True Sex

The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Emily Skidmore

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479897995
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Mujeres en la historia

Winner, 2018 U.S. History PROSE Award The incredible stories of how trans men assimilated into mainstream communities in the late 1800s In 1883, Frank Dubois gained national attention for his life in Waupun, Wisconsin. There he was known as a hard-working man, married to a young woman named Gertrude Fuller. What drew national attention to his seemingly unremarkable life was that he was revealed to be anatomically female. Dubois fit so well within the small community that the townspeople only discovered his “true sex” when his former husband and their two children arrived in the town searching in desperation for their departed wife and mother. At the turn of the twentieth century, trans men were not necessarily urban rebels seeking to overturn stifling gender roles. In fact, they often sought to pass as conventional men, choosing to live in small towns where they led ordinary lives, aligning themselves with the expectations of their communities. They were, in a word, unexceptional. In True Sex, Emily Skidmore uncovers the stories of eighteen trans men who lived in the United States between 1876 and 1936. Despite their “unexceptional” quality, their lives are surprising and moving, challenging much of what we think we know about queer history. By tracing the narratives surrounding the moments of “discovery” in these communities – from reports in local newspapers to medical journals and beyond– this book challenges the assumption that the full story of modern American sexuality is told by cosmopolitan radicals. Rather, True Sex reveals complex narratives concerning rural geography and community, persecution and tolerance, and how these factors intersect with the history of race, identity and sexuality in America.

1

The Last Female Husband

New Boundaries of Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century

In late October 1883, a salacious story emerged out of Wisconsin that captivated readers nationwide and that tells us a great deal about how Americans perceived the porous boundaries between masculinity and femininity in the late nineteenth century. Newspapers reported that Samuel Hudson had arrived in the small town1 of Waupun with his two children in search of his wife, who had deserted the family in northern Illinois several months earlier. To his surprise, he found his wife posing as newlywed Frank Dubois, husband to Gertrude (née Fuller) Dubois. Frank and Gertrude Dubois then quickly fled Waupun, prompting a manhunt that lasted several weeks, and which was covered with great interest in newspapers throughout Wisconsin and the nation. These newspaper narratives divulge a great deal about the ways gender deviance, same-sex desire, and pathology were constructed in the 1880s. Sexology was still an emerging science in this period, and newspaper editors had very few authorities to turn to if they wanted “expert” opinions on the significance of “female husbands” such as Frank Dubois. In the void of plausible scientific rationale, newspaper editors around the nation crafted their own explanations of the case; some viewed Dubois’s case as relatively harmless, whereas others mobilized Dubois’s marriage to ridicule the notion of women fulfilling the role of husband. Collectively, the newspaper accounts published about and around Frank Dubois show that there was no single coherent national narrative that explained the phenomenon of gender transgressors in the early 1880s.

This lack of cohesion is surprising, given the fact that this period witnessed a clear shift in the language used to describe gender transgression and relationships between individuals perceived as women. In fact, Frank Dubois is the last individual to be described in the mass-circulation press as a “female husband”—a term that had appeared with some frequency in both British and American works since the mid-eighteenth century.2 Additionally, the same year that Dubois appeared on the pages of newspapers nationwide, the first utterance of the term “lesbian” appeared in an American publication.3

Thus, given that 1883 witnessed the emergence of the term “lesbian” and the disappearance of the term “female husband,” one might assume that the early 1880s ushered in a new era in understandings of gender and sexuality. This assumption is supported by the existing historiography, which suggests that the late nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift from the “romantic friendship” model of same-sex intimacy to the heterosexual/homosexual binary.4 According to Lillian Faderman, this process (spearheaded by sexologists) resulted in the “morbidification” of relationships between women.5 However, despite the introduction or disappearance of terminology used to describe gender transgression or same-sex intimacy, the 1880s should not be heralded as a sea change moment wherein everyday Americans embraced a new paradigm of gender and sexuality. Instead, Americans were slow to accept the homosexual/heterosexual binary, and even as sexological writing appeared with greater frequency in the mass-circulation press, sexological theories had little influence on popular understandings of gender and sexuality in this period. Collectively, the newspaper accounts produced around Frank Dubois and other gender transgressors in the 1880s show that, despite the fact that this decade might seem like one in which there was great transformation, there was, in fact, no single coherent national narrative that explained gender and/or sexual deviance.

This chapter will challenge the ways we have traditionally thought of this period—questioning the ways nineteenth-century female gender and sexuality were conceived, as well as how these formations were viewed after the purported shift at the end of the century. As scholars such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have argued, in the nineteenth century, women were allowed to pursue intimate connections with other women because sexual desire without a male partner was allegedly inconceivable, or at least unmentionable.6 Additionally, the social structure of middle-class life in the nineteenth century meant that many women lived in what Smith-Rosenberg famously referred to as a “female world.” In this world, homosocial networks “accompanied virtually every important event in a woman’s life, from birth to death … Within such a world of emotional richness and complexity, devotion to and love of women became a plausible and socially accepted form of human interaction.”7 Coupled with Victorian notions of female passionlessness, the pervasiveness of close relationships between women allowed for these relationships to appear innocent and, at times, compatible with heterosexual marriages.

However, scholars such as Rachel Hope Cleves and April Haynes are beginning to acknowledge that Americans were not quite so naïve about female sexuality as historians have previously assumed.8 As this chapter will discuss, newspapers readily made illusions to female desire. Additionally, as we move beyond 1870, the year in which Foucault famously argued that sexologists “invented” the homosexual, sexual desire and relationships between trans men and biological women continued to be discussed as relatively benign in the nation’s newspapers—an observation that is surprising given that the rise of sexology is often associated with the increasing pathologization of intimacy between individuals perceived to be the same biological sex.9 Thus, as this chapter will show, the late nineteenth century witnessed more continuity than change.

“A Truant Wife”

Before moving into a discussion of the specifics of Frank Dubois’s story, it is first important to pause to consider the world in which Dubois emerged. Life in the United States in the early 1880s was both exciting and terrifying, depending on where you stood and who you were. Reconstruction had been brought to a halt, although the nation was still fractured in significant ways between North and South, and racial tensions continued to drive American politics. The lynching of African American men still constituted a national crisis, though few in power acknowledged it as such. Many elites were vocalizing concern, however, about another purported social problem: the “New Woman.” This decade witnessed a growing number of white, middle-class women entering professions and political activism, and the mainstream national press regularly gave voice to those who expressed concern that such “New Women” might destabilize the social order by stepping outside their traditional roles.10

In the West, the encroachment of both the national boundaries of the United States and white settlers continued, resulting in sustained conflicts with Native people. In East, the “Gilded Age” was in full swing. Immigrants were flooding into cities at a record number, drawn by the perception of employment opportunities provided by the nation’s nascent industries. Business moguls such as Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie were transforming the nation’s economy, landscape, and skylines. The combination of immigration and industrialization led to rapid growth of the nation’s cities, but the majority of the nation’s population remained in rural areas. Despite the rural populace, the nation was increasingly interconnected. Advances in communication technology meant that even the most remote outpost was connected to the nation’s burgeoning metropolises through an ever-growing network of telegraph wires, railroad lines, and, most relevant to our purposes here, newspapers.11

In fact, when Frank Dubois’s story emerged in Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1883, the United States was home to about one thousand daily newspapers nationally, and a greater number of weekly or biweekly papers. In fact, the Census Bureau reported in 1880 that newspapers were published in 2,073 of the nation’s 2,605 counties.12 Papers around the country shared content through wire services such as the Associated Press, and around one-third of small-town papers purchased “readyprint” pages of news stories from metropolitan suppliers.13 Improved transportation networks (especially the railroad) facilitated the circulation of metropolitan newspapers to hinterland subscribers and enabled the editors of small-town newspapers to gather and present to their readers news from around the country.

Despite these indications of standardization of content, most newspapers retained their local flavor. Most were focused on local issues, and editors selected which elements of national stories to reproduce, adding or subtracting components of wire dispatches to appeal to local audiences and to reflect local print cultures.14 Most large cities had numerous competing dailies, and editors sought to differentiate their paper from the competition in order to gain readers. While editors of small-town papers may not have had the same competition, they nonetheless selected content and framed stories in ways that revealed regional or local flavor and reflected the editorial biases of the staff. These advances in the processes of newspaper publication allowed Frank Dubois’s story to spread very quickly in 1883, and yet the continued influence of local print cultures assured that the story would not be packaged in the same way as it circulated.

Indeed, Dubois’s story appeared almost immediately in national newspapers. The same day that Dubois’s local paper, the Waupun Times, reported the revelation of his “true sex,” the story also appeared in newspapers around the nation, from New York City to Grand Forks, North Dakota. The wire dispatch read:

A Waupun special to the Sentinel15 says: “S. J. Hudson of Belvidere, Ills., who came here recently with two children in search of his runaway wife, found her masquerading in male attire under the name of Frank Dubois. She was living with Gertrude Fuller, having been married to her early last spring by Rev. H. L. Morrison, at the home of the bride’s mother. The deception had not been suspected, but many thought Frank Dubois had many characteristics of a woman. Under this name she had solicited odd jobs of painting, and was earning enough to support them both.”16

In most cases, the above dispatch was published on an interior page within a column relaying other brief stories from around the nation, likely provided to the papers by the Associated Press.17 The remarkably unsensational account presented the details of the story in a matter-of-fact way and provided very little in the way of a framework through which readers could make sense of the story; there is no suggestion as to why Dubois began dressing as man, or what motivated him to marry Fuller. However, newspaper editors stepped in to fill the void and presented the dispatch under a wide range of titles, including “A Truant Wife” in the Helena Independent, and “An Insane Freak” in the Grand Forks Daily Herald. While such titles did not provide much framing, they did suggest to readers how they should think about the story. Additionally, they reflect a range of understandings regarding gender transgressions: the “truant wife” of Helena was the “insane freak” of Grand Forks.

One term that was used by the press with regularity to describe Frank Dubois, however, was “female husband.”18 The term was originally coined by English novelist Henry Fielding in his 1746 criminal biography The Female Husband.19 Fielding’s novel was based on newspaper stories, which had appeared in England the same year, about the arrest of a fraudulent doctor and “female husband” Mary/Charles Hamilton.20 After the publication of Fielding’s work, the term “female husband” would go on to appear with relative frequency in the British and U.S. press, most often to describe women who lived as men or who partnered with other women and took on “masculine” occupations.21 While female husbands were by no means celebrated in the mass-circulation press, they were not denigrated as insane, as sexologists were beginning to do with their figure of the “female invert.” As Jennifer Manion has argued, “If representations of female husbands in the eighteenth-century press appear to mock their protagonists at first glance, they also serve to make the category real.”22 The utterance of the term “female husband” in the press animated in the minds of some readers the possibility of women serving the function of husband, a prospect that some readers likely found appealing. Indeed, as Rachel Hope Cleves has observed, the term “female husband” had a long tenure in the U.S. press, and yet its meaning was by no means stable. She writes, “The diversity and longevity of stories about female husbands leads to the conclusion that this form of same-sex union, in particular, had cultural legibility within American society despite its routine description as singular and astonishing.”23 As Cleves explains, the term “female husband” appeared with great regularity in the press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Significantly, it was often used to discuss cases that the press deemed remarkable but not pathological.

Additionally, newspaper coverage of female husbands consistently conveyed an understanding of the boundaries of gender as porous and incomplete. It appears that a great deal of public interest in stories such as that of female husband Frank Dubois was provoked precisely by their illustration of h...