LGBTQ history Archives - Not Even Past

A (Queer) Rebel Wife In Texas

In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her May 25, 1852 wedding to aspiring attorney William H. Neblett, however, lend an entirely different type of insight into the “rebel wife’s” intimate affairs, one that unearths a wealth of decidedly queer complexity.

Book cover of A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr — *A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864* edited by Erika L. Murr

The bulk of these missives were penned by sisters Sallie and Amanda Noble, childhood friends of Neblett residing at the time in Houston. Much of the correspondence between the Noblewomen and Neblett gestures toward an increasingly sapphic sociality. On September 12, 1851, for instance, Sallie writes to Neblett to divulge that she “was feeling in a funny mood [that] morning [and] could think of no better business than to trouble [Lizzie] with a few of my funny thoughts . . . . I told Amanda a few minutes ago that . . . I was going to do just as I pleased [and] I did not care what people said [or] thought…Did you ever have such feelings Lizzie?” Noble does not elaborate on just what kinds of things she intended to “do . . . as [she] pleased,” but later in this same letter, Sallie assures Neblett that despite persistent rumors that she is soon to be wed, “I have not the most distant idea of getting married soon.”

Ten days later, Sallie’s sister Amanda sends Neblett a note inquiring “what [had] become of [the] Angel of a beauty you [Lizzie] described to us some time since. Is she up there [in Anderson] still?” before adding, “I am happy to know that you have some one or two up there with whom you can be intimate, girls I mean.”

Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress

While both messages suggest something of a queer kinship between long-time companions, with the Nobles detailing their own disinterest in the prospect of marriage and asking after Lizzie’s Anderson dalliances, Amanda’s letters, in particular, indicate that she and Neblett’s relationship may have constituted what we might now term a romantic friendship. This is evident beginning with Noble’s July 14 admission that “many many have been the times that I’ve wished myself in Anderson with you [Lizzie]—how we would ramble and frolic through the woods—leave our clothes off of us, and many other amusing things, which would be a sunny spot in our lives.”

The tone of Noble’s dispatches becomes more clandestine near the close of 1851. On November 8, Amanda wrote to report that, “when Pa gave me your letter, I was all anxiety to know the contents, so much so, that I could scarcely contain myself. Having hid myself where none could disturb or molest, I sat me down, and there silently and alone communed with my Lizzie.” This desire for seclusion is reflected in Noble’s decision to sign this letter simply “A.,” though similarities in handwriting and content between this and previous writings confirm Amanda as its author. The rest of the missive seems to reveal that the two women have had some kind of falling out. Noble writes “As I perused line after line [of Lizzie’s last communication], thoughts of the past came washing with violence, and in a few moments tears came trickling down my cheeks…It pains me when I think that I ever offended one that I love so much as you Lizzie.” Amanda admonishes her friend to “dwell on the pleasures of happiness we’ve had together” rather than her bouts of temper, and adds that “the past, though [infused] with the bitter, has also its share of the sweet.”

Image of part of the "Dear Lizzie" letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851) — “Dear Lizzie” letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)

Revisiting her earlier fantasy, Noble tells Neblett that “it appears to me if I were with you that something would quicken my languid imagination. We would ramble over the woods, build fires, and roast potatoes again, and perform many wondrous exploits. Lizzie, I so sincerely wish I were with you, but how I shall get there, I know not . . . I will not ‘give it up so’—perhaps fate will yet smile on [us].”

It is unclear, though, whether that was to be the case. Shortly after the writing of this letter, Lizzie was wed and embarked on a new, ultimately trying chapter of her life—marked by war, motherhood, violence, and loss. And, despite earlier protestations to the contrary, the years following Lizzie’s marriage found both Sally and Amanda Noble following suit, with the former marrying a John Kennard in 1855 and the latter marrying Henry White in 1856. Years later, however, Neblett still seemed to maintain a nostalgic fondness for the confidantes of her maiden days, journaling of a sick and seemingly dying Amanda in 1863, “she is not long for this world—[but] she ought to live, for she has always managed to extract much sweetness from life.”

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Bibliography

A. to Lizzie Scott, November 8, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Benowitz, June Melby. “Neblett, Elizabeth Scott.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed February 11, 2020: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fne28.
Neblett, Elizabeth Scott, and Erika L. Murr. A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, July 14, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, September 22, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Noble, Sallie to Lizzie Scott, September 12, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

You might also like:
Rage and Resistance at Ashbel Smith’s Evergreen Plantation
Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation
White Women and the Economy of Slavery

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.

By Lauren Gutterman

At first look, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of the 1950s wife and mother. In 1947, at age eighteen, Barbara met and married a sailor who had recently returned home from the war. The couple bought a house in suburban Norwalk, California and had two daughters. While her husband financially supported the family, Barbara joined the local Democratic club and the PTA. Yet beneath the surface, Barbara’s picture-perfect life was more complicated. Soon after marrying, Barbara realized she had made a mistake. She called her mother asking to return home, but was told, “You’ve made your bed. Lie in it.” Divorce was not an option, so Barbara persevered. Eventually, through the PTA she met Pearl, another wife and mother who lived only a few blocks away. Though Barbara had never before been conscious of same-sex desires, she thought Pearl “the most gorgeous woman in the world” and fell madly in love. In an oral history interview recorded years later, Barbara could not recall exactly how it happened, but somehow she was able to tell Pearl that she loved her and the women began an affair that continued for more than a decade.

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage centers on women like Barbara who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desires in the second half of the twentieth century. Many—if not most—women who experienced lesbian desires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were married at some point, yet this population has been neglected in histories of gay and lesbian life, as well as histories of marriage and the family. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1989, Her Neighbor’s Wife is the first historical study to focus on the personal experiences and public representation of wives who sexually desired women. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs and letters, the book documents the lives of more than three hundred wives of different races, classes, and geographic regions. These women serve as a unique lens through which to view changes in marriage, heterosexuality, and homosexuality in the post-World War II United States.

To a remarkable degree, the wives in this study were able to create space for their same-sex desires within marriage. Historians have typically categorized men or women who passed as straight while secretly carrying on gay or lesbian relationships as leading “double lives.” This concept may describe the experiences of married men who had anonymous homosexual encounters far from home, but it fails to capture the unique experiences of married women who tended to engage in affairs with other wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: at church, at work, or in their local neighborhood. Barbara and Pearl, for instance, lived mere blocks away from each other. They socialized together with their husbands and children, went on trips together, and even ran a business together for many years. While LGBT history has focused on queer bars in urban spaces, many wives who desired other women found ample opportunity to engage in sexual relationships with other women in their own homes in their husbands’ absence. Some of these men remained unaware of their wives’ same-sex relationships, but others chose to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs and waited for them to pass.

Alma Routsong and her family in a press photo for her novel Round Shape, 1959. Routsong carried on a relationship with another woman for a year in Champaign, Illinois, in the early 1960s before divorcing her husband. Curt Beamer for the News-Gazette. (From the Isabel Miller Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries.)

Lesbian history has highlighted the politically radical implications of love and sex between women, but married women’s same-sex affairs did not always function as a type of resistance to or protest against the institutions of heterosexuality and marriage. In some cases, engaging in same-sex relationships within marriage propelled women to identify as lesbians and to leave their marriages. This was a path, and a choice, that became increasingly available to (and expected of) women across this book’s time period as divorce became more common, and gay and lesbian activists challenged the stigmatization of homosexuality. However, many wives’ ambivalence about labeling themselves or their affairs as lesbian, and their refusal to divorce well into the 1980s and beyond, challenge a simplistic interpretation of such wives’ desires and identities. While the emergence of no-fault divorce, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism made it possible for many wives to leave unhappy marriages and build new lives with other women, others experienced the growing division between married and lesbian worlds as constraining, as forcing a choice they did not have to make before.

Della Sofronski dressed for a neighborhood Halloween party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which she and her lover attended in costume as husband and wife, ca. 1945. (From the private collection of Kenneth Sofronski.)

Barbara and Pearl’s story reveals how women responded differently to the social and cultural transformations of the 1970s. During their many years together, Barbara and Pearl had secretly planned to leave their marriages once their children were grown. Around 1970, when Barbara was forty and her daughters were in high school, she decided she was ready to leave her marriage and begin her life with Pearl. But Pearl did not want to divorce. She was ill at the time and worried about losing health insurance if she left her husband, a man Barbara described as “a sweet guy.” So Pearl remained married, and Barbara divorced. “I went to Chuck Kalish and said, ‘I’m going.’ And I went,” she recalled. By this time Barbara had discovered the Star Room, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles. In fact, Barbara invested some of her own money in the bar, making her a part owner, and when she left her marriage she moved into a house directly behind the bar where she easily embarked on a new lesbian life. “I was in hog heaven,” Barbara later said.

Like Barbara and Pearl, the wives described in Her Neighbor’s Wife made a range of choices over the course of their lives. Some ended their lesbian relationships and remained married for good. Some experimented with “open” or “bisexual” marriages in the era of the sexual revolution. Yet others divorced their husbands in order to pursue openly lesbian lives. Whatever paths they took, however, the wives in this study suggest that marriage in the postwar period was not nearly as straight as it seemed.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France (2016)

By John Carranza

In the 1980s, the United States experienced a new disease that seemed to target young, gay men living in New York City and San Francisco. From the beginning, those doctors and scientists willing to treat members of the gay community remained perplexed as to why these men, their ages ranging from their early twenties to their thirties, were falling ill with rare diseases that would not ordinarily affect someone their age. The earliest name given to this new epidemic was gay related immune deficiency (GRID) before it took the name acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), which was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The push for scientific advancement and treatment was not readily available to these young men, and many government officials at the state and national levels refused to acknowledge the epidemic that soon spread across the United States and affected groups other than gay men.

David France’s How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS is a complementary work of history to the 2012 documentary of the same name that documented the early years of the AIDS epidemic to the successful discovery a decade later of combination drug therapies that brought people with AIDS from the brink of death back to life. The main actors in France’s sweeping narrative are a group of men and women who formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, devoted to demanding action from the government and pharmaceutical companies for treatment. Their initiatives were influential in saving thousands of lives by the early 1990s.

ACT-UP buttons from the 1980s (via Wikimedia Commons).

ACT-UP began as an informal group of gay men who were dying of opportunistic infections related to the compromised immune systems associated with AIDS. However, as time went on, the epidemic took more lives and the government remained silent, so they took it upon themselves to learn about their illnesses in order to demand government intervention and the development of medical treatments. In this way, many of them became citizen-scientists. They compiled the scientific data made available to them by competing scientists and used it to educate one another and the government officials that they lobbied. They pushed for medications that would treat their opportunistic infections, as well as the virus that causes AIDS once it was discovered. They were also first in realizing the safe sex might lessen the chances a person had for catching this new and mysterious disease.

635944716875263811-1398634550_fighting-for-our-lives

AIDS activists in the 1980s (Curve Magazine via the Odyssey Online).

France recounts the activism necessary to win visibility not just for gays, but also for other populations who became affected, such as intravenous drug users and women. ACT-UP’s activism undertook public demonstrations as a means of demanding more scientific research, access to drugs, and lower prices for those drugs once they were identified as possible treatments. In its earliest years of activism, the group modeled itself on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s by practicing nonviolent civil disobedience and going into traditionally conservative parts of the United States to educate people. ACT-UP petitioned members of Congress for AIDS funding for research, fought with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow lifesaving drugs onto the market faster, set up needle exchanges for intravenous drug users, and protested on Wall Street. The early stages of ACT-UP’s activism included using the infamous symbol of the pink triangle with SILENCE = DEATH written beneath it, which was made into bumper stickers and posters that could be plastered all over the city, as well as hats and T-shirts. One of the enduring symbols of their activism is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was created in San Francisco to remember the lives lost in the epidemic. It made its first appearance on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1987 when it included more than 1,900 panels.

The AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in 2011 (via Wikimedia Commons).

David France’s book is a great achievement in that he details the events and lives of the people who lived through the AIDS epidemic over the course of approximately thirteen years. France achieves this not simply as a researcher with an eye for historical detail, but also as a person who lived through those events as a journalist. His ability to document the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s resulted in the ability to keenly observe developments while still keeping a certain level of objectivity. France uses extensive archival research, including the papers of the most visible activists and he draws on his own experience. Where possible, France conducted oral interviews with members of ACT-UP who are still alive today. France captures the emotion and frustration of the members of ACT-UP who pushed for access to life saving drugs while negotiating alliances and feuds among members of the group and the scientific community. How to Survive a Plague is essential reading, not only for members of the LGBTQ community, but for everyone who may have been too young or not have been alive during the 1980s and early 1990s when the fight for visibility and medication was still happening. How to Survive a Plague is an excellent example for understanding how activism works, how advocacy for those marginal members of society can be effective, and to show government and public health officials how not to handle a plague.

You may also like:

Joseph Parrott reviews The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson (2006).
Chris Babits explores the Dallas Gay Historic Archives.
Blake Scott reviews AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer (1992).

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

By Christopher Babits

Good historians keep an open mind when doing archival research. Our reading of the relevant literature, not to mention the preliminary research we conduct, provides a general understanding of our topic, but we have to prepare ourselves for surprises. This is the most exciting part of research — examining documents no one has seen and making connections others have not made. Research has a funny way of bringing the unforeseeable into one’s life, though.

green_repository_at_the_national_archives

National Archives (via Wikimedia Commons).

There was little reason I should have anticipated coming across Hitler in my research. I am a historian of the United States and my dissertation examines the history of sexual orientation change therapies from the Second World War into the twenty-first century. A wide-range of stakeholders have practiced, sought out, been forced to undergo, and challenged the ethics of therapeutic practices aimed at changing a person’s homosexuality. Needless to say, researching this topic has brought me into contact with some disturbing history. This has included graphic descriptions of men and women being electrocuted or even lobotomized because of their sexual orientation. I expected to come across these accounts in the archives. They are an integral part of the history I want to tell. Hitler was a different story.

I first came across the infamous German dictator while conducting research in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas. I was going through an extensive LGBT collection and came to a folder devoted to Paul Cameron. In the 1980s, Cameron earned acclaim for being expelled from the American Psychological Association (APA). The reason? He falsified data in order to push an anti-gay agenda. After being expelled from the APA, Cameron doubled his efforts to discredit LGBT activists by continuing to conduct and disseminate research. This included a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.” Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

Envelope from a promotional Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality mailing (via UNT Digital Library).

In “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality,” ISIS included a section with the title “German History Repeats Itself in the U.S.” According to the pamphlet, “gays [in 1920s and 1930s Germany] were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).” The pamphlet continues: “Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe.”

(via Wikimedia Commons)

I had no clue what to think when I first read these sentences. Did I not pay attention in my world history courses? Were my teachers and professors woefully ignorant of the past? I sent pictures of the pamphlet to colleagues who know German history much better than I do. We were all confused. Despite this confusion, I knew that I would not be free from Hitler.

I was proven correct repeatedly as I conducted research at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville. In 1993, Cameron’s organization, now called the Family Research Institute, sent out a newsletter with an article that asked, “Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?” The authors pointed to Samuel Igra’s 1945 work, Germany’s National Vice, as evidence that Hitler was a homosexual artist before rising to power. Other publications, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995), give the same warning: the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals who desired a fascistic takeover of their country. Importantly for my research, proponents of sexual orientation change therapies have referred to not only Cameron’s pamphlets but also the works of Igra and Lively and Abrams. If I truly want to understand the intellectual rationale for sexual orientation change therapies, I had to know how and why someone would want to believe that the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals. But first, I needed to see if there was any historical basis for these accusations.

Nürnberg, Reichsparteitag 1933. Adolf Hitler und Stabschef Röhm.

Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Research into the history of Nazism brought me to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. Röhm, who had convinced Hitler of his political potential in 1919, was homosexual, a fact that Hitler knew about his political and military subordinate. Over the next fifteen years, Hitler and Röhm worked closely as they grew the Nazi Party. Although Röhm and a few other SA leaders were open about their homosexuality, their rise to power was not due to their sexual orientation. What’s more clear, however, is that the downfall of Röhm and the SA prefaced the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In 1934, Hitler, with the help of other aides (like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), orchestrated the arrest of Röhm and other SA leaders because the latter challenged Hitler’s authority. After Röhm was murdered in his prison cell (Hitler gave him the option of taking his own life, which he refused to do), homosexuals became a group targeted by the Nazis. A pink triangle, not a pink swastika, soon singled out (mostly) homosexual males in concentration camps.

Although I was not prepared to find Hitler in the archives, it is clear that people like Cameron had easy-to-discern motivations. They were able to use parts of the past, even if they took liberties with what had happened, to discredit LGBT activists and claims for equality. What better way to do this than compare them to the Nazis?

More by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:
Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy
Review of The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Recent Posts