Partner Marie Louise Perry
Queer Places:
Binghamton State Hospital, Binghamton, New York, Stati Uniti
Joseph
Lobdell (born in 1829 as Lucy Ann Lobdell), was a 19th-century person assigned
female at birth who lived as a man for sixty years.[1]
His case is the first use of the word "lesbian" to denote a woman loving woman
- as opposed to someone from the Isle of Lesbo.
20th-century scholars have labeled Lobdell a lesbian; others have argued that Lobdell was really a transgender man.[2] An 1877 New York Times article referred to Lobdell's life as "one of the most singular family histories ever recorded."[3] Writer William Klaber wrote an historical novel, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell,[4] which was based on Lobdell's life.
Lucy Ann Lobdell was born December 2, 1829 to a working-class family living in Westerlo,[5] Albany County, New York. According to an autobiography published in 1855, Lobdell was different from the start, desiring pursuits such as schooling and hunting that were unconventional for young girls. He endured an unhappy marriage to a man (George Slater), who eventually abandoned Lobdell and their young daughter.
Lobdell married George Washington Slater, who was reportedly mentally abusive and abandoned Lobdell shortly after the birth of their daughter, Helen.[1] He lived a transient life for many years, working in various rural communities in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and even as far west as Minnesota.
Lobdell was known for marksmanship and nicknamed "The Female Hunter of Delaware County."[2] He was also known to be an accomplished fiddle player and opened a singing school for a time.[6] Lobdell received a Civil War pension[7] when Slater was killed in the war.[6] By the mid-1860s, Lobdell fell on hard times and sought refuge in the almshouse of Delaware County, New York. It was here that Lobdell met a woman named Mary Louise Perry, and the pair developed a relationship that would last many years. The couple left the almshouse in the late 1860s and traveled throughout the rural areas of Pennsylvania.
Lobdell entered the County Poor House in Delhi, N.Y., in 1860, where he met Marie Louise Penny.[6] He later married Penny in 1861[8] in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. At some point in 1877, Lobdell purchased a small plot of land in Wayne County, Pennsylvania—a plot his brother later characterized as “four or five acres situated near Narrowsburgh in Wayne County Pennsylvania. I don’t think it is worth more than $10. Is a very rocky[,] poor place.” Although this may be read as a sign of the couple’s increasing stability, their legal troubles continued, and in 1880 Lobdell’s brother ordered that Lobdell be tried in an insanity hearing at Delaware County Court.
In 1876 she was arrested as a vagrant and lodged in jail in Pennsylvania. A petition is now on record there from the wife for the release of her husband Joseph Israel Lobdell from prison because of failing health. In compliance with this petition he (or she) was released, and for three years they lived quietly together until she had a maniacal attack that resulted in her committal to the Willard Insane Asylum.”
In 1879, Lobdell was taken away to the Willard Insane Asylum in Ovid, New York.[6] While in the asylum, Lobdell became a patient of Dr. P.M. Wise, who published a brief article "A Case of Sexual Perversion," in which the doctor noted Lobdell said "she considered herself a man in all that the name implies."[9] 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.
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