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TRUE SEX
True Sex
The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Emily Skidmore
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2017 by New York University
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-7063-9
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Harry Gorman’s Buffalo
1. The Last Female Husband: New Boundaries of Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century
2. Beyond Community: Rural Lives of Trans Men
3. “The Trouble That Clothes Make”: Whiteness and Acceptability
4. Gender Transgressions in the Age of U.S. Empire
5. To Have and to Hold: Trans Husbands in the Early Twentieth Century
Conclusion: Kenneth Lisonbee’s Eureka
Introduction
Harry Gorman’s Buffalo
In 1902, thirty-three-year-old Harry Gorman was hospitalized in Buffalo, New York, after he suffered a serious fall that broke one of his legs. While on the surface this event sounds inconsequential, it prompted a firestorm of media coverage. Indeed, on his1 hospital bed, it was revealed that Gorman lacked the anatomy generally associated with maleness—despite having lived as a man for more than twenty years. This revelation drew attention from newspapers across the nation, from Tucson to Boston and Fort Worth to New York City.
Gorman explained that his decision to dress as a man had been made in his youth, motivated by both a desire for freedom and a frustration with the limited opportunities available to women. He told the New York World, “I wanted to be a man, and since I reached my thirteenth birthday[,] I have worn male attire. I landed in New York twenty years ago. I have worked in all the large cities of the United States and Canada as a man. People think they are so smart. Why, I fooled them all, and if it had not been for my accident when I fell and broke a leg[,] I would still be a man.” Gorman went on to explain that, as a man, he took advantage of all the opportunities with which men were provided, including getting married to a woman. He also voted, telling the New York World, “I’m a good democrat … and have voted the straight ticket for the last seven years.”2
Perhaps most sensational of all, however, was Gorman’s revelation that he was not the only trans man to call Buffalo home. In fact, he claimed that he knew at least “ten women right here in Buffalo who wear men’s clothing and who hold men’s positions.”3 He went on to explain, “Did we have an organization? No, hardly an organization, but we run across each other once in a while[,] and over our beer and cigars in saloons[,] we have had many a good hearty laughs at the expense of the men.”4 In this way Gorman suggested to readers that though his “true sex” may have been discovered, there were many more individuals like him who still roamed the streets, undetected. Indeed, the headline of Indiana’s Logansport Journal worried, “Ten Women Masquerade as Men.” Furthermore, and perhaps more unsettling to some readers—especially cisgender5 men—those undetected trans men were frequently in saloons, one of the most hallowed male institutions in the early twentieth century, mocking and having “many a good hearty laughs at the expense of the men.”
Just as the brief story of Gorman initially may appear inconsequential, the revelation of Gorman’s “true sex” might, at first glance, similarly seem unimportant to the history of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Newspapers across the country discussed Gorman’s case in articles under flashy headlines such as “She Was a Man for 20 Years.”6 The blitz of newspaper coverage about Harry Gorman illustrates that Americans at the beginning of that century were fascinated with gender—particularly its permeability, its elasticity, and the ways it intersected with race, class, and sexuality. Even though the disclosure of Gorman’s “true sex” was described by some newspapers as “startling,” it is likely that this was not the first story of a trans man that newspaper readers had encountered. In fact, newspapers around the country regularly reported stories of individuals who had been assigned female at birth but chose to live as male; at least sixty-five cases appeared in U.S. newspapers between the 1870s and 1930s.
For example, in 1883, Frank Dubois gained national attention when his “true sex” was discovered. Anatomically female (and the birth parent of two children), Dubois abandoned his family in Belvidere, Illinois, to start a new life in the small town of Waupun, Wisconsin. Once in Waupun, Dubois made a name for himself as a hardworking man, and he quickly settled down and married a young woman named Gertrude Fuller. 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 town searching for their departed wife and mother, attracting widespread attention in the nation’s newspapers. And while Harry Gorman portrayed Buffalo’s trans men in an antagonistic relationship with cisgender men, mocking them from the corners of saloons, it appears that many trans men sought to live normative lives—just as Frank Dubois had done in Waupun—supporting wives, earning respect as hard workers, and flying under the radar as much as possible.
The stories of Harry Gorman and Frank Dubois are illuminating in that they provide a far more complicated vision of the American past than the one historians have previously accepted. Gorman’s comments about there being ten other trans men in Buffalo are suggestive not only in what they reveal about that city but also in what they imply about everywhere else in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. His comments intimate that if Buffalo—a city not commonly thought of as the bedrock of the queer community—had at least eleven trans men in 1902, than surely so did Tulsa, Saint Paul, Jackson, and