Johnny breaks a leg, 1846
The lively city of New York had equally lively inhabitants. Johnny was one of them, working either as a sex worker or as a bouncer at a house of prostitution. Judging by pieces in 19th-century newspapers, a female sex worker dressing as a man wasn’t unusual.
“City Intelligence: Broken Leg.” New York Daily Herald [New York, New York] 23 April 1846; p. 2.
A woman passing by the name of “Johnny,” and residing at a house of ill fame in Anthony-street, was brought to the City Hospital yesterday with a broken leg, caused by scuffling with a good looking fellow, who had come all the way from the West and taken up his quarters there.
Johnny, however, had an earlier career that was very much other than female-oriented. Expected to control teams of horses, drivers were stereotypically muscular and sturdy. Johnny seems to have been no different.
“A Theme for a Novel.” New York Daily Herald [New York, New York] 27 April 1846; p. 2.
We mentioned, a few days since, the case of a woman taken to the City Hospital from a house of ill fame in Anthony street, having broken her leg. She passed there by the name of “Johnny,” and no one knew her by any other. The singularity of the name as applied to a female, led us to inquire somewhat into her history. We found that previous to her entering the house in Anthony street, she had acted in the capacity of stage driver nearly three years on one of the omnibus routes in this city. Dressed in male apparel, she chewed tobacco, smoked segars, drank brandy, and swore as valiantly as any of her confederates, and her sex was never discovered. It was during this time she adopted this name, whch is now the only one by which she is known. This would make a good foundation for a local novel by some one of our ambitious aspirants for fame.
After this piece, Johnny faded into the thicket of newspaper text, probably ignored by even the most sensational of 19th-century writers, who preferred their heroines waifish or matronly and left their prostitutes described in vague terms.
But Johnny appears to have maintained an identity as a man after the years spent as a stage driver; the word “passing” used in the first article implies that a woman was “passing” as someone not female, which hints that Johnny was living as a man. With luck, Johnny was able to maintain that identity after the week spent as the Herald’s minor celebrity. And certainly it’s to be hoped that the rest of Johnny’s life was rich and fulfilled.
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