Two progressive, upper-crust women hosted a former president and first lady at their home on the edge of Balboa Park. A spirit who sent famous composers and built one of the most beautiful homes in San Diego for himself and his partner. A famous female impersonator who is still the talk of the town in East County history. And the La Jolla doctor whose amazing secret made front page news from coast to coast.
Meet San Diego’s early LGBTQ—or at least near-LGBTQ—pioneers. All of them lived here about a hundred years ago, long before most people thought of “gay” as something other than festivals. We know nothing of their physical relationships, but it is clear that they lived lives that could be considered otherworldly in their time – and ours.
In honor of San Diego Pride this week, take a closer look at six LGBTQ pioneers.
Alice Lee & Katherine Teats: The Dynamo and Her Partner
Alice Lee, the second cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, had connections in high places. She formed friendships with the Roosevelt family, Florence Nightingale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and President Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances. She moved back to San Diego around 1902, possibly because of her poor health. If that was the case, she had company among the thousands of others who had come here to absorb our supposed healing powers. One astute promoter, the city’s official doctor, claimed that the locals had “lungs like skulls and hearts of blacksmiths as hard as a turtle.”
Around 1900, Lee met a woman named Katherine Teats and spent the rest of her life with her. The teats lived a low life, and Lee supported progressive causes and many joined local charity boards. She led the influential Save the Beaches movement to keep the coast out of private hands and established a public forum that lasted into the 1970s.
Lee and Teats spent years living in a house on Seventh Avenue on the northwest edge of Balboa Park. It was there that they hosted Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife Edith when they visited the town for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition which gave us modern Balboa Park. (There is a short film about Roosevelt’s visit that shows him and a woman with a rather impressive hat.)
Are Lee and Teats a romantic couple? Teats’ great-nieces told the late local historian Sarai Johnson that family lore considered the two lesbians, and a census form described Teats as Lee’s “partner.” But then, as now, we cannot make assumptions about the personal lives of private individuals.
Still, it is clear that there was what was then known as a “Boston marriage” – a partnership between two wealthy women who may or may not have had a physical relationship. It is likely that “most people outside the relationship did not count on the sexual possibilities of the relationship. They didn’t think of two women living together as pathologically as they did when I was growing up in the 1950s,” said Lillian Faderman, a retired La Jolla professor considered “the mother of lesbian history.” (See our Q&A ;A 2021 with her.)
There are many other examples of female same-sex relationships. “These women from the 19th and early 20th centuries are amazing,” Faderman said. “They refused to conform to what society expected. They might be seen as something strange, but they were not respected. They managed to maintain their role in their society. They are our ancestors.”
The Spiritualist & His Devoted ‘Secretary’: A Lofty Legacy
Jesse Shepard, a spiritualist and musician who played for the Russian czar and future British king, did not spend long in San Diego with his devoted “secretary” Lawrence W. Tonner. But the pair spent two busy and influential years here in the late 1880s. Thanks to them, Villa Montezuma is located in the Sherman Heights neighborhood, one of the most impressive and well-preserved Victorian houses in San Diego.
Shepard came to town as a prominent spiritualist who “sometimes claimed that the spirits of famous composers or pianists worked through them,” according to a 1987 article in the Journal of San Diego History. He traveled throughout Europe, performing for famous people such as royalty and the novelist Alexander Dumas.
Spiritualism became very popular around the turn of the 20th century, and many famous people such as Arthur Conan Doyle embraced the idea of communicating with the dead. But Shepard abandoned spirituality while in San Diego and turned to another focus: building Villa Montezuma. He didn’t own it for long, though: Shepard sold it in 1889, a year after San Diego’s real estate market tanked.
Little is known about Tonner or their relationship, which lasted until Shepard’s death in 1927 while playing the piano in imitation. “Many wealthy gay men considered their partners to be their chauffeur, assistant or secretary,” Faderman said. “Jesse Shepard must have assumed he would get away with that, and I imagine straight people believe him.”
Villa Montezuma, with its large Queen Anne bells, is now a city-owned museum.
The Female Impersonator: Building a Mystery
One of the most famous performers of the early 20th century was in for a surprise: she wasn’t what she used to be. The lady, elegant on stage, was a man named Julian Eltinge. The audience knew this going in, but they were still stunned.
“At first the audience seemed to be obsessed with his ability to attract the allure of femininity. He was a very handsome man in his youth and was able to transform himself into a beautiful woman and sing in a very beautiful contralto voice,” said Nicolas Beyelia, a historian and librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library who has written about Eltinge.
Silent films turned Eltinge into an even bigger star, and he built a house in East County in the early 1920s. The Alpine Historical Society fondly remembers him as a “Famous Alpine in Drag” and a local historian describes him as “loyal, generous, and, yes, manly.”
A century ago, Eltinge’s publicists also emphasized his masculinity. “It would be very difficult for me to imagine that he was the cigar-chomping, blessed, hot-headed braggart who threw out his PR in front of the public,” Beyelia said in an interview. “I couldn’t find anything about his sexuality or romantic interests, which really says a lot without saying a word.”
The Great Depression took its toll on Eltinge’s career and finances, and he was forced to leave his Alpine home. A street named Eltinge Drive, however, keeps its name alive in a conservative, Republican-leaning town.
The Transgender Physician: A Secret Life in La Jolla
Elgine blurred gender lines, but he wasn’t actually transgender. But the La Jolla doctor was a resident of the opposite sex, as newspaper readers across the nation discovered in 1936.
A post-mortem examination of Dr. Eugene Perkins – who lived here for decades – that the doctor had female anatomy. Perkins, who died of a heart attack, had been married to a woman for 28 years.
In 1969, a La Jolla resident told a historian about the news spreading. “I called Uncle Arnold, who lived across from the Perkins all these years. I told him, first of all, that Dr. Perkins was dead, and my uncle was surprised. I then said, ‘I’m even more surprised for you – Dr. is a woman. Perkins.’ I repeated it three times, and Uncle Arnold said, ‘Well, there’s something wrong with this telephone.'”
Although they are all public figures in one way or another, we know nothing about the private lives of Perkins, Lee and Teats, Shepard and Tonner, or Elgine. But their stories still have power, said historian Faderman.
“In the 1950s when I was a teenager, I was introduced to the lesbian bar culture and I remember thinking that this is new, there was no one like this before,” she said. “Indeed, we have always had sexual and gender diversity. It’s important to know that they were there, that we didn’t think this up. It’s just inside the human spirit.”
For more on San Diego’s LGBTQ history, check out our previous articles on local mid-century gay life, a landmark 1970s criminal case that spurred gay activists to action, the role of AIDS in city politics, and the work of the lesbian historian Lillian Faderman.