“I may look crooked and out of style, but I greet the world with a grand old smile”
—
Robert Huddleston “The Pony Boy”
Those who chose to call themselves
Freaks— and made a living at it– were, and are just as happy overall as you and me. (Not that that’s saying much.)
As Diane Arbus once said:
“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
“Born-Freaks” were the royalty of the sideshow, standing above the “Made-Freaks” and Working-Acts in earning power and status. As performers and people they were a society set apart, a society that earned respect for changing its liabilities into assets.
From the texts written in Latin, Ambrose Paré’s
Monstres et Prodiges (1573), Licetus Fortunius’
De Monstrorum Caussis, Natura, et Differentiis…(1634), and Ulisse Aldrovandi’s
Monstrorum Historia (1642), the classic images of Freaks had jumped from the hidden pages to become in the late 19th and early 20th Century entertainment for the masses.
The freakshow amused, educated, and often intentionally horrified.
