I can forgive Vicinus for starting off by claiming that much of the historical work on cross-dressing men has focused on the theater and especially on Shakespeare’s works, only because this article was written before much of the work on gender-crossing and trans history has been done. She’s looking at the couple of decades around 1900, a time when understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing one of those periodic revolutions. The instability of how to read “male impersonation” came from both the multiplicity of framings of the act itself and the attitude of the viewer.
20th c
The strict scope of this project cuts off at the 20th century, but this tag will occasionally be used when a source spills over.
LHMP entry
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.
A great deal of this article isn’t directly of interest, so much will be glossed over. The “proverbs” in question are various Greek adages in reference to people from Lesbos that mostly are not in reference to female same-sex relations. [Note: I’ve seen some arguments that some of the interpretations are more ambiguous that indicated here, but I’ll stick to summarizing what’s in this article.]
This article focuses on the end of the 19th century as the era when a medical model of homosexuality replaced a religious/moral model, creating the conditions for the idea of belonging to a sexual minority. Starting with the first publication of a medical paper on “sexual inversion” in Germany in 1870, the next few decades saw increasing interest from medical professionals in the topic.
This is an overview of the rise of sexological theories about female homosexuality. The field consistently made connections between homosexuality and neurosis in women, as well as connecting the former with “inversion” or masculinity. Different part of the field gave different weight to ideas of genetic versus behavioral causes. There were also systematic ways in which the sexological approach to homosexuality differed for men and women. But the overall concept pressured women with homoerotic feelings to consider themselves mentally—and perhaps physically—ill.
Martin uses the writings of early 20th c Australian poet Mary Fullerton, and in particular numerous poems related to her long-term relationship with Mabel Singleton, to explore the debate among historians around the question of romantic friendship and lesbian sexuality. [Note: Fullerton was born in 1868 and much of the discussion concerns solidly 19th century topics, so I consider the article in-scope for the Project.]
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
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.
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.
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.
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