Skidmore - True sex: the lives of trans men at the turn of the twentieth century

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

www.nyupress.org

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 Gormans 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 his hospital bed, it was revealed that Gorman lacked the anatomy generally associated with malenessdespite 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 , Im a good democrat and have voted the straight ticket for the last seven years.

Perhaps most sensational of all, however, was Gormans 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 mens clothing and who hold mens positions. menthose 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 Gormans 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 Gormans case in articles under flashy headlines such as She Was a Man for 20 Years. The blitz of newspaper coverage about Harry Gorman illustrates that Americans at the beginning of that century were fascinated with genderparticularly its permeability, its elasticity, and the ways it intersected with race, class, and sexuality. Even though the disclosure of Gormans 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 nations newspapers. And while Harry Gorman portrayed Buffalos 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 livesjust as Frank Dubois had done in Waupunsupporting 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. Gormans 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 Buffaloa city not commonly thought of as the bedrock of the queer communityhad at least eleven trans men in 1902, than surely so did Tulsa, Saint Paul, Jackson, and Reno. In short, his remarks reveal that our nations past is far queerer than is generally discussed and that queer history penetrates beyond the coasts and into the nations interior.

Furthermore, Gormans 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, Gormans 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 Kerwineos true sex was revealed in 1914, the local papers were full of testimonies attesting to how conventional Kerwineos 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.

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, Kerwineos life as a man began once he had moved away from Chicagoa city with a burgeoning queer subcultureto 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.