Billy Tipton was no ordinary man. In the 1930s, Tipton got his start as a jazz musician, which wasn’t the most common career for a white kid from Oklahoma. He started off leading bands on the radio, before he started one of his own — The Billy Tipton Trio — and recorded a couple albums. He toured for years in South, Midwest, and eventually the Pacific Northwest. Billy was never a star, but he was a respected and gifted musician. Eventually, though, he settled down. He got married, adopted three children, and became a talent scout. It wasn’t until after his death in 1989 that his secret was revealed, both to his family and the world. Billy Tipton was assigned female at birth, but had lived and performed for decades as a man.
His death ignited a firestorm of tabloid coverage. That coverage was, as you might imagine, less than glowing. The salacious details of his marriage and sex life were put under a public microscope. The media persistently misgendered him. They attacked his family. His life became a spectacle, briefly used to hammer home conformity to a cisnormative world. And once they were done attacking, his story faded away.
“How would I summarize the story of Billy Tipton?”
Or, well… it faded away from mainstream attention. But Tipton’s death in 1989 only barely preceded the start of trans awareness in the 1990s. The ‘FTM’ (female-to-male) community in the 1990s picked up his story. Quietly, persistently, the story spread. Tipton was never big enough to have a robust catalog of public appearances, and his recorded musical output wasn’t enormous. But still, he served as an inspiration.
Part of what No Ordinary Man does so beautifully is capture his cultural importance. The movie has no shortage of documentary talking-heads, but here they are mostly transmen, rather than experts in the era or in Tipton’s early life. In lieu of archival footage, the movie asks transmen to ‘audition’ to play Billy, reading through a handful of scenes. The brief scenes are well-written, but more important is the range of ways the different trans actors interpret the script. One reads a brief passage about a rumor that Duke Ellington may perform at their club with a cocksure attitude of someone desperate to prove themselves. The next highlights the ‘rumor’ aspect as a concern about his outing, the bravado covering his fear at living in the closet.
Late in the film, one scholar points out that Tipton was living in a radically different world. His ideas of gender and sexuality may have been very different than the ones we hold today. And because of that, stories can speak to different people in different ways. Butch lesbians might relate to Tipton’s story in a very different way than transmen do. Ciswomen, likewise, can see themselves in the story of someone born a woman going to extreme measures to break into a male-dominated field. Smartly, directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt (himself a transman) don’t try to speak for Tipton, but instead seek to allow the communities he inspired to speak for themselves.
“He was a transmasculine jazz musician.”
So much of trans representation on film is limited to a single person in a film otherwise populated by cispeople — and that’s if they actually cast a trans actor in the role to begin with. And yet here we see a diverse range of trans expression in one room, all inspired by the same story. Building a community. Not just with each other, but with Billy’s family. One of the more moving segments comes late in the film, as some of the trans actors and filmmakers go to meet Billy Tipton’s son. In the 1980s and 90s, Billy Jr. thought his father’s legacy was one of shame and secrecy. There’s something deeply moving about seeing him learn that his legacy is so much more powerful than that.
Documentaries typically thrive on the strength of their story. And, I’ll be honest: Billy’s story is slim. He was a successful regional jazz musician for a couple decades. And then he retired from the public eye to raise a family. He had multiple romantic relationships with women that aren’t touched upon at all here. Little archival footage remains, including photographs.
But No Ordinary Man argues that the story is remarkable enough without those artifacts. And, you know what? The movie is right. The story of a transman operating publicly in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s is incredible in its own right. And the story of his legacy is even more powerful. The transmen here are living documents of Tipton’s art, his history. While we can never know how Tipton would have thought about his own gender, we can see how his life influenced the way others did. No Ordinary Man is, in that sense, an argument for the importance of reclaiming Tipton’s story.
To that end, it succeeds beautifully.