True Sex. Emily Skidmore

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ is overcome with grief and her sorrow at parting with her husband is as sincere and as genuine as has ever been witnessed.” The Times observed that “the wife is almost overcome with grief. No sorrow more profound or deeper was ever seen.”15 Such statements presented Green’s life as valuable in that he was sorely missed, and his widow’s grief was presented as sincere and understandable—not deviant or strange. These superlative statements describing Mary’s genuine grief and sincere sorrow had the additional effect of ensuring that she could go on living in the community without any negative repercussions.

      As the coverage of Green’s case continued in the Richmond press, more details emerged about the nature of his marriage—details that helped to depict his life as laudable rather than abnormal. For example, in its second story on the case, the Times published an interview with Green’s widow wherein she explained the circumstances surrounding her marriage. Mary Green made clear that she did not know of her husband’s anatomy before they married, and once she learned of it, she decided to keep the secret to avoid embarrassing her husband. Since that day, she said, “we lived together as brother and sister.” Significantly, rather than criticize Mary Green’s choice as evidence of a pathology or sexual deviance, the Times endorsed her decision, writing, “Those who at first censured, now pity the woman, and recognize the nobility of character she has shown in carrying untold a sorrow, because it gave happiness to another. Her course is commended by everyone now, and those who dared offer suggestion against her, are repentant.”16 In this quote, the Times characterized Green’s marriage as one that no one else had the right to judge, despite its unconventional nature. Phrases such as “her course is commended by everyone now” suggest the universality of the paper’s assessment, making any further speculation of the motives behind the marriage—such as sexual deviance—seem foolish.

      Despite its laudatory assessment of Mary Green as a self-sacrificing individual, the Times also made clear that she should not be considered a martyr, as George Green himself had been an honorable man. The paper quoted her as saying, “He was the noblest soul that ever lived. He has worked so hard through his life, and has been all I had to cheer me. No man can say he ever wronged him. He was a Christian and I believe he is now with Christ.”17 Apparently others in the community also shared this opinion of Green, as Petersburg’s Index-Appeal reported that Green’s funeral was held at St. Joseph’s Catholic church, conducted by Rev. J. T. O’Ferrell and that Green’s body was buried in the Catholic cemetery in Petersburg.18

      As Green’s story circulated outside the local context to the pages of large metropolitan newspapers such as the San Francisco Call, the New York World, the Chicago Daily Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, it remained much the same as it appeared within the local press. This national coverage shared several common trends: most mentioned how well Green had played the part of a man, how contented his marriage had seemed, and rarely was any hypothesis offered as to why Green began living as a man.19

      I will return to the implications of the national coverage of Green’s case later in this chapter. For now, I would like to suggest that the local newspaper accounts of George Green’s death can tell us a great deal about queer history in rural spaces. For one thing, the local reports are overwhelmingly supportive of Green and his life choices. While they present Green as a curiosity, at no point do they suggest that he was a deviant individual. Instead, they describe his life in male clothing in entirely normative terms—he was a hard worker, a good husband, and an altogether productive member of society. Furthermore, the fact that his funeral was held in the local Catholic church and his body buried in the parish cemetery supports the notion that the rural community of Ettrick was willing to stand by its queer citizen.

      Additionally, the trajectory of Green’s life suggests to us a new way of conceiving of queer history. Most works on queer history focus on the urban lives of queer individuals, as well as the formation of urban subcultures. In his now-classic essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” John D’Emilio argued that the formation of the identity category of homosexuality was created out of the shifts that took place in the late nineteenth century from family-based household economies to modern capitalism. The movement from rural family units to urban enclaves of similar individuals was a crucial part of this shift. As D’Emilio explains, “By the end of the century, a class of men and women existed who recognized their erotic interest in their own sex, saw it as a trait that set them apart from the majority, and sought others like themselves … it has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on sexual identity.”20 Although some have quibbled with the particulars over the years, D’Emilio’s essay remains an extremely important text, and in fact, it can be credited with shaping much of the historiography of LGBT history in the 1990s and beyond. Indeed, with its focus on rural to urban migration, D’Emilio implicitly suggests that the city is the place for historians to look for queer history.

      In this way, George Green’s case can be useful for several reasons. One, it seems to provide clear evidence that rural communities could be supportive environs for trans men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, George and Mary Green’s choice to continually live in rural spaces, perhaps in isolation from other queer individuals, runs counter to the ways that historians have imagined queer history and suggests the need to reevaluate how portable the insights about gays and lesbians can be in understanding the historical lives of trans men and other gender transgressors. Indeed, not only did the Greens choose to live in rural North Carolina and Virginia, they seemingly chose to live outside of queer communities. Thus, even though much about the Greens’ lives together is unrecoverable (Were they in a physical relationship? Was it true that Mary did not know George’s “true sex” before their marriage? etc.), the things we do know about them should prompt us to reconsider what we think we know about queer history.

      Figure 2.1. William C. Howard, 1902. Image from the Chicago Tribune.

      Similarly, we don’t know what precisely the Greens’ friends and neighbors thought about their relationship—whether, for instance, they presumed it to be asexual and therefore simply eccentric rather than queer. However, to assume that everyone in Ettrick presumed that George and Mary’s relationship was (and had always been) nonsexual ignores clear evidence that ideas about same-sex intimacy had been circulating in even the most remote corners of the nation for decades.21 Additionally, sexological theories of sexual inversion that connected cross-gender identification with sexual deviance (and, more broadly, pathology) had been circulating throughout the national press since at least the 1890s, and yet those ideas appeared irrelevant in the ways that the Ettrick community responded to the news that George Green lacked the anatomy traditionally associated with masculinity. He was not depicted as a deviant individual who had pathologically manipulated the public for years, but rather as a respected community member whose positive contributions were remembered fondly. Furthermore, it is worth noting that George Green was by no means the only trans man to choose to live in a rural area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the day after newspapers nationwide reported George Green’s “deathbed discovery,” another very similar story appeared from Canandaigua, New York.

      William C. Howard

      Alice Howard was born in upstate New York in the 1860s. According to Howard’s half brothers, as a child, Alice would often wear “men’s attire, and showed fondness for boy’s and men’s work. This tendency grew till when still quite young she adopted male clothing and men’s mode of life.”22 By the time Howard was twenty, he had taken the name William and was living full-time as a man. Perhaps surprisingly, this transition did not happen once he moved to a city or even upon moving away from his family home. Instead, the 1880 federal census lists twenty-year-old William Howard (male) as living in the same household as his mother, sister Minnie, as well as an aunt and uncle.23 Although it seems that Howard’s family wasn’t thrilled with his choice (the Rochester Democrat-Chronicle later reported “though the family had known of the strange predilection … for many years, they had been СКАЧАТЬ