In his book Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past, historian Peter Boag states that “America's frontier past . . . was a place where a wide variety of people who did not conform to gender and sexual expectations lived, loved, and died.”[1] Indeed, he reveals that “same-sex sexuality and gender fluidity represented in and by the cross-dresser actually lay at the very heart of the classic Old West.”[2]

The photographs shown here verify that early gender transgression occurred also east of the Pecos. Written on the reverse side of the dual portrait is “Jack Leighton” and “Ted Sturgeon” of Delavan, Illinois from (apparently) September 1889. The seated individual is identified on back as as “Mr. C. Reil,” of “Kellogg Minn” (Minnesota). The place and time of the tintype image are unknown, but the photograph appears to date from the mid-19th-century.

Sources

1. Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California, 2011), 196.

2. Boag, 196.