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Billy Tipton
Feb. 21st, 2011 09:21 amBilly Tipton was a jazz musician from the midwest (starting in Oklahoma City). Billy played piano and saxophone, for the most part, and garnered enough esteem to form the Billy Tipton Trio in the 1950s, to a fair amount of success. Billy went on to book acts, rather than perform.
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Billy married three women, and had long-term relations with two others. In the world of entertainment, and jazz in particular, this is not especially remarkable. Billy and third wife Kitty did take in three boys and raise them as their own, but unfortunately, they did this by contacting "girls in trouble", rather than go thru the legal system.
Kitty may have done this for expediency, but Billy had a reason for this that didn't come out until death in 1989 (of a potentially treatable bleeding ulcer): Billy was biologically a woman.
None of Billy's wives knew this, and apparently neither did the two women Billy lived with but didn't marry. This was apparently due to Billy's controlling nature in the bedroom, where the lights always had to be off, and the bindings around Billy's chest (ostensibly to hold in an old injury) never came off. As several of these women continued in not knowing even after marrying other men, we presume that Billy used a "prosthesis" of some form.
In 2008, a judge determined that the three "adopted" sons were not at all at fault in their deceitful upbringing, and thus could inherit from their only parents' estates.
But, to my mind, what strikes me as tragic is that Billy died rather than reveal the medical truth in 1989, after women had made in-roads into the jazz scene (and not just as torch singers), and gender-bending acts were practically de rigueur (when you think about Prince, Culture Club, Kajagoogoo, etc.).
"
Billy married three women, and had long-term relations with two others. In the world of entertainment, and jazz in particular, this is not especially remarkable. Billy and third wife Kitty did take in three boys and raise them as their own, but unfortunately, they did this by contacting "girls in trouble", rather than go thru the legal system.
Kitty may have done this for expediency, but Billy had a reason for this that didn't come out until death in 1989 (of a potentially treatable bleeding ulcer): Billy was biologically a woman.
None of Billy's wives knew this, and apparently neither did the two women Billy lived with but didn't marry. This was apparently due to Billy's controlling nature in the bedroom, where the lights always had to be off, and the bindings around Billy's chest (ostensibly to hold in an old injury) never came off. As several of these women continued in not knowing even after marrying other men, we presume that Billy used a "prosthesis" of some form.
In 2008, a judge determined that the three "adopted" sons were not at all at fault in their deceitful upbringing, and thus could inherit from their only parents' estates.
But, to my mind, what strikes me as tragic is that Billy died rather than reveal the medical truth in 1989, after women had made in-roads into the jazz scene (and not just as torch singers), and gender-bending acts were practically de rigueur (when you think about Prince, Culture Club, Kajagoogoo, etc.).
