Author Earl Lind, whose works shed light on the transgender experience in early 20th-century America, kept his true identity so deeply concealed that his real name is still hidden nearly a century after he published his memoirs. Thanks to a public-health researcher, however, another mystery surrounding the author has been solved.
Dr. Randall Sell, associate professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, recently stumbled upon 35 pages of a third volume of Lind’s memoirs, long considered lost by LGBT historians.
Sell himself had been hunting for years for the lost “Riddle of the Underworld,” which Lind advertised when he published his first two memoirs, “Autobiography of Androgyne” and “The Female Impersonators,” but which never made it to print. Unexpectedly, Sell happened upon a part of the book while researching Dr. Victor Robinson, a sexologist in the 1930s and ’40s, at the National Library of Medicine.
“I almost had a heart attack. That’s not what I was looking for, so it was amazing,” Sell said. “There are many places you could look for these chapters but in Victor Robinson’s papers? That’s not a logical place, and it was sort of odd that they were there. I never in my life fathomed that there was a connection between Victor Robinson and Earl Lind, but I guess there weren’t many people doing sexology work back then so they probably all knew each other and that’s how this got passed along.”
Sell’s find includes a prologue and four chapters, as well as a six-page contract dated from 1921 between the author and Robinson for the work to be published in the journal “Medical Life.”
Sell contacted gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz, who published the documents on his website OutHistory.org, which went live Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day.
Ted Faigle, program manager at Drexel’s Program for LGBT Health, transcribed the documents that were discovered, which he said was a challenging feat.
“He was writing on a manual typewriter of course, and he scratched through things, wrote in between the margins and down the side of the page, so all of that had to be processed so we could figure out if he was changing the meaning of things or adding things,” Faigle said. “And we’re not even sure if all of the notes were his or if an editor or someone wrote some of it because, since it was never published, we don’t know how far this got in the editorial process.”
In “Riddle of the Underworld,” Lind, who also went by the names Ralph Werther and Jennie June, describes himself as “bisexual,” although the term does not appear to refer to the modern conception of the word.
“I was brought into the world as one of the very rare humans who possess a strong claim, on anatomic grounds as well as psychic, to membership in both the sexes,” Lind wrote in the introduction. “I was foreordained to live part of my life as a man and part as woman.”
“He wasn’t using that word the way we think of it today,” Sell said. “He was using it to mean this combination of genders. He saw himself as both male and female.”
The several chapters that were discovered provide an overview of Lind’s views on androgyny and explore some of his experiences as a “female impersonator” traversing what he calls the “Underworld,” the underground communities that exist out of the spotlight of society.
Lind wrote that he carried out the “necessary” public life as a man, but about one night a week for six years he went out in New York City as “Jennie June,” a more fulfilling experience than his everyday life.
“Under that name and as a representative of the gentle sex, my personality had a tremendously more remarkable career in its journey through life than that achieved in New York’s Overworld,” Lind wrote.
One of Lind’s chapters explores the practice of voyeurism, and Sell said he suspects the successive sections that are still missing are each devoted to a separate facet of Lind’s “Underworld.”
“What we found is the first few parts of it, and I think all but one would have been the introduction and the first few chapters, which were all about himself,” Sell said. “But the part on voyeurism I think is an example of what the other chapters were going to be like, each talking about these things that go on under the general radar of society.”
Sell said “Riddle of the Underworld” puts into perspective just how troubling life must have been for transgender individuals in the early 20th century.
“Imagine being a transgender person back then,” he said. “We have terms and language today that probably still aren’t perfect and may be inadequate, but back then there was nothing. These people were just sort of wandering through life trying to figure out what’s going on and if they’re the only person like this.”
The fact that Lind’s real name still has yet to be discovered is a testament to how far in the closet he needed to be in order to publish his works, Sell said.
“No one knows who he is. There’s even the contract that we found, and his real name isn’t on that. There are no hints,” Sell said. “He talks about his jobs, what he did, where he lived, times he was arrested, all of these things that should help us to figure out who he was and no one has been able to yet. He was probably a student at Columbia University, but that’s it. This was an amazing, interesting, fascinating individual who wrote about his life at a time when so few other people were daring to because of the dangers that existed for them.”
As much as the transgender community has been able to come out of the shadows in the last century, Sell noted that Lind’s text also describes issues that are still impacting the LGBT population.
In a section titled “The Boy is Father to the Man,” in which Lind describes long struggling with his assigned sex, he makes a plea, typed in all capital letters, for protection for questioning youth.
“I beg all adults, particularly school officials, to be extraordinarily charitable and sympathetic with girl-boys and others sexually abnormal by birth who may seem to have lost their senses,” Lind wrote. “Guard against doing anything that would lead the disgraced to commit suicide, which even is fairly common among these ‘stepchildren of nature.’”
Sell said the references to LGBT suicide should particularly resonate with a modern audience after the spate of recent youth suicide apparently motivated by antigay taunting.
“I think if the typewriter could have bolded and underlined this back then, he would have,” Sell said. “He’s telling these educators that they have to understand that these kids are in your schools and you have to protect them. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about today. He was talking about it 90 years ago, and what scares me is that we could still be talking about it 90 years from now. You can look through history and we keep repeating the same mistakes. The same issues are going to keep coming up if we don’t address them.”
Faigle agreed that Lind’s commentary on youth suicide is a very sobering passage.
“This was 100 years ago and people have been making these appeals and calling attention to this problem over and over and over again and somehow the message still isn’t getting through,” he said. “When you have five or six or seven suicides in a row, it makes you feel like we’ve failed. It’s good to know what our history is and how much it’s changed, but it’s also hard to bear the burden of feeling like we haven’t been able to do anything about this yet.”
Sell noted that the eventual recovery of the rest of “Riddle of the Underworld” may provide even more insight into the LGBT community’s history.
“People truly can’t understand where we are right now if we don’t now where we came from,” he said. “I’m amazing and thrilled that I found this, but I think someone might know where the rest of it is. It’s weird to say that we just discovered this, because actually Victor Robinson had discovered it and I’m sure others saw it and didn’t know what it was. So maybe someone has seen it and not known what it is. It’s going to take a lot of people out there looking for this.”
To access the transcription and photos of the original “Riddle of the Underworld,” visit www.outhistory.org/wiki/Exhibits.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].