As a performer, I am naturally drawn to heroines of the stage and screen. Particularly those with darker backstories. So this month’s herstory is dedicated to the fascinating life story of Edwardian dancer and accused wartime spy (no, not Mata Hari!) but the lesser known queer heroine, Maud Allan, a true rebel of the stage.
Maud Allen was born Beulah Durrant on 27 August 1873 to a middle class family and was a piano prodigy as a child. She was educated in San Francisco, and was sent to Germany to continue her musical studies.
Notoriety visited Beulah’s young life early on, when her brother was charged with brutally murdering two women and hanged. Beulah never got over this, and always maintained that her brother was unfairly framed for the murders.
To escape connection to this crime, Beulah changed her name to Maud Allan and began her dance career while studying piano in Germany. She made her stage debut in 1903 aged 30. She never formally trained in dancing, but was encouraged by various top brasses who were impressed with her naturalistic, sensual style.
The piece that put Allan ‘on the map’ was her Dance of the Seven Veils inspired by Oscar Wilde's play ‘Salome’. In Wilde’s infamous play, Salome performs the dance after she is rejected by John the Baptist. Her step father, (King Herod) in exchange, tells her she can have whatever she desires, and she asks for her rejecting suitor's head. She gets it, and John dies.
Allan, although not a classically accomplished dancer, made up for her lack of technicality with shock value and novelty. She danced topless, clad only in jewels. She also insisted on having a hyper realistic wax ‘head’ sculpture of John the Baptist on stage with her as a prop. The effect was to both stun, terrify and disgust audiences. But as we know, no publicity is bad publicity, and she attracted a lot of morbid curiosity and media attention as a result of her shock tactics. Her risque show ‘The Vision of Salome’ travelled across Europe as a result.
The Cult of the Clitoris
When she brought the show to London in 1908, she was truly pioneering something that hadn’t been done before, mainly because the portrayal of biblical characters on stage was illegal at the time. Nevertheless, she risked it, with a 2 week residency at the Palace Theatre in the West End. She became an overnight sensation as a result, making £500 a week (!) and very quickly became a darling of upper class society. Next she went to Russia, then the USA, where, despite attempts to copy her act and therefore ban her from performing; she gained even more notoriety and sold out her shows across the country.
Following her success, Allan, now an internationally recognised star with friends in high places, commissioned none other than the composer Debussy to write the music for a new show which would be much more ambitious in scale, with a chorus of dancers and a full symphony orchestra. It never took off though.
Regardless, between 1912 and 1915 success continued as she toured the rest of the world: Africa, India, The Far East and Australasia. Her risque style wasnt always well recieved, but it only added to her notoriety and fame. She even appeared in a silent movie at this time,
So far, so good. But it is at the end of World War One, in 1918, that things get bizarre. Allan returned to London and took the lead role in a production of, yep, you guessed it, Oscar Wilde's play Salome. In response, MP Noel Pemberton Billing, a populist and anti-homesexual, anti-semite conspiracy theorist (think Nigel Farage/Tommy Robinson for a modern equivalent) published an extroadinary article called ‘The Cult of The Clitoris’. In it, he claimed that "47,000 highly placed British perverts were propagating evils” By ‘perverts’ he refers to homosexual men and in particualr, lesbian women, who were apprently being hired by the Germans during the War to seduce men and women into homosexual cults, and therefby reveal state secrets in exchange for keeping their sexuality secret. The inflammatory language used is reminiscent of some of our extreme populist conspiracy theories today:
“…(the Germans) planned on exterminating the manhood of Britain …even to loiter in the streets was not immune. Meretricious agents of the Kaiser were stationed at such places as Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner... wives of men in supreme positions were entangled…in Lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were threatened…”
A Queer icon vindicated
Enough to inspire moral panic in any good citizen, surely! But particularly frightening at a time when sodomy was a hanging offence, and we were in a terrible war where paranoia of foreign enemies was heightened. Maud Allan’s name was listed by Billing as one of these pervert lesbian spies.
Although same-sex relationships between women weren’t technically illegal (mainly because they weren’t even recognised) lesbian women were of course considered deplorably unnatural and evil. AND Maud had spent significant time in Germany!
Allan sued Billing for libel and the 6 day trial was a press sensation, which resulted in Billing winning. Although the spy accusations were never proved, Allan’s private life was put under intense public scrutiny during the trial, as well as her mental health. It was commonly thought that homosexuality was evidence of insanity, and Billing claimed that her shocking and sexualised performances, along with her ‘family history’ of violence and murder clearly proved that she was deviant in mind and body. The case also reignited the controversy of the earlier Oscar Wilde trial itself.
But all was not lost for Maud Allan. The War soon ended in Allied victory and the witnesses in her trial admitted to lying. Billing himself was later convicted of perjury and fraud.
Suffragettes and Legacy
Meanwhile, Allan reinvented herself. She founded a school of dance for underprivileged children in London which was bombed during World War Two and sustained irreparable damage. She then became a wartime volunteer ambulance driver, and in 1943 relocated to LA where she became a draughtswoman at an aircraft factory. She died in 1956.
So….was she actually gay? Does it even matter? Of course not. But for those curious as to where Billing even got this idea from, here’s what we know: Allan was never linked to any male husbands or lovers (unheard of at the time). There is also sufficient evidence to suggest Allan was involved with Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s wife. Allan and Margot became close after she started mixing in upper class circles in 1910, and Margot paid for her lodgings for 20 years! After this Allan is linked to her dance school secretary Verna Aldrich from 1930. Verna was her live in ‘companion’ during this period. However it was not a happy union and records show that Allan was an abusive, jealous and controlling partner, constantly threatning Aldrich that she would expose her if she tried to leave her, and stealing money from her. So, yes, Maud Allan probably was gay. But Billing’s conspiracy theory of German homosexual spies has zero evidence to support it. It was simply a moral panic propagated by a right-wing zealot.
Interestingly, Allan’s link to Margot Asquith inspired the suffragettes, who were active during the height of her Salome fame. One suffragette gave Allan’s name as an alias when she was arrested for attacking PM Herbert Asquith, the cuckolded husband and arch enemy of the suffragette campaign. Touche!
Maud Allan was not flawless. But she is a fascinating, bold and creative woman who pushed the boundaries of her art and her sexuality, but paid a price at a time of bigotry, intolerance and fear. It is frightening that we can see similar witch hunting of marginalised LGBT and queer people re-emerging today among far-right thinking. Do we ever learn from the past?
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