True Sex. Emily Skidmore
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
In Wise’s account, Lobdell’s claims of masculinity and his deviant sexuality are intimately connected. Wise’s case description opens with the following remarks:
CASE.—Lucy Ann Slater, alias, Rev. Joseph Lobdell, was admitted to the Willard Asylum, October 12th, 1880; aged 56, widow, without occupation and a declared vagrant. Her voice was coarse and her features were masculine. She was dressed in male attire throughout and declared herself to be a man, giving her name as Joseph Lobdell, a Methodist minister; said she was married and had a wife living. She appeared in good physical health; when admitted, she was in a state of turbulent excitement, but was not confused and gave responsive answers to questions. Her excitement was of an erotic nature and her sexual inclination was perverted. In passing to the ward, she embraced the female attendant in a lewd manner and came near overpowering her before she received assistance. Her conduct on the ward was characterized by the same lascivious conduct, and she made efforts at various times to have sexual intercourse with her associates.67
In this account, Lobdell’s assertion of masculinity and his “perverted” sexual inclinations are manifestations of the same pathology. This production is characteristic of the sexological conception of inversion as a theory of homosexuality, which, as Jack Halberstam explains, “folded gender variance and sexual preference into one economic package and attempted to explain all deviant behavior in terms of a firm and almost intuitive belief in a binary system of sexual stratification in which the stability of the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ depended on the stability of the homosexual-heterosexual binary.”68 In Wise’s estimation, Lobdell’s sexual behavior was intimately connected to his masculinity—a connection that both testified to his pathology as well as validated the “naturalness” of the emergent heterosexual/homosexual binary and the bi-gender system on which it depended.
While much of Wise’s article reads as very similar to the newspaper narratives about Lobdell that had been circulating in the press since the early 1870s, one arena where Wise’s account diverges is his frank discussion of sexuality. While nineteenth-century standards of decorum prevented newspaper journalists from doing more than simply hinting at the intimate nature of Lobdell and Perry’s relationship, the context of a medical journal allowed Wise to be explicit in his descriptions of Lobdell’s desire for sexual gratification with women. Wise mentions how the pair met in the Delaware County almshouse—in prose strikingly similar to the “Romantic Paupers” article that circulated in 1871, suggesting that he used newspaper accounts of Lobdell’s life to bolster his clinical observations,