Until his death in 1989 at the age of 74, not even his wife or adoptive children knew that jazz pianist Billy Tipton had been anything other than a cisgender man.
According to No Ordinary Man — a new documentary about Tipton’s legacy as a transmasculine icon — the musician became fodder for daytime talk shows and supermarket tabloids shortly after his death, with Oprah Winfrey and her also-rans prying into the marriage between Tipton and his common-law widow Kitty Kelly. “Billy Tipton was a man in every sense of the word,” Kelly proclaimed to the unsympathetic studio audience of one show, fighting back against the media’s constant misgendering of her late partner. “He will always be a man.
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