Meet Elizabeth Anderson, the gal behind phreeque.com. Today, Elizabeth discusses this project and shares her thoughts on the future of sideshow.
What is your website all about?
The Phreeque site is a collection of biographical accounts of extraordinary circus performers.
How did this project get started?
I started researching sideshow in high school after I read Jan Bondeson’s book “The Two-Headed Boy”. Before that I had heard of some of the more famous circus acts – Tom Thumb, Chang & Eng, Jojo the Dog Faced Boy – but was really shocked by how many others there were. I found myself wanting to know everything about all of them. There was only one sideshow resource page at the time, which mostly adapted its information from Frederick Drimmer’s book “Very Special People”. I started collecting books and discovering all the differing accounts about these amazing people’s lives, so when I started Phreeque in 2002 my intent was to set the record straight and give the public the opportunity to learn about and celebrate freak performers as they really were.
What do people use your website for?
I stopped paying attention to the keywords people were using to find the site, but as far as I know it’s mostly used as a research tool for academic and art work, genealogy, and general curiosity. I know there’s a spike in traffic whenever sideshow is mentioned on TV. Some people have linked to Phreeque from gross-out sites which I think is unfortunate, but at the same time maybe people who go to my site to be grossed out will end up learning something instead.
How have people responded to phreeque.com?
The response has been mixed, as with anything on the Internet. I mostly get positive feedback from people thanking me for treating the subject so respectfully, or who want me to know about their relative or acquaintance who had been a sideshow performer, but I also get the occasionally hate mail from someone who’s determined to be offended no matter what. I get a lot of requests for additional information from people doing various projects about freaks, and from modern sideshow performers who want to inject a historical element into their work. I’ve been credited in a couple books. I also have had the amazing opportunity to work with a real postmodern sideshow/vaudeville revival group, the 999 Eyes, who have authentic human oddities among their performance troupe. They found me through the site.
You’ve studied the historical figures of sideshow’s past. What about its future?
I think modern sideshow culture has grown a lot in recent years, because as recently as the 90s shows were afraid to include performers with disabilities because of possible public backlash, and now it’s almost expected to have born freaks as well as working acts. I have to say that’s almost entirely because of the efforts of the 999 Eyes, who were the first troupe in decades to center around born freaks, and who dealt with some pretty disgusting intolerance during the time I was working with them. I do think there are a lot of issues with sexism and heterosexism in sideshow, mainly because it has become so closely wedded with rock & roll culture. And of course there’s still a lot of unwarranted criticism from activists of various stripes. There’s still this attitude that if you allude to freak show, at all, ever, you’re being ableist. That’s probably the biggest source of frustration for me since I have a lot of activist and academic friends.
Tags: anatomical oddity