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Suits Me: The Double Life Of Billy Tipton

Suits Me: The Double Life Of Billy Tipton

by Diane Wood Middlebrook (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 1999

    $6.50
Synopsis

For fifty years the world - and three wives - believed that Billy Tipton, professional jazz musician, was a man. Writer Diane Wood Middlebrook lifts the lid on jazz's greatest cross-dresser in her appealing biography that covers the musician's early years in Oklahoma, the nights playing with Louis Armstrong's partner and his/her extraordinary relationships.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 352
 Edition: New e.
 Publisher: Virago
Published: 07 Oct 1999
ISBN 10: 1860497632
ISBN 13: 9781860497636

Media Reviews
'Fascinating ... this biography may make us think differently not only about the nature of gender but about our most basic perceptions of reality' - New York Observer Billy Tipton was a jazz performer who played in clubs throughout the Midwest of the US for nearly 50 years. Tipton never made the big time as a musician and ended up working as a booking agent in Spokane, Washington. Only with Tipton's death in 1989 was it revealed that the five-times-married father of three boys was biologically female. Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography describes the transformation of Dorothy Tipton, a white Oklahoman who was not allowed to play jazz because she was a girl, into Billy Tipton, a male pianist and bandleader. The author traces the life of this itinerant jazz musician over several decades and through changing constructions of gender. Middlebrook, whose biography of Anne Sexton was noted for its controversial use of tape recordings and notes made during the poet's psychiatric treatment, was approached by Kitty Tipton Oakes, one of Billy's former wives, to write this biography. She interviewed his/her friends, spouses, family members, and colleagues and found them to have different, yet universally sympathetic, readings of Tipton's gender. In addition to examining what gender is, Suits Me also asks to whom it belongs: the individual or the people who interact with the individual.' - Rebecca Brown, Amazon.co.uk Review 'This well researched biography avoids sensationalism in its perceptive portrayal of an artist...' - Publisher's Weekly 'A considerable achievement' - Telegraph 'This barely believable life is told with genuine care and without a trace of sensationalism' - Observer
Author Bio
Diane Wood Middlebrook is the author of several volumes of poetry and the prize-winning author of ANNE SEXTON: A BIOGRAPHY (Virago). The recipient of many fellowships and awards, she is Professor of English at Stanford University, where she also served as the director for the Center for Research on Women.