Until his death in 1989 at the age of 74, not even his wife or adoptive children knew that jazz pianist Billy Tipton had been anything other than a cisgender man. According to No Ordinary Man — a new documentary about Tipton’s legacy as a transmasculine icon — the musician became fodder for daytime talk shows and supermarket tabloids shortly after his death, with Oprah Winfrey and her also-rans prying into the marriage between Tipton and his common-law widow Kitty Kelly. “Billy Tipton was a man in every sense of the word,” Kelly proclaimed to the unsympathetic studio audience of one show, fighting back against the media’s constant misgendering of her late partner. “He will always be a man. He will be nothing more than a man.”
In the popular imagination of the late 1980s, commentator Kate Bornstein recalls, “there was no such thing as a trans man.” The then-popular term “transsexual” was mostly associated with trans women, creating a void that left room for a biography like Diane Middlebrook’s Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, which posits that its subject was an ambitious female artist who, in a reverse Tootsie, only dressed like a man for a chance at a musical career. (Not mincing words, interviewee Susan Stryker calls Suits Me an “emotionally violent book” and an instance of “very well-heeled, very polite transphobia.”)
Canadian filmmakers Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt (the latter of whom is trans) seek to reclaim Tipton as a transmasculine pioneer — one small but significant step in the larger project of constructing a history of transmasculinity. If Tipton, who was born in 1914 and began presenting as a man in the 1930s, left behind any statements about his conception of his gender identity, the documentary doesn’t supply them. Two things can be true at once. Chin-Yee and Joynt’s approach is a largely ahistorical one, applying recently codified understandings of gender identity to a figure whose self-interpretation and worldview seem to have died with him. But that doesn’t make Tipton any less of a touchstone — even a role model — for a group yearning for “grandfathers.”
Despite the central role that Tipton’s son, Billy Jr., plays in the film, No Ordinary Man is, in fact, much less about the subject than what his existence means to trans men today. If anything, we learn frustratingly little about Tipton himself — hardly anything about his early life, the several romantic relationships he had with women other than Kelly, his musicianship or the arthritis that eventually ended his piano career. There’s no explanation for why only one of his three sons appears in the documentary, or why the filmmakers don’t appear to have interviewed anyone else who knew Tipton.
And yet No Ordinary Man is a fascinating and exhilarating film. The archival material is impressive and the talking-head interviews deeply compassionate and intellectually heady. But Chin-Yee and Joynt’s creative coup is their framing device, in which a group of (wonderfully eloquent) transmasculine actors — mostly white but not entirely, as seen above — “audition” for a role in the documentary, playing Tipton at crucial junctures of his life, as when the musician is told that he’d soon meet Duke Ellington, or when he chances upon another trans man in the wild. The actors offer their insights into Tipton as informed by their own experiences of transmasculinity — an implicit substantiation not only of the panoply of trans actors, but the hard-earned wisdom they bring to trans roles. And given the media circus that greeted Tipton after his death, No Ordinary Man provides an urgent model in trans narratives of revelation without sensationalization.
The documentary is surprisingly wide-ranging, especially for its 83-minute run time, but it’s particularly powerful in its media criticism of how trans stories are framed to favor cis subjects, as well as the fraught relationship that trans men have to invisibility. (One interviewee deplores that Tipton wasn’t afforded the privacy and assimilation in death that he’d clearly sought in life — at one point turning down a high-paying gig with Liberace to continue the life of a largely anonymous touring musician in the Midwest — but can’t help being grateful that the post-mortem hypervisibility that was forced on Tipton provided him with a dearly appreciated forefather.) And yet the film’s most moving moment might belong to Tipton Jr., who’s shocked to discover through the filmmaking process that the memories of his father haven’t been forgotten. Anything but.
Production company: Parabola Films
Directors: Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt
Producer: Sarah Spring
Executive producers: Marc Côté, Lindsey Dryden
Director of photography: Léna Mill-Reuillard
Editor: Aisling Chin-Yee
Music by: Billy Tipton, Rich Aucoin
83 minutes
