LHMP #480a Boag 2011 Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past Introduction

The chapter opens with an anecdote about Horace Greeley (tagline: Go west, young man!) in 1859 checking out those who had actually followed his advice and speaking with a Colorado gold prospector who had decided to return back east. After the interview, he was informed that the prospector he’d been talking to was a woman.

This book explores such people in the American West who crossed gender in various ways. A major theme is that cross-dressers (the author’s term) were a common part of daily life in the West. A secondary topic is how, when, and why this simple fact was erased from US history. [Note: In conflating a wide variety of motivations and understandings of gender-crossing, Boag uses the term “cross-dressing” without intending to apply any particular interpretation on the individual instances. Thus “cross-dressing woman” is a person assigned female who dresses in male clothing and vice versa. I will follow this terminology for clarity. This is not meant to indicate any interpretation about individual identity.]

One inspiration for doing this study was the debate around the movie Brokeback Mountain regarding whether the same-sex relationship depicted was historically accurate—a debate grounded in generations of hyper-masculine cowboy characters in media. In contrast to the Hollywood image, Kinsey’s survey of sexual behavior found that male same-sex relations were more common in rural communities than urban ones.

The disconnect, Boag posits, comes from the conjunction of two events: the ending of the overall westward migration that defined the “frontier,” and the rise of sexological understandings of homosexual and heterosexual—both factors occurring around the turn of the 20th century. Both events are somewhat illusory. The end of the “Frontier” stood in for a variety of economic and social changes. And the popular embrace of sexological models was gradual and inconsistent. Even as westward movement slowed, the fictionalization of the “Wild West” began through performances and popular media.

Changes in the popular understanding of sexuality came from a combination of the shift from the one-gender model to the two-gender model (see Laqueur) by around 1800, and the theorizing that same-sex desire was caused by “inversion” of the sexual impulse, developing in the later 19th century. The medicalization and pathologization of same-sex desire became linked to theories about social decay and the stresses of modernization. Thus, according to this theory, same-sex desire would not occur in the “unspoiled” “natural” environment of the western frontier.

This framing required explanations for the observable fact of frequent cross-dressing in frontier cultures, which were resolved by a program of redefining the participants as heterosexual. Women who cross-dressed, by this framing, did so because success in the West required male disguise. Men who cross-dressed were a more difficult problem. It was addressed variously by erasure and the association of gender variance with non-white populations. Historians colluded in revising the story of the West as being the triumph of white male farmers, marrying and building communities.

The introduction finishes with a detailed case study of one individual who illustrates the issues and explanations discussed in the book.

Alberta Lucille Hart was born in 1840 to parents who had recently “reverse-migrated” from Oregon to Kansas. After the death of the father, the mother and child returned to Oregon where they had relatives. Hart enjoyed male-coded play and activities, enjoyed sports, despised housework, and began self-identifying as “the man of the family” (despite her mother remarrying). In addition to desiring to dress in male clothing and adopting a male hairstyle, Hart had a series of crushes and erotic fantasies centered on the female domestic servants in the household.

In response to teasing at school, Hart focused on excelling academically and graduated at the top of her class, continuing the pattern of crushes on female teachers and classmates. Academic success continued at college, where Hart formed a close relationship with classmate Eva Cushman. Their relationship was the subject of semi-friendly teasing and gossip. It became sexual, and when they were apart Hart wrote daily love letters to Cushman. Due to an inheritance from her late father, Hart was not only able to attend Stanford University, but to pay for Cushman to attend with her.

At university, Hart began adopting more masculine dress and activities, such as smoking and drinking, which resulted in Cushman gradually drawing away. [Note: Cushman’s reactions suggest that she understood herself to be involved with a woman, and the Hart’s increasing shift to male-presenting identity was not what she had signed up for. However it’s also possible to interpret her behavior as reacting to specific behaviors, rather than to female masculinity itself.] Hart regularly visited San Francisco for its nightlife and began a sexual relationship with a dancer there. This profligate lifestyle left Hart broke by graduation. She returned to Oregon and worked a variety of jobs to return to solvency then entered medical college as the only woman in her class. Again, she dealt with hazing by excelling academically and gaining highest honors.

The relationship with Cushman was completely over by this point and there was a series of unsuccessful romantic and sexual relationships with women and one extremely unsuccessful experiment with a man.

Hart’s medical studies led her to sexological writings, which resulted in depression regarding her own sexuality. She sought psychological treatment, but she laid out as a condition that she had no intention of changing her “masculine ambitions and tastes.” Her doctor agreed to focus on completing Hart’s transition into a man, including a hysterectomy. Hart chose to use the name Alan and shifted completely to a male presentation. In 1918, Hart gave a newspaper interview about his history and experiences, stating that he realized he must be one sex or the other, not “dual sex.”

This publicity raised questions of how law and society should treat Hart—for example, would he be subject to the military draft (which women were not)? Of course, “passing women” in the military were a long tradition.

Hart enjoyed a long medical career, with some speed bumps when rumor or notoriety caught up with him. Hart also published four medical-related novels, including one involving a gay man that may have been somewhat autobiographical. Eventually Hart settled into a long-term position in Connecticut where he served as director of a state health office up to his death in 1962 at age 72. Hart had one brief marriage in 1918, then a longer one starting in 1925 and lasting until his death.

Hart’s well-documented life was characterized in various ways by others: cross-dresser, homosexual, and “invert” (as “transsexual” was not yet in use until much later in his life). There is no clear documentation of how he categorized himself other than clearly considering himself a man. Across Hart’s lifetime, nomenclature and categories developed, shifted, and proliferated.

The author discusses Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as performance. In this context, to perform as male is to be male. Yet performance is not permanent or stable. In this context, cross-dressing can simultaneously disrupt the binary while also confirming it.

Popular media is the key source of information, not only for the existence of cross-dressing, but for documenting its reception. The author notes his potentially problematic use of “cross-dressing” to cover a disparate range of behaviors and identities. He notes that his use of pronouns will follow the understanding of how the person identified, but will sometimes reflect how they presented at various life stages.

Boag also takes note of the term “progress narrative,” which refers to framings of a personal story that characterize cross-dressing as done for a practical purpose unrelated to sexuality or gender identity.