Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Forced Crossdressing

I found a few stories about Tommy Tucker, who was not only forced to wear dresses and such almost all of his life, but he was taken on tours and shown off in his finest outfits ~ in an effort to sell war bonds.

Here's an article from Life magazine from the 1940s.

The story recently caught the eye of the Washington Post and John Kelly wrote about him here and here.

While I'm being a tad offbeat here, does anyone know what television series featured a male playing the female lead?  The audience was never told that the lead was, in fact, male.  Hint: the series ran for 19 years.

Send a comment with your guess. (update: as of 9am EDT there are two correct answers.  I'll post all tonight) (update to update: comments posted ~ you all [and one e-mail response] got it right.  I found this out as a Trivial Pursuit answer many years ago)





6 comments:

  1. Continuing the animal theme, the answer is Lassie. All the dogs who played Lassie were male. Their thicker coats looked better on t.v., and as they are larger than female collies, they could work with the child actors longer before the actor outgrew them.

    Sharon

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  2. Meg:

    Lassie was always a female. Your squirrel story was the give-away that we were likely talking about an animal. Lassie was, I believe the longest running series with an animal as the lead (we also had RinTinTin, Flicka, Fury, Mr. Ed).

    Great question, though. Please post how many correct answers you receive.

    Best,
    Rhonda Darling

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  3. The series was...Lassie, of course, in all it's variations!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rhonda, Darling (or is that Rhonda Darling?) ~ I understand that you meant "always a male." If I could edit comments I wooda.

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  5. So, instead of being the winner, i'm the weiner? :-)

    Rhonda

    ReplyDelete

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