The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Abstract

Historian Peter Boag reflects on the methodological, linguistic, and historiographical difficulties, limitations, and breakthroughs he experienced while researching and writing his book Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). He also describes the ways journalists and dime novel authors, as well as historians and scientists, expunged from the story of the Old West the troubling gender and sexual identities associated with cross-dressing, as those story-tellers went about creating a myth of a wholly heterosexual American frontier at the turn of the twentieth century.