Introducing “Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness,” with Joan Ilacqua (episode 361)

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Transcript

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Queer Boston Revealed

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 361, introducing Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness with Joan Ilacqua. Hi, I’m Jake. For months now, regular listeners have heard me talking about another podcast I’m working on. Mostly it comes out as an apology, saying, sorry for another rerun, sorry for another episode hosted by co-host emerita Nikki. But overall, I’ve been pretty cagey about what this other podcast is. Well, today it’s time to reveal the brand new podcast, Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness. In just a few moments, I’m going to be joined by the host, my friend and the executive director of Queer History Boston, Joan Ilacqua. She’ll tell you a bit more about her organization and about this new podcast that I’ve been producing for them, and then we’ll get down to business and play the first episode of Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness. I’m really proud of the work we’ve been doing together, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

Jake:
[1:18] But before I talk about this other podcast that I’ve been working on, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to everybody who supports this podcast financially. Obviously, I’m a big podcast nerd because when I’m not working on my podcast, I’m producing a podcast for Queer History Boston, and when I’m not doing that, I’m probably listening to a podcast. I subscribe to shows about local history from cities around the U.S., to shows that recap my favorite TV shows, comedy podcasts. Even podcasts about podcasting to help me be a better podcaster. Whatever your hobby or your interest, there’s probably a podcast about it. And if there’s not, you should go start one. That’s what Nikki and I did back in 2016 when we realized that there wasn’t already a podcast about Boston history. Podcasts are great because they’re free to listen to. But, as you’ve heard me say before, they are unfortunately not free to create. Which I was reminded of when I advised Joan on getting Queer Boston’s Pursuit of History off the ground. We basically started that project with a significant shopping list of gear, from mics and recorders to acoustic treatments to travel cases.

Jake:
[2:31] Our supporters make it possible for me to focus on creating hub history without having to worry about how to cover our ongoing costs. Whether it’s a one-time contribution on PayPal, or an ongoing contribution of $2, $5, or even $20 or more on a monthly basis, our listeners make Hub History possible. To everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors. Oh, and if you’re inspired to start your own podcast, you could hire me to help like Joan did.

Jake:
[3:18] All right, that out of the way, I’m joined now by Joan Ilacqua. Since 2020, Joan’s been the Executive Director of Queer History Boston, which was previously known as the History Project. Before taking over as ED, Joan served as co-chair of the History Project’s Board of Directors, and she worked for Harvard Medical School as the Archivist for Diversity and Inclusion. She also serves on the Boston 400th Anniversary Commemoration Commission and the Community Archives Collaborative Steering Committee. And this month, she’s adding a brand new credential, one that’s very familiar to me. She’s now the host of a brand new podcast. I can’t wait to share it with you. Joan Ilacqua, welcome to the show.

Queer History Boston Today

Jake:
[4:06] Joan, will you take a minute and introduce yourself and your organization to our listeners?

Joan Ilacqua:
[4:10] Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Joan Ilacqua. I am the Executive Director of Queer History Boston. We are Boston’s LGBTQ plus community archives. So we have archival collections, publications, ephemera, all that other fun stuff. And then we do a lot of outreach and public education around queer history in Boston.

Jake:
[4:31] Besides the project we’re about to talk about, What does that mean to share queer history around Boston? What sort of activities do you all take on?

Joan Ilacqua:
[4:40] We have researchers who come to us, and those researchers include everyone from students and, historians and scholars and journalists and then just like community members who are interested in queer history. And we have over 250 collections in the archives. Those range in date from the very earliest or now the late 1800s. We brought in some North Shore cross-dressing photos. They’re like kind of butch femme, like little sailor suit kind of outfits. Very cute. But the majority of materials are Gay Liberation era. So like 70s, 80s, 90s. And so this research part of the work and the collection part of the work is part of it. And then I’m a public historian. I think it’s incredibly important to bring history to the people. And so, we work with other orgs on public educational programs. We do live oral histories. Actually, we have one coming up at the end of October. We do lectures and walking tours and exhibits, too. We don’t have our own exhibit space, but right now we have up a collaborative exhibit with the West End Museum, and we have some other pop-ups planned for this fall.

Jake:
[5:58] If somebody’s a researcher or, as you said, just a community member who’s interested, what should they picture as being in your collections? What types of materials do you archive?

Joan Ilacqua:
[6:10] I’m just going to say yes. We archive everything. So we’re an interesting archival organization in that when we were founded, we’ve been around since 1980. We were formerly known as the History Project. But when we were started, no one was really openly or actively collecting queer and trans materials. That’s changed. There are a lot of local repositories that have some good stuff. I think we have the most. Those things range from personal papers and diaries. We do have letters. We have runs of publications like Gay Community News and other LGBTQ plus newspapers and, We have so much ephemera. Things that are created not necessarily as records for the archives, but that tell a story of the community. That includes flyers, postcards, buttons. We have glasses from bars that people picked up and then donated to us later on. We have some drag queen dresses. It’s a little of everything. If you’re interested in this history and you reach out to us, we either have something or we can point you in the right direction, at least.

Jake:
[7:16] So along with all those forms of outreach and public history, there’s now the project that we’re working on together. So what is the name

Jake:
[7:23] of this awesome new podcast that Queer History Boston is presenting this month?

Launching the New Podcast

Joan Ilacqua:
[7:28] We are introducing Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness. This is our first foray into podcasting. This amazing opportunity came up. Mass Humanities offered funding through their Expand Mass Stories program, focusing on promises of the revolution. And that included what did the revolution promise but not actually deliver on. And that’s where we found our niche. And so this podcast looks at the stories of queer and trans Bostonians throughout history. You know, we’re promised life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Queer people have not always been given those rights. And so we’ve taken them. The timing came together really well. We’re so excited to do this delve into, local LGBTQ plus history. And it’s our way of both celebrating the revolution and acknowledging the work that this community is still doing for those rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Jake:
[8:28] So what does the arc of the show look like? How many episodes are there going to be? What sort of time period or topical topics will it cover? What does the run of this show look like?

Joan Ilacqua:
[8:41] We start with the revolution. We do an introductory nod to the pilgrims and, how much they loved self-expression and creativity. I’m joking. But we really, we start with the late 1700s, looking at people who transgressed gender during the revolutionary period. And then we kind of move generationally up to the first pride. And that’s 1971 here in Boston. So part of this is a limited scope because we have funding for six episodes. But also there are so many more stories and people that we know about who aren’t household names that we really had to, hold ourselves back from being like, here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about queer history and we’re afraid to ask. So it’s a little bit more targeted. So it’s a, you know, 200, 300 or so years.

Jake:
[9:38] So, you were kind enough to allow me to play the first episode here in the Hub History feed. So, why don’t you set up episode one? What historical characters are we going to meet? What’s the focus? And then who are the experts who are going to weigh in?

Joan Ilacqua:
[9:55] We are going to meet Deborah Sampson, who is known probably most well for being the first American woman to receive a military pension. Sampson cross-dresses, joins the military, eventually gets found out and leaves, and then petitions for a pension later in life. Sampson’s this very interesting historical figure. I wouldn’t go so far as to label Sampson as trans. I wouldn’t use those words specifically on folks in the 1700s. But she’s definitely transgressing gender norms. And like, what does that mean that that’s a person who we’ve celebrated? We also talk about some less well-known revolutionary era figures. One of them is named Francis Lewis, who may have been trans, actually, or intersex, who lived out on Martha’s Vineyard. And in order to tell these stories, I and Jake and a group of volunteer historians did research, pulled together some narrative and sources, and then we reached out to, experts in this time period and these topics and had conversations with them. So, in this first episode, you get to hear from Jen Manion, who’s a professor at Amherst College, and J.L. Bell, who is a local historian, I want to say local historical legend, but he’s still with us. That makes it sound like he’s history himself.

Jake:
[11:17] Yeah. So before I hit play on episode one of Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness, where can our listeners find out more about QHB, about your new podcast pursuit, and sign up to get more information?

Joan Ilacqua:
[11:31] Yeah, our website is queerhistoryboston.org. Our social media is at queerhistoryboston. For the podcast, you can subscribe with your podcast app of choice. And the best way to get more info from us actually is to join the email list. I promise we don’t send out a million emails, but we do send out good ones and we do a lot of events. So that’s definitely where you’re going to want to learn more.

Jake:
[11:57] All right. Well, thank you very much, Joan. And this is Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness.

Gender on the Revolution

QBPoH:
[12:09] Welcome to Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness, where in recognition of the 250th anniversary of the revolution, we explore the stories of queer and trans Bostonians who fought for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is Episode 1, Gender and the Revolutionary War. Pursuit of Happiness.

QBPoH:
[12:30] Hi, I’m your host, Jo Nalakwa, Executive Director of Queer History Boston. In this episode, we’re talking about people who transgressed gender norms in the late 18th century as the American Revolution both upended and solidified the future of the United States. We’ll share the stories of gender revolutionaries in conversation with historians J.L. Bell and Jen Mannion and talk about the continued fight by the trans community for their right to life, liberty, and happiness today. But before that, we’d like to thank Mass Humanities for their support of this project through the Expand Massachusetts Stories program. We’d also like to thank everyone who supports Queer History Boston. We’re a community archives that documents, preserves, and shares LGBTQ plus histories of greater Boston and New England through collections, collaboration, and public education. Queer History Boston envisions a world where every LGBTQ plus person can see themselves in history, where queer communities in Boston and beyond are emboldened by the past to shape a future of collective liberation. Learn more about our work and find links to our collections, social media, and more at queerhistoryboston.org.

QBPoH:
[13:40] This is our very first episode, so let’s set the stage and talk about how we do queer history. Broadly, Queer History Boston defines queer and trans people in history who did not have the same language or norms around sexuality and gender that we do today as those who transgressed the gender and sexuality norms of their times. Today, the words queer and trans encompass a broad and inclusive range of sexuality and gender practices. But for those we discuss in history, we often don’t know how they may have identified themselves, especially if their stories are told through records written about them and not by them. For example, in arrest or trial records, medical records, or even fantabulous news sources. We use the words queer and trans, along with other terms like lesbian, gay, and bisexual, with respect and in recognition that these pioneers who transgressed the norms of their times are part of the queer community’s legacy of fighting for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

QBPoH:
[14:36] A note on pronouns, too. We try to be intentional with the pronouns we use for the historical figures we explore. We respect the pronouns individuals used in their own lifetimes if we know them. And if there’s some degree of doubt and we don’t know what pronouns someone would have used, we tend to default to they. We may also use a variety of pronouns for an individual depending on the context. For example, with Deborah Sampson. She used she her pronouns growing up, he him pronouns while enlisted, and then she her pronouns later in life and in her memoir. In conversation, we tend to use the pronouns that make sense in that moment. But we’re not perfect, so if we mess up, or if you know something about a historical figure and would like to share, please do feel free to reach out. And if you’d like to learn more about interpreting queer and trans history, there are some sources in our show notes.

QBPoH:
[15:31] LGBTQ plus history began in America before the Pilgrims landed in 1620. In the 1600s, as many as 40,000 Native people lived in 67 villages that made up the Wampanoag Nation across what is now southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. European conquests devastated these communities and enforced European ideas of gender and sexuality, disrupting traditional and ceremonial roles of LGBTQ plus Native Americans. However, from the activists who organized the National Day of Mourning at Plymouth Rock to queer, trans, and two-spirit activists today, Indigenous communities persist and continue to shape and make queer history in Massachusetts and throughout Turtle Island, an Indigenous name for North America.

QBPoH:
[16:16] After the Puritans landed, they established laws prohibiting same-sex relationships and gender transgressive activity. Some of the only records of LGBTQ plus people in early American history come from our criminalization by the courts. Those who violated Puritan laws governing sexuality and gender expression were arrested and therefore documented. In 1642 in Plymouth, Edward Michelle and Edward Preston were charged with lewd and sodomitical practices, while Sarah Norman and Mary Hammond were charged with lewd behavior in 1649. Joseph Davis of Haverhill, Dorothy Hoyt of Essex County, and Mary Henley of Middlesex County were arrested for cross-dressing even before Massachusetts formally banned it in 1695.

Deborah Sampson Enlists

QBPoH:
[17:01] So with these laws on the books and a revolution on the horizon, we come to the story of Deborah Sampson.

QBPoH:
[17:08] Deborah Sampson is likely best well known for being the first woman in the United States to receive a military pension after her service in the Revolutionary War. Much of her story is told through the lens of her 1797 memoir, written with Herman Mann, entitled The Female Review, Life of Deborah Sampson, The Female Soldier in the War of the Revolution. Mann was an accomplished publisher, and he helped to tell and sometimes embellish or fully fabricate portions of her life. Sampson was born in 1760 in Plimpton, Massachusetts. Her early life was not easy. Her father abandoned the family when she was five years old, and she was sent to live with relatives. At age 10, she was indentured to the Thomas family in Middleborough. Indentured servitude was a common but exploitive practice, where someone worked for a set period in exchange for room and board. Although she was not formally educated, she learned from the Thomas sons, and became a teacher when her indentured servitude concluded at age 18. At age 22, she attempted to join the army.

QBPoH:
[18:12] According to her memoir, Samson was a tall woman. Mann describes her as, quote, more than the middle size, that is five feet and seven inches. He goes on, the features of her face are regular, but not what a physiognomist would term the most beautiful. Her aspect is rather masculine and serene than effeminate. Her waist might displease a coquette, but her limbs are regularly proportioned. Ladies of taste considered them handsome when in the masculine garb. Ooh la la. Sampson’s first enlistment attempt, using the name Timothy Thayer, was not successful. She was exposed by a neighbor and had to return the portion of her enlistment bonus that she hadn’t yet spent. She tried again in May 1782 in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, this time using the name Robert Shurtleff. Dressed in masculine clothing, she joined the Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment. The Light Infantry was an elite unit, and only tall and physically fit soldiers were recruited. Because of her height and her experience with farm work and other labor, Samson blended seamlessly into the demanding service of the Light Infantry.

QBPoH:
[19:20] Samson’s secret was almost exposed in summer of 1782. She was injured. She had been shot in the thigh. Mann explains in the female review, Our gallantress, having previously become a good horseman, immediately mounted an excellent horse. They pursued the enemy till they came to a quagmire. They rushed on them on the right and left till as many as could escaped. The rest begged quarters. The dauntless fair, at this instant, thought she felt something warmer than sweat run down her neck. Putting her hand to the place, she found the blood gushed from the left side of her head very freely. She said nothing, as she thought it no time to tell of wounds unless mortal. Coming to his stand, she dismounted, but had not strength to walk or stand alone. She found her boot on her right leg filled with blood, and in her thigh, just below her groin, she found the incision of a ball whence it issued. Females, this effusion was from the veins of your tender sex, in quest of that liberty you now so serenely possess.

QBPoH:
[20:23] She told one of the sergeants she was so wounded, she chose rather to be left in that horrid place than be carried any further. They all as one concluded to carry her in case she could not ride. Here was her trial, a thousand thoughts and specters at once darted before her. She had always thought she should rather die than disclose her sex to the army. And at that instant, almost in despair, she drew a pistol from a holster and was nearly ready to execute the fatal deed. But divine goodness here stayed her hand, and the shocking act and idea of suicide were soon banished by her cooler reason. Her comrades-in-arms delivered our Deborah, aka Private Shirtlift, to the regimental surgeon. However, to escape discovery, she left the hospital, stitched up her own head wound, and removed the musket ball from her own thigh. She claimed to keep the ball as a memento.

QBPoH:
[21:15] The next year, while stationed in Philadelphia, Samson came down with an almost fatal fever. According to Mann, the doctor treating her, quote, putting his hand in her bosom to feel her pulse, was surprised to find an inner waistcoat tightly compressing her breasts. Ripping it in haste, he was still more shocked not only on finding life, but the breasts and other tokens of a female. Immediately, she was removed into the matron’s own apartment, and from that time to her recovery, treated with all the care and art that expense could bestow. After her discovery, Samson was mustered out and honorably discharged on October 25, 1783, after about a year and a half of service.

QBPoH:
[21:55] Following the war, Sampson met and married Benjamin Gannett and raised four children on the Gannett family farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. The small farm had been overworked, and Sampson began a years-long fight to get back pay and a pension for her service. Working with editor Herman Mann, they published her memoir, The Female Review, in 1797, and Sampson began giving lectures dressed in her uniform and performed precision musket drills. By 1804, she enlisted the help of Paul Revere, among other public figures, in her pursuit of a pension. He wrote a letter in her favor, stating that she was, quote, “…much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous.”, She was awarded her pension in 1805, and then secured an additional general service pension in 1821. She died on April 29, 1827, of yellow fever. Her husband then petitioned for a pension as the spouse of a veteran. He was awarded it, but died before he could collect.

QBPoH:
[22:54] Samson has been memorialized in a number of ways. Her historic home still stands in Sharon, Massachusetts, although it is not open to the public. Her statue sits in front of the public library, and a city park is named after her. Plimpton, Massachusetts, where she was born, has a memorial boulder dedicated to Sampson on the town green, and her image is on the town flag. In 2021, the Deborah Sampson Act was signed into law, which created a dedicated Office of Women’s Health at Veterans Affairs. We know that people who have transgressed gender and sexuality norms have always

QBPoH:
[23:26] existed, but Deborah Sampson became a celebrity for her transgressions. To better understand what laws and societal norms surrounded her, and to learn more about less infamous historical figures, I sat down with historian J.L. Bell.

Revolution Era Gender Rules

QBPoH:
[23:41] Hi, I’m J.L. Bell. I write about revolutionary New England, especially on a website called boston1775.net. I’ve written a book called The Road to Concord, How Four Stolen Cannons Ignited the Revolutionary War, and I’ve written a lot of articles about life in and around Boston during the revolution. Speaking of the revolution, today we’re talking about essentially gender in the revolution, people who transgress gender norms, how that was reported in some ways, and what are the contexts around the people we’ll be discussing. And so my first question, I feel like is a very introductory, scene-setting question. Could you tell us about what kind of prohibitions existed against transgressing gender and sexuality during this period? The 18th century in New England was an interesting period because after the 17th century, the settlement of the Puritans and the Puritan dominance.

QBPoH:
[24:37] The laws were still on the books against what they called sodomy, but we see very few prosecutions for it. And when cases come up in the courts or in church disputes, things like that, it turns out that, you know, when this minister is being complained about because he’s having some sort of relations with other men. Well, he’s been doing it for 20 years, and they keep ignoring it all that time until, for some reason, they decide they can’t ignore it anymore. And even then, often those disputes are settled without the harsh punishments that are still on the books from the Puritan period. So it looks like for sexuality overall, and for queerness, there is a slightly more forgiving atmosphere in the 1700s than there was in the 1600s. We might also be seeing that in how during the 1600s, there were fewer premarital pregnancies. Starting at the very end of that century, and then through most of the 1700s, a large percentage of women give birth to their first child within seven months of marriage. So it has just become expected that even though fornication is still on the books as a crime.

QBPoH:
[25:56] People are fornicating. So, there just seems to be a more forgiveness about sexuality and sexual behavior in the 1700s. They’re always fornicating? Well, yes, people fornicating in the 1600s, but I think a little bit less because we don’t have that pregnancy pattern, and they probably didn’t have better birth control. No.

QBPoH:
[26:18] So, there does seem to have been a little more openness. There was the practice of bundling, which is really talked about mostly, when it became out of fashion and seen as quaint or even depraved, but there was a feeling that if a couple were engaged to each other, they had a little more of an open door. Could you tell us what bundling is specifically? Bundling is a practice where a couple, an engaged man and woman, can spend the night together in bed, sometimes with a board between them, sometimes supposedly in a sack. The idea is that before you get married, you really should know what the other person is like 24 hours of the day. It also, in a period when houses were smaller, heating was more difficult, things like that. It was just more convenient. So it would not be surprising for the daughter of a household to have her boyfriend over the whole night. And New Englanders and other Americans in the 1800s looked back and thought, especially from the Victorian period, that this was absolutely strange and depraved, but it was just considered normal, in New England and in rural New England up until the early 1800s. Wow. And I think that’s actually a really good segue into this court case from 1771. Gray v. Pitts was a Massachusetts court case that’s considered an early use of the gay panic defense. Could you tell us more about Gray v. Pitts?

QBPoH:
[27:47] Gray v. Pitts, which we know about because some documents were published in the papers of John Adams, he took notes on this case, is a strange case. The people involved seem to be young men over and above the age of majority, over and above 21. So some were listed as infants, meaning that they were teenagers, not that they were actual infants. And some were probably of legal age. Most of them the sons of merchants, wealthy. They would become merchants themselves, many of them later. My reading is they just had too much time on their hands. And the case was nominally an assault case, but the assault was motivated by the assailant being upset that he had been fooled by a, young man, a teenage boy probably, who was dressed as a woman, And that he actually tried to woo this fellow before he found out, and he felt embarrassed, and he started whacking people. The masquerade was not prosecuted. The assault was.

QBPoH:
[28:54] This is also a curious case because James Otis, who at the time was going mad, decided to come and he was a very learned man. He decided to give a long disquisition in the court about classical examples of men dressing as women, showing that the society at the time understood that these things happened. Another sort of curious possible precedent for what happened is that during the Pope night celebrations, the anti-Catholic processions that took place every 5th of November, one of the common figures on the floats, there would be big, effigies of the Pope, of the devil, of men hanged in effigy. There’s also a teenage boy dressed as a woman dancing around on the float. And this was called by the name of the Nancy Dawson. Nancy Dawson being a very famous, popular dancer from London. It was really just a festival of misrule, and part of the misrule was the knowledge that at least one, probably, at least actually in Boston too, of these male youth would engage in cross-dressing, if only for the evening.

QBPoH:
[30:04] And there’s a 1696 law that comes up in my research. You mentioned there are sodomy laws on the books. Massachusetts later on has prohibitions about what’s called lewd and lascivious conduct that takes until the 70s to kind of figure out what does that actually mean? What can we actually police? But this one from 1696 says, if any man shall wear women’s apparel or if any woman shall wear men’s apparel and be therefore of duly convicted, they shall be corporately punished or fined at the discretion of the county where the offense is committed toward the defraying of the county charges.”.

QBPoH:
[30:38] In doing queer history, often I could find the names of people who broke these laws. And sometimes I find out what happened to them, and sometimes I don’t. And that’s about all the information there is. But we also have these figures where their stories have emerged much more fully. Whether they’re true or not is a different story. Well, Francis Lewis was in a very different position than the young men involved in Gravy Pitts, because Francis Lewis was what we would clearly call these days transgender. Francis Lewis was born as Deborah Lewis in 1730. The family rather quickly moved from Cape Cod onto the island of Martha’s Vineyard. And I don’t know if that’s significant. Were they actually seeking a smaller, more isolated community? But Francis or Deborah grew up for 30 years. And then in the 1760s, the newspapers began to report that Deborah Lewis had become Francis Lewis and was going to be engaged. Francis did get married and lived another several decades through the revolution, through the beginning of the U.S. Constitution, had a number of children with his wife. And when he died, this story came up again, but it was noted that he was highly respected in his community.

QBPoH:
[31:59] When the story first came out, one of the Boston newspapers said that a widow had come and was boarding at the house, and then she turned out to be pregnant, and they were—well, as far as I can tell, none of that is true. That is the press trying to make sense of this unusual, unheard of almost situation. But it is clear that unlike, say, Deborah Sampson, who presented as Robert Shurtleff for a number of years, but then went back to being Deborah Sampson for the rest of her life, Deborah Lewis became Francis Lewis and lived as Francis Lewis, presumably much happier for decades and decades, and was totally accepted within his community. The Boston newspapers might have had some difficulty figuring this out, but even they came around to the idea that this was Francis and Francis was a respectable paterfamilias. You’ve done a lot of research on a lot of different topics within Boston’s revolutionary history. And I’m curious, how did you come across this story of Lewis? Because one of the few places I’ve read about Lewis is on your blog.

QBPoH:
[33:03] Honestly, I do not remember. I’ve been doing the Boston 1775 blog on a daily basis for 20 years next month. I think I probably came across a newspaper clipping and just thought, hmm, this is interesting, and started to keep looking for that name to find other references to Francis Lewis, Deborah Lewis. I did go back to the vital records to track down the birth of the baby. And also, this move to Martha’s Vineyard is curious to me. But because it’s an ordinary rural family, we just don’t know what the full story is. We just know what sort of blossomed in the newspapers in the 1760s and has a brief curious story from Martha’s Vineyard and then went away again. And everybody went back to seeing Francis Lewis as a normal man. And I think that’s something interesting to point out about this time period is Francis Lewis comes out as Francis and he lives for several more decades and he has a huge family and that’s his life. And we often have a tendency to think of like, you know, things that happened in the past were not as good as things that are happening now. But these stories and I think snippets of here’s somebody who had a pretty ordinary life and was trans are really important to elevate and talk about now. One of the things about Francis Lewis was that Francis Lewis seems to have fit into the categories that they had, the mental categories.

QBPoH:
[34:33] They were able to just think, oh, oh, okay, he’s a man.

QBPoH:
[34:37] He got a wife, he’s having children, he’s farming off on the vineyard. We understand that. He does not seem to have been seeking to add to the categories, the mental categories that his neighbors were working with. And that might have made his life easier. The newspaper reports did say that, when the baby was born, it was unclear to the family, to the midwives, what biological sex the baby was. So, some people look at this and put other narratives or other stories onto it. In some ways, that would have been more confusing to his peers and contemporaries than the idea that, okay, he’s a man. Not to give us too much whiplash, I had mentioned this story of a figure whose name is Miss Betty Cooper or Cato. Part of my question here is, could you tell us a bit about this story if you don’t mind recapping it? Well, there is very little to say about Miss Betty Cooper or Cato. Caitlin DeAngelis is the scholar who found this one advertisement in a Boston newspaper after an enslaved man named Cato ran away and the owner added, known as Miss Betty Cooper.

QBPoH:
[35:51] Interestingly, there is no long description of this figure, and thus, when it says known as Miss Betty Cooper, the implication is that everybody knew who this person was. We also know from this advertisement that the previous owner, was William Cooper, who was the town clerk of Boston for decades, and from a quite prestigious family, brother of the most respected clergyman in town. So Miss Betty Cooper was taking his surname as her name. But unfortunately, we don’t have any other evidence about this. So we are really trying to read as much as possible from this one source.

QBPoH:
[36:33] The name Cato, like other classical Roman or Greek names, was very common to be applied to an enslaved black man. So there are just too many Catos to trace. And although the name Betty Cooper shows up in other sources, there’s no way to tie that to this particular figure. And we can hope that he, she escaped. It’s also possible that the person who put in the ad recovered his human property. And that may be why the ad does not reappear. It is a fascinating question. And the most interesting thing is the fact that, the people reading the newspaper, were expected to recognize who this person was and to recognize this unusual, juxtaposition of Cato, also known as Miss Betty Cooper.

QBPoH:
[37:23] Yeah, I think part of what I’m interested in with this story and the story of Francis Lewis, you know, these are both stories that involved a fair amount of research to elevate, to bring to light, even if there’s not, in the case of Miss Betty Cooper, much additional connection that we can find. But then we have Deborah Sampson. Debra Sampson is a totally different situation because with Francis Lewis, we’re working with maybe a half a dozen newspaper articles with Betty Cooper. We are working with one advertisement with Debra Sampson. She had a biography. She was on the stage. She was remembered. She was a celebrity. And so we know her story and her story has always been part of the narrative of the revolution. Usually it’s an oddity, but it’s always been there. And how people interpret what they get out of it may have changed over the years, but it’s impossible to write her off. She is so clearly documented and documented in such detail. In addition to the older books, there’s been a more recent book called Masquerade by Alfred Young. There have been novelizations of her life. So she is in a totally different category. We actually know more about Deborah Sampson than we probably do about 80% or more of Continental Army soldiers.

QBPoH:
[38:45] One of the things I find fascinating about this story as a queer historian is that she cross-dresses, becomes Robert Shirtleff, is Robert Shirtleff for several years. It seems still was Robert Shirtleff after she is dismissed from the military for a while and then goes back to Deborah Sampson, has a family.

QBPoH:
[39:06] And I mentioned earlier people who we just know the name of them. We have somebody else in a similar situation who gets caught a lot earlier named Ann Bailey in Boston. And so what I’m meandering around to in a question here about this is what made Deborah Sampson famous?

QBPoH:
[39:25] Deborah Sampson was more famous than other women who also, for a shorter time, served in the Continental Forces or the militia as young men because she did so longer and more successfully, therefore. And frankly because she was interested in the celebrity in part to, support herself and her family later that she was actually, trying to get a pension going on the stage selling her story in book form and that gives us all those details some of which are even reliable whereas these earlier figures there are a couple of women who are known to us only through the prosecution after they have been found out, usually in a very short time, as having been masquerading as men in order to join the army. And they’re prosecuted because they are seen as trying to defraud the state by taking money under false pre-census, because you got a little assigning bonus if you signed up. Interestingly, both the cases, that Al Young talks about in Masquerade as predecessors to Debra Sampson. The first one, after she was found out, people went back and thought, she served three months before.

QBPoH:
[40:42] She actually did the job for a while. And then Ann Bailey was found out after a couple of weeks. But during those couple of weeks, she had been made into a corporal. So she had been given a certain amount of authority. And Al Young argues that the reason Debra Sampson was able to stay in the Continental Army for as long as she did is because she was.

QBPoH:
[41:02] A good soldier, because she did her job as the servant for an officer. And in a way, we can look at these other women and say, okay, they were doing good as well until they were found out. What does this tell us about the need to have an all-male army?

QBPoH:
[41:19] One of the parts of Debra Sampson’s story, which the full title I have written down somewhere here, the female review or memoirs of an American young lady, and then we have that, beautiful 18th century description, whose life and character are peculiarly distinguished being a continental soldier for nearly three years in the late American war, during which time she performed the duties of every department into which she was called with punctual exactness, fidelity, and honor, and preserved her chastity and voliate by the most artful concealment of her sex. And there is a bit of exaggeration there. I don’t believe she actually served for three years, for instance, but we can see that he’s in that subtitle, making the case for her, making the argument that not only is she punctually and exact as a soldier, but she also has to make clear that she was preserved her celibacy or her chastity, that she was, not transgressing all the bounds. I suspect that just as with the Deborah Lewis, Francis Lewis story, that there was an instinct on people to think that there must be some sexual transgression here that caused the break. And Herman Mann is assuring us that that is not the case. And in fact, as it turned out, Deborah Sampson was wounded and in the wounding the second time, the doctor discovered her actual anatomy and the jig was up.

QBPoH:
[42:48] Post-Revolutionary War, she moves to Sharon. She gets married to Benjamin Gannett. They have several children together. And it’s this sort of quest for a pension to support the farm and the family.

QBPoH:
[43:03] That she starts sharing this story more widely, dressing again as Robert Shurtleff, giving performances.

QBPoH:
[43:11] When she dressed in her regimentals or in some version of her Continental Army uniform, she was doing that on the stage, except for the brief period after her departure from the Army. She lived as a woman, but here she was clearly presenting herself to the public for money as a woman who could dress as a man, behave as a man. She would go through the drill with her musket to show how capable she still was. And at the time, she was at that time a middle-aged woman, a mother of several children. So it must have been quite impressive for people who were not used to seeing somebody break those rules. There’s also the celebrity connection of being able to have Paul Revere intercede on her behalf in order to get her pension. She receives an earlier pension, but it’s not very much money. And she goes back and petitions again. And at this time, this was before the U.S. government established regular pensions for everybody who had been in the war. If you wanted to get a pension, you had to go and petition specifically for yourself. And often you’d have to make the case that you had been disabled in some way.

QBPoH:
[44:18] And so for her to actually ask for a pension was not just a matter of filling out forms. She really had to push for it. And yes, she had to call in favors. And Paul Revere at the time was a successful industrialist. He also sort of saw himself as the leader of the community of mechanics and industrialists and that class of men who had fought the war and come out ahead.

QBPoH:
[44:42] I’m getting very Johnny Tremaine in the back of my head. That’s the one story. And for these other stories of people like Deborah Sampson and ordinary people coming out of this time period are a really important lens to bring to this interpretation of the 250th.

QBPoH:
[44:57] Especially in this current political climate. America has, this is its main origin story. There are a few others, the settlement, the move to the West. But this one is the one that when we talk, oh, being patriotic or having patriotic history, this is the period that we argue over. This is the period we every political party, every American tries to claim in some way. And so it’s no surprise that stories from this period have more resonance. There are more examples of women passing as men and fighting in the U.S. Civil War than in the revolution. We really, Deborah Sampson is really our one example in the revolutionary period for an extended period of time. There might have been others, they got away with it. But nevertheless, because it is the revolution, it has extra points on the old patriotic and respect scale.

Female Husbands Reconsidered

QBPoH:
[45:53] To best understand Debra Sampson’s story within the context of female soldiers, we spoke with historian Jen Mannion, professor of history at Amherst College and author of the award-winning book, Female Husbands, A Trans History. We were also joined by our executive producer, Jake Sconyers. You’ll hear a few questions from him here.

QBPoH:
[46:13] Thank you, Jen, so much for taking the time to chat with us. I’m really excited to talk to you about Female Husbands. What’s the background story? How did you come to write Female Husbands? Thank you for having me, and thank you for the question. A couple different things led to the research. One is, I’ve been teaching the History of Sexuality Survey to undergrads for many years by that point, and the origins of homosexuality is such an important moment in that scholarship. And this idea that female masculinity gets locked in, fused with female homosexuality, I felt like we don’t think or talk enough about female masculinity and different kinds of gender transing before it came to signify homosexuality. Just from flipping through old newspapers over the course of my career to that point, I knew there were just so many short anecdotes and references to different kinds of female masculinity or gender transing or cross-dressing that deserved some kind of more serious, sustained study. So that was really what started this off for me.

QBPoH:
[47:31] We’re already talking about these two figures, Miss Betty Cooper, who is an enslaved person, Francis Lewis, who we think may have been an intersex person out on Martha’s Vineyard, who aren’t super well-known, who are kind of these blurbs in newspapers. And then we have Deborah Sampson, who becomes this important or well-known figure, as part of the story of the American Revolution. So I’m curious, how did Sampson become a public figure, But also, how did some of these stories become big public stories? Well, let me answer the other piece of that question, which is why most people don’t become a big story, right? And so in the first two cases, you’re talking about an enslaved person, and we know archival traces for enslaved people. They’re just traces in most cases that…

QBPoH:
[48:24] People appear in newspapers in these highly charged moments, usually because they’ve done something that someone doesn’t like. Often, we don’t even have a legal name for them, and it can be really hard to connect them to any other evidence about their life. And so I think that’s part of the case with Miss Betty Cooper. And I think also for people assigned female at birth, which is where we think Deborah Lewis lies also, they just have fewer records and less of a legal trail. And so when you look at these groups of people that we might just say enslaved and women, they’re already the hardest people, to write history about and to have any kind of detailed accounting of their lives, their longings, their dreams, their movement.

QBPoH:
[49:14] Especially in their own words. I have tons of records. I have tons of newspaper clippings of anecdotes of people, who are similarly interesting to us because of their potential gender transgression or sexual transgression or some quirky thing that they did, who I’ve never developed or tried to trace in other ways or tried and quickly stopped. One of the reasons why I ended up focusing on female husbands is because people who lived legally as men had a more robust paper trail. So I could flesh out their lives much more fully through the archives than I could with this other group who were described as female sailors and sometimes soldiers. From the moment where they were discovered to have disappeared and presented themselves as men. Their local hometown paper would say this person left, but they wouldn’t really know where they went or what name they assumed. And so the trail ends.

QBPoH:
[50:22] That could have been the case for the person that I, in my book, describe as Robert Shurtleff. Because the only reason we know about this person, and they became so influential, is this moment in their life where they decided, I’m going to present myself as a man and I’m going to enlist in the Continental Army as a man named Robert Shurtleff. And this period of their life in 1782 and 1783, it was their choice. We could debate motivation and what it meant to them, but my reading on them is we’re doing them a disservice to not take seriously that chunk of time and how they did it, how it affected them, and then how it really shaped the rest of their life.

QBPoH:
[51:18] They became important for other reasons that did have to do with them being the quote-unquote first woman to do certain things. So they were the first woman to get back pay for military service. They were the first woman to petition Congress and receive a pension for military service. Those are real. And when you’re looking at a moment in time in an episode that seems like all the writings and all the stories are 90% by and about men.

QBPoH:
[51:52] People want to have a different angle and some insight into how the revolution was experienced by women. And so in comes Deborah Sampson, who was a woman who did this extraordinary thing. I’m thinking who I’m seeing being talked about right now, if you’re thinking about the Paul Revere’s and the people who Longfellow wrote poems about, those kinds of American figures. In my perception, sometimes I think Sampson gets pulled out both as like, here’s a woman who’s part of the revolution, but also it only gets talked about in terms of being a woman that entire time. But there’s something else going on there with their gender presentation and their choice to enlist as Robert Shurtleff. They get caught they get honorably discharged but it’s not like a switch flips and they go back to I’m Deborah Sampson do you know what I mean?

QBPoH:
[52:49] I’ve had a long ambivalent relationship with this figure because they’re the first entry in Jonathan Nekatts’ Gay American History under the chapter called Passing Women.

QBPoH:
[53:04] So that’s doing a whole different kind of framing than what you’re uncomfortable with in terms of the way some revolutionary history accounts simplify, depoliticize, naturalize, this person as a woman who’s a patriot in this kind of really flat way. I don’t actually remember learning about Debra Sampson in school, but I remember being floored when I read about Debra Sampson, Robert Shirtlift in gay American history. And so what it means in this context to be told that this person is like a queer ancestor. I think a lot of queer scholars have actually done interesting stuff in giving us more to think about, about why Deborah Sampson, Robert Shurtleff, is such an interesting person. If you focus on taking seriously the claim that they possibly engaged in intimacies with women while they were living as Robert, and what the potential significance of that was, taking seriously that they did this of their own free will, and that one of the things that was really important to me to hold as I write about these different figures in my book is that it changed them.

QBPoH:
[54:31] There’s no way it didn’t change them because gender is so loaded and there’s so many different parts involved in this embodiment and practice for years successfully. I’m not invested in and I don’t think it makes sense anyway to try to assert some identity claim or to think that Samson had some interior, notion of sexual or gender identity that’s in any way like analogous to how we think about those things now that the very act of living as a man.

QBPoH:
[55:08] Changed who they were and how they understood themselves and how they understood gender. And I like to think of them as not going back to becoming a woman, but just kind of continuing on their gender journey to do the next thing that felt right to them at that phase in their life. And they were a phenomenal, interesting person who was poor also. And their poverty motivated a lot of these choices. The decision to fight for back pay is because their family was impoverished. The decision to sign off on the biography with Herman Mann was because they were impoverished and to get some money and to also get some favor for their petition before Congress to get a pension. The decision to go out on a tour, a speaking tour, to promote the book and their life, they were also unique to.

QBPoH:
[56:06] I think they’re worthy of our interest, even though a lot of us have really ambivalent feelings about the uplifting of this person because of the way they are uplifted. But talking about the motivations for pursuing her pension later on, you can’t help but notice that she also got an enlistment bonus or enlistment bounty. There’s financial motivations on all sides of the story. One of the challenges for historians of gender and sexuality is that a lot of us are motivated by multiple things. Some of Samson’s early biographies and a lot of people who encounter records of sailors and soldiers, say, yes, they were likely motivated by the financial opportunity that was denied women at that time, which seems obvious. I would never deny that. But then they also often say, and there’s no way they were a lesbian, and there’s no way they were transgender. So there’s been this pitting of these two motivations against each other, which we actually don’t have evidence for and seems counterproductive, but I think it’s one of the reasons why there’s this rupture in the historical memory between these two camps. Patriotism, yes, and with financial motives, and that that is incommensurate with any possible gender or sexual variance.

QBPoH:
[57:35] And I think that’s interesting, too. Looking at the man memoir, and I wish I had it in front of me to quote, but they’re saying she was so good at being a woman that she cast aside her womanly desires. You see this narrative making happening in real time there where it’s like, don’t think too hard about the gender parts of this. Think about how patriotic it is. And it shows, I think, how dangerous it could be to think about the gender and to think about what could happen if there were more Samsons out there, and how that would upset the order of the new nation, that sort of thing, which I think is something we don’t talk a ton about either. Yeah, that book had a particular agenda, and so it had to balance a lot of competing needs, including.

QBPoH:
[58:23] Acknowledging that this happened. And it’s kind of the key moment that even makes this a story, but without giving it too much validity, on its own terms, because then it would potentially undermine the claim and the desire.

QBPoH:
[58:41] For respectability. But there are other newspaper accounts that come much earlier, which are actually really interesting and more engaged with how they managed to pull this off. There’s this one, it’s part of a feminist history series, and it’s one of the accounts that offers really specific details like, well, you know, Deborah Sampson was taller than the average woman. Deborah Sampson grew up working on a farm, was muscular, was comfortable engaging in certain tasks that were then later expected of soldiers. So just really going into detail. And it was really because they weren’t middle class. They weren’t raised in the constraints of white middle class womanhood. And had they been, they probably couldn’t have done this. So those are kind of the records that are the most interesting to me because they’re giving real specific concrete language to, well, what does it take to be a man? What does it take to be a woman? And what are the circumstances of one’s life that make it more or less likely that they could pull this off? Sorry, Jake, chiming in one more time.

QBPoH:
[59:58] All those aspects that she was accustomed to farm labor, that she was tall and muscular. She didn’t just enlist, she got assigned to the Light Infantry, which is a fairly elite unit. They were skirmishers. They were sent out to make contact with the enemy and she saw a lot of action.

QBPoH:
[1:00:14] Good for her. That is a very common narrative in the accounts of other sailors and soldiers as well. How skilled they were at doing the job expected. And predating the Samson Shirtlift story, there are these other sailors and soldiers stories that come out. It feels like there’s this lineage of, this does well for publishing. This is how we share these stories. Here are these very specific, unique individuals. Part of what I find interesting and what I want to tug at is that a lot of the times, at least in my own research, sometimes you’re learning about figures who are transgressing gender and sexuality norms of their times, and all you have is their name because they were arrested and tried. Or you have some trial records, you might have some medical records, but not really anything about how they felt or what they thought or necessarily what anyone other than the people that are prosecuting them thought of them. I think what I’m trying to say is that I really wish that Samson’s memoir gave us more of an insight into those thoughts. And it might be me in 2026 thinking…

QBPoH:
[1:01:29] I’m not asking a good question. I’m just sort of thinking about historical yearning, or something. I think I maybe want to offer you a release from this wish because it’s never going to be fulfilled. And I want to say what the past offers you is so much more interesting than that. We are so trapped by our own notion of like the self and articulation of identity. I do it it’s a big part of my life and i’m exhausted by my own doing of that the past is offering us, so many different kinds of records and ways to hold and grapple with people who did really interesting and in some times unusual things, without that annoying inner monologue, I find it refreshing and liberating, and you might too, because what’s she going to say?

QBPoH:
[1:02:35] If we had one diary entry where she explained, in her most raw, vulnerable voice to say, this is simply who I am and what this means to me, we would have to elevate it above everything else because it would be her voice. Even though it would just be one singular take, it might not be the take that reflected the range and complexity and nuance of her experience or the change over time. But because we have the take, then it’s the take. And we just have to accept it. I mean, it’s kind of who’s making money off of these stories. I think that comes into play with Samson, especially after Samson’s death. The memoir, I think, gets edited again and republished. And so it also becomes part of that cycle of myth-making and storytelling that started with a real live person and then ended up somewhere else. I hear a little a sense of dis-ease with the money-making about these stories. But to me, it’s amazing that these stories were published because it’s this tremendous historic record, however flawed.

QBPoH:
[1:03:47] You know, that gives life to these experiences. So it’s not all that different from some of the media that circulates now that people who are thought to be unusual or eccentric are singled out in the news. And I think one of the things that’s always been interesting to me in doing this research is the tone of the reporting. They’re often neutral. They’re always celebratory, in some way, and they’re sometimes critical, you know, and so kind of what’s the weight of the judgment that’s being circulated or promoted when these narratives are told, but there’s really two main categories of records, and, you know, one is the newspaper. The newspaper accounts often come out right away, and then people realize, oh, there’s a story to tell, I’m going to collect more of the information and I’m going to embellish it and then publish it as a pamphlet or a dime novel or a book. The newspaper records are often very reliable, but also riddled with certain kinds of errors. Even the early accounting of Shurtleff, like the earliest newspaper stories that came out 1784 only use the name Robert Shurtleff.

QBPoH:
[1:05:09] They don’t use the other name, but they get the length of service wrong and the age wrong and, you know, certain facts like this. So there’s just a.

Female Soldier Traditions

QBPoH:
[1:05:22] This quote-unquote female sailor, female soldier genre was a huge tradition in the British press, and there are many examples. They’re written about in newspapers. They’re packaged in these pamphlets. I love the William Chandler story, the female shipwright. I wanted to do a whole dissertation project, but it’s really James Gray, who was mostly, written about as Hannah Snell, who is the female soldier and who the genre is kind of fortified by their existence. And so by the time Deborah Sampson comes around, there’s already a female soldier. And there’s already a book called The Female Soldier. And so most of the elements of, Samson’s life are just versions of what was already described to the very excited, enthusiastic public about James Gray.

QBPoH:
[1:06:26] And there’s a lot of scholarship that looks at them together. But this is also a trend that you see throughout the 18th and 19th century. So stories about Deborah Sampson, you know, kind of pick up again in the context of the Civil War. And there are new accounts of people at that time transing gender and fighting in the war. So then there’s a reference back. So in the Deborah Sampson accounts, there are references back to Hannah Snell, James Gray, William Chandler, in some cases, Joan of Arc. So there’s always an effort to situate these people within a longer historic timeline, which I think is so interesting. And in some ways, it is a form of legitimizing and normalizing. On the one hand, this is extraordinary. On the other hand, this has happened before. That’s super interesting, the idea of sort of legitimizing the idea of the woman soldier who does something dangerous and risky and courageous and, for the war effort, like the underlying kind of nationalism and patriotism that we see when we talk about war in a certain historical context. You basically answered the question that I was going to ask about this around the idea of memorializing or valorizing people whose stories are like this. But until very recently, that was history.

QBPoH:
[1:07:51] History was political history. It’s only been 50 years that social and cultural, history, racial justice, centering women, all of these other, efforts to tell a richer story have gotten space and interest and voice. So the idea that, you know, military figures and anyone attached to a major war are the key figures of history, that is what the field of history was. I think it’s also worth emphasizing how short 50 years is.

QBPoH:
[1:08:33] And that’s something that comes up when Queer History Boston talks about our origins. We’re 1980. It was both so long ago, not that long ago, and we’re still having the same fights about queer and trans history. And I think we have a really potentially big opportunity in looking at the 250th and the attention around the anniversary, but also I think the, animosity and big feelings around what the federal government is trying to do around the 250th, to queer some of this valorization. It’s really important that liberals and feminists and queer people stay engaged with and stake a claim to 250 histories. Yep. We’ve always been here. We’ve always been part of it. If you’re a student of history, you know that there’s always…

QBPoH:
[1:09:21] Ten steps forward, five steps back, there’s a push and a pull. And the movement to tell a more inclusive, humane, just history, we’ve actually done really well in the last 50 years. And while this censorship and erasure and in some cases the circulation of outright lies is, it’s really bad. It’s anti-democratic. It’s against the truth. In some respect, it is a sign of how much we’ve actually achieved. And we just didn’t think that we’d ever have to fight for that again. We thought we were just going to keep going.

QBPoH:
[1:10:03] And now we have to fight for some things that we thought were done. But that’s okay. This period was actually a really important, exciting time of upheaval and contestation and possibility. And a lot of people who were in positions of not having autonomy or control over their lives or their bodies because they were enslaved, or they were married women, or they were poor, were questioning these old hierarchies and fighting back and finding their own voice. So, on the one hand, the political revolution also made space, for other kinds of imaginings that were really, really important, including people transing gender and trying to flee from enslavement or, whether fight in the war or go to sea or just try to make more money. Like, it’s all really exciting, right?

QBPoH:
[1:11:04] We do have a claim to this moment as being a time of possibility and inspiration for queer and trans people. So we owe it to ourselves to dig in and figure out, the feminist, anti-racist, queer, trans threads and actors in this moment because they’re there and they are a really important, vital part of this era of American history.

Queer History Still Matters

QBPoH:
[1:11:37] And Jen is right. Highlighting queer and trans people and our history is a vital part of telling the American story. Although the laws have changed, queer and trans people still face discrimination in all parts of public life. As we document this period of history, there are also trans soldiers today defending America, and they have to make a decision about serving or living as their authentic selves. I’m reminded of Christine Jorgensen, often known as the first public American trans woman. She transitioned after her service in World War II. She came to Boston to perform and to talk about her life in a similar way to how Deborah Sampson gave lectures about her military experience. But because of anti-cross-dressing laws in Boston, she was not allowed to perform. And so instead, Christine Jorgensen took a walk and a photo shoot on the Freedom Trail, where she visited sites like Paul Revere’s house. And how amazing is it that we’re talking about Paul Revere standing up and supporting Deborah Sampson’s petition for a pension in 1804, and in the 1950s, Christine Jorgensen, this trans woman, is coming and literally asserting her place in American history on the Freedom Trail.

QBPoH:
[1:12:49] Even as we make progress there are always obstacles to that progress and looking at our history seeing these moments where people are either explicitly fighting for their right to life liberty and happiness or content to live life the way they wanted to like francis lewis, it’s an important connection to make as we do the work ourselves for liberation for all it’s important to remember those who came before us who opened the door or started down the path that we’re on today, those who we can find strength and inspiration from as we continue this fight ourselves.

QBPoH:
[1:13:24] It’s difficult to hold, at least in my mind, how in 2026 we’re celebrating the service of Deborah Sampson, this first woman to receive a military pension who also cross-dressed in order to serve her country, while watching this backsliding in progress for rights for queer and trans people in America happen at the same time. But even as we look back, we look forward, and we continue the fight. I’ll see you in episode two, where we’ll move from one revolution to another, from the American Revolution to the Second Great Awakening. We’ll talk about the 19th century transcendentalists and the social movements they championed, alongside the personal journeys through sexuality and gender that some key figures, like Louisa May or Lou Alcott, experienced. Transcendentalism is super queer. You’re gonna love it. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast app of choice. Please leave a rating or a comment to help other listeners discover the show, or just tell a friend. Word of mouth is the best marketing. You can find more of our work on YouTube or Instagram, where we are at Queer History Boston, or on our website, queerhistoryboston.org. Big thanks to our guests in this episode, JL Bell and Jen Mannion. Additional thanks to the Queer History Boston Podcast Working Group for their feedback and encouragement. The executive producer for this series is Jake Scogniers for Hub History Studios.

QBPoH:
[1:14:51] I’m your host and producer, Joan Alacqua. And thank you again, Mass Humanities, for supporting this work.

Outro and Where to Find It

Jake:
[1:15:06] So that was the first episode of Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness, which is the mystery project I’ve been teasing for months now here on Hub History. I’m really excited and proud of the work that we’ve done in episode one. I hope that you will all go over to Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness and subscribe to that show. And just to remind us once again how you can find out more about Queer History Boston and the new podcast, I’m bringing back Joan Ilacqua.

Joan Ilacqua:
[1:15:33] Hi, I’m back. Best place to find info about us? QueerHistoryBoston.org. We have a podcast page, actually, that is QueerHistoryBoston.org slash podcast. But you can follow us on social media. We are at Queer History Boston everywhere. And feel free to subscribe on your podcast app of choice.

Jake:
[1:15:52] Thanks for coming back for the outro, Joan. And thank you so much for sharing Queer Boston’s Pursuit of Happiness with our listeners.

Joan Ilacqua:
[1:15:59] Absolutely. Thank you for having me and thank you for all of your work.

Jake:
[1:16:03] That’s all for now stay safe out there listeners.