An exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society highlights the stories of transgender people in the American West during the frontier era. “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West” runs through Jan. 5. The exhibit looks at the lives of several individuals in the Pacific Northwest who didn’t conform to gender norms through four themes: visibility, identity, acceptance and history.
Peter Boag is a professor and the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University Vancouver. He co-curated the exhibit and joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end this week with an exhibit that’s on display right now at the Oregon Historical Society. It’s called, “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West.” It focuses on the lives of people in the Pacific Northwest who did not conform to the gender norms of the time, meaning 1860 to 1940. But in its exploration of identity, visibility, invisibility and acceptance, it also sheds light on our current moment.
Peter Boag is a professor of History of the American West at Washington State University Vancouver. He co-curated the exhibit. He joins us now. It’s great to have you in the studio.
Peter Boag: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Miller: This is a topic where the terms that we can use now to describe people’s identities and lives – it’s challenging because a lot of the words that we use these days literally didn’t exist in the time that you are exploring. And I think it’s not always clear how people would have identified themselves if they’d even had the full spectrum of words that we use now. How do you navigate that?
Boag: Well, that’s an excellent question and it is perhaps the trickiest. So I had to look at the lives of … The project has been based on a wide variety of people who didn’t comport to gender norms. But not all of these people we would call trans today. Some of them were. And the way that I identified those who were trans was to kind of look at their lives over a period of time. If in fact, they seem to live the gender identity that they felt was their gender identity, which was different perhaps from the sex they were assigned at birth, then I was pretty convinced that they would be trans today.
However, I tried to avoid that term in my book, but we embraced it in the museum exhibit because the museum exhibit serves a different purpose than the book. It reaches out to a broad audience of people who don’t perhaps have a lot of knowledge about history.
Miller: What did you look for in the documents? I’m curious how much evidence you had to even base those decisions on?
Boag: Yeah, well, this is always the problem of doing any sort of history, trying to find the evidence to make some sort of legitimate conclusion.
Miller: Is it harder in this case because often what you were looking for would have been maybe intentionally hidden?
Boag: Yes, that’s part of the issue, it was intentionally hidden. And then also a lot of documents that simply don’t survive. Many of these people didn’t keep their own records of their own lives, so we have to rely on newspaper reports, gossip in the community, sometimes legal records. But many of these people did leave a long history in the documents, where when you see how they lived and how they referred to themselves, it’s clear that they were what we would call trans people today.
Miller: You mentioned your book. This exhibit is based largely on your 2011 book, “Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past” – it’s “Re,” hyphen, “Dressing America’s Frontier Past.” What were you interested in exploring? This is now more than a dozen years ago.
Boag: The book came out in 2011 and it achieved a certain level of success, but people are rediscovering it today because trans people and trans issues are so much in the news, for good and bad reasons. So when I was working on the book, my first goal was to uncover the stories of all sorts of people who dressed in ways that didn’t comport with their assigned sex. But as I started doing this research and I found so many of these people, I just kept finding them, and finding them, and finding them, and finding them. And I thought, “What is going on? I’m a Western historian. I’m a historian of sexuality and gender. Why had I never heard these stories before?”
So part of my goal in writing the book was then to explore how this history [and] these people have been forgotten, and what were the processes by which that occurred?
Miller: The mythology of the West is that this was a place – and I think we still talk about the West in the same way today – where people are freer to make their own way, to carve out their own lives. Was that at all true? And “mythology” is an important word to use to describe this because there are all kinds of ways in which freedom was not a reality in a whole bunch of ways. But was it at all true in terms of sexuality and gender? Was there more freedom of a kind here than in, I don’t know, St. Louis or the East?
Boag: Well, I did find a lot of people who dressed in ways that weren’t considered appropriate for their assumed sex in St. Louis, so it did happen everywhere. So I would be hesitant because I think this contributes to this mythology that the West is just wide open, accepting space. There was incredible discrimination, prejudice, the Ku Klux Klan, even slavery and all these sorts of things in the American West. So I don’t think it was necessarily an easier place.
Always keep in mind that the people I found – and this is one of the big philosophical questions I struggled with writing this book and lay awake today thinking about – these people didn’t necessarily want to be found. They led typically very quiet lives hiding themselves in their communities. These weren’t people on the front lines of activism. And so by bringing out their stories, in a sense, does something that they probably would have hesitated doing in their own lives.
Miller: Am I right that, looking through the exhibit, it seems like you weren’t the first ones to out them? I mean, there were front page articles in their hometown papers saying, this woman who has lived with us her whole life or for 40 years, she was a man. I mean, front page articles. And that was some of your primary documents, right? This is how you were able to put this book and this exhibit together?
Boag: Yes. And not only front page articles, but these articles circulated across the United States.
Miller: This was national news?
Boag: Yeah, these became national news. One of my favorite characters is Harry Allen, who plays a very significant role in the book and also in the exhibit. They lived most of their life in Washington, spent some time here in Oregon. This is at the turn of the 20th century. Their story was told in newspapers in Minneapolis, in Washington D.C. So these stories circulated widely.
Miller: Why?
Boag: Because it was so shocking. This was a period of … well, every period is a period of transition for society, but this is especially a transformational or transitional era from what I call, in American history, kind of an early modern to a modern era. There were many concerns in society about what direction the country was going. And previously, there was a strong bifurcation between what is understood to be the two sexes. As more and more people started crossing the boundaries between the two sexes, this became all of a sudden a social, cultural and medical problem. So people are fascinated by these stories.
Miller: Am I right that especially early on in the period of time that your exhibit focuses on, our country was transitioning from the idea that there is a frontier – this edge of anglo-white expansion, and the other side is the wild places – to basically having the country be “tamed.” How did [or] did that play into people’s understandings of gender and sexuality?
Boag: Oh, very much so. The so-called “closing of the frontier,” which you mentioned, is kind of a mythological event in American history. But there was a sense that the country was changing and its frontier Western roots that many people thought gave Americans their unique identity in the world, that that was disappearing because we had railroads, we had telegraphs, we had urban areas. It was becoming modernized. So there was this concern that this cultural ancestry of what an American was, was disappearing.
Now, at this very precise moment that there were these concerns, sexology, a science, a pseudoscience … there are legitimate sexologists, we still use the term today, but back then when you look at their science it’s kind of a pseudoscience. They were medical doctors and physicians who were studying sexuality. And in the United States, American physicians were starting to detect whether it was true or not. They detected an increase in people they would consider to be, the term they used was “sexual invert.” Today, it would include gay people, lesbian, trans people, transsexual, non-binary people. But they believed that there was an increase in the number of these people who were appearing in society and they associated it with urban areas, because that’s where most of these physicians worked. And it was possible for communities of gay people to live there.
As the frontier was disappearing, more “perverse sexuality” in their estimation was on the rise. So they linked the two.
Miller: I’d like to hear some more specific stories of some of the people that you have looked into, starting with Alan Hart. Who is he?
Boag: Alan Hart is a very famous Oregonian, though he was born in Kansas. And as a very young person, lost his father. He was assigned the female sex at birth. So for his childhood, he was known as mostly Lucille Hart or Lucy Hart. Once his father died, his mother moved. She was from Albany, Oregon, so they moved back to Albany. That’s where Hart grew up. Then headed to college in California, but went to medical school. At the time, it was called the University of Oregon Medical School and was located here in Portland.
For what we know of Hart, most of his life, he didn’t really associate or didn’t think of himself as female. So his transition was long. But it was during medical school, especially when he started reading some of these sexological texts that were published and were widely available, he said he learned more about his “condition.” And he sought psychological help by a very progressive Portland physician, who helped him accept who he was and actually performed what you might call an early form of transsexual operation on Hart to make it a little bit easier for him to wear men’s clothing and not be bothered by some things that are specific to a female body.
So he moved on, he became a medical doctor. He worked some in Oregon and some in Washington state. He also wrote several novels set in the Pacific Northwest. And eventually, he ended up on the East Coast where he worked as a radiologist – that was his specialty, radiology.
Miller: How much discrimination did he face?
Boag: Alan Hart’s one of these people who was a little bit more open because he couldn’t really escape the story. So people knew and it appeared in newspapers. He did find that he had to leave a few positions because it became very difficult. But I think on the East Coast, he led a relatively quiet … He found that working in a radiology lab, where you often work alone – or at least at that time, he was able to do research on his own – it tended to be a little bit more secure for him. But he did marry, he married a couple of times. His second wife survived him into the 1960s, I believe, on the East Coast. His body was cremated and it was distributed, I understand, over Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula.
Miller: What about Joe Monahan?
Boag: Joe Monahan is one of my favorites, partly because he is an Idahoan and I lived in Idaho for a number of years. Monahan, yeah, fascinating story. Monahan was born in New York in about 1850. He was assigned a female sex but identified himself as male. He left New York when he was quite young, in about 1867 or so. He left as a young woman but showed up in Southwestern Idaho – there was a gold rush going on in the Owyhee Mountains at that time. He showed up there as a man. He lived in that community from the late 1860s until he died in 1904.
Throughout that time, he always did what was considered to be male jobs. He worked as a cowboy, he eventually had his own small ranch. He worked mining, as a prospector, driving wagons, these sorts of things. And many people in his community were always a little suspicious, but they accepted him for who he was. When he died in 1904 – he actually died just across the border here in Oregon – his friends were preparing his body for burial and they determined that, in fact, some of their suspicions were true, that he probably had been assigned a female sex at birth.
Miller: I was struck by the fact, looking through the exhibit, that a lot of people whose stories are highlighted were caught up in one way or another in the criminal justice system. How much of that is a result of the fact that these are the stories that you’re maybe as a historian more likely to have access to, that there’s a written record that you can access and you can tell these stories? And how much of it is a sign that these people were more likely to be policed in the first place?
Boag: Yeah, that’s a very good question. Society was so bifurcated and it was assumed males wore male clothing and females wore female clothing. So oftentimes, if people would appear in public there was this automatic assumption that you didn’t have to scrutinize their body.
Miller: And that clothing was way more coded than it is today, right? I mean, now there’s all kinds of clothing that anybody can wear without people walking by making assumptions about that person, simply based on that pair of sweatpants.
Boag: Yeah. It wasn’t as though there were police out on the street scrutinizing people for the clothing they were wearing. But what happened is that, especially for people who were female to male, they would be mixing in working class neighborhoods, and in the culture and saloon life. And these areas of cities tended to be policed more heavily because they were working class, they tended to be more racially diverse. The police focused on these areas. So in the broad sweeps that happened, this is where a lot of these individuals were arrested and they’re the ones who provide so much of the material that I was able to use.
Miller: I’m curious what you see as the significance of this exhibit now, when trans rights are under attack in a lot of states and potentially going forward at the federal level?
Boag: I wrote this book years ago and those sorts of thoughts weren’t really on my mind at the time. But the story has so much transformed in the last few years. This is one of the reasons the Washington State Historical Society – [where I] originally curated the exhibit, they own the exhibit and it’s traveling – had in mind because of how trans issues were coming more to the forefront, but also because trans people are more visible in society today. And where do such individuals find their stories being told? It’s a service to trans people, specifically. But this exhibit is a service to everyone to come and learn these stories, and find out that this has always happened, or at least as far as the exhibit is concerned, it happened in the 19th century American West. It was a part of everyday life. We’re hoping, of course, that this helps people better understand.
Miller: Peter Boag, thanks very much.
Boag: You’re welcome.
Miller: Peter Boag is a professor of the History of the American West at Washington State University’s Vancouver campus. He joined us today to talk about “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West” exhibit. It is on display now through January 5 at the Oregon Historical Society. And if you are working on your calendar for 2025, it’s going to be at the High Desert Museum in Bend starting in November of 2025.
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