![]() ![]() ![]() And that maybe it would help those who similarly struggle. “I really wanted to share the story of a person who, against all odds, really was able to muster the courage to live an amazing life on his – on her – own terms. She says she also wrote it as a sort of allegory for these troubling times. Writing his story, she says, “was in the back of my mind for a long time – his life, to me, even before I met Flo, was always very remarkable.” The only thing that people cared about was, how good are you?”ĭeb Carson has spent much of her own life in and around the arts (she worked at the Palladium Theater, for example, for more than a decade) she believes she inherited what she and her cousins always referred to as ‘the Flo gene.’” This is the way Jackie put it: No one care who you kissed. “The big takeaway from Jackie, and the big takeaway for me, was who cared? No one within that welcoming community, that safe harbor community, no one cared. “He never went by anything other than Flo among his circus family members,” he told Carson. Jackie was one of Albert’s closest friends. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” 1952. But that was the feeling of the family – ‘Uncle Albert’s gay.’ And I came to believe that wasn’t the case.”įrom Cecil B. Back in those days, it was a binary thing – people just assumed you were either straight or you were gay. “He was the one who told us how Albert lived his life as a woman, and truly believed that he was a woman in a man’s body,” Carson says. She learned a lot about her uncle from his longtime friend and fellow clown Jackie LeClaire, who sat for three lengthy interviews at his home in Sarasota. Carson had a road map, but describing some of the stops along the way required a little creative license. It’s a testimony to his resolve that Abraham Isadore Meyrowitz (the name on Albert White’s birth certificate) chose it over his own Maryland family home.īecoming Flo is described by its author (right there on the cover) as “A Mostly True Story.” Although she was aware of the various troupes that employed her uncle – where he was and what he was doing at any given time – no records exist of how he felt about certain things, or who helped him up the stairs to the Big Top. Florida Archives.Ĭircus life, particularly in the earlier decades of the 20 th Century, was hard. Ringling Brothers clowns, circa 1964: Flo is second from left. “And the more I researched it, it really struck me about the power of art, and his courage, and what he had to do to transcend bigotry and anti-Semitism and homophobia. “His was an amazing story to begin with,” she explains. He was an outsider welcomed into a family of outsiders.įor Carson, there was a surprise waiting around every corner. The book documents her uncle’s beginnings, as the black sheep in a family of Russian Orthodox Jews, to his acceptance and embrace from the circus community. Albert had literally run away to join the circus and never looked back.Ĭarson’s curiosity led her to research and write Becoming Flo, a thin but nonetheless riveting biography. An interesting mix of people.”Īlbert White died in 1974, when Carson was 19, but she never forgot about him, or the stories her grandmother, and her mother, shared when he wasn’t in the room – that he had left home, at the age of 16, to escape an abusive father. It was quite a gathering of very interesting folks. “He would have all of his friends from the circus, and my grandmother would have all of their neighbors. “My grandmother and my uncle would have a Christmas party every year, which was really funny,” Carson says. He was a “drag clown,” which meant the character he “portrayed” under the Big Top was female. About the Hollywood circus movies he’d appeared in.Īlbert White had been a professional clown since in 1920s, and had worked his way up the ladder to reach the golden gig with Ringling, the nation’s top circus. 1965, Sarasota: Albert White with Deb (left) and Sue Carson.Ĭarson and her siblings loved to hear his tales about the road, about the strange and wonderful people he encountered with regularity.
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