Once again, I have an article on a topic covered much more extensively in a publication I already blogged. Though in this case, by a different author. Thomas/ine Hall reminds us of the ways in which historic fixation on binary gender complicate the question of categorizing interactions as "same-sex" or "opposite-sex". There are several topics that I'll be discussing in the book version of the Project where it's inaccurate to characterize the topic as "lesbian" but that shed useful light on how historic societies would have viewed lesbian activity.
LHMP
Blog entry
This is largely a "teaser article" for Jen Manion's book on female husbands. Since it largely duplicates material I've already blogged, I've just linked that write-up. But it does quote a medical journal article written by Joe Lobdell's psychiatrist, which includes some interesting points of language.
This is a very useful and detailed article comparing references to same-sex activity in Colonial-era religious opinions, legal codes, and popular opinion, all of which could be quite different in degree.
By what appears to be random coincidence, I have a handful of articles coming up that are preliminary versions of material I've already covered, or in one case, material more thoroughly covered by another article I'm about to blog. So there's a certain amount of "for completeness' sake" happening on the blog in the next week or so.
But hey! I've finished the substantial revisions to the Skinsinger stories. Only a couple of technical editing passes to go plus figuring out book formatting. How hard could it be?
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 316 - On the Shelf for June 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/06/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for June 2025.
I’d say something about Pride Month, but here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, every month is Pride Month. Even so, I’ve committed to blogging a publication every day this month, just because.
Publications on the Blog
It's common to discover that my publication database includes preliminary versions of research that are later incorporated in a book. I often cover these out of order. (To the extent that I have any order at all.) But in this case, the present article discusses some of the background considerations for Boag's book and adds to understanding it, rather than being redundant. (I have a few articles coming up that ended up being redundant and I've largely simply cross-referenced them to the more complete versions.)
The concluding chapter of Boag's book on cross-dressers on the American frontier uses the case study of Joseph (Lucy) Lobdell to illustrate how stories of gender-crossing began being turned into stories of psychological illness. Lobdell was right on the cusp: considered a "curiosity" at first but then pathologized. (Though it doesn't help that Lobdell seems to have suffered from genuine mental illness, separate from their gender and sexuality.)
This chapter returns again to AMAB stories, focusing on the way those stories were explained away from the "real history" of the western frontier.
History must not only be studied, but continually re-studied and re-surfaced. We have all seen how easy it is for something "obvious" to become memory-holed even in as short a time as the last five years. How much easier when the primary sources were shaky to begin with and the myth-makers have a social and political agenda that they may not be entirely conscious of themselves. How easy it is to re-write history "as it should have been" (a phrase that has always grated on me in the context of the Society for Creative Anachronism, regardless of the direction of one's "should").
I haven't blogged this chapter in as much detail, as it runs crosswise to the topics the Project is interested in. But it's always useful to see the ways in which structurally parallel topics in male and female queer history (if you will forgive me for applying an inappropriate binary) are so very non-parallel in how they played out. A very brief slice of very recent history has convinced us that queer history can be viewed as a unified subject. But apparent/assigned gender has always been a stronger force than any theoretical similarity in non-normative experience.
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