True Sex. Emily Skidmore

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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