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The Last Female Husband
New Boundaries of Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century
In late October 1883, a salacious story emerged out of Wisconsin that captivated readers nationwide and that tells us a great deal about how Americans perceived the porous boundaries between masculinity and femininity in the late nineteenth century. Newspapers reported that Samuel Hudson had arrived in the small town1 of Waupun with his two children in search of his wife, who had deserted the family in northern Illinois several months earlier. To his surprise, he found his wife posing as newlywed Frank Dubois, husband to Gertrude (née Fuller) Dubois. Frank and Gertrude Dubois then quickly fled Waupun, prompting a manhunt that lasted several weeks, and which was covered with great interest in newspapers throughout Wisconsin and the nation. These newspaper narratives divulge a great deal about the ways gender deviance, same-sex desire, and pathology were constructed in the 1880s. Sexology was still an emerging science in this period, and newspaper editors had very few authorities to turn to if they wanted “expert” opinions on the significance of “female husbands” such as Frank Dubois. In the void of plausible scientific rationale, newspaper editors around the nation crafted their own explanations of the case; some viewed Dubois’s case as relatively harmless, whereas others mobilized Dubois’s marriage to ridicule the notion of women fulfilling the role of husband. Collectively, the newspaper accounts published about and around Frank Dubois show that there was no single coherent national narrative that explained the phenomenon of gender transgressors in the early 1880s.
This lack of cohesion is surprising, given the fact that this period witnessed a clear shift in the language used to describe gender transgression and relationships between individuals perceived as women. In fact, Frank Dubois is the last individual to be described in the mass-circulation press as a “female husband”—a term that had appeared with some frequency in both British and American works since the mid-eighteenth century.2 Additionally, the same year that Dubois appeared on the pages of newspapers nationwide, the first utterance of the term “lesbian” appeared in an American publication.3
Thus, given that 1883 witnessed the emergence of the term “lesbian” and the disappearance of the term “female husband,” one might assume that the early 1880s ushered in a new era in understandings of gender and sexuality. This assumption is supported by the existing historiography, which suggests that the late nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift from the “romantic friendship” model of same-sex intimacy to the heterosexual/homosexual binary.4 According to Lillian Faderman, this process (spearheaded by sexologists) resulted in the “morbidification” of relationships between women.5 However, despite the introduction or disappearance of terminology used to describe gender transgression or same-sex intimacy, the 1880s should not be heralded as a sea change moment wherein everyday Americans embraced a new paradigm of gender and sexuality. Instead, Americans were slow to accept the homosexual/heterosexual binary, and even as sexological writing appeared with greater frequency in the mass-circulation press, sexological theories had little influence on popular understandings of gender and sexuality in this period. Collectively, the newspaper accounts produced around Frank Dubois and other gender transgressors in the 1880s show that, despite the fact that this decade might seem like one in which there was great transformation, there was, in fact, no single coherent national narrative that explained gender and/or sexual deviance.
This chapter will challenge the ways we have traditionally thought of this period—questioning the ways nineteenth-century female gender and sexuality were conceived, as well as how these formations were viewed after the purported shift at the end of the century. As scholars such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have argued, in the nineteenth century, women were allowed to pursue intimate connections with other women because sexual desire without a male partner was allegedly inconceivable, or at least unmentionable.6 Additionally, the social structure of middle-class life in the nineteenth century meant that many women lived in what Smith-Rosenberg famously referred to as a “female world.” In this world, homosocial networks “accompanied virtually every important event in a woman’s life, from birth to death … Within such a world of emotional richness and complexity, devotion to and love of women became a plausible and socially accepted form of human interaction.”7 Coupled with Victorian notions of female passionlessness, the pervasiveness of close relationships between women allowed for these relationships to appear innocent and, at times, compatible with heterosexual marriages.
However, scholars such as Rachel Hope Cleves and April Haynes are beginning to acknowledge that Americans were not quite so naïve about female sexuality as historians have previously assumed.8 As this chapter will discuss, newspapers readily made illusions to female desire. Additionally, as we move beyond 1870, the year in which Foucault famously argued that sexologists “invented” the homosexual, sexual desire and relationships between trans men and biological women continued to be discussed as relatively benign in the nation’s newspapers—an observation that is surprising given that the rise of sexology is often associated with the increasing pathologization of intimacy between individuals perceived to be the same biological sex.9 Thus, as this chapter will show, the late nineteenth century witnessed more continuity than change.
“A Truant Wife”
Before moving into a discussion of the specifics of Frank Dubois’s story, it is first important to pause to consider the world in which Dubois emerged. Life in the United States in the early 1880s was both exciting and terrifying, depending on where you stood and who you were. Reconstruction had been brought to a halt, although the nation was still fractured in significant ways between North and South, and racial tensions continued to drive American politics. The lynching of African American men still constituted a national crisis, though few in power acknowledged it as such. Many elites were vocalizing concern, however, about another purported social problem: the “New Woman.” This decade witnessed a growing number of white, middle-class women entering professions and political activism, and the mainstream national press regularly gave voice to those who expressed concern that such “New Women” might destabilize the social order by stepping outside their traditional roles.10
In the West, the encroachment of both the national boundaries of the United States and white settlers continued, resulting in sustained conflicts with Native people. In East, the “Gilded Age” was in full swing. Immigrants were flooding into cities at a record number, drawn by the perception of employment opportunities provided by the nation’s nascent industries. Business moguls such as Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie were transforming the nation’s economy, landscape, and skylines. The combination of immigration and industrialization led to rapid growth of the nation’s cities, but the majority of the nation’s population remained in rural areas. Despite the rural populace, the nation was increasingly interconnected. Advances in communication technology meant that even the most remote outpost was connected to the nation’s burgeoning metropolises through an ever-growing network of telegraph wires, railroad lines, and, most relevant to our purposes here, newspapers.11
In fact, when Frank Dubois’s story emerged in Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1883, the United States was home to about one thousand daily newspapers nationally, and a greater number of weekly or biweekly papers. In fact, the Census Bureau reported in 1880 that newspapers were published in 2,073 of the nation’s 2,605 counties.12 Papers around the country shared content through wire services such as the Associated Press, and around one-third of small-town papers purchased “readyprint” pages of news stories from metropolitan suppliers.13 Improved transportation networks (especially the railroad) facilitated the circulation of metropolitan newspapers to hinterland subscribers and enabled the editors of small-town newspapers to gather and present to their readers news from around the country.
Despite these indications of standardization of content, most newspapers retained their local flavor. Most were focused on local issues, and editors selected which elements of national stories to reproduce, adding or subtracting components of wire dispatches to appeal to local audiences and to reflect local print cultures.14 Most large cities had numerous competing dailies, and editors sought to differentiate their paper from the competition in order to gain readers. While editors of small-town papers may not have had the same competition, they nonetheless selected content and framed stories in ways that revealed regional or local flavor and reflected the editorial biases of the staff. These advances in the processes of newspaper publication allowed Frank Dubois’s story to spread very quickly in 1883, and yet the continued influence of local print cultures assured that the story would not be packaged in the same way as it circulated.
Indeed, Dubois’s story appeared almost immediately in national newspapers. The same day that Dubois’s local paper, the Waupun Times, reported the revelation of his “true sex,” the story also appeared in newspapers around the nation, from New York City to Grand Forks, North Dakota. The wire dispatch read:
A Waupun special to the Sentinel15 says: “S. J. Hudson of Belvidere, Ills., who came here recently with two children in search of his runaway wife, found her masquerading in male attire under the name of Frank Dubois. She was living with Gertrude Fuller, having been married to her early last spring by Rev. H. L. Morrison, at the home of the bride’s mother. The deception had not been suspected, but many thought Frank Dubois had many characteristics of a woman. Under this name she had solicited odd jobs of painting, and was earning enough to support them both.”16
In most cases, the above dispatch was published on an interior page within a column relaying other brief stories from around the nation, likely provided to the papers by the Associated Press.17 The remarkably unsensational account presented the details of the story in a matter-of-fact way and provided very little in the way of a framework through which readers could make sense of the story; there is no suggestion as to why Dubois began dressing as man, or what motivated him to marry Fuller. However, newspaper editors stepped in to fill the void and presented the dispatch under a wide range of titles, including “A Truant Wife” in the Helena Independent, and “An Insane Freak” in the Grand Forks Daily Herald. While such titles did not provide much framing, they did suggest to readers how they should think about the story. Additionally, they reflect a range of understandings regarding gender transgressions: the “truant wife” of Helena was the “insane freak” of Grand Forks.
One term that was used by the press with regularity to describe Frank Dubois, however, was “female husband.”18 The term was originally coined by English novelist Henry Fielding in his 1746 criminal biography The Female Husband.19 Fielding’s novel was based on newspaper stories, which had appeared in England the same year, about the arrest of a fraudulent doctor and “female husband” Mary/Charles Hamilton.20 After the publication of Fielding’s work, the term “female husband” would go on to appear with relative frequency in the British and U.S. press, most often to describe women who lived as men or who partnered with other women and took on “masculine” occupations.21 While female husbands were by no means celebrated in the mass-circulation press, they were not denigrated as insane, as sexologists were beginning to do with their figure of the “female invert.” As Jennifer Manion has argued, “If representations of female husbands in the eighteenth-century press appear to mock their protagonists at first glance, they also serve to make the category real.”22 The utterance of the term “female husband” in the press animated in the minds of some readers the possibility of women serving the function of husband, a prospect that some readers likely found appealing. Indeed, as Rachel Hope Cleves has observed, the term “female husband” had a long tenure in the U.S. press, and yet its meaning was by no means stable. She writes, “The diversity and longevity of stories about female husbands leads to the conclusion that this form of same-sex union, in particular, had cultural legibility within American society despite its routine description as singular and astonishing.”23 As Cleves explains, the term “female husband” appeared with great regularity in the press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Significantly, it was often used to discuss cases that the press deemed remarkable but not pathological.
Additionally, newspaper coverage of female husbands consistently conveyed an understanding of the boundaries of gender as porous and incomplete. It appears that a great deal of public interest in stories such as that of female husband Frank Dubois was provoked precisely by their illustration of how permeable gender boundaries really were. American audiences had a powerful desire for such stories, and newspaper editors did not shy away from them. As such, by referring to Dubois as a “female husband,” newspaper editors rendered his case legible as a familiar social phenomenon to American readers and helped to ensure interest in the case. Furthermore, while the term itself was likely familiar to readers, they also likely had seen it used in a variety of ways; “female husband” is ambiguous (or is an oxymoron, as Susan Clayton has argued), allowing for it to be interpreted and utilized in a variety of ways, which likely added to its appeal to newspaper editors nationwide.24
“He Is a Woman”
Journalists in Milwaukee were seemingly aware of the potential national interest in the Frank Dubois story and pounced on the case as a means of earning national recognition for their papers. Indeed, Milwaukee was the closest big city to Waupun, and its newspapers (mainly the Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee Journal) possessed many more resources than did Waupun’s. However, the journalists’ drive to produce an exclusive story that would be reprinted nationally apparently led to some violations of ethical journalism. For example, on November 1, 1883, the Milwaukee Journal published a front-page article titled “He Is a Woman,” which was supposedly the first interview with Frank Dubois and Gertie Fuller after the revelation of Dubois’s “true sex.” This story appeared to be quite the scoop, as no other paper had yet reached the pair. The article began with a lengthy description of the Journal reporter’s long chase of Dubois and Fuller, which brought him “seven miles into the country.”25 The reporter found the pair taking refuge in the house of a local farmer, where Dubois and Fuller allegedly agreed to an interview.
The reporter painted a dramatic scene, wherein both parties appeared distressed. Dubois “cast nervous glances toward the door, and his small hands worked and twisted in apparent mental agony,” while Fuller “was in tears, and appeared greatly distressed when the question of her husband’s sex was mentioned.” The reporter also offered detailed physical descriptions of both Dubois, who appeared as “a slightly built effeminate personage,” and Fuller, who is depicted as a “rather pretty blonde with dark hair.” The article goes on to reproduce the reporter’s interview with Dubois, wherein Dubois initially insists on his maleness:
“Mr. Dubois, you, of course, know the stories which have been circulated concerning you”
“I do,” hesitantly and in a voice which could not be mistaken for a man’s.
“You are married to Gertrude Fuller, are you not?”
“I am; the ceremony was performed by Rev. H. L. Morrison, in Waupun.”
“You insist you are a man?”
“I do—I am. As long as my wife is satisfied it’s nobody’s business.”
“Mr. Dubois, you look like a woman, act like a woman, and there are dozens of reasons to suppose you are not Frank Dubois, but Mrs. Hudson—a woman. Do you refuse to reveal yourself?”
“There is nothing to reveal.”
“If you are caught in this disguise you will be arrested! You should place yourself in the proper light at once and thus avoid punishment.”
Apparently this line of questioning got to be too much for Fuller, who then cried:
“O Frank, Frank, for God’s sake tell all and have it over,” at this moment exclaimed the young and pretty wife, tears streaming down her face.
Dubois looked toward her, his lips trembled, and he burst into tears, sobs choking him for a time. Finally he said: “It’s true,” and endeavored to leave the room. He was restrained and finally was induced to tell his story.26
In this account, Dubois is presented as wholly effeminate, and the notion that he could have successfully passed as a man is presented as absurd. His innate femininity is highlighted at the end of the above quote, where he bursts into (feminine) tears. For her part, Fuller is presented as a heartbroken young woman. She is characterized here, and in other press coverage of the Dubois case, as a “normal” woman; later in the interview, Dubois reveals that Fuller did not know his “true sex” before their wedding night. However, the precise nature of her relationship with Dubois is cast in vague terms, and the possibility of sexual intimacy is at least tacitly suggested. For example, Dubois’s flippant line about how “as long as my wife is satisfied it’s nobody’s business” assuredly reflects a certain understanding that biological women could sexually satisfy one another and, furthermore, that biological women had (contrary to Victorian notion of female passionlessness) sexual desire.
Significantly, this interview later proved to be entirely contrived. Many of the details provided in the Journal’s “scoop” were contradicted in the days following the article’s initial publication. Both the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Waupun Times reported that the story was a forgery, 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 not stop at the “Case of Betty John” and instead went on to publish another analogue that perhaps provided a clearer referential idiom for readers.
Two weeks after the publication of the “Betty John” case, the Waupun Times again published a “counterpart” to Dubois, this time drawn from the medical journal Alienist and Neurologist. The paper introduced the example with the following preface: “The sensation produced by the attempt of Mrs. Hudson [Frank Dubois] to play the role of husband has attracted a good deal of attention, but other similar cases have been known before. In a recent … Alienist and Neurologist, Dr. P. M. Wise, of the William [sic] Lunatic Asylum, described a woman now in that institution who for some years passed as ‘husband’ and was acknowledged as such by the ‘wife,’ although it does not appear that any marriage ceremony was ever performed. The following is an abstract of Dr. Wise’s paper.”42 Significantly, Wise’s article was a pathbreaking piece within the realm of sexology, as up to this point sexologists had primarily been interested in exploring gender and sexual deviance in men. Thus, Wise’s study was one of the first to be entirely devoted to a patient with female anatomy. What’s more, Wise’s article contained the first usage of the term “lesbian” in an American publication. The individual featured in Wise’s article was Joseph Lobdell, a gender transgressor who gained notoriety in the national mass-circulation press in the 1870s and 1880s. I will return to discuss Lobdell’s appearance in the Waupun Times shortly, but given the great importance of Lobdell’s case history as the first “lesbian,” it is worth pausing to discuss his life previous to his mention in the rural Wisconsin paper (and for that matter, prior to his incarceration in the Willard Asylum for the Insane).
“Romantic Paupers”
Joseph Israel Lobdell was born Lucy Ann Lobdell around 1829 in Westerlo, New York.43 According to an autobiography published in 1855, Lobdell was different from the start, desiring pursuits such as schooling and hunting that were unconventional for young girls. He endured an unhappy marriage to a man (George Slater), who eventually abandoned Lobdell and their young daughter.44 At that point, faced with few opportunities to support himself as a woman, Lobdell began dressing as a man.45 He lived a transient life for many years, working in various rural communities in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and even as far west as Minnesota. In most of these locations, he presented himself publicly as a man and earned a living through hunting or working in other rural industries, such as lumbering.46 By the mid-1860s, Lobdell fell on hard times and sought refuge in the almshouse of Delaware County, New York. It was here that Lobdell met a woman named Mary Louise Perry, and the pair developed a relationship that would last many years. The couple left the almshouse in the late 1860s and traveled throughout the rural areas of Pennsylvania.
Although there are few records related to the early years of their relationship, it appears that by 1871 the pair had become somewhat notorious in the region of southeastern Pennsylvania. One local paper reported, “Much has been said and written about lately concerning two dilapidated specimens of humanity, who have been wandering about through this region of country for nearly three years, and who have been representing themselves as man and wife, and call themselves Joseph Israel Lobdell and Mrs. Lobdell.”47 The story proved to be of interest beyond southeastern Pennsylvania, and it appeared in newspapers across the country, often under the title “Romantic Paupers.”48 This article established a standard narrative about Lobdell and Perry that circulated in the mass-circulation press as they continued to receive attention throughout the 1870s and 1880s.
Notably, just like the press coverage of Frank Dubois, “Romantic Paupers” reveals the relatively fluid and nonbinary way both gender and sexuality were described in the late nineteenth century. While historians for a generation have embraced the “romantic friendship” model as a means of understanding nineteenth-century same-sex intimacy, a close reading of “Romantic Paupers” and subsequent iterations of Lobdell’s story suggests that Americans were not so innocent concerning the idea of same-sex love as previously believed. Similar to newspaper discussions of the relationship between Frank Dubois and Gertie Fuller, papers did not explicitly mention the nature of Lobdell and Perry’s partnership, yet they did repeatedly suggest that it went beyond a platonic friendship, often describing it as “strange,” or as a “mutual affection so strong they refused to be separated.”49 Such descriptions may not have signaled sexual connotations to all audience members, but the vague language certainly left much to readers to interpret for themselves and cracked open room to imagine sexual possibilities. Certainly the combination of phrases such as “female husband” and references to the “strong affection” that had “sprung up between the two women” were enough to suggest to some readers that Lobdell and Perry’s relationship was similar to other marriages, including their erotic components.50 Just as some have written about the closet being more of an “open secret” rather than the absence of knowledge, one of the remarkable aspects of newspaper coverage of their relationship is the silence that enveloped it.51 Indeed, journalists allowed Lobdell and Perry to keep their “open secret” by not discussing explicitly the nature of their relationship—and yet some readers no doubt filled this silence with their own interpretations of the sexual possibilities therein.
Lobdell and Perry cycled in and out of various state institutions and almshouses throughout the 1870s. They generally escaped lengthy sentences and were relatively free to wander the rural counties of western New York and eastern Pennsylvania. At some point in 1877, Lobdell purchased a small plot of land in Wayne County, Pennsylvania—a plot his brother later characterized as “four or five acres situated near Narrowsburgh in Wayne County Pennsylvania. I don’t think it is worth more than $10. Is a very rocky[,] poor place.”52 Although this may be read as a sign of the couple’s increasing stability, their legal troubles continued, and in 1880 Lobdell’s brother ordered that Lobdell be tried in an insanity hearing at Delaware County Court.
During the hearing, fourteen men from the surrounding community testified, and each swore that Lobdell was not of sound mind. William M. Main, for example, stated, “I am acquainted with Lucy Ann Slater and have known her for about twenty years. On one subject her mind is not sound but on other matters [I] have heard her talk quite sensibly. I have never had an intimate acquaintance with her habits and customs. I know that she sometimes dresses in men’s clothes and it is on that subject that I think her of unsound mind.”53 In Main’s testimony and several others recorded in the Delaware County Court, Lobdell’s insanity was specific to his desire to wear men’s clothing. However, as many of the testimonies made clear, Lobdell’s mode of dress was nothing new for him. In fact, several of the witnesses testified that they had known of Lobdell’s predilection for men’s clothes for twenty years or longer. This revelation suggests something quite powerful: that Lobdell’s neighbors were, for many years, willing to accept his queer embodiment and his partnership with a woman, and that they did not undertake any effort to modify his behavior or interfere with his relationship. While those actions would occasionally make Lobdell the subject of sensational newspaper articles, these courtroom revelations suggest a more mundane component of Lobdell’s story: that his behavior was condoned by his neighbors, except in instances when he appeared to be a threat to himself or the community. Indeed, the court testimonies reveal that neither Lobdell’s gender transgressions nor his relationship with Mary Perry was considered threatening.
Furthermore, such testimony suggests that it was not simply Lobdell’s queer embodiment that brought about the insanity hearing, because otherwise the hearing would have been called years before. The testimony makes clear that there were more factors involved than simply Lobdell’s dress, particularly his ability to support a household financially. Neighbor Harry Walsh, for example, testified, “She is insane without doubt and incapable of governing herself or of managing her property.”54 As Christine Stansell has shown, by the late nineteenth century in the North, mainstream attitudes about poverty had shifted from those widely held in the Revolutionary era. Whereas earlier, poor people were pitied, by the mid-nineteenth century, poor people were vilified as bringing poverty on themselves through laziness.55 In this way, Lobdell’s inability to properly care for himself, Perry, or his land was understood by those in his 1880 court hearing to be the result of personal pathology.
Another aspect of Lobdell’s identity that prompted some to view him as a nuisance to the community was his public articulations of religion. Lobdell’s brother made an explicit connection between Lobdell’s strange faith and his supposed insanity in his testimony, stating, “I think her insanity was to some extent caused by excitement in religious matters.”56 Newspapers had long remarked on Lobdell’s public expressions of religion, often noting that while traveling, he and Perry would present themselves as “Rev. Joseph Israel Lobdell and wife.”57 Furthermore, it was in Lobdell’s expression of religion that he was most often described as insane. For example, the New Haven Register reported that in the 1870s, when living in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, the pair would make frequent appearances in “the village, where the man would deliver wild and incoherent harangues on religion, and both would beg for food and shelter.”58 Similarly, the New York Herald wrote in 1877, “They were preaching, they said, the gospel of a new dispensation. The man delivered meaningless harangues, until the strange pair were driven from the place.”59 Over and over, Lobdell’s “incoherent” articulations of religious philosophy were deployed in newspapers as a means of conveying Lobdell as an outsider, someone who did not share the same values as the community he was attempting to enter. Thus, Lobdell was seen as a public nuisance not only (or perhaps even primarily) because of his queer embodiment, but also because of the ways he disrupted community life in other ways—his inability to provide for himself or his wife (and hence his reliance on the charity of others), and his religious provocations. These factors combined led to his incarceration at the Ovid Asylum in Seneca County, New York, and later the Willard Asylum for the Insane.60
This notion that Lobdell was strange, but what made him a danger was not his queer embodiment or his relationship with Perry per se, but rather their unconventional and undomestic lifestyle, is evident in the various contemporary newspaper narratives about the couple. Newspaper articles written about Lobdell and Perry in the 1870s conveyed a surprisingly fluid understanding of sexuality. Articles such as “Romantic Paupers” and “A Mountain Romance” suggested the possibility of a long-term “romantic” and “singular” attachment between the individuals. This relationship was consistently described as “strange,” and yet it was not depicted as dangerous or pathological. Indeed, newspapers throughout the nation occasionally used the term “female husband,” with all the ambiguities it contained, to refer to Lobdell.61
“A Case of Sexual Perversion”
Once Lobdell was institutionalized, however, he was placed under the medical gaze and his queer embodiment was interpreted much differently than it had been by his neighbors and in newspaper accounts. At Willard Psychiatric Center, Lobdell was put in the care of Dr. P. M. Wise, a sexologist who had studied under the prolific James Kiernan (who himself had studied under the influential German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing). At the time, sexology was still in its infancy. In fact, Krafft-Ebing’s pathbreaking Psychopathia Sexualis would not be published for several more years, and most studies of deviant sexuality remained focused on biological men. However, theories were circulating within European medical journals about women—specifically, the “sexual inversion” model of homosexuality was thought to apply to both men and women. Krafft-Ebing created a taxonomy of female gender and sexual deviance, dividing “abnormal” women into four categories, depending on their level of expressed masculinity.62 This focus on gender rather than sexuality illustrates that sexologists (perhaps even more than newspaper editors) embraced the Victorian-era belief that women were passionless and asexual, which made erotic relationships between two women difficult to imagine. Indeed, as George Chauncey glibly noted in his canonical article “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality,” “In the context of female passionlessness, there was no place for lesbianism as it is currently understood: if women could not even respond with sexual enthusiasm to the advances of men, how could they possibly stimulate sexual excitement between themselves?”63 Although many Americans in the nineteenth century understood sexual desire in women to be a natural element of the human experience, sexologists viewed female sexual passion as pathological and “unnatural.” In Krafft-Ebing’s theories and elsewhere in early sexological thought, sexual inversion in women was a condition caused by the complete reversal of one’s gender role. And because gender was believed to be an innate part of one’s identity, sexual inversion was thus articulated in Krafft-Ebing’s theories as a psychological disorder, likely congenital in origin. P. M. Wise wholly embraced this vision of sexual inversion, and the influence of Krafft-Ebing’s theories is plainly evident in Wise’s description of Joseph Lobdell in his article “A Case of Sexual Perversion.”
Though it was published in a regional medical journal and written about an individual housed at a mental institution for patients whose families could no longer financially support or physically care for them, Wise’s article was trailblazing in the field of American sexology. “A Case of Sexual Perversion” is historically significant because Lobdell was one of the first cases of “sexual inversion” in a biological woman to be discussed in the U.S. press.64 Other American sexologists took interest in Lobdell’s case, as did journalists in the mass-circulation press. Lobdell quickly became a measuring stick against which other gender and sexual deviants were compared and the theory of sexual inversion tested. Indeed, this was the same article that the Waupun Times reprinted in its analysis of the Frank Dubois case in late 1883—just months after the article first appeared in the Alienist and Neurologist. Before returning to the Dubois case, however, it is worthwhile to explore the ways in which Dr. P.M. Wise described Joseph Lobdell and his purported sexual and gender deviance.
In “A Case of Sexual Perversion,” Wise describes sexual inversion first and foremost as a mental disease; he remarks that “it is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion as always a pathological condition and a peculiar manifestation of insanity.”65 According to Wise, this “mental disease” was the cause of Lobdell’s queer embodiment, his repeated assertions that he was a man, and his “deviant” sexuality. Wise suggests that Lobdell’s case upholds the then-conventional sexological wisdom that insanity (and therefore homosexuality) could be passed from one generation to the next. He argues that Lobdell was genetically predisposed to this disease because he “inherited an insane history from her mother’s antecedents.”66
In Wise’s account, Lobdell’s claims of masculinity and his deviant sexuality are intimately connected. Wise’s case description opens with the following remarks:
CASE.—Lucy Ann Slater, alias, Rev. Joseph Lobdell, was admitted to the Willard Asylum, October 12th, 1880; aged 56, widow, without occupation and a declared vagrant. Her voice was coarse and her features were masculine. She was dressed in male attire throughout and declared herself to be a man, giving her name as Joseph Lobdell, a Methodist minister; said she was married and had a wife living. She appeared in good physical health; when admitted, she was in a state of turbulent excitement, but was not confused and gave responsive answers to questions. Her excitement was of an erotic nature and her sexual inclination was perverted. In passing to the ward, she embraced the female attendant in a lewd manner and came near overpowering her before she received assistance. Her conduct on the ward was characterized by the same lascivious conduct, and she made efforts at various times to have sexual intercourse with her associates.67
In this account, Lobdell’s assertion of masculinity and his “perverted” sexual inclinations are manifestations of the same pathology. This production is characteristic of the sexological conception of inversion as a theory of homosexuality, which, as Jack Halberstam explains, “folded gender variance and sexual preference into one economic package and attempted to explain all deviant behavior in terms of a firm and almost intuitive belief in a binary system of sexual stratification in which the stability of the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ depended on the stability of the homosexual-heterosexual binary.”68 In Wise’s estimation, Lobdell’s sexual behavior was intimately connected to his masculinity—a connection that both testified to his pathology as well as validated the “naturalness” of the emergent heterosexual/homosexual binary and the bi-gender system on which it depended.
While much of Wise’s article reads as very similar to the newspaper narratives about Lobdell that had been circulating in the press since the early 1870s, one arena where Wise’s account diverges is his frank discussion of sexuality. While nineteenth-century standards of decorum prevented newspaper journalists from doing more than simply hinting at the intimate nature of Lobdell and Perry’s relationship, the context of a medical journal allowed Wise to be explicit in his descriptions of Lobdell’s desire for sexual gratification with women. Wise mentions how the pair met in the Delaware County almshouse—in prose strikingly similar to the “Romantic Paupers” article that circulated in 1871, suggesting that he used newspaper accounts of Lobdell’s life to bolster his clinical observations, and thereby illustrating that some of Wise’s observations were based on his reading of sensational newspapers, not on clinical evaluation. Nonetheless, Wise quickly moves on to discuss the sexual nature of Lobdell and Perry’s relationship. Whereas earlier newspaper reports suggested that the pair posed as husband and wife to protect themselves while traveling, Wise makes clear that Lobdell assumed the sexual responsibilities of a husband and had “a vivid recollection of her late ‘married life.’ From this statement it appears that she made frequent attempts at sexual intercourse with her companion and believed them successful; that she believed herself to posses virility and the coaptation [sic] of a male; that she had not experienced connubial content with her husband, but with her late companion nuptial satisfaction was complete.”69 Wise then goes on to discuss Lobdell’s claim that he possessed a “peculiar organ that make me more a man than a woman,” which “had the power to erect … in the same way a turtle protrudes its head.”70 Although Wise explains that he had never seen this organ, he did confirm that Lobdell’s clitoris was larger than normal—an observation which would come to be standard within sexological definitions of lesbianism.71 Wise’s descriptions of Lobdell’s sexual relationship are significant here because they are written in such a way that seems to confirm that Lobdell’s deviant sexuality was caused by a mental disease; descriptions of Lobdell’s actions are prefaced by the phrase “she believed,” and sexual relations with Perry are referred to as “attempts” rather than definitive actions.72
Additionally, Wise’s inclusion of Lobdell’s claim of a “peculiar organ” gave rise to the suggestion that he was perhaps intersex, which was another hotly debated issue within the medical community in the late nineteenth century. As Elizabeth Reis has observed, the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a transition in the ways intersex bodies were viewed by the medical profession (and American society more broadly). Previously, intersex individuals were thought to be physically monstrous creatures; by the nineteenth century, however, Americans increasingly viewed an intersex individual as human, although “a repulsive and duplicitous one.”73 As the nineteenth century progressed, intersex bodies were increasingly associated with homosexuality and other forms of sexual “deviance” defined by the medical profession as immoral and perverse.74 Thus, Wise’s decision to include a description of Lobdell’s anatomy (regardless of whether it was accurate) was likely deliberate in that it aided in Wise’s depiction of Lobdell as deviant and pathological.
Wise’s “A Case of Sexual Perversion” was the first study of female sexual inversion published in an American medical journal, and he played a critical role in formulating American medical definitions of gender and sexual deviance (and normativity). Indeed, although the Alienist and Neurologist was a St. Louis medical journal with a relatively small circulation, its articles were frequently noticed by local newspaper editors, who reproduced or summarized them in columns compiling news items of interest.75 Such was the case with the Waupun Times in their reproduction of Wise’s study, but this reproduction should not be interpreted as acceptance of his sexological theories. Indeed, the general public did not immediately embrace the new concepts introduced by sexologists—they were deployed skeptically rather than embraced enthusiastically.
“A Case of Sexual Perversion” appeared in the Waupun Times in substantially edited form. Many of the details that would have been considered salacious were removed; there was no mention of Lobdell’s description of his “special organ,” for example, and no reference to his repeated advances toward female staff members at the hospital. Instead, the only portions that the Waupun Times reproduced were those that described Lobdell’s early life, his marriage to Henry Slater, and his decision to don male clothes to facilitate hunting, along with a brief description of his relationship with Mary Perry. On this last point, the excerpt explained, “The attachment became mutual which led to their leaving their temporary home and commencing life in the woods in the relation of ‘husband and wife.’ In 1876 she was arrested as a vagrant and lodged in jail in Pennsylvania. A petition is now on record there from the wife for the release of her husband Joseph Israel Lobdell from prison because of failing health. In compliance with this petition he (or she) was released, and for three years they lived quietly together until she had a maniacal attack that resulted in her committal to the Willard Insane Asylum.”76 Although this description of Lobdell’s relationship with Perry appears somewhat benign, it is followed immediately with the concluding sentence (which, significantly, was not included in Wise’s original article): “Several similar cases of ‘perverted sexual instinct’ have been reported in Germany, male as well as female.”77
The inclusion of Wise’s article within the Waupun Times reveals several important insights into popular understandings of gender and sexuality in the late nineteenth century. First, it illustrates that newspaper editors—even those in small towns such as Waupun—were aware of sexology from its earliest days in the United States. As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, Wise’s article on Lobdell was one of the first studies of sexual inversion in women published in the United States, and the article contains the very first usage of the term “lesbian” in a U.S. publication. The fact that within a few months of its initial appearance in the Alienist and Neurologist Wise’s article would go on to appear within a small-town newspaper like the Waupun Times illustrates that sexological theories did not remain isolated within elite publications, and that they very quickly began to circulate within the mass-circulation press, flowing to and from rural areas. However, the fact that readers and newspaper editors in rural areas were aware of sexological theories on sexual and gender deviance did not mean that they necessarily believed them.
Subsequent articles published in the Waupun Times suggest that the editors were unwilling to accept sexological theories on “perverted sexual instinct” as the final word on the Dubois case. On December 18, 1883, at the conclusion of an article republished from the Fond du Lac Commonwealth, the Times editors wrote, “The Dubois matter is getting tiresome. We have published many articles on the subject because the whole thing is so marvelously strange and without much plausible reason. We hope the article published today from the Commonwealth is the last chapter.”78 Thus, while the newspaper narratives produced around Frank Dubois in 1883 suggest some of the ways sexology was beginning to influence popular discourse on gender and sexuality, they also provide evidence that sexology was looked to as providing a possible explanation, but not the only one. Indeed, the Waupun Times, unlike virtually all the other newspapers nationwide, went out of its way to provide readers with antecedents to makes sense of Dubois’s story. This likely displays how much more invested Dubois’s friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Waupun were in the story than were typical readers of newspapers elsewhere in the nation. They desired not just to be titillated by the tale of an eccentric individual but also to understand the story and the possible rationale behind Dubois’s unusual decisions. Editors of the Waupun Times understood this but came up short in terms of being able to provide local readers with a definitive explanation because there was no definitive explanation for gender transgression or “female husbands” in 1883.
“Female Husbands”
As was mentioned above, the national press consistently used the ambiguous term “female husband” when discussing Frank Dubois’s case. This phrase was by no means new, but its resurfacing in relation to the Dubois case prompted some newspapers to ruminate on its meaning. For example, on November 4, 1883, the New York Times published a multivalent editorial titled “Female Husbands.” It began by reminding readers of the details of the Dubois case, and it almost mournfully reported that “public opinion will not tolerate the marriage of two women.”79 The paper then went on to carefully consider the potential benefit that such marriages might pose:
If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it? Such a marriage concerns the general public less than the normal sort of marriage, since it does not involve the promise and potency of children. It has been well established that if a woman chooses to wear trousers she has a right to wear them, and no one will venture to deny the right of any two women to live together if they prefer one another to solitude. Why, then, has not Mrs. Dubois the right to live with another woman who wears lawful trousers, and why should so much indignation be lavished upon Mrs. Dubois’s female husband?
There are many women who, if they had the opportunity, would select other women as husbands rather than marry men. The women who regard men as dull, tiresome creatures, incapable of understanding women, would find sympathy and pleasure in the society of female husbands.80
While up to this point the anonymously published editorial appears to be an earnest endorsement of same-sex marriage, it quickly takes a satirical turn:
The marriage of women would solve the problem which renders wretched the superfluous women of New England. Those unhappy women cannot marry because there are not enough men in New England to be divided fairly among them. The New England men, to a large extent, abstain from marrying their fellow New England women, and prefer to seek wives in other states. If half of these neglected women were to put on trousers and marry the other half, the painful spectacle of a hundred thousand lonely spinsters would forever disappear. The female husbands and their wives could read Emerson’s essays to each other, and thus completely satisfy the wildest longings of the female New England heart. What more could a New England spinster desire than a husband who never smokes, swears, or slams the door; who keeps his clothes in order, and does not stay out of the house until late at night, and who reads Emerson, understands the nature of women, and can discuss feminine dress with intelligence and appreciation?81
A sense of anxiety is palpable in the article, and it is clear that for some readers, news of the Dubois story provoked fears about the sanctity of marriage and its future in American society. This anxiety is articulated more clearly in an editorial published in the Milwaukee Peck’s Sun, penned by editor and eventual Wisconsin governor George W. Peck. He argues that “the marriage relation is an excellent thing for the world at large but if it is tooled with in this way by amateurs it will be brought into discredit and will become very unpopular. The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd. The best woman in the world could not take the place of a man, and do chores around the house and go down town nights and come home full of election whisky without giving herself away.”82 Of course, several fictions are required both here and in the New York Times in order for the narrative to operate on the level of satire and/or ridicule. Although the national press had flirted with illusions of the sexual attraction between Dubois and Fuller—using vague language to suggest a “mysterious link” joining the married couple—in the New York Times editorial, women are depicted according to the Victorian model of female passionlessness. As such, it is suggested that the “wildest longings of the female New England heart” could be satisfied by poetry—not sexual activity. Additionally, while Peck claims authoritatively that “the best woman in the world could not take the place of a man,” he ignores the fact that Frank Dubois had successfully passed as a man for many months, adeptly performing all the manly chores that were expected of a husband.
Furthermore, while most coverage of the Dubois affair portrayed Gertrude Fuller as a “normal” woman—young, conventionally attractive, and, had it not been for Dubois, a suitable partner for a middle-class man—in the New York Times editorial, same-sex marriage is portrayed as a solution to the “problem” of spinsters (or, as the author refers to them, the “wretched … superfluous women of New England”). Americans had long been anxious about the troublesome figure of the “spinster,” as rates of unmarried women had climbed throughout the nineteenth century, at times reaching near 10 percent.83 The spinster was a queer figure, as she rejected convention by remaining unmarried, and yet the popular image of the spinster—old and unattractive—suggested that she was unmarried not by choice, but because she was undesirable to men. Thus, in the New York Times “Female Husbands” editorial, same-sex marriage was evacuated of its radical potential to serve as an alternative to heterosexual marriage, because it was positioned simply as a solution to a problem that plagued heterosexual men—unattractive women. Thus, rather than acknowledging the facts of the Dubois case—that a “normal” biological woman chose to marry a trans man—the New York Times ridiculed the practice by associating it with a group that was universally derided.
Furthermore, these editorials differ substantially from coverage of the Dubois case elsewhere in the mass-circulation press in another important way: they portray the boundaries between men and women as inflexible and impermeable. As Peck writes, “The idea of a woman playing husband and trying to split wood or drive team is absurd.” This conveys the notion that women are inherently so distinct from men that the suggestion that they could complete the same tasks was laughable. However, elsewhere in the mass-circulation press, journalists were not so quick to dismiss the idea of women successfully embodying masculinity. The editorials published in the Peck’s Sun and New York Times reveal the anxiety provoked not simply by the facts surrounding Frank Dubois’s marriage, but also by the tepid response to the marriage evident in the nation’s newspapers. If individuals assigned female at birth could successfully woo “normal” women, and if their actions were condoned, then the romantic future of heterosexual cisgender men could be in peril.
Although George Peck and the author of the “Female Husbands” editorial likely sought to delegitimate same-sex marriage and trans men, neither the authors, nor the papers that published their editorials, could control the ways that readers interpreted their work. No doubt, some individuals who read the line “If Mrs. Dubois chose to marry a woman, whose business was it?” agreed with the sentiment. Some, perhaps even were themselves engaged in some sort of queer domestic arrangement. As subsequent chapters will illustrate, queer households peppered communities throughout the nation, and trans men lived in towns large and small from coast to coast. These individuals assuredly read editorials like “Female Husbands” with a smirk, perhaps before heading out and splitting wood or performing some other “manly” chore with ease.
Conclusion
The newspaper coverage of Dubois’s story in 1883 marked a turning point in representations of trans men and relationships between individuals assigned female at birth; it was within coverage of Dubois that many of the last utterances of the term “female husband” appeared in metropolitan newspapers such as the New York Times.84 Although the phenomenon of women posing as husbands did not disappear, the label of “female husband” did. This shift was likely caused by growing anxiety (palpable in the editorials discussed above) about the term itself. Indeed, the term “female husband” could serve dual purposes. At once, it registered the absurdity of the notion of women serving as “husband,” as women in the late nineteenth century were constructed as being the opposite of that which is implied by the term. On the other hand, however, the term “female husband” could also provide same-sex relationships with a certain amount of legitimacy. Husbands in the nineteenth century carried a great deal of legal and social authority; male privilege was enshrined in large part through coverture laws that conferred authority to “husbands” in unique and important ways. As such, the term rendered respect such that the phrase “female husband” was jarring—too jarring, it seems, for newspaper writers to employ after 1890.
In the 1870s and 1880s, however, newspapers were willing to discuss “female husbands,” and what’s more, they were willing to make vague references to same-sex desire. Indeed, even in Victorian-era America, there appeared to be an understanding of biological women as sexual entities. In the coverage of both Joseph Lobdell and Frank Dubois, newspapers consistently made open-ended statements about their “mysterious” relationships with women, leaving readers to imagine the possibilities of same-sex intimacies. Furthermore, the relationships themselves were not portrayed as inherently deviant. Instead, Lobdell’s failure to live up to the expectations of a “husband” (i.e., his inability to provide a stable home for Mary Perry) rendered him a nuisance—not his queer embodiment. Similarly, Frank Dubois was seen as strange because he abandoned a normative household where he was a wife and mother in order to serve as a husband to another biological woman. Such behavior was considered strange, but not in and of itself dangerous. Even as sexological writing began to infiltrate popular discussions of gender and sexuality, it was not immediately embraced as gospel. Newspaper editors, particularly those who wrote for the community wherein a trans man was “discovered,” continued to do what they did in the Dubois case: they looked to sexology to provide one possible explanation, but they also sought out local experts—people who knew the individuals personally and could attest to their character and their standing in the community. It continued to be the case that the opinions of neighbors, coworkers, and wives mattered much more on the local level when it came to determining the reaction to trans men than did the “expert” opinion of sexologists.
On the national level, however, sexologists did come to have greater explanatory power after the 1890s. The sexological model of the “female sexual invert”—a dangerous and pathological individual who threatened to seduce “normal” white women—became an increasingly familiar figure in the national press broadly, and the sensational press in particular. Sensational journalism, referred to at the time as “yellow journalism,” gained influence in the 1890s under the auspices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Although Pulitzer and Hearst were critiqued by their competitors for exploiting violence, sex, and crime in order to appeal to mass audiences, the genre caught on. This growing popularity was helped in part, no doubt, by Pulitzer and Hearst’s increasing roles as media moguls, which they used to exert influence beyond New York City by the purchasing of newspapers and, in Hearst’s case, creating wire services, each of which bore the mark of sensationalism.85
In this marketplace—wherein journalists were expected to exploit difference in order to create morality tales in which “good” and “dangerous” were easily identifiable from each other—there was no room for ambiguous terms like “female husbands,” as they left too much space for reader interpretation. As the genre of sensationalism increasingly marked metropolitan newspapers, trans men were figured as deviant in nationalizing discourse, and therefore little room was left for a term that conveyed some level of legitimacy to those figures whom sensational journalists sought to portray as freaks. Previous scholars have noted this identifiable shift in national representations of gender and sexuality, and the 1890s have been heralded as a period in which understandings of gender and sexuality underwent substantial change.86 However, once you scratch beneath the surface and interrogate the dissonance between local and national discussions of trans men, tremendous continuity can be seen between the 1870s and the twentieth century.
