Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

In 2016, actor and activist Adam Pearson made a television documentary called Freak Show, analysing how the centuries-old practice of the freak show was thriving in the modern day.

The key difference between the practise now and the historical practise is agency. Today’s version of a freak show is more often than not run by the performers. People audition and become part of a show where the headline act is often the manager and promoter, as well. Profits are shared among the performers and, broadly speaking, the effect is positive on the performers, who feel empowered by their differences. It makes them rock stars, rather than figures of disgust and ridicule.

Every single aspect of this goes against the historical practise of the freak show. The point of them wasn’t to celebrate the differences of each performer; it was to dehumanise them. The money raised by the shows went straight to Svengali behind it all, who didn’t spend a moment on stage yet kept every penny for himself while treating his performers like cattle. Most terrifyingly of all, these shows didn’t wait for people to audition.

It was one of the countless dark secrets of the industry. When asked, the people behind these shows would say that they ‘discovered’ their performers. That they came to them, more often than not, because their disability ruled them out of other work, or that the promoters ‘discovered’ them and ‘made them an offer they couldn’t refuse’. No. The vast majority of the time, people were coerced or conned into being a part of a freak show.

Other times, like the Muse brothers, they were outright kidnapped.

Born in Truevine, Virginia, in the late 1800s, George and Willie Muse were abducted from their home when they were six years old by James Herman ‘Candy’ Shelton. Shelton would install himself as their manager and began selling them off to any circus or carnival that paid enough. What made them worth kidnapping? Their albinism. Shelton had seen this one difference and decided that he could make such a killing out of it that he took them for himself.

Horrifyingly, he told the young boys that their mother had died and left them in his care so they would stop asking questions about her, and for nearly 30 years, the boys would spend their days doing whatever he told them. Being showcased in every awful, degrading way they could. In one circus, they were descendants of animals. In another, they were martians – at one point, their talent for music was spotted, their version of the popular World War I song ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’ becoming part of their act.

In 1927, the brothers were performing at the Ringling Brothers Circus in Roanoke, Virginia, and when they came on stage, a woman in the audience stood up and began to scream. It was their mother, Harriet, who was very much alive, unlike what Sherman had told Willie and George. The three were finally reunited, and legal proceedings were opened up against Sherman and the Ringling Brothers for abducting George and Willie and selling them into slavery.

Within a year, the brothers were back on the freak show circuit. This time, however, they were working under their own management and taking a salary for their labour, a portion of which was sent back to Harriet as a way of bringing the whole family out of poverty, which they finally did by the time of their mother’s death in 1942. However, the Muse brothers were one of the lucky few who managed to turn things around for themselves.

The vast majority of people who got caught up in the freak show circuit never made it out on their own terms. That’s the legacy that the modern-day freak show is trying to undo, and if they can, more power to them.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for it, though.