Hänschen Rilow and Ernst Röbel

Hänschen Rilow and Ernst Röbel, two characters in Frühlings Erwachen, an 1891 German play by Frank Wedekind translated in English as Spring Awakening (or variations, such as The Awakening of Spring), are a same-sex teenage couple who – in a reversal of later conventions – have the most optimistic storyline in the production. Röbel is a mediocre student on the verge of failing his classes; Rilow, the more apt and sexually forward pupil who seduces him. (Rilow may also be read as bisexual given a scene in which he masturbates to an image of a woman.) The final scene in which they appear takes place in a vineyard and concludes with a declaration of love; remarkable, given that two of the other children end up dead and one on the run after breaking out of a reformatory.

For its frank discussion of sexuality Frühlings Erwachen has been repeatedly censored, including an incident in New York where an injunction had to be sought in order to put on a single matinee performance. (Ironically, Frühlings Erwachen was adapted as a Broadway musical in 2006.)

Isadora Duncan

Bisexual American dancer Isadora Duncan based her career on a rejection of the highly technical ballet popular in the 19th century and the embrace of a more freeform, natural style inspired by Greek artwork. She began teaching dance as a child before moving to Britain after limited professional success in the United States. Although her attempts to found her own dance schools floundered, her influence did spread, bringing a new aesthetic to American and Western European dance; what troupe she did forge she called the Isadorables. Her memoir was published soon after her accidental death, and was written due to a sharp decline in her fortunes as age made performing less of a possibility and her sympathy for the Soviet Union left her unpopular. A dance company named after her now performs her pieces with an all-female troupe.

Charley Parkhurst

Credited on a bronze plaque as “the first woman to vote,” Charley Parkhurst was assigned female at birth but went on to become a stagecoach driver in California, a high-status position known as a “whip” or “Jehu”. Known as “One-eyed Charley” for the eyepatch he earned from a horse kick, he had a reputation for being an agreeable type who drank, smoke, and drove a respectable “six-horse”. Legend even tells of him taking down a notorious highway baron. Parkhurst has since been featured as the subject of several novels based on rumors about his life.

In addition to the possibility that Parkhurst never voted at all, the consistency and longevity of his assumed identity (like many other historical trans figures he made the newspaper after his body was inspected post-mortem) suggests that he identified as a man rather than a woman, and so could not have been the first woman to vote anyway.

Gertrude Stein

Author, art collector, lecturer, and proprietor of a chic Parisian gathering spot for up and coming creative celebrities, Gertrude Stein was a living cultural hub. Originally from California, she and her partner Alice B. Toklas moved to the Left Bank to join Stein’s brother Leo as he was pursuing painting. They opened up their household, 27 Rue de Fleurus, as a gallery for artists and writers like Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. Stein’s own writing, a mix of poetry and prose, employed a deliberately simplified style that went on to play an influential role in American Modernism. Although Stein had a reputation for feminist and democratic politics, she was – and is – infamous for her support of the Vichy government during World War II, despite her own Jewish heritage.

Historiography Saturday: Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a Victorian parable so integrated into popular culture that its adaptations alone have their own Wikipedia page, the titular Dr. Henry Jekyll devises a drug that allows him to become an alter ego not restricted by expectations of respectability. The two halves coexist until the Hyde personality begins to take over and commits murder; facing discovery, Hyde commits suicide, ending both their lives.

Although the novella is clearly an allegory, Stevenson resisted applying a specific meaning to the Jekyll-Hyde duality. However, scholars have suggested that one possible interpretation might be that Jekyll creates Hyde as an outlet for his homosexuality, an attraction that would be unthinkable for a respectable physician to act upon.It is important to note that while many adaptations add a female love interested (or at least lust interest) for Jekyll, the original only contains two women, neither of which is even given a name. In 1885, the year before Strange Case was published, the Labouchere Amendment was passed, criminalizing sodomy and leaving homosexuals vulnerable to blackmail; the repeated references to a fear of blackmail could be read as references to the Amendment. One critic has gone so far as to suggest that the character is a stand-in for Stevenson’s own attraction to men, though her textual evidence is spotty. Regardless of authorial intent, the tale does take on a different spin when read as a tragedy of the repression of same-sex attraction.

Mrs. Nash

The woman remembered only as Mrs. Nash was a 7th Calvary fixture. Officially a laundress for the US army regiment, she was also a well-liked seamstress, baker, and midwife who befriended the wife of the now-infamous Captain George Custer (and received paychecks from him for her services). She married a series of soldiers, the first two of which ran off with money she had saved. Sources disagree on whether she married three or four total, but what is certain is that she and her final husband enjoyed each other’s company until she fell fatally ill while he was on patrol. Her dying wish was for her friends to bury her as she was without any of the usual preparations; out of care for her they disobeyed, and discovered that she was not a cis woman. When her widower returned he was mocked mercilessly until he committed suicide.

In accordance with her long-term identity this blog refers to Mrs. Nash as transgender and employs female pronouns.

Murray Hall

The death of transgender Tammany Hall staple and bail bondsman Murray Hall in 1901 caused a minor scandal in the daily papers when his trans status was disclosed to the coroner by his physician (to the physician’s credit, he refused to comment publicly). Hall had died of untreated breast cancer after living as a man for more than a quarter century, including two marriages to women and dutiful ballot-casting at every opportunity. By all accounts he lived up to the political machine stereotype, cigars and whiskey included, which the Times used as a dig against the politicians who “flatter themselves on their cleverness” but who had been fooled by Hall’s behavior into believing he was a cis man.

The Smithsonian hosts a more complete biography of Hall here; a solid collection of cited excerpts from Hall’s news paper coverage is available here.

Hastiin Tłʼa

Hastiin Tłʼa (sometimes written as Hosteen Klah) was a master Navajo weaver and medicine man who was instrumental in preserving records of traditional rituals through his contact with anthropologists and pioneering work in translating the sacred art of sandpainting into other media. Although sources seem to disagree on whether he was gay or intersex, Tłʼa fit into the broader category of nádleeh (“one who changes”) and was permitted to learn both weaving (normally for women) and singing (normally for men). He became a master of both, and was invited to host an exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Because of the difficulty he experienced in locating suitable apprentices, Tłʼa took to preserving his chants and sandpainting by integrating the symbols into his weaving and permitting outside observers to draw and paint them, a practice that was – and still is in places – considered heretical. Much of his work is stored with the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, which he helped co-found.

Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás

The first paleobiologist, Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, was also a near-monarch of Albania and a spy in World War I for Austria-Hungary. He rejected the concept of studying a singular academic discipline and integrated geology, paleontology, and physiology into a hybrid system for reconstructing dinosaur behavior. At the time his hypotheses were considered outlandish, but later scholarship indicates that funky crests were indeed related to sexual selection, confirms the evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs, and supports the theory that smaller landmasses can produce pygmy species variations. Several dinosaur species, including Nopcsaspondylus (“Franz Nopcsa’s vertebra”), are named after him.

An adventurer as well as a scholar, Nopcsa made several voyages into the Balkans, and took a particular interest in Albania. He learned several dialects of the native language and used his influence to originate the discipline of Albanian studies; he even joined in the country’s fight for independence from the Turks, and made a bid for the title of King. His campaign cited his aristocratic heritage and proposed an eccentric solution to Albania’s financial problems: Auction off the title of Queen to a wealthy American woman. For the openly gay Nopcsa, the idea made sense: He already had a partner in his secretary, so what did it matter who he married? Albania, however, disagreed, and selected a minor German noble who was deposed six months later as the country transitioned into a republic.

Marcel Proust

In the comedic film Little Miss Sunshine, a fictional scholar describes French author and philosopher Marcel Proust as both a “total loser” and “probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare”; judging by his biographical material, both assertions are exaggerations, but not unfounded ones. His magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (translated as In search of lost time), totals thousands of pages across seven volumes and is widely considered to be a seminal work of 20th century literature. In addition to his massive novel, Proust was an enthusiast of the English polymath John Ruskin, and translated several of his books to great renown even though his grasp of the language was imperfect.

For all of Proust’s successes as a writer, a scan through his famous quotes suggests that the rest of his life was less fortunate. He suffered from lifelong ill health and died middle-aged; he was also a closeted homosexual (though Temps perdu does include frank discussions of homosexuality and gay characters, a rarity for the time and place).