and the Sentinel went so far as to report that the interview had been fabricated by a “swarthy young gentleman” who was seen at a hotel during the time the interview was supposedly taking place.27 And yet, despite multiple reports that the interview was fictitious, it went on to be reproduced as truth in newspapers nationwide, from the Chicago Daily Tribune to the New York Times, from the Boston Globe to Illinois’s Decatur Review.28 Thus, the representations within this article are noteworthy because they embody a narrative that was deliberately constructed to appeal to a wide audience.
Contrary to the interview published in the Milwaukee Journal, neither Dubois nor Fuller admitted Dubois’s “true sex” for several weeks, even after interviews with Dubois’s former husband and stepmother were published in which they both stated emphatically that Dubois was biologically female.29 Initially, Fuller explained the misunderstanding by arguing that the news of Dubois’s “true sex” was merely a malicious rumor started by her sister, who wanted Dubois for herself. In response to her mother’s pleas to come home, Fuller reportedly mailed a letter that explained, “I and Frank intend to stick together until the last cat is hung.”30 However, Fuller eventually was compelled to return to Waupun, where she remained loyal to her husband, telling reporters, “I ain’t quite such a big greenhorn that I wouldn’t know [his ‘true sex’] after living with him for pretty near a year. I am positive that he is a man.”31 While such statements were (anatomically speaking) false, their inclusion in the press coverage of the Dubois case reveals that newspapers throughout the country were comfortable with frank discussions of female sexuality and were capable of acknowledging women’s capacity for sexual desire—and, perhaps most significant, they reveal an acknowledgment of female desire for a “female husband.”
Dubois himself was not apprehended by law officials until late November 1883, and in the month between the first reports of his “true sex” and his final admission, many different theories regarding the rationale behind his marriage to Fuller circulated in newspapers. No doubt, readers wondered about the nature of their relationship. However, standards of decorum prevented newspaper journalists from explicitly discussing (or pondering) the level of intimacy shared by the pair. Nonetheless, the stories contained frequent allusions to romantic or sexual contact. For example, the Milwaukee Journal reported, “Mrs. Hudson [Frank Dubois], the husband, wields a powerful influence over the young girl who is wedded but not a wife—an influence far more powerful than would be possible for one woman to wield over another without ties stronger than are known to exist between the Hudson woman and Gertrude Fuller.”32 Even more suggestive, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that, prior to the revelation of Dubois’s “true sex,” the pair “as far as appearances indicated was reveling in the full enjoyment of connubial bliss and enjoyment.”33 Such statements appeared throughout the local and national coverage of Dubois’s case. While references to “full connubial bliss” didn’t explicitly state that Dubois and Fuller had a sexual relationship, they did nonetheless leave the possibility open to readers and suggested that perhaps the pair were more than simply friends. Indeed, newspapers refused to state emphatically what the nature of their relationship was; the Milwaukee Sentinel, for example, reported four days after its reference to “connubial bliss” that “the mysterious link of sympathy which must exist between the pair is still a mystery.”34
The nineteenth-century boom in newspaper publishing and wire service technologies allowed for the Dubois’s story to circulate to papers throughout the nation quickly. However, the availability of information did not mean that all newspapers presented the story in the same way; instead, Dubois and his relationship with Fuller were produced differently according to the logics of local print cultures. In fact, local coverage of the case in Waupun, Wisconsin, was substantively different from coverage that appeared elsewhere.35
“The Wonderful Pair”
The Waupun Times covered the story with great consistency between late October and mid-December 1883; only twice was Dubois not mentioned in issues published during this period. Due to the paper’s weekly publication schedule, editors had the opportunity to provide commentary on the stories that had appeared in other publications since their last edition. For example, the opening to their second article on the story stated, “There is not much new in regard to Frank Dubois and his would-be-wife since our last issue. The subject has been pretty thoroughly advertised throughout the state, and even to the Atlantic coast, and no one has yet advanced any plausible reason for the strange conduct of the wonderful pair.”36 In preparation for subsequent issues, the editors looked for other examples of trans men to contextualize Dubois’s story. This contextualization is one of the things that marks the Waupun coverage as distinct—whereas virtually all other coverage of the story depicted Dubois as a singular individual without precedent, the local press sought to find Dubois’s antecedents in order to make sense of the case.
The first analogue that the Waupun Times reported was the “Case of Betty John,” from Birmingham, England.37 The case involved a suit against an individual who had been known as both Elizabeth and John Haywood, and much of the published excerpt described the difficulty the Birmingham court had determining the individual’s “true sex.” Elizabeth/John was described thusly:
It appeared from undoubted evidence that while dressed like a man, she was suspected to be a woman; but in both dresses was strongly suspected to be a man. The common opinion of the ignorant was that she was a hermaphrodite, partaking of both sexes. When she carried a male dress, she spent the evening at the public houses with her male companions, and could like them, swear with a tolerable rate, get drunk, smoke tobacco, kiss the girls, and now and then kick a bully. Though she pleaded being a wife, she had really been a husband, for she courted a young woman, married her, and they lived in wedlock until the young woman died, which was some years after and without issue.38
This excerpt seems to serve dual purposes; it suggests that gender deviants are spectacles but also assures readers that the Frank Dubois case was not wholly unprecedented. However, in highlighting Dubois’s historical precedent, the editors of the Waupun Times produced his body as potentially intersex. Indeed, in the above quote, the subject discussed is not a gender transgressor but a “hermaphrodite.”
As John Howard and Lisa Duggan have illustrated, the relaying of analogues when discussing sex or gender transgression was a relatively common way for late nineteenth-century newspapers to make meaning. For example, in “The Talk of the Country,” Howard discusses how the trial of Oscar Wilde provided a reference point for discussions of a case of alleged sexual misconduct and describes it as a “referential idiom—a Victorian-era tendency to connote homosexuality only through references to prior cases.”39 Even within the discussions of the Wilde trial itself, newspapers did not explicitly discuss the sexual charges made against the Irish author. As Jonathan Ned Katz has argued, “This ambiguity left readers quite in the dark about Wilde’s transgressions, or forced them to use their imaginations to make sense of the reports.”40 Thus, subsequent references to Wilde’s case created a situation wherein, as Howard has described, “the referential idiom, it seems, had no concrete referent.”41 As such, readers were provided with an analogue, and yet the precise meaning they drew from the reference was subjective and, as Katz has noted, up to one’s “imagination.” Indeed, newspaper editors relied heavily on readers’ “imaginations” to fill in the blanks regarding sexuality.
Perhaps such references went over the head of some readers, but assuredly some readers understood that sexual intimacy was possible between Frank Dubois and Gertie Fuller (and Elizabeth/John and their love interest, as well). Assuming otherwise would be to fall into the same trap that befell nineteenth-century sexologists, wherein sexual innocence was believed to be the hallmark of all but the perverted. Indeed, individuals in the nineteenth century most often lived in close quarters with one another, making sexual prudery virtually impossible (or at the very least, possible only to the upper middle class). Furthermore, those individuals who were raised in rural areas or in close proximity to livestock were similarly well acquainted with reproductive activities and therefore no strangers to sexuality in many manifestations. In this context, it is foolish to dismiss the power in such “referential idioms” as the “Case of Betty John” that the Waupun Times published, as such references were powerful framing devices that provided context for audiences to interpret the Frank Dubois case. However, the Waupun Times did