(Originally aired 2025/06/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for June 2025.
I’d say something about Pride Month, but here at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, every month is Pride Month. Even so, I’ve committed to blogging a publication every day this month, just because.
Publications on the Blog
It's common to discover that my publication database includes preliminary versions of research that are later incorporated in a book. I often cover these out of order. (To the extent that I have any order at all.) But in this case, the present article discusses some of the background considerations for Boag's book and adds to understanding it, rather than being redundant. (I have a few articles coming up that ended up being redundant and I've largely simply cross-referenced them to the more complete versions.)
The concluding chapter of Boag's book on cross-dressers on the American frontier uses the case study of Joseph (Lucy) Lobdell to illustrate how stories of gender-crossing began being turned into stories of psychological illness. Lobdell was right on the cusp: considered a "curiosity" at first but then pathologized. (Though it doesn't help that Lobdell seems to have suffered from genuine mental illness, separate from their gender and sexuality.)
This chapter returns again to AMAB stories, focusing on the way those stories were explained away from the "real history" of the western frontier.
History must not only be studied, but continually re-studied and re-surfaced. We have all seen how easy it is for something "obvious" to become memory-holed even in as short a time as the last five years. How much easier when the primary sources were shaky to begin with and the myth-makers have a social and political agenda that they may not be entirely conscious of themselves. How easy it is to re-write history "as it should have been" (a phrase that has always grated on me in the context of the Society for Creative Anachronism, regardless of the direction of one's "should").
I haven't blogged this chapter in as much detail, as it runs crosswise to the topics the Project is interested in. But it's always useful to see the ways in which structurally parallel topics in male and female queer history (if you will forgive me for applying an inappropriate binary) are so very non-parallel in how they played out. A very brief slice of very recent history has convinced us that queer history can be viewed as a unified subject. But apparent/assigned gender has always been a stronger force than any theoretical similarity in non-normative experience.
If women taking on male identities can be explained away for practical reasons (safety, economics, social power) then where is the explanation for men taking on female identities where those advantages are reversed? If women taking on male identities can be explained as a necessary requirement for desiring women, then where is the explanation for their female partners desiring them?
I'm starting coverage of a new book today, about how queer the Old West actually was and how that got hidden. At this point--thanks to my retirement work-schedule--I'm keeping my blog buffer full enough that I can commit to posting something every day for Pride month, just as I did when I kicked off the Project back in 2014. Well, actually, in 2014 I started posting on June 9, so I didn't actually post every day that month. I think maybe I did the whole month in some other year?
This concludes Wendy Rouse's book on queer people and themes in the American women's suffrage movement. I found this book rich and useful, because while the specific lens Rouse uses is suffragists, there is nothing about these women and their lives that is specific to the suffrage movement, as opposed to being specific to a particular era and context in US history.
Another chapter in the America's queer suffragists book. I almost have the next book all written up and ready to go. And--hey!--I worked on a fiction project today! I'm doing revisions on my "skin-singer" stories with the goal of self-publishing them as a collection, combined with a concluding never-before-published novelette. Mind you, I've been saying for years, "This is the year I get the Skinsinger collection out," but for real this time. My goal is to have it available by Worldcon (makes a nice target).
