Fan Letter for Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Diane Middlebrook

Family anecdotes
Queer families and friends
Queer film
Tipton, Billy, 1914-1989
Jazz musicians
Transgender people
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Feminist Theory Archive

Billy Tipton was an American jazz musician who lived as a man for almost his entire adult life—it was only after he passed that his family, loved ones, and the public learned that he had been born Dorothy Tipton.

In this item, filmmaker Mitchell Loch, of Single Bound Productions, writes to Diane Middlebrook about the movie rights to her book, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, as well as about several personal anecdotes that the book brought to mind relating to queerness and queer people in Loch’s life.

This is categorized as a fan letter, but it’s clear that Loch is already well acquainted with Middlebrook.

Here one observes the mythologizing of Tipton, as someone with a sensational movie-worthy life, as well as how people he never knew make him personal to their own lives.

Mitchell Loch

Subgroup 2. Series 10. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, 1997-2001
Container: Box 23, Folder 2
Description: Suits Me: fan mail
Date: 1998-2000

Diane Middlebrook Papers, Pembroke Archives, Brown University

November 6, 1998

Written and sent by Mitchell Loch
Received and stored by Diane Middlebrook
Donated to the Feminist Theory Papers by Nancy K. Miller and Leah Middlebrook, in August of 2010
Curatorial work and processing of series 7 – 14 by Crystal Johnson, Amanda Knox, Halle McArne, and Mary Murphy, in 2017

Researchers are advised that express written permission to reproduce, quote, or otherwise publish any portion or extract from this collection must be obtained from the Brown University Library. Although Brown University has physical ownership of the collection and the materials contained therein, it does not claim literary rights. The owners of the literary rights from whom to obtain any necessary permissions are Leah Middlebrook and Nancy K. Miller.

From a collection of fan letters regarding Middlebrook’s book, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton. See other folders in Subgroup 2. Series 10. for more items related to the book.

Text

English

Paper document, Stapled papers, Letter, Printed letter, Typed letter, List

https://www.riamco.org/render?eadid=US-RPB-ms2010.043&view=inventory

[no text]

[Partial transcript]
What follows are some things that went through my mind while I re-read and contemplated SUITS ME:

• the many conversations that my friend Peter Ostwald (the late psychiatrist and your fellow psychobiographer) and I had about his daughter Chantal who has been wearing only men's clothes in Washington, D.C. for quite some time now
• the motivation behind my first movie "My Better Half" which presented me onscreen as a creature that was half-man/half-woman. That film played at both the Castro and the Roxie back in 1978.
• my mother's family of oil drillers in Oklahoma and our many family vacations in Ponca City, Bartlesville, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Stillwater, Nowatah (where my aunt and uncle lived under the water tower), Shawnee and the Missouri Ozarks
• similarities observed within SUITS ME and my grandmother's memoirs and my parents' love letters
• my great Aunt Emma, a spinster, and the series of women (all in pants or overalls) who lived in her "guest house" over the years. One of them found a peacock feather for me at Will Rogers State Park.
• my gay uncle Bob leaving Nebraska to become the top, albeit closeted, attorney for the Southern Gas Company here in Los Angeles. He kicked me out of his house after I came out to him and his lover.
• my sister not coming out as a lesbian until she was 42 years old and ill with a rare liver disease.
• the films ZELIG, VELVET GOLDMINE, VICTOR/VICTORIA, CRUMB, PRICK UP YOUR EARS, ED WOOD, and, of course, CITIZEN KANE
• my British friend Helen who worked as a librarian at the San Francisco School District. After she died, her husband Michael - a schizophrenic genius and a member of Mensa who now lives in the Tenderloin - told me that he'd been wearing Helen's clothes for many years without her knowledge
• who, if I could, I would cast as an onscreen Billy Tipton and each of his/her sexy wives
• how a narrative about Billy Tipton should be structured in terms of ambiguity, dichotomy, mystery

Letter