Queer Photo Archive, which features an array of other gender-nonconforming, trans, and queer pioneers (please visit TSQ*Now at www.tsqnow.online to see more images and info). This particular photo also prompted me to embark on an ambitious exploration into the life of this amazing person. Days and nights of research (especially looking at newspaper accounts of the era) yielded a decades-long account of the life of a gender rebel who was repeatedly arrested over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s for wearing men's clothing. There were numerous aliases—Jacques Moret was the other most popular one, but Jack Starr was the most enduring. Jack's exploits unfolded primarily in Montana. In the repeated front-page accounts of the various arrests and trials, Jack comes across as an adventurer, a ladies' man, a cultured musician, and an unrepentant rascal often in trouble with the law. There are repeated mentions over the years of Jack's female companions, and a wildly entertaining list of occupations: bootlegger, bartender, blackjack dealer, truck driver, longshoreman, shipyard steamfitter, and riveter.I was blessed with the opportunity in 2019 to work with the amazing writer-directors Stephen Kijak and Kimberly Reed to tell a little bit of Jack's previously untold story in the Scout Productions LGBT history series, EQUAL—which is now airing on HBO Max and stars the fabulous Theo Germaine as Jack. I'm also currently working on a film treatment about Jack in hopes that even more people might be inspired by the courage of this century-old role model.During the fall of 2020 as guest curator for Karen Tongson's awesome Butch Hair Quarantine Instagram account, I had the opportunity to share a selection of my QPA photos and research and to reflect a bit about my great affection for all these heroic criminals. Much of the contemporaneous coverage of their stories conveys a surprising warmth and friendliness toward these subjects—all arrested for the crime of passing as men.We don't know that Jack or any of these folks would have identified as trans in our contemporary understanding of that identity. Since Jack actually lived as a man for a considerable period of time, it certainly feels appropriate to embrace him as a trans man forefather. The passing sojourns of the other folks in my QPA photo collection seem to have been briefer; in my research I have not been able to track them beyond the newspaper coverage to know what happened to them in the end.I strongly identify with gender-pioneering heroes like Jack, imagining that if I had lived in those very rigidly gendered times, this likely would have been the best option available to me. In my own gender journey (which has included a period of time on testosterone and in which I have mainly identified as a butch dyke), I continue to ponder the mystery of being different. Gender-nonconforming, butch, trans, AFAB, masculine of center. Words may fail us. But these pictures are worth a thousand words.