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Summary: This is a true story you don't want to miss reading.
Review: The shear thought that a woman the public had access to passed as a male jazz musician in the mid 20th century is mind-boggling. Only until Billy Tipton's death was her secret revealed. I found myself racing through this book at every spare moment satisfying my curiousity for how she pulled off her "show". The collection of photographs and memoirs is great.
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Summary: A book that stays with you long after you put it down.
Review: There is little I can add to the comments of the previous four Customer Reviews. This truly is, as one customer says, the strangest book I have ever read. Three weeks later, I am haunted by thoughts of what life must have been like for Dorothy/Billy, and what tremendous resolve and effort it must have required to maintain such a life for so long a time. Take my advice--read this book. Like Windsong, it will stay on your mind.
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Summary: Interesting Look at the Late Billy Tipton
Review: This book might have been better handled by a transgendered or lesbian author, but Diane Wood Middlebrook does a fairly good job of reporting on her subject Billy Tipton.The book does have a bit more filler about other people and about the music industry and jazz than I personally was interested in, but it also tells a great deal about Billy Tipton and her life. I appreciated the photographs that were included in the book. I think most, if not all, of the questions regarding Tipton were answered by Ms. Middlebrook. In some ways Billy's life is sad. Sad that our culture and society was such that only men were allowed in most of the major professions. Equally sad that the homosexual community was practically non-existant at that time in the way of really being a community capable of giving support to young women like Billy Tipton.
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Summary: The losses that this person suffered for a life in music.
Review: This is a very thought provoking book about how a person had to change and deny everything that about themselves. Ms Middlebrook does a superb job in telling this compelling story of Billy Tipton. I felt the sense of loss that Dorothy/Billy must have gone through just so she/he could play jazz in an era that didn't allow women to do so. This is a book well worth reading if you are interested in music or women's issues. I could not wait to come home from work so that I could finish it and even now am still thinking about all that this person went through for decades.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange, Disturbing, and poorly written
Review: This was one of the most bizarre and disturbing books that I have ever read. I can't believe that people call this a masterpiece. I couldn't even finish this book--it was that bad. What really turned me off about the book initially, was that I didn't think that the author was as objective as she should have been. The explanations that she printed regarding Billy's behavior were simply inplausable. Moreover, I will NEVER believe that Billy's so-called wife, did not know his true sexual identity. And, I think its entirely too convenient that she commissioned the author to write this book. What I found disturbing about this book is the implications about Billy's charachter. I have nothing against cross-dressing. However, when one knowingly adopts children into that double life, everything is different. I doubt that the boys (now men) will ever recover. How will they ever be able to trust anyone when their father, who they should be able to trust above all others, has not disclosed to them the true nature of something as fundamental to human nature as his own sex? It's not as if Billy could fool himself for long--I'm sure every time he used the bathroom he was reminded of exactly what his true sex was. How could he do that to those young boys? All I see is a selfish, selfish, selfish, person that only cared about himself and what he wanted-- but was too afraid to do what it would really take to get it. If he wanted to be a man--he should have gotten an operation and have been done with it. He shouldn't have EVER adopted children--they will be scarred for life. Billy's so-called wife was in on it too. Billy disgusted me and so did this book.
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Summary: NOT a Jazz fan but the book was EXCITING, SURPRISING
Review: To be honest, I purchased the book simply to find out how an actual woman got away with having 5 wives plus children (only 2 of the 5 wives knew that 'he' was a 'she') and not being discovered!! And boy, it was quite interesting to learn the truths!! Billy must have truly loved Jazz with all her being, to portray 'someone else' throughout her entire life!! I can't even begin to imagine wanting something sooo much to go to the extremes of totally 'reinventing' myself as a new person. We all have a desires to show people our true selves, being proud of who we are!! Can you imagine not being able to take that pride and instead 'masquerade' as someone entirely different (let alone the opposite sex)? NEVER going to a doctor your ENTIRE life, in fear of being 'discovered'? Just thinking of the extremes that Billy had to go through to pull off this 'feat' and all for the love of music! Could you honestly say you would be able to do the same? I know I couldn't!! The real question for Billy would be.....WAS IT REALLY WORTH IT??? Get this book.....it's the greatest!!!
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Summary: A compelling portrait of a unique American life.
Review: When Billy Tipton died in 1989, the world rushed in and gave him, briefly, the larger fame he had once nibbled at as a jazz musician and entertainer. But in June of 1958, after 20 years of chasing the brass ring, when the door to the big time world of popular music opened and beckoned Billy in, he backed away from the spotlight, settling for playing the hotel ballrooms and clubs of greater Spokane, Washington. In Suits Me, Stanford University English professor Diane Wood Middlebrook explores both the geography of jazz and swing in the heartland of America, and the geography of gender in the middle of the 20th century. Because underneath his dapper suits and corny comedy routines, Mr. Billy Tipton concealed the body of a woman, and when he died, his sex revealed by paramedics and the coroner's report, he left hundreds of people who knew him, and millions more who heard the news, astounded by his "deception..." Professor Middlebrook's research has been thorough, and she has spoken with most of Tipton's living relatives, former wives, business partners and many other musicians of the era. What she reveals to her readers is a fully textured portrait of an era and a man who worked hard and earned every privilege he received. She lets us almost hear the music, taste the dust from the roads Billy and his bandmates and partners traveled. She lets the people who knew him comment on whether they thought he was a man or a woman. She lays out the mystery of how others perceived and ignored or challenged Billy's gender presentation, and the l! engths to which Billy went to protect his secret, which sometimes wasn't all that hidden. Suits Me is an amazing story filled with strange reversals: Billy had a male cousin named Bonnie, his mother's nickname was Reggie, his first "wife" had left her husband, Earl, for a life on the road and was known as Non Earl. And there were enough female musicians on the circuit in those days that cross-dressing to the extent that Billy did should not have been necessary to maintain a career, as many people have conjectured to justify Billy's behavior. Billy's death and the revelation of his "true sex" led various groups to claim his memory as a symbol of their own cause: lesbians said he lived as a man to safely love women; feminists said he lived as a man in order to have a career; transsexuals said he lived as a man because he was a man-he just didn't avail himself of the medical technology to make himself legal. Because Billy never declared himself any of these things (although he did declare himself a man), it seems presumptuous for any group to claim such an independent spirit as their own. But Billy also acknowledged to some family members that he remained a woman in body; to one female cousin he intimated he would one day go back to living as a woman once the kids he had adopted with his last wife, Kitty, were grown and out on their own, and to another female cousin he declared that he had made a conscious choice to live as a man and that he was a normal person. It is only respectful to refer to Billy with masculine pronouns, using the male gender he so completely inhabited. Middlebrook skillfully interweaves masculine and feminine pronouns to reflect the understanding of the people Billy interacts with, and to acknowledge the reality of Billy's body. In this way, she creates a striking sense of the incongruity of gender and body that Billy lived with, and others like him still live with every day. There is only one point of contention where I take exception to Middlebrook's analysis of Tipton'! s motivations. She assumes that the absence of breast bindings or genital prosthetics (pants stuffers) from Billy's body at his death, and from his personal effects, was an indication that he was anticipating discovery. I contend this can't be known. He may have simply grown weary of the apparatus, seeing no need for it since he had retired from public life. Perhaps he felt he had earned the right to be a man in his own skin, regardless of its shape. Perhaps it was with relief that he discarded those accoutrements years earlier. And I suspect that, unless diagnosed with a terminal illness, most of us don't realize the finality of our own death even when the moment is upon us. It is dramatic and appealing to conjecture that he staged the conditions of his discovery as consciously as he had staged the presentation of his gender identity, but I contend that the simple reality of Billy's life is more appealing: he was socially a man and physically a woman. That dichotomy fascinates us, and we struggle to rationalize it, to explain it, to defend it or to tear it apart. Depending on our allegiances, we rush to invalidate either the body or the soul that informed it. But I think both are real and valid, and that Billy Tipton's life simply illustrates one person's adaptation to his situation. Without a definitive statement from Tipton, which he never gave, his life is open to any interpretation, whether insensitive or informed. In spite of this one logical flaw in her analysis, I think Middlebrook has composed a fine portrait of an artist, one that will ultimately give readers some insight to the reality of what we now call the transgendered experience as it was lived before the modern transgender movement had established itself. This is an important book, both for the history in it, and for its vivid depiction of the brave determination of Billy Tipton that his talent, energy and love sustained. Some transpeople may be put off by the pronoun inconsistency, feeling that the only way to treat Billy i! s as the man he wanted to be and was-the way others perceived him, for the most part, in his vibrant life. Some transpeople may find the reflection of the very real challenges Billy struggled with in his female body to be a welcome reality check for their own experience with incongruous gender and bodies. Non-trans people should find this study a stimulating, evocative read, one that pulls back the curtain just enough to expose the tantalizing mystery of a very American life.
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Summary: A self-made man
Review: When jazz entertainer Billy Tipton died in 1989, the news accounts didn't focus on his achievements in life as a musician, but rather that he was biologically a woman. Beginning in the late 1930s, young Dorothy Tipton began a transformation of herself that deceived almost every person who encountered him in later life, including some of his ex-wives and his adopted children. "Suits Me" brilliantly vivifies this extraordinary life, giving the readers the context and the background of what might have led Dorothy to become Billy. Taking her cues from Billy himself, Middlebrook does not portray her subject as a lesbian or a transgendered person or a crossdresser, but rather as a person determined to be a successful jazz musician, but who ultimately walked away when the spotlight became too bright to conceal the charade. "Suits Me" is a masterful biography that educates readers not only about its subject, but also about social constructs of gender, and leaves readers astounded.
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