When people think of Cincinnati, Ohio, they might think of weird chili (calm down, Cinci people, it is weird, but pretty damn good), baseball, or the city’s German heritage, but there’s another, considerably more risqué claim to fame that rarely makes it into the Queen City tourism brochures. According to some burlesque historians, Cincinnati may have been the birthplace of American striptease, thanks to a daring entertainer named Millie De Leon and a particularly scandalous performance at the People’s Theatre in 1901.
At the turn of the 20th century, burlesque was a popular form of entertainment featuring comedy, music, dancing, and increasingly suggestive performances. Among the entertainers pushing the boundaries was Millie De Leon, a New York-born dancer who performed under the provocative nickname “The Girl in Blue.” Originally a hoochie-coochie dancer, De Leon specialized in suggestive movements inspired by the belly-dancing craze that had swept America following the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Around 1901, she arrived in Cincinnati and began performing at Hubert Heuck’s People’s Theatre, located at 13th and Vine Streets in the city’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.
Working with theatrical manager James Fennessy, De Leon developed an act that took the already naughty world of burlesque a step further. During her performances, she would provocatively remove articles of clothing, most famously unclasping garters from her legs and tossing them into the audience. Making matters even more scandalous, she sometimes neglected to wear the customary tights beneath her costume. At a time when the public display of a woman’s bare legs could cause an uproar, De Leon’s performances were positively outrageous. Naturally, audiences couldn’t get enough.
De Leon quickly became a national sensation, touring theaters across America and Canada while attracting enthusiastic crowds, outraged moral crusaders, and plenty of unwanted attention from the police. Between 1903 and 1915, she was arrested numerous times for violating local indecency laws, but the resulting publicity only helped make her more famous. She understood something that generations of entertainers would eventually learn: a little controversy could sell an awful lot of tickets.
Historians, including Bernard Sobel, author of Burleycue: An Underground History of Burlesque Days, have pointed to De Leon’s Cincinnati performances as an important starting point for the deliberate removal of clothing as theatrical entertainment. However, the exact origins of striptease remain disputed. European theaters had featured performances involving staged undressing before De Leon appeared, and other American entertainers have also been credited with developing the art form. What makes her significant is the way she combined suggestive dancing, calculated disrobing, audience participation, and shameless self-promotion into a commercially successful act that helped establish the foundations of modern American striptease.
By the 1920s and 1930s, striptease had become a staple of American burlesque, eventually producing legendary performers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand, and Ann Corio. Yet decades before those stars were teasing audiences beneath the bright lights of Broadway, Millie De Leon was already making Cincinnati theatergoers lose their minds over a glimpse of bare skin. The original People’s Theatre building still stands at the corner of 13th and Vine, an unlikely landmark in the history of adult entertainment. Whether Cincinnati can officially claim to have invented striptease is debatable, but there’s a compelling case that one of America’s most enduring forms of provocative entertainment got its start in the Queen City.
