"Les Nègres" in Paris - Jack Brown and Charles Gregory, postcards publicizing their engagement with the Nouveau Cirque, 1902

Film of extracts from "Les Joyeux Nègres", leading off with Brown and Gregory.

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Jack Brown (5 March 1875 - after 1920), African-American female impersonator and dancer. Born in Petersburg, Virginia the son of Alfred Brown - who was later institutionalized in an insane asylum - and a mother whose name is unknown, he arrived in Europe sometime between 1900 and 1902. In October 1902, he was engaged by Jean Houcke for his "Les Joyeux Nègres" spectacle at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris. Opening on 24 October 1902, the show ran for eleven months, and was a huge commercial success. During the run of the production, Jack performed as a female impersonator alongside his partner, Charles Gregory, together dancing the then-wildly-popular Cake-Walk. During the winter of 1902-03, the production was filmed by the Cinématographe Lumière company. In 1904, Brown visited Moscow, and we find him in Paris again in April of 1910 with a partner, a Miss Carslyle, again dancing the Cake-Walk. He performed in Paris, London, and toured Russia during the next four years. At the beginning of 1914, he returned to the United States for eight months before returning to England at the outbreak of WWI; he spent the next five years living in London and touring around the British Isles. Early in 1917, he married a Scottish woman, Vera MacFarlane, and in the fall of 1919, he returned to Paris with a contract to appear at Ciro's. Apparently, there is no information about him beyond that. (Biographical date courtesy of Dulce Jennings.)

I haven't been able to find any information on Charles Gregory other than he had been a member of the Florida Blossoms minstrel troupe.

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I came across these images because some of them had been used in publications related to William Dorsey Swann, the self-proclaimed first "Queen of Drag." And with the internet being the internet, these pictures of Jack Brown are now generally identified as being of Swann. William Dorsey Swann is a very interesting historical character -  Channing Gerard Joseph’s article in the 31 January 2020 edition of The Nation is entitled “The First Drag Queen was a Former Slave” - and you can read more about him here.