Is "Fat Claude" the Dyke Olympian-cum-Nazi Violette Morris?
A brief history of a very bad gay who may or may not be in one of the most important photos in dyke history.
This winter, before I got my new knee (hence my slow writing these days) (and it's wonderful!), I fell down a delicious research rabbithole about a chubby butch / trans masc-ish person. Originally this person was identified as Fat Claude from the 1932/1933 photograph "Fat Claude and Her Girlfriend," per The Met. The photo is also known as "A Couple at Le Monocle, Paris," per the MOMA.
This is the same photo of a butch and a femme in a 1932 sapphic cabaret that I fell in love with when someone shared it on Tumblr in the late 2000s. I was elated and happily obsessed. I had found a very histroic (e.g. very dead) and very butch-trans role model, with the mentorship of 1) fashion and my already fervent love of tuxes and ties, and 2) proof of existence.
Then!, in the midst of Tamara Chaplin's gripping and almost gossipy tale of 20th century Parisian lesbianism, Becoming Lesbian – a sincere compliment for an academic history; I had no idea there were lesbian brothels!! – she mentions that the butch has been identified! It is Violette Morris!
Specifically, Chaplin writes that "Fat Claude" is "actually the French athlete and Nazi collaborator Violette Morris."
Yeeghads. Barf. And screams of agony.
I was left wondering: who was this Morris? And, as I dug deeper and deeper, I asked myself: is Fat Claude really Violette?
In order to make sense of this trans-dyke saga, here's what we know about Morris and the Fat Claude photo. Also, I'm using "she" for Violette as she delighted in being a woman who could beat men at any sport.
- In the early to mid-1920s, Violette Morris becomes at athlete extraordinaire, topping men at boxing and race car driving and dominating women's games as well. She secures medals in the Olympics and the first National Women's Games in sports including shot put, discus, and javelin, as well as generally winning at swimming, archery, water polo, and more. She also wins a nonstop, 24-hour car race called the Bal d'Or.
- Among many fabulous folks, Morris befriends the brilliant performer and dancer Josephine Baker in the 1920s.
Likely Josephine Baker visiting Morris before or after a race, which had so much press (like many of her events) that photos from all angles survive.
- As nationalism, patriarchy, and misogyny are often in a deep, toxic, and unconfessed threesome, it is thus tragic and unsurprising that France refuses Morris a sporting license in 1928. This denial is put down to her loose morals and wearing men's clothes, as well as a variety of other assertions that change depending on which historian you read (also and of course: hey, transphobia). By now, Violette is front page news or at least getting major photo spreads in Paris gossip newspapers, particularly because of her gender.
- In 1929, Morris opts for and arranges a double mastectomy to make it easier to drive her race cars!! Hawt.
- In 1932 or 1933, the photographer Brassaï goes to the sapphic cabaret Le Monocle, purportedly invited by his friend Claude, where he takes a series of photos that immortalize this dyke bar. The same as Fat Claude or is this Morris or our mysterious butch friend?
- The Le Monocle photos are NOT in Brassaï's first 1934 book, Paris de Nuit / Paris by Night, although everyone seems to think so. He would later say these photos – as well as the other photos of sex workers and drag balls that he is now more known for – were censored.
- In the mid-1930s, and surely broken by the inability to participate in sport, Morris starts a car parts shop but that fails, and then starts singing in nightclubs, including sapphic cabarets. She lives on a boat near Paris with a femme actress Yvonne de Bray (she's not the femme in the photo). In 1937, she supposedly defends herself from a man trying to break in, shooting and killing him; she is acquitted.
- In 1936, one historian claims that Hitler personally invited her to the Berlin Olympics but other historians still cannot find evidence of this.
- In 1940, Hitler's Nazi forces invade Paris. At some point, Morris begins working for the Nazi party.
- In 1944, Morris is murdered by driving a fleeing Nazi officer and his family, and we know this much is true. In the years that follow, she is branded as a torturer, a black marketeer, and other awful violences that we cannot prove.
Imagine that! A gender non-conforming person being blamed for evil! That never happens, he wrote with all the trans sarcasm he could muster.
And yet Violette Morris did awful things. In the face of the ever rising fascism we are facing and fighting in the U.S. and abroad, we need to know about people like Morris to remind ourqueertransselves that we are not always the moral high ground. Our people have stooped so very low to survive, to get revenge from those who rejected them. And it turns out sometimes some of us are people who suck.
All of this said, and in this time of facial recognition, I'm still not sure it's Violette Morris...and I'll prove it to the best of queer transfeminist critique too.
Not only because I don't want one of the famous dyke photos of all time to be a Nazi traitor but also, as a fat butch / trans masc, oh so many of us get recognized for one another. So one key question remains for me:
How do we know it's her?
