This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
gender disguise f>m
Gender disguise is a major context for exploring homoerotic potential in literature and was a significant tool for establishing same-sex partnerships in real life examples. The most common version is a female-assigned person who presents as male and has access to a male role in relation to a woman. Not all such partnerships may have included sexual activity, but many demonstrably did. Literary examples generally indicate whether the disguise is meant to be situational or is meant to signal transgender identity. Real life examples are rarely clear on this point, due to the legal and social pressures and consequences, and therefore the likely distortion of self-reported motivations.
LHMP entry
As this chapter focuses on male cross-dressing, I will be skimming it more briefly. As in the first chapter, we begin with an extensive case history. “M” began dressing in female-coded clothing as a youth, and left home for the West at age 15 due to family conflicts. M preferred playing with dolls, cooking, and sewing rather than male-coded activities, but didn’t back down from fighting his bullies. Further questioning indicated that M’s mother had initiated both the cross-dressing and needlecrafts.
This chapter is probably the one of most interest in the book, cataloging and discussing cases of female cross-dressers. The text alternates between detailed case studies and general discussion.
In 1912, in Portland Oregon, Harry Allen (alias Harry Livingstone) was arrested and eventually charged with violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes) due to having written to her partner (who presented herself as his wife) Isabelle Maxwell in Seattle, asking her to come to Portland, where she then engaged in prostitution to support them both.
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.
Introduction
The author points out that this is an inescapably political book and should be read in that context. He points out that the question of “who is queer” is not at all straight-forward [pun intentional] in a historic context, and that queer figures have been silently and invisibly embedded in US history far deeper than most people are aware.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night draws on two prominent motifs of Italian theater: a cross-dressed heroine who provokes female desire, and the ideal of the Italian actress, who combined beauty and rhetorical skill. Shakespeare and other English playwrights backed off somewhat on the lesbian eroticism, but retained the image of a female character claiming power through performance and improvising, as manifested in Viola/Cesario’s ambiguous teasing banter with Olivia.
This article looks at the treatment of virginity and desire in John Lyly’s late 16th century play Gallathea, a mythological story in which two young women both cross-dress as boys to escape being a virginal sacrifice, and thus fall in love with each other. In this play, Venus (as the proponent of erotic desire) more specifically through the agency of Cupid urges all characters, including Diana’s nymphs, toward romantic love, while Diana (in theory supporting the position of virtue) valorizes virginity and chastity.
This article looks at two stories within the 1001 nights that set up scenes of apparent homoeroticism due to gender disguise. In two romances—that of Qamar and Budur, and that of Ali Shar and Zumurrud—the woman disguises herself as a man during a period when the lovers are separated, and then when they are reunited and the disguised woman is in a position of greater social power, she teases her lover (who has not recognized her or even realized she is a woman) by demanding that he submit to her sexually (believing he is submitting to a man).
This article looks at how beauty and attractiveness and desirability are framed within the early manuscripts of the 1001 Nights as involving similarity rather than gender difference. While later editions, and especially translations and adaptations into western languages, tended to insert a more binary-gendered aesthetic into the descriptions of characters in the thousand and one nights, this is a conceptual shift from the early versions.
Ovid also composed one of the longest texts dealing with love between women from the Roman period—the story of Iphis, also from the Metamorphoses. In brief, a poor man of Crete tells his wife they can’t afford to raise their expected child if it’s a girl. So a girl child would be killed. The child being a girl, at the recommendation of the goddess Isis, the mother conceals its biological sex and raises it as a boy. The name Iphis is given and noted as being a name that might be borne by either gender.
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