Sensational journalism, referred to at the time as “yellow journalism,” gained influence in the 1890s under the auspices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Although Pulitzer and Hearst were critiqued by their competitors for exploiting violence, sex, and crime in order to appeal to mass audiences, the genre caught on. This growing popularity was helped in part, no doubt, by Pulitzer and Hearst’s increasing roles as media moguls, which they used to exert influence beyond New York City by the purchasing of newspapers and, in Hearst’s case, creating wire services, each of which bore the mark of sensationalism.85
In this marketplace—wherein journalists were expected to exploit difference in order to create morality tales in which “good” and “dangerous” were easily identifiable from each other—there was no room for ambiguous terms like “female husbands,” as they left too much space for reader interpretation. As the genre of sensationalism increasingly marked metropolitan newspapers, trans men were figured as deviant in nationalizing discourse, and therefore little room was left for a term that conveyed some level of legitimacy to those figures whom sensational journalists sought to portray as freaks. Previous scholars have noted this identifiable shift in national representations of gender and sexuality, and the 1890s have been heralded as a period in which understandings of gender and sexuality underwent substantial change.86 However, once you scratch beneath the surface and interrogate the dissonance between local and national discussions of trans men, tremendous continuity can be seen between the 1870s and the twentieth century.
2
Beyond Community
Rural Lives of Trans Men
In his recent work, Colin Johnson writes, “It still feels safe to many people to assume that rural Americans simply didn’t talk about same-sex sexual behavior or gender nonconformity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Or, if they did, what they had to say about these matters was probably more similar than not to what comparably situated people would say today.” Johnson goes on to refute this truism—which he refers to as the “rural repressive hypothesis”—because it “assumes incorrectly that nothing ever changes in rural America.”1 This chapter picks up Johnson’s insights and considers their applicability to the lives of trans men at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, this chapter follows a spate of recent work comprising the “rural turn” in queer studies—Johnson’s as well as that of John Howard, Peter Boag, Brock Thompson, Rachel Hope Cleves, and Nayan Shah—taking a fresh look at non-metropolitan areas and challenging much of what scholars (and society more broadly) have long assumed about queer history in rural spaces. Looking beyond the coastal cities that once dominated the field of LGBT history, this chapter takes an in-depth look at the lives of trans men who chose to live in rural (or at least non-metropolitan) areas in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter questions why, in a period when the nation as a whole was undergoing rapid urbanization and queer subcultures were beginning to emerge in the nation’s cities, many trans men chose to remain in (or relocate to) small towns and rural spaces in the nation’s interior.
While finding comprehensive statistical data on gender transgressors in this period is impossible, the available evidence suggests that many trans men chose to live in small towns. Between 1876 and 1936, newspapers discussed sixty-five unique cases of individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as men.2 Of those sixty-five cases, twenty-two (or close to 35 percent) lived in non-metropolitan areas. Many others lived in small cities not commonly associated with large queer communities, such as Omaha, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Lincoln, and Bangor. In fact, at a time when the nation’s cities were growing at a breakneck pace, a majority of the documented cases of trans men lived outside of large cities. In this way, the stories of Joseph Lobdell and Frank Dubois discussed in the previous chapter do not represent a prehistory to the urban migration of trans men that the 1890s would usher in; rather, they suggest patterns that gender-transgressive individuals would continue to express well into the twentieth century.
Whereas the metronormative logic that has guided much of queer history to this point suggests that individuals need to move to large cities in order to lead queer lives, this chapter suggests otherwise. What makes the fact that so many trans men lived in rural areas and small towns so remarkable is that it appears as though this was their choice. Like most individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trans men in this book were fairly transient, moving several times in their adult lives. Beginning in the 1890s, for example, a trans man named Ellis Glenn repeatedly chose to live in towns with populations under five thousand, such as Lapeer, Michigan; Hillsboro, Illinois; and Williamstown, West Virginia. And, as court testimony bore out, he was able to lead an active social (and romantic) life in each of these locales.3 This movement (from small town to small town, not small town to large city) paints a very different trajectory for queer lives than queer history has traditionally presented. This chapter will ruminate on such movement: Why did trans men like Ellis Glenn choose to live in small towns? What did these spaces offer that larger cities might not? How might these deliberate choices shift the way we think about queer history? In answering these questions, this chapter will argue that rural spaces and small towns presented trans men with surprising opportunities. While large cities might afford their queer residents the benefit of anonymity, non-metropolitan areas offered their own set of advantages, which some queers found preferable to the ones offered by larger cities. Specifically, non-metropolitan spaces assured trans men that as long as they lived their lives as normative men, their gender transgressions would be tolerated due to the structures of familiarity that regulate life in small towns. Indeed, trans men were protected both by the nature of small town life as well as by the value placed on masculinity in such environments. Because trans men preformed vital functions within their communities (serving as farmers, husbands, and neighbors), their lives as men were often seen in a positive light.
Beyond rethinking the notion that rural areas and small towns are inherently dangerous spaces for queer individuals, this chapter will also challenge the notion that these spaces are “backward.” It might appear on the surface that rural spaces were less likely to pathologize queer individuals at the turn of the twentieth century because they were “behind,” or unaware of the emergent sexological discourse on sexual inversion or homosexuality. However, this is not what I wish to argue. I do not mean to suggest in any way that the inhabitants of rural areas were any less savvy about sexuality or gender than their urban counterparts, nor were they ignorant of the emergent discourse of sexology. In fact, individuals in small towns were aware of the emergent sexological discourse of the day, as illustrated by the Waupun Times reproduction of Dr. P. M. Wise’s article “A Case of Sexual Perversion.” The fact that within a year of its initial appearance in the Alienist and Neurologist Wise’s paradigm-setting article would go on to appear in a small-town newspaper like the Waupun Times disproves the idea that rural communities were isolated from the emergent scientific discourse on sexual and gender deviance. Just as significantly, the Waupun Times editorial staff did not reproduce Wise’s article to serve as the last word on the Dubois case; instead, they offered the article alongside accounts from Dubois’s mother-in-law, neighbors, and other family members, and the testimonies from community members were granted just as much weight as the theories of sexual and gender deviance articulated by Wise.
This example suggests the utility of Martin Manalansan’s notion of “alternative modernity” in thinking through the realities of gender and sexuality in rural areas, rather than the “backward” framework that all too often colors discussions of small towns and rural spaces.4 Brock Thompson has deployed Manalansan’s notion in his work on Arkansas, in which he explains, “Arkansas was never behind; Arkansas never played catch-up to modern alternatives found elsewhere in the nation. Rather, Arkansas offered and operated under specific social and cultural conditions that shaped it as an alternative modernity … Arkansas … operated within its own framework of modernity, buttressed by and defined within specific cultural circumstances found in the rural South.”5 Thompson’s notion of Arkansas as an “alternative modernity” allows him to debunk the “rural is to urban as backward is to progressive” framework that has all too often guided work in queer history. This chapter will argue that Manalansan’s “alternative modernity” can help us rethink rural spaces throughout the nation