and into the nation’s interior.
Furthermore, Gorman’s depiction of the community of trans men is revealing. Rather than being part of a tight-knit community that shared an underground lifestyle, trans men existed out in the open, living and passing as normative men, and only on occasion encountered one another. While perhaps some urban enclaves did exist, Gorman’s comments anticipate a great deal of what this book reveals: that trans men at the turn of the twentieth century were not always urban rebels who sought to overturn normative gender roles. On the contrary, they often sought to pass as conventional men, aligning themselves with the normative values of their communities. Additionally, when mixed-raced Milwaukee resident Ralph Kerwineo’s “true sex” was revealed in 1914, the local papers were full of testimonies attesting to how conventional Kerwineo’s life as a man had been. His neighbor Joseph Traudt told the Evening Wisconsin, “In the neighborhood it was frequently remarked what a nice married couple [Kerwineo and his wife] were. After having seen the ‘husband’ help his ‘wife’ across a muddy street[,] my mother said to me: ‘How nice he is to his wife.’ ”7
Like many of the other trans men discussed in this book, Kerwineo, Gorman, and Dubois lived lives marked by movement. However, their trajectories challenge the dominant narratives about queer history. Although Gorman claimed that he had “worked in all the large cities of the United States and Canada as a man,” many of his contemporaries chose to move not from large city to large city but rather from small town to small town, often living in rural outposts like Manhattan, Montana, and Ettrick, Virginia. For his part, Kerwineo’s life as a man began once he had moved away from Chicago—a city with a burgeoning queer subculture—to the relatively sleepier city of Milwaukee. Frank Dubois also began his male life after a move; he had left his family in Belvidere, Illinois, to start over not in Chicago (the nearest large city) but in the tiny hamlet of Waupun, Wisconsin. Trans men seemingly chose these out-of-the-way places in order to make quite regular, maybe even ordinary, lives. They were, in a word, unexceptional.
True Sex explores the lives of Frank Dubois, Ralph Kerwineo, and many other trans men who lived in the United States in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, this book examines the newspaper narratives produced around the moment of “discovery” when a trans man’s “true sex” was revealed to his community in the period between the 1870s and the 1930s. The reports published around these times of revelation are the focus here because they provide a unique window into the ways individuals and communities made sense of national discourses about proper gender embodiment and the emergent medical literature on homosexuality. Indeed, the period on which this study focuses witnessed the emergence of sexology, or the study of human sexuality, in the United States. A field of inquiry first established in Europe, sexology gained a foothold in the United States in the late nineteenth century with the publication of several important works, most notably Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis and Havelock Ellis’s 1895 “Sexual Inversion in Women.” Both of these works defined homosexuality as pathological and degenerative and argued that in women, same-sex desire was most often signified by inversion, or the predilection toward masculinity and cross-dressing.8 Thus, one of the objectives of this book is to interrogate how the emergence of this new scientific discourse affected the ways communities responded to the trans men in their midst.
Scholars for three decades have been attempting to understand the relationship between sexological theories on gender and sexuality and popular understandings of the same. While Michel Foucault has famously argued that sexologists created the “species” of the homosexual, other scholars have been more tepid in their analyses. George Chauncey warned in 1982 that “it would be wrong to assume … that doctors created and defined the identities of ‘inverts’ and ‘homosexuals’ at the turn of the century, that people uncritically internalized the new medical models, or even that homosexuality emerged as a fully defined category in the medical discourse itself in the 1870s.”9 However, one challenge scholars have faced is a methodological one: How can we recover the ways everyday Americans embraced or rejected medicalized understandings of sexuality and gender? Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic Slashers, which focuses on Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her female lover, Freda Ward, provides useful insight in this arena by tracking the emergence of “a recognizable American type—the mannish lesbian or invert, a prosperous white woman whose desires threatened the comfortable hegemony of the white home.”10 Duggan argues that the emergence of this recognizable “type” occurred in the 1890s through the development of the cultural narrative of the “lesbian love murder”—a form that developed in sexology, the sensational press, and literature. These accounts portrayed lesbians as masculine women who were violent, dangerous, and a threat to white domesticity. However, even Duggan acknowledged that her study was limited and analyzed only one of the many cultural narratives of lesbian identity that had been circulating at the turn of the twentieth century.
True Sex takes a wider optic and depicts a world in which gender norms were subject to sustained debate. This book reveals that Americans, from small towns to big cities, often questioned proper “male” and “female” behavior and that the newspaper-reading public came face to face with stories of cross-dressers, “female husbands,” and “sexual inverts” with surprising regularity. This discourse was not isolated to metropolitan areas but instead could be found within the most rural frontier outpost. For example, in the summer of 1901, newspapers nationwide breathlessly reported on the Parkersburg, West Virginia, trial of Ellis Glenn. The objective of the trial was to determine Glenn’s “true” identity; an individual named Ellis Glenn had committed several crimes in West Virginia and Illinois, but upon arrest it was discovered that he was anatomically female. When asked to clarify this turn of events, the suspect explained that he was not actually Ellis Glenn but rather Glenn’s twin sister—and that the pair had switched places just prior to the arrest. According to the story, a deep sisterly devotion motivated her to take the fall for her persecuted brother.11 Thus, a lengthy trial took place centered wholly on determining Glenn’s true identity as either (as the Chicago Tribune described it) “a latter[-]day martyr or … an adventuress so exceptional as to lack a class.”12 In other words, the prosecution was charged with proving that the Glenn who had committed the forgeries—the Glenn previously known as a man—had actually been a woman posing as a man.
For several weeks in July 1901, Ellis Glenn’s trial was featured in newspapers across the country, from Anaconda, Montana, to Montgomery, Alabama.13 Therefore, in discussing Glenn’s story, and those of many others, True Sex depicts a past during which gender norms were consistently challenged, questioned, and, most significant, in process. Whereas historians have traditionally credited only certain decades as being moments of “gender trouble” (the 1920s being the most common example), this book illustrates that gender is always in crisis and that cross-dressing figures have often been the site on which debate about gender norms has taken place.
True Sex also reveals that many trans men chose to live in small towns and farming communities rather than in the nation’s burgeoning metropolises. Since its inception, queer history has been dominated by studies of individual communities that were often centered in large coastal cities, such as George Chauncey’s Gay New York and Marc Stein’s Philadelphia-based study City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves.14 This historiographical trend (which Jack Halberstam has referred to as “metronormativity,” defined as the notion that queerness and urban centers have a particular, and unique, relationship) was also long a guiding force in queer studies more broadly. Since the early 2000s, scholars in both LGBT history and queer studies have begun to explore queer life in rural areas, adding depth to our understanding of queer lives beyond the coasts and major cities. However, most of the historical work that exists covers the period beginning in the mid-twentieth century and focuses on male sexuality and cisgender bodies, leaving big questions about earlier periods and other bodies.15 True Sex begins to answer those questions and, in so doing, reminds us that urban queer communities are just the tip of the iceberg of queer history.
This book not only looks beyond the confines of coastal cities but also looks closely at the affiliations trans men developed within their chosen hometowns. Whereas the studies of urban queer subcultures have long been the preferred format for LGBT histories, the approach used here is far different. True Sex reveals that not only did trans men at the turn of the twentieth century often choose to live