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100 years ago, central Iowans embraced gender-nonconforming immigrant and fortune teller Heroda Kaiji
Heroda Kaiji, when he sensed that he was dying, asked his friends to take him from his rooming house apartment in Stuart to a shady hill beside the South Raccoon River near Dexter. He wanted to spend his final moments looking out across Dexfield Park, the amusement park where he had performed as a palmist and fortune teller for the previous two seasons.
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No official documentation of Heroda’s early life seems to exist that might verify his origin story. Vaudeville performers in that era frequently incorporated many “Oriental” motifs into their stage acts and assumed identities, but Heroda’s contemporaries noted that he was “a natural linguist” familiar with several languages, including Bengali and a form of Aramaic spoken only by “scattered peoples from North of Damascus.” One Des Moines newspaper correspondent, in an otherwise warm profile, credits Heroda with “the rich imagination of the Oriental;” but the everyday Iowans who knew Heroda accepted him as a beloved member of their communities, one who was, according to newspaper accounts “a Turk by birth and a gentleman by instinct and training” who was “popular with the young people” — at least in part due to the assortment of pet monkeys that lived and traveled with him.
Heroda Kaiji, depicted and described in this Nov. 20, 1903 issue of Nebraska’s Crawford Tribune.
The most surprising aspect of the palmist and his welcome place in the community was that in both his professional and his everyday life, Heroda Kaiji presented as a woman. He wore “his hair long and coiled high in feminine fashion.” He preferred women’s Oxford shoes in a size five — the very size that Florenz Ziegfield preferred for his Follies showgirls. The Stuart Herald reported that “his mincing walk was the result of the long practice of an impersonator.” Even the most celebrated “female impersonator” of the era, Julian Eltinge — Broadway star and purveyor of feminine beauty products — was careful to cultivate a hyper-masculine persona when off-stage.
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More than a century later, as Iowa Republicans accelerate their campaign to strip civil rights away from our neighbors and loved ones, we can remember and find courage in the lives of Heroda Kaiji and the Iowans who embraced and protected a gender nonconforming foreign-born Muslim. Those Iowans lived as they were taught, welcoming the traveler, the stranger in their midst. But as we look back over those intervening years, we have to ask, “What happened to that Iowa?”
https://littlevillagemag.com/peak-iowa-fortune-teller-heroda-kaiji/
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No official documentation of Heroda’s early life seems to exist that might verify his origin story. Vaudeville performers in that era frequently incorporated many “Oriental” motifs into their stage acts and assumed identities, but Heroda’s contemporaries noted that he was “a natural linguist” familiar with several languages, including Bengali and a form of Aramaic spoken only by “scattered peoples from North of Damascus.” One Des Moines newspaper correspondent, in an otherwise warm profile, credits Heroda with “the rich imagination of the Oriental;” but the everyday Iowans who knew Heroda accepted him as a beloved member of their communities, one who was, according to newspaper accounts “a Turk by birth and a gentleman by instinct and training” who was “popular with the young people” — at least in part due to the assortment of pet monkeys that lived and traveled with him.
Heroda Kaiji, depicted and described in this Nov. 20, 1903 issue of Nebraska’s Crawford Tribune.
The most surprising aspect of the palmist and his welcome place in the community was that in both his professional and his everyday life, Heroda Kaiji presented as a woman. He wore “his hair long and coiled high in feminine fashion.” He preferred women’s Oxford shoes in a size five — the very size that Florenz Ziegfield preferred for his Follies showgirls. The Stuart Herald reported that “his mincing walk was the result of the long practice of an impersonator.” Even the most celebrated “female impersonator” of the era, Julian Eltinge — Broadway star and purveyor of feminine beauty products — was careful to cultivate a hyper-masculine persona when off-stage.
...
...
...
...
More than a century later, as Iowa Republicans accelerate their campaign to strip civil rights away from our neighbors and loved ones, we can remember and find courage in the lives of Heroda Kaiji and the Iowans who embraced and protected a gender nonconforming foreign-born Muslim. Those Iowans lived as they were taught, welcoming the traveler, the stranger in their midst. But as we look back over those intervening years, we have to ask, “What happened to that Iowa?”
https://littlevillagemag.com/peak-iowa-fortune-teller-heroda-kaiji/