Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past

Peter Boag

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780520270626
• eBook ISBN: 9780520949959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century—when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category—Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Trip Along the Pike’s Peak Express:Cross- Dressers and America’s Frontier Past
• part one. “Females in Male Attire, and Males in Petticoats”: Remembering Cross- Dressers in Western American and Frontier History
• part two. “Th e Story of the Perverted Life Is Not Attractive”: Making the American West and the Frontier Heteronormative
• Conclusion. Sierra Flats and Haunted Valleys: Cross- Dressers and the Contested Terrain of America’s Frontier Past
• Notes
• Index