Was calamity jane gay

Martha Jane Canary (May 1, – August 1, ), better known as Calamity Jane, was an American frontierswoman, sharpshooter, sex worker, and storyteller. [2][3][4] In addition to many exploits, she was known for being an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok. Better known by her nickname ‘Calamity Jane’, the legendary Martha Jane Canary was famed as a sharp-shooting, tobacco-spitting, whisky-guzzling and foul-mouthed reprobate who regularly wore men’s clothes and engaged in fearsome gunfights in midth century America’s Wild West.

Doris Day made her a gender-bendin', pistol-packin' songthrush. Jane Russell stripped her down to her bloomers. But who was the real Calamity Jane?.

calamity jane musical

Ultimately, the film has Calamity marry her close friend Wild Bill Hickock (Howard Keel), but the gay attraction between her and Katie remains one of the film's most convincing plot points. To further complicate things, Canary married two men and was supposedly the mother of two children. Jones notes that at least one TV series (Deadwood) portrayed Canary as a lesbian.

So, was Calamity Jane a lesbian, or what we would call gender fluid, or something else altogether?. She rode as a female army scout and served with Custer. She saved a runaway stagecoach from a Cheyenne war party and rode it safely into Deadwood. She earned her nickname after hauling one General Egan to safety after he was unhorsed in an ambush.

She was a crack shot, a nurse to the wounded, a bullwhacker and an elite Pony Express courier. Not one of these things is true. Martha Jane Canary spent most of her itinerant life in grim poverty and hopelessly addicted to alcohol. She worked not as an army scout but as a camp-follower, launderess, saloon girl and occasional prostitute.

But the material is all here, and very interesting material it is, too. Myth-busting and myth-making went hand in hand. An account put it that. Twentieth-century representations at least until the telly series Deadwood made her into a butch lesbian tended to present her as a rather feminine cross-dresser, just a crack of the whip away from being Doris Day in her scanties.

That was, as Jones sees it, part of an attempt to tame the wild west and fold its more challenging figures into a conservative scheme of sexual stereotypes, where a tender heart beat under the buckskin and the love of Wild Bill whom in reality Canary knew only for a couple of months was all that was needed to bring her back into the corral. Unlike cute little sharpshooting Annie Oakley, the real Calamity Jane was a pretty butch figure though she married and had a child, so seems to have been straight.

Her early appearances in the real historical record are patchy. At one point she scraped a living hawking copies of her own book door to door. She posed for pictures and sold postcards of herself in her buckskin get-up. She played herself on stage, and was even brought east for the Pan-American Exposition in by a philanthropist-entrepreneur. On the day of the shoot, Mayo recalled, Calamity Jane was found sitting on a keg behind the Deadwood bar.

After stumbling along the track to the cemetery, and nearly tumbling into the adjacent gulch on several occasions, she promptly fell asleep at the gravesite. In due course, she too was buried there as had been — it was claimed — her deathbed wish. Copy link Copied. Linkedin Messenger Email. Presumably not, given how ill-suited the epithets.

From the magazine. Comments Toggle Comments On Off.