Before Gay Meant Gay: Meet San Diego’s Early LGBTQ Pioneers – Voice of San Diego

Two progressive, upper-crust women who hosted a former president and first lady at their home at the edge of Balboa Park. A spiritualist who channeled famous composers and built one of the most stunning mansions in San Diego for himself and his companion. A celebrity female impersonator who’s still the talk of East County history buffs. And a La Jolla physician whose stunning secret made front-page news from coast to coast.

Meet the early LGBTQ – or at least LGBTQ-adjacent – pioneers of San Diego. They each lived here about a century ago, long before most people thought “gay” was anything other than festive. We know nothing about their intimate physical relationships, but it’s clear they lived lives that would be considered alternative in their time – and ours.

In honor of San Diego Pride this week, here’s a closer look at six LGBTQ pioneers.

Alice Lee & Katherine Teats: The Dynamo and Her Partner

Alice Lee, a second cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, had connections in high places. She forged friendships with the Roosevelt family, Florence Nightingale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and President Grover Cleveland and his wife Frances. She moved west to San Diego around 1902, possibly due to her poor health. If that was the reason, she had company in the thousands of others who flocked here to soak up our supposed healing powers. One savvy promoter, the city’s official physician, claimed that ultra-fit locals had “lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows and hearts as tough as that of a turtle.”

Around 1900, Lee met a woman named Katherine Teats and spent the rest of her life with her. Teats lived a low-profile life, while Lee advocated progressive causes and joined local charity boards galore. She led the influential Save the Beaches movement to keep the coast out of private hands and founded a public forum that lasted into the 1970s.

Lee and Teats spent decades living in a home on Seventh Avenue at the northwestern edge of Balboa Park. There, they hosted Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife Edith when they visited town for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition that gave us modern Balboa Park. (There’s a brief film of Roosevelt’s visit that shows him and a lady with a rather remarkable hat.)

Were Lee and Teats a romantic couple? Teats’ grand-niece told the late local historian Sarai Johnson that family lore considered the pair to be lesbians, and a census form described Teats as Lee’s “partner.” But then, as now, we can’t make assumptions about the intimate lives of private people.

Still, it’s clear they had what was known then as a “Boston marriage” – a partnership between two wealthy women that may or may not have been physically intimate. It’s likely that “most people outside of the relationship didn’t dwell on the sexual possibilities of the relationship. They didn’t think of two women living together as pathological as they did when I was growing up the 1950s,” said Lillian Faderman, a retired La Jolla professor who’s considered “the mother of lesbian history.” (See our 2021 Q&A with her.)

There are many other examples of female same-sex relationships. “I just find these late 19th- and early 20th-century women so awesome,” Faderman said. “They refused to confirm to what society expected. They might have been seen as somewhat odd, but not unrespectable. They managed to maintain their role in their society. They’re our foremothers.”

The Spiritualist & His Devoted ‘Secretary’: A Lofty Legacy

Jesse Shepard, a spiritualist and musician who performed for a Russian czar and a future British king, didn’t spent long in San Diego with his devoted “secretary” Lawrence W. Tonner. But the pair spent a busy and influential two years here in the late 1880s. Thanks to them, the Sherman Heights neighborhood is home to Villa Montezuma, one of the most impressive and well-preserved Victorian houses in San Diego.

Shepard came to town as a well-known spiritualist who “sometimes claimed that the spirits of famous composers or pianists performed through him,” 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 was hugely popular around the turn of the 20th century, and many celebrities like Arthur Conan Doyle embraced the idea of communicating with the dead. But Shepard abandoned spiritualism while in San Diego and turned to another focus: building Villa Montezuma. He didn’t own it for long, however: Shepard sold it in 1889, a year after the San Diego real estate market went bust.

Little is known about Tonner or their relationship, which lasted until Shepard died in 1927 while playing the piano at a recital. “Many wealthy gay men deemed their partners their chauffeur, assistant, or secretary,” Faderman said. “Jesse Shepard must have assumed he’d get away with it because of that, and I imagine straight people believed it.”

Villa Montezuma, with its grand Queen Anne gables, is now a city-owned museum.

The Female Impersonator: Building a Mystery

One of the most famous performers of the early 20th century had a surprise up her sleeve: She wasn’t what she appeared to be. The classy, graceful woman on stage was actually a man who went by the name Julian Eltinge. Audiences knew this going in, but they were still stunned.

“Audiences initially seemed mesmerized by his ability to conjure the illusion 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 really lovely contralto voice,” said Nicolas Beyelia, a historian and librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library who’s written about Eltinge.

Silent movies turned Eltinge into an even bigger star, and he built a home in East County in the early 1920s. The Alpine Historical Society remembers him fondly as a “Famous Alpiner In Drag” and a local historian describes him as a “loyal, affable, and, yes, manly man.”

A century ago, Eltinge’s publicists emphasized his masculinity too. “I would really have a hard time imagining that he was the cigar-chomping, womanizing, hot-headed braggart that his PR expelled into the public,” said Beyelia in an interview. “I was unable to find anything about his sexuality or his romantic interests, which says a lot without really saying a word.”

Eltinge’s career and finances faded by the Great Depression, and he had to give up his Alpine home. A street called Eltinge Drive, however, keeps his name alive in a conservative town that’s rock-ribbed Republican.

The Transgender Physician: A Secret Life in La Jolla

Elgine blurred gender lines, but he was not actually transgender. But a La Jolla doctor was actually living as the opposite sex, as newspaper readers across the nation discovered in 1936.

A postmortem examination of Dr. Eugene Perkins – who’d lived here for two decades — revealed that the physician had female anatomy. Perkins, who died of a heart attack, had been married for 28 years to a woman.

In 1969, a La Jolla resident told a historian about spreading the news. “I called Uncle Arnold, who had lived across from the Perkins all these years. I told him, first of all, that Dr. Perkins was dead, and my uncle was shocked. Then I said, ‘I have a still greater surprise for you — Dr. Perkins is a woman.’ I repeated it three times, and Uncle Arnold said, ‘Well, there is something wrong with this telephone.’”

While they were all public people in one way or another, we don’t know anything 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 as a teenager, I was introduced to the lesbian bar culture and remember thinking this is new, there was no one like this before,” she said. “In fact, sexual and gender diversity has always been with us. It’s important to know that they were there, that we didn’t invent this. It’s just within the human spirit.”

For more about San Diego’s LGBTQ history, check our previous articles about local gay life in mid-century, a landmark 1970s criminal case that spurred gay activists to action, the role of AIDS in city politics, and the work of lesbian historian Lillian Faderman.

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