Full citation:Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
The chapter opens with an anecdote about Horace Greeley (tagline: Go west, young man!) in 1859 checking out those who had actually followed his advice and speaking with a Colorado gold prospector who had decided to return back east. After the interview, he was informed that the prospector he’d been talking to was a woman.
This book explores such people in the American West who crossed gender in various ways. A major theme is that cross-dressers (the author’s term) were a common part of daily life in the West. A secondary topic is how, when, and why this simple fact was erased from US history. [Note: In conflating a wide variety of motivations and understandings of gender-crossing, Boag uses the term “cross-dressing” without intending to apply any particular interpretation on the individual instances. Thus “cross-dressing woman” is a person assigned female who dresses in male clothing and vice versa. I will follow this terminology for clarity. This is not meant to indicate any interpretation about individual identity.]
One inspiration for doing this study was the debate around the movie Brokeback Mountain regarding whether the same-sex relationship depicted was historically accurate—a debate grounded in generations of hyper-masculine cowboy characters in media. In contrast to the Hollywood image, Kinsey’s survey of sexual behavior found that male same-sex relations were more common in rural communities than urban ones.
The disconnect, Boag posits, comes from the conjunction of two events: the ending of the overall westward migration that defined the “frontier,” and the rise of sexological understandings of homosexual and heterosexual—both factors occurring around the turn of the 20th century. Both events are somewhat illusory. The end of the “Frontier” stood in for a variety of economic and social changes. And the popular embrace of sexological models was gradual and inconsistent. Even as westward movement slowed, the fictionalization of the “Wild West” began through performances and popular media.
Changes in the popular understanding of sexuality came from a combination of the shift from the one-gender model to the two-gender model (see Laqueur) by around 1800, and the theorizing that same-sex desire was caused by “inversion” of the sexual impulse, developing in the later 19th century. The medicalization and pathologization of same-sex desire became linked to theories about social decay and the stresses of modernization. Thus, according to this theory, same-sex desire would not occur in the “unspoiled” “natural” environment of the western frontier.
This framing required explanations for the observable fact of frequent cross-dressing in frontier cultures, which were resolved by a program of redefining the participants as heterosexual. Women who cross-dressed, by this framing, did so because success in the West required male disguise. Men who cross-dressed were a more difficult problem. It was addressed variously by erasure and the association of gender variance with non-white populations. Historians colluded in revising the story of the West as being the triumph of white male farmers, marrying and building communities.
The introduction finishes with a detailed case study of one individual who illustrates the issues and explanations discussed in the book.
Alberta Lucille Hart was born in 1840 to parents who had recently “reverse-migrated” from Oregon to Kansas. After the death of the father, the mother and child returned to Oregon where they had relatives. Hart enjoyed male-coded play and activities, enjoyed sports, despised housework, and began self-identifying as “the man of the family” (despite her mother remarrying). In addition to desiring to dress in male clothing and adopting a male hairstyle, Hart had a series of crushes and erotic fantasies centered on the female domestic servants in the household.
In response to teasing at school, Hart focused on excelling academically and graduated at the top of her class, continuing the pattern of crushes on female teachers and classmates. Academic success continued at college, where Hart formed a close relationship with classmate Eva Cushman. Their relationship was the subject of semi-friendly teasing and gossip. It became sexual, and when they were apart Hart wrote daily love letters to Cushman. Due to an inheritance from her late father, Hart was not only able to attend Stanford University, but to pay for Cushman to attend with her.
At university, Hart began adopting more masculine dress and activities, such as smoking and drinking, which resulted in Cushman gradually drawing away. [Note: Cushman’s reactions suggest that she understood herself to be involved with a woman, and the Hart’s increasing shift to male-presenting identity was not what she had signed up for. However it’s also possible to interpret her behavior as reacting to specific behaviors, rather than to female masculinity itself.] Hart regularly visited San Francisco for its nightlife and began a sexual relationship with a dancer there. This profligate lifestyle left Hart broke by graduation. She returned to Oregon and worked a variety of jobs to return to solvency then entered medical college as the only woman in her class. Again, she dealt with hazing by excelling academically and gaining highest honors.
The relationship with Cushman was completely over by this point and there was a series of unsuccessful romantic and sexual relationships with women and one extremely unsuccessful experiment with a man.
Hart’s medical studies led her to sexological writings, which resulted in depression regarding her own sexuality. She sought psychological treatment, but she laid out as a condition that she had no intention of changing her “masculine ambitions and tastes.” Her doctor agreed to focus on completing Hart’s transition into a man, including a hysterectomy. Hart chose to use the name Alan and shifted completely to a male presentation. In 1918, Hart gave a newspaper interview about his history and experiences, stating that he realized he must be one sex or the other, not “dual sex.”
This publicity raised questions of how law and society should treat Hart—for example, would he be subject to the military draft (which women were not)? Of course, “passing women” in the military were a long tradition.
Hart enjoyed a long medical career, with some speed bumps when rumor or notoriety caught up with him. Hart also published four medical-related novels, including one involving a gay man that may have been somewhat autobiographical. Eventually Hart settled into a long-term position in Connecticut where he served as director of a state health office up to his death in 1962 at age 72. Hart had one brief marriage in 1918, then a longer one starting in 1925 and lasting until his death.
Hart’s well-documented life was characterized in various ways by others: cross-dresser, homosexual, and “invert” (as “transsexual” was not yet in use until much later in his life). There is no clear documentation of how he categorized himself other than clearly considering himself a man. Across Hart’s lifetime, nomenclature and categories developed, shifted, and proliferated.
The author discusses Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as performance. In this context, to perform as male is to be male. Yet performance is not permanent or stable. In this context, cross-dressing can simultaneously disrupt the binary while also confirming it.
Popular media is the key source of information, not only for the existence of cross-dressing, but for documenting its reception. The author notes his potentially problematic use of “cross-dressing” to cover a disparate range of behaviors and identities. He notes that his use of pronouns will follow the understanding of how the person identified, but will sometimes reflect how they presented at various life stages.
Boag also takes note of the term “progress narrative,” which refers to framings of a personal story that characterize cross-dressing as done for a practical purpose unrelated to sexuality or gender identity.
This chapter is probably the one of most interest in the book, cataloging and discussing cases of female cross-dressers. The text alternates between detailed case studies and general discussion.
In 1912, in Portland Oregon, Harry Allen (alias Harry Livingstone) was arrested and eventually charged with violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes) due to having written to her partner (who presented herself as his wife) Isabelle Maxwell in Seattle, asking her to come to Portland, where she then engaged in prostitution to support them both.
During interrogation, Allen was recognized by a federal agent who had dealt with him previously regarding a bootlegging charge, under the identity Nell Pickerell. The authorities dropped the transporting charge and, given that cross-dressing was not illegal in Oregon, fell back on a vagrancy charge.
Allen became a media sensation, noting his ability to pass and history of male-coded, physically demanding jobs. His previous brushes with the law were dredged up, including press coverage of his gender-crossing as early as 1900, when he was a teenager. A great deal was made of two women who had fallen in love with Allen and then, on learning his assigned sex, committed suicide in despair. Newspapers offered various speculations on the reason for Allen’s gender-crossing, including dress reform, disappointment in (heterosexual) love, and to enable his criminality. Allen offered the straightforward explanation that it was to gain better jobs.
While in prison, Allen was interviewed by an anthropology student working on a thesis about alternative gender expressions in primitive societies, who argued that Allen was criminalized by society solely due to not fitting in, and that in a different society, Allen could have been offered a social role aligned with his desires. This interpretation fictionalized Allen’s life as much as the newspapers had, inventing events and details to support the theory. The student denied that Allen sexually desired women (despite evidently being a lesbian herself), which was contradicted by other observers.
Other reports described Allen as a “sexual invert”—a category that could include both lesbians and trans men at that time. Allen’s own testimony indicates that he considered himself to have changed sex.
Overall, society wanted to fit Allen into a “progress narrative” (i.e., economic motives) but Allen’s assertions contradicted this.
In 1908, in Montana, Sammy Williams—a lumberjack and cook—died at age 80 and was discovered to have a female body. Despite occasional teasing about beardlessness, Williams’ gender had never been questioned. Like many similar cases, the story spread in newspapers across the country, which framed it as a progress narrative with a certain amount of sympathy.
Gender-crossing stories of this type were relatively common in newspapers in the second half of the 19th century, generally locating the subject in the West. Progress narratives were the typical framing and the media might disapprove, but often were merely curious. The reasons offered for cross-dressing both by the subjects and by the reporters focused on practicality, safety, or for economic advantage. Some returned to female dress when no longer traveling.
Another context for more obvious cross-dressing was sex work, where either partial or full male clothing was used as an advertisement, with their identity as a woman not being concealed. Ironically, cross-dressing was used both to engage in, and to avoid engaging in, sex work.
Other motivations for cross-dressing included to participate in “slumming” tourism, or to assist in changing identity after encounters with the law. Women might cross-dress to track down a male betrayer, to elope with a disapproved suitor, to escape an abusive husband, unwillingly as a kidnap victim, or to avoid detection. All of these motivations existed, but when moving past media sensationalism, we also find sexual and gender motivations—details that newspapers were more reluctant to promote.
Newspaper accounts of women in same-sex sexual relationships framed them as mentally unstable and potentially violent, as with the case of Alice Mitchell. While cross-dressing stories of the 1850s to 1880s generally avoided suggesting sexual motives, by the end of the century, this aspect was increasingly mentioned. This paralleled the development and spread of sexological theories that linked sexuality with gender presentation.
A news item is offered from 1889 describing a young woman complaining about the obsessive and unwanted physical attention of her older female cousin with whom she shared a bed. The older woman expressed a wish to marry her and proposed cross-dressing for this purpose.
News accounts often worked to feminize cross-dressing individuals, once their identity was known, giving and impression of “we could tell, of course.” This framing typically accompanied a positive attitude toward the person, especially when they were not perceived as claiming male identity.
The depictions in the press align with specific timelines. Feminized descriptions are common more toward the mid-19th century, but by the end of the century there was an increasing focus on sexuality and on gender identity, emphasizing masculinity. By the 1890s, cross-dressers were more likely to be described as appearing and acting masculine, and were more likely to be given backstories involving an early interest in male-coded activities. By the 1910s and 1920s, unmasked cross-dressers were more likely to be described as physically robust and to be awkward and unattractive if required to wear women’s clothing. And in these later decades, they were more likely to be described as flirting with women or having female romantic partners. [Note: the chapter has more specific case studies than I am noting here.]
This pattern of reporting around the turn of the century aligns with increasing anxieties about “new women” usurping men’s place in society.
This new era of cross-dressing stories includes Milton Matson, arrested in 1895 on a fraud-related charge. His original gender was revealed and he explained (though we may feel free to be skeptical of the details) that his parents had dressed him as a boy after his brother’s death, for reasons related to inheritance, and he’d been cross-dressing so long that it felt natural. He had always preferred male-coded activities and enjoyed courting women.
Eugene De Forest, arrested in 1915 for “masquerading as a man” had a similar story and had been living as a man for 25 years, including marriage to a woman (as well as an earlier marriage to a man).
Jack Garland, on the other hand, avoided charges of gender impersonation by freely admitting that she was a woman who chose to dress in male clothing. Garland first gained media attention in 1897, but later did appear to be passing as a man.
The author discusses what types of evidence we can have regarding how cross-dressers understood their own gender identity, as well as evidence for how their associates interacted with them with regard to gender. Individuals who were long-term members of a community were generally taken at face value, even if circumstance revealed their bodies. Whereas individuals who moved frequently and had no community ties were more likely to be shunned and treated as a sensational curiosity. But not all long-term community members enjoyed acceptance once revealed. Responses might include ridicule or ostracization.
The chapter concludes with a summary of the main themes and chronology.
As this chapter focuses on male cross-dressing, I will be skimming it more briefly. As in the first chapter, we begin with an extensive case history. “M” began dressing in female-coded clothing as a youth, and left home for the West at age 15 due to family conflicts. M preferred playing with dolls, cooking, and sewing rather than male-coded activities, but didn’t back down from fighting his bullies. Further questioning indicated that M’s mother had initiated both the cross-dressing and needlecrafts. A similar story is found around the turn of the century about a different boy whose mother had strongly desired a daughter and treated him as one. Regardless, M expressed a strong preference for living as a woman.
Male cross-dressing occurred in a variety of contexts, including Native American alternate genders, temporary cross-dressing during dances and entertainments in all-male communities, as well as those doing it out of personal preference or identity.
Theatrical cross-dressing was performed for audiences who also enjoyed blackface acts, as well as “exotic” acts by Chinese performers, so the interest was part of a general taste for disruptive and non-normative performance.
Outside of performance contexts, local laws might prohibit male cross-dress as noted in 1882 in Nevada. In mid 19th century San Francisco, arrests for cross-dressing document its prevalence. While reasons given to the authorities must be viewed with some skepticism, they include evading pursuit, “for a lark,” as a disguise during criminal activity, to escape prison, but also some more unexpected reasons, such as to avoid the constriction and warmth of male clothing for medical reasons.
The gender imbalance in the West meant that someone presenting as a woman with female-coded skills such as cooking, sewing, and housekeeping might make a good living with few questions.
Moving into the 1890s, cross-dressing men came under greater scrutiny with regard to sexuality and mental health. The idea of the “sexual invert” was spreading and might be applied or even adopted as an understanding for cross-dressing. In this context, those who cross-dressed for theatrical performance came under pressure to present a more normative image off-stage.
There is a discussion of the dynamics and hazards of male cross-dressers inspiring, encouraging, or pursuing flirtations or sexual relationships with men. There is a discussion of certain cases that may have involved intersex people who presented as different genders at different periods of their life.
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
Joe Monahan died of a sudden illness in rural Idaho in 1903. The friends who prepared him for burial were surprised that he had a female body and buried him quietly. But another local felt that Monahan had been done a disservice and brought the matter to the attention of a newspaper, extoling his ordinary, virtuous life. Few facts were known about him at that time and only a few more can be found in the archives. He was born around 1850, probably in New York, and had been living in Idaho since at least 1870. He was spotty about picking up his mail—but he did receive mail—and had voted in 1880. (Women did not have the vote in Idaho at that time.) An acquaintance noted that the letters he received were possibly from a sister in Buffalo New York, to whom he wrote occasionally. This friend wrote to an official in Buffalo hoping to locate his family (in part, to deal with his estate). This turned up a foster mother and foster sister, who confirmed that “Johanna Monahan” had gone West around age 14 and had corresponded regularly. Their letters were later found in Monahan’s cabin.
But searching the archives in Buffalo for a Johanna Monahan only added some further confusion about her birth family and identity. In any event, the foster mother reported that Monahan’s mother had dressed her in boy’s clothes and had her earn a living with jobs typically performed by boys. When her foster mother took Monahan in, he was sent to school. In her version, Monahan left in 1869 first to California, then to Idaho.
As the story made its way into the Idaho media, other people began adding details to Monahan’s history, including that many had suspected he was a woman but no one made a fuss about it. People in that region were aware of many cross-dressing women, for various reasons. Even in correspondence discussing this issue, Monahan’s associates used male pronouns for him.
All of this is backstory for how Monahan’s story was picked up in popular media. In the 1950s, Monahan’s story was revived in newspapers, theater, and eventually movies with the 1993 film The Ballad of Little Jo, all of which include a large amount of invention and no hint of queerness. Monahan is made fully heterosexual and “man troubles” are offered as the motivation for her transformation.
This framing was begun in 1904 when uneasiness about the sexual implications of cross-dressing led newspapers to “reclaim” Monahan as essentially feminine, including fake images in a hoopskirt and an invented romantic betrayal by a man. (The fiction is embellished by many details with no connection to Monahan’s actual history, including the addition of an illegitimate child.)
The chapter moves on to provide more examples of how the actual biographies of cross-dressing women were re-written in the late 19th and early 20th century to disarm concerns about gender and sexuality.
Existing fictional genres were adapted, such as the seduction motif in which the woman both flees and cross-dresses to escape her shame. Such a fiction was assigned to Charley Parkhurst when a post-mortem not only identified his bodily sex but indicated a previous pregnancy. (Motherhood was a strong motif for feminizing the subject.)
Dime novels of the 1870s were fond of using heterosexual relationships as the motivation for cross-dressing, as with fictionalizations of the life of Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane). The real life Canary rarely cross-dressed and identified as female, but her fictional twin is more cagey, implying either inversion or non-binary identity, and cross-dressing regularly in order to hunt down the man who betrayed her.
Several other fictional examples of “betrayal and escape” or “betrayal and revenge” are listed. Such stories solidly establish the heterosexual credentials of their heroines. Such overt inventions then sometimes were resurrected as “true” news stories.
Fictional cross-dressing narratives sometimes re-normalized their protagonists with marriage and a return to female presentation. Often this includes a return to the urban East, symbolically localizing cross-dressing to the peculiar logistics and needs of Western life.
Another subgenre involves a woman cross-dressing to join a male lover in criminal activities—a genre that has roots in a number of actual biographies. (Note: these are all cited from newspaper accounts, and it’s unclear whether the author considers them wholly fictional or simply sensationalized and “straightened.”)
Even as the fictional genre of cross-dressing women came to popularity, the acceptance of real-life cross-dressing women waned, with women in San Francisco and other locations facing arrest for cross-dressing by the early 20th century.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of whether cross-dressing destabilized gender or enforces it by aligning activities and characteristics rigidly with gender presentation. I.e., women could participate in the “Wild West” but only as men. This alignment must then be undermined by re-feminizing the participants once they were separated (by time, space, or reality) from the actual frontier.
This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.
The biography that kicks off the chapter follows Mrs. Nash, a woman of Mexican origin. An army captain had hired Nash as a laundress in New Mexico and then recognized her some years later in 1868 in Kansas when she was presenting as a man, which she explained she had done out of economic necessity to get work driving ox teams across the plains. The captain once again hired her to do laundry for his troop, enabling her to return to female dress. In addition to having a great reputation for her laundry skills, she was in demand as a cook, specializing in tamales and baked goods. She also did sewing and dressmaking, making all her own clothing.
Nash spoke of having had two children back in Mexico who had died, but did not much like sharing quarters with children, though she also turned her hand to midwifery. With all these side hustles, she brought in a significant income, which had the unfortunate side-effect of attracting mercenary men who married her then absconded with her money. (This happened twice, once with the man who gave her the married surname of Nash.) Her third marriage was more successful. But after 4 or 5 years of marriage, Nash fell ill with appendicitis while her husband was away. Knowing the end was near, Nash asked for a priest and requested that she be buried quickly in whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. But after her death, her co-workers wanted to honor her better. When they were preparing the body for burial, they discovered that Nash had male anatomy, much to the astonishment of the witnesses. The army surgeon confirmed this observation. When her husband returned from patrol, he was questioned about his wife but indicated that he knew her to be a woman. He implied that they had a sexual relationship. But he was mocked and teased so relentlessly about his marriage that a month after Nash’s death he committed suicide.
After that, stories began being invented to explain Nash’s cross-dressing, including the assertion that it was a disguise to escape consequences for a mass murder. News accounts asked the question that confronts the “progress narrative:” what practical benefit would there be for a man to masquerade as a woman, losing male privilege and economic opportunity?
Notable in the news accounts is how Nash’s ethnicity (Mexican) was emphasized and highlighted. Along with this, she was assigned negative stereotypes that should have been contradicted by the regard her associates actually had for her.
This was a common pattern in accounts of male cross-dressing: if the person was not white, their race was emphasized; if white, it was not mentioned. (In one exception, the cross-dresser was noted as being white in the context that he regularly associated with Black men.)
After her death, accounts of Nash claimed that there had been suspicion about her sex, referencing unusual facial hair (and her habit of wearing a veil across her face), a large build, and a low voice. But these later claims are at odds with the genuine surprise felt during her laying out.
One racialized motif that was particularly prevalent was the “Mexican bandit” who cross-dressed to evade the law, invoking a stereotype of Mexican men as simultaneously criminal, deceitful, and unmanly. “Indian blood” was another motif that was invoked, drawing from genuine Native traditions of cross-gender social roles.
The Mexican motif also worked in the opposite direction, depicting Mexican men as unmanly because they were prone to cross-dressing.
Non-whites, in general, were “de-masculinized” by denying them the rights accorded to white men in American society, such as the right to own property and to vote.
A strong example of this was the feminizing of Chinese men. Due to migration patterns and motivations, the male-to-female ratio among Chinese immigrants was enormous, even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 froze immigration. Combined with anti-miscegenation laws, this meant that Chinese immigrant communities were largely all-male. Other factors that contributed to the feminization of Chinese men was a tendency to sparse facial hair, the long, braided hairstyle (but see the political history of the Chinese queue), and loose, non-European clothing styles. The exclusion from land-owning and many white-coded occupations, combined with the general scarcity of women in the West, forced many Chinese men into female-coded occupations such as cooking, laundry, and domestic service.
There was also a sexual element to the framing of racialized cross-dressers, as they were sometimes (whether accurately or not) accused of cross-dressing for the purpose of prostitution. Once again, this intertwined with white reactions to Native “berdache” traditions. (Although Native American alternate gender traditions also included women taking on a male social role, this does not appear to have become part of the official “story” about cross-dressed women.)
Another side of the fictionalization of Western masculinity was how it became a stand-in for what was perceived as an erosion of older models of masculinity. Becoming a “pseudo-cowboy” via reading and re-enacting Western literature created new models of manliness that were coded white. [Note: compare also the erasure of non-white “cowboys” from popular media.]
Overall, the narrative was: the West was “won” by virile (straight) white men. Non-whites were marginalized as villains, criminals, deviants, and effeminates, and queer men were subsumed to one or more of these. Thus “men” were all straight because anyone who wasn’t straight could be reclassified as “not a man.” Ideals of masculinity were equated with the “men of the West” which influenced even those not on the frontier to support and maintain these mythic archetypes as a historic reality that they could adopt as an image. [Note: see, for example, the “Marlboro man” which one could become by smoking the right brand of cigarettes.]
Touching back on the story of Mrs. Nash and her husband from the beginning of the chapter, the (white) husband’s sexuality was never questioned in the press, only his supposed gullibility (he didn’t know) or greed (he only cared about her income and cooking). He was normalized as a “regular man,” just as those who cross-dressed for dances or entertainment in all-male communities were normalized (regardless of their individual motivations).
There is a discussion of how the “progress narrative” (i.e., cross-dressing is done for social practicality) is gendered and breaks down when applied to men.
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York. But Lobdell had been running ahead of discovery before, and had even published a feminist treatise under his birth name, Lucy Ann Lobdell, complaining of an abusive husband, of the wage discrimination faced by women, and arguing that if women were being forced to step up to be the primary support of their families, then society should accommodate them.
[Note: Lobdell’s story shows the difficulty in trying to apply modern identity labels to historic individuals. While Lobdell lived most of his adult life as a man, the autobiographical treatise not only was written under a female name, but from a female social identity—very emphatically.]
After returning to New York, Lobdell continued living as a man and became a music and dance teacher. At one point he became engaged to one of his female pupils, but a rival suitor dug up Lobdell’s background and was planning a tar-and-feather party. The fiancée got wind of this and warned Lobdell and he was on the run again. Ill health led Lobdell to return to a female identity in order to live in a charity house.
In the same area, one Marie Louise Perry, abandoned by the unsuitable lover she had eloped with (though additional details are confused and conflicting) also ended up in the same charitable institution. Perry and Lobdell took a shine to each other and left the institution together in 1869, found a preacher to marry them, and started an itinerant, somewhat feral lifestyle with Lobdell hunting and doing odd jobs as they tried to live off the land. They spent several stints in jail for vagrancy or more nebulous charges, with Lobdell’s sex being a point of contention when discovered. Despite a mistaken report of Lobdell’s death, he ended up in an insane asylum in 1880 due to what appears to be genuine mental illness (depression and dementia), but exacerbated by attitudes toward his gender presentation.
Various dates for his eventual death in the asylum are given, ranging from 1885 to 1912. After Lobdell’s commitment, his wife continued to live on their farm for a while, then returned to Massachusetts until her death in 1890. A newspaper interviewed her about her “strange” relationship with Lobdell, at which she argued that there was nothing strange in two women living together. [Note: Once again complicating the question of Lobdell’s gender identity.]
The doctor who treated Lobdell in the asylum wrote him up as a case study in “sexual perversion,” referring to his relationship with Perry as “lesbian”—one of the earliest American case studies in the sexological tradition. Lobdell claimed at one point that he had “peculiar organs” that supported his claim to male identity. [Note: There’s no suggestion in the book that Lobdell might have been intersex, although that is mentioned in the context of an entirely different case study.] The doctor took this at face value and recorded it as the mythic “lesbian with enlarged, penetrative clitoris” which has haunted the historic record. The doctor drew connections between Lobdell’s mental illness and his sexual inversion in support of the theory that inversion could be a byproduct of some other medical or psychological misfortune (in contrast to another theory that inversion was always congenital).
When originally documented, Lobdell’s case was considered an anomaly. But as sexologists identified increasing numbers of cases in the 1890s, they concluded that some historical force was causing a rise in perversion. [Note: As opposed to the possibility that, having discovered the hammer, they were now going around identifying lots of objects as nail-like.] This just happened to coincide with the era when people were declaring the end of the Western frontier. It was—they concluded—the passing of the West that was generating a wave of sexual inversion. By this means, they could neatly erase the presence of queer people from the West itself by claiming that sexual inversion only arose as the West disappeared.
The chapter spends some time exploring the connections the sexologists made between inversion, “degeneracy” in both a moral and eugenicist sense, and the alleged decline of western civilization (primarily in the context of Europe). This image of degeneracy was in contrast to American ideals of progress and expansion. Sexual degeneracy might be contributing to the fall of Old World civilization, but America could stand firm and hold the moral line, thus avoiding the same fate.
Vigorous rural manual labor was the way to avoid the enervating effects of urban life that led people to the neurasthenia that caused inversion and other ills. (I’m doing some serious condensation of this discussion.) “Urban” life was also a dog whistle for immigrants, non-white communities, and the working class, all of whom were potentially susceptible to degeneracy. The frontier, the outdoors, (and whiteness) were the cure for these ills!
Conclusion—Sierra Flats and Haunted Valleys: Cross-Dressers and the Contested Terrain of America’s Frontier Past
This brief chapter sums up the main themes of the book, tying them together with examples of mid-19th century fiction (e.g., by Bret Harte) that reflect reality more than the later mythologizing Western fiction that erased queerness entirely.