From Frontier Oddity to Sexual Inversion
The concluding chapter of Boag's book on cross-dressers on the American frontier uses the case study of Joseph (Lucy) Lobdell to illustrate how stories of gender-crossing began being turned into stories of psychological illness. Lobdell was right on the cusp: considered a "curiosity" at first but then pathologized. (Though it doesn't help that Lobdell seems to have suffered from genuine mental illness, separate from their gender and sexuality.)
Tomorrow I start with a run of shorter articles, though it turns out that several of them repeat information covered in more detail elsewhere.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #480f Boag 2011 Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past Chapter 5 About LHMP Full citation:Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
Chapter 5 – “Death of a Modern Diana”: Sexologists, Cross-Dressers, and the Heteronormalization of the American Frontier
Our kick-off biography for this chapter is a long, convoluted story about expert hunter and frontiersman Joseph Lobdell, who left home in New York in 1855 for the wilds of Minnesota. Lobdell was famed for his hunting and well-liked, until by chance it was discovered he had a female body. His Minnesota neighbors took this badly and shipped him back to New York. But Lobdell had been running ahead of discovery before, and had even published a feminist treatise under his birth name, Lucy Ann Lobdell, complaining of an abusive husband, of the wage discrimination faced by women, and arguing that if women were being forced to step up to be the primary support of their families, then society should accommodate them.
[Note: Lobdell’s story shows the difficulty in trying to apply modern identity labels to historic individuals. While Lobdell lived most of his adult life as a man, the autobiographical treatise not only was written under a female name, but from a female social identity—very emphatically.]
After returning to New York, Lobdell continued living as a man and became a music and dance teacher. At one point he became engaged to one of his female pupils, but a rival suitor dug up Lobdell’s background and was planning a tar-and-feather party. The fiancée got wind of this and warned Lobdell and he was on the run again. Ill health led Lobdell to return to a female identity in order to live in a charity house.
In the same area, one Marie Louise Perry, abandoned by the unsuitable lover she had eloped with (though additional details are confused and conflicting) also ended up in the same charitable institution. Perry and Lobdell took a shine to each other and left the institution together in 1869, found a preacher to marry them, and started an itinerant, somewhat feral lifestyle with Lobdell hunting and doing odd jobs as they tried to live off the land. They spent several stints in jail for vagrancy or more nebulous charges, with Lobdell’s sex being a point of contention when discovered. Despite a mistaken report of Lobdell’s death, he ended up in an insane asylum in 1880 due to what appears to be genuine mental illness (depression and dementia), but exacerbated by attitudes toward his gender presentation.
Various dates for his eventual death in the asylum are given, ranging from 1885 to 1912. After Lobdell’s commitment, his wife continued to live on their farm for a while, then returned to Massachusetts until her death in 1890. A newspaper interviewed her about her “strange” relationship with Lobdell, at which she argued that there was nothing strange in two women living together. [Note: Once again complicating the question of Lobdell’s gender identity.]
The doctor who treated Lobdell in the asylum wrote him up as a case study in “sexual perversion,” referring to his relationship with Perry as “lesbian”—one of the earliest American case studies in the sexological tradition. Lobdell claimed at one point that he had “peculiar organs” that supported his claim to male identity. [Note: There’s no suggestion in the book that Lobdell might have been intersex, although that is mentioned in the context of an entirely different case study.] The doctor took this at face value and recorded it as the mythic “lesbian with enlarged, penetrative clitoris” which has haunted the historic record. The doctor drew connections between Lobdell’s mental illness and his sexual inversion in support of the theory that inversion could be a byproduct of some other medical or psychological misfortune (in contrast to another theory that inversion was always congenital).
When originally documented, Lobdell’s case was considered an anomaly. But as sexologists identified increasing numbers of cases in the 1890s, they concluded that some historical force was causing a rise in perversion. [Note: As opposed to the possibility that, having discovered the hammer, they were now going around identifying lots of objects as nail-like.] This just happened to coincide with the era when people were declaring the end of the Western frontier. It was—they concluded—the passing of the West that was generating a wave of sexual inversion. By this means, they could neatly erase the presence of queer people from the West itself by claiming that sexual inversion only arose as the West disappeared.
The chapter spends some time exploring the connections the sexologists made between inversion, “degeneracy” in both a moral and eugenicist sense, and the alleged decline of western civilization (primarily in the context of Europe). This image of degeneracy was in contrast to American ideals of progress and expansion. Sexual degeneracy might be contributing to the fall of Old World civilization, but America could stand firm and hold the moral line, thus avoiding the same fate.
Vigorous rural manual labor was the way to avoid the enervating effects of urban life that led people to the neurasthenia that caused inversion and other ills. (I’m doing some serious condensation of this discussion.) “Urban” life was also a dog whistle for immigrants, non-white communities, and the working class, all of whom were potentially susceptible to degeneracy. The frontier, the outdoors, (and whiteness) were the cure for these ills!
Conclusion—Sierra Flats and Haunted Valleys: Cross-Dressers and the Contested Terrain of America’s Frontier Past
This brief chapter sums up the main themes of the book, tying them together with examples of mid-19th century fiction (e.g., by Bret Harte) that reflect reality more than the later mythologizing Western fiction that erased queerness entirely.
Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: USAMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorgender disguise f>mgender disguise m>ftransgender identityfemale husbandEvent / person: Lucy Ann Lobdell (Joseph Lobdell) & Marie Louise Perry View comments (0)
