Various Queer Things

In the mid-1870s the police regularly arrested a person called Jeanne Bonnet who always wore “male attire.” In contrast with DeWolf’s dress reform clothing, Bonnet preferred the stylish “hoodlum” suits worn by the city’s young and rowdy working-class men; with her short hair, narrow build, and a penchant for hard liquor, she regularly moved through city space as a man. Bonnet hung out in the bars and brothels along Dupont Street, befriending Barbary Coast women and persuading at least one local sex worker, Blanche Buneau, to leave prostitution and her exploitative lover. The police arrested Bonnet more than twenty times for cross-dressing and occasionally brought additional charges. For example, when the police realized that the masculine figure drinking at the bar was a woman in men’s clothing, they arrested Bonnet for violating not only cross-dressing law but also the local dive laws that banned women from entering bars. This harassment ended only in 1876, when an unidentified gunman shot and killed Bonnet in Blanche Buneau’s bed. The murder was never solved, and Buneau disappeared from the historical record. [...]

In October 1890 a judge sent Dick/Mamie Ruble to the state insane asylum because of “a hallucination that she should wear men’s clothing and wants legal authority for doing so.” Ruble was arrested for violating cross- dressing law, but the case took a dramatic twist in court, when Ruble refused to identify with available gender categories and explained to the judge, “I’m neither a man nor a woman and I’ve got no sex at all.” While many cross- dressing offenders pled for mercy and claimed their crimes were innocent “pranks,” Ruble challenged the judge to locate femininity on his/her muscular body: “Did you ever see a woman with a hand like that Judge . . . ? Look at that muscle. Oh I tell you I couldn’t pass for a woman anywhere, even if I tried.” Unimpressed by Ruble’s declarations, the judge called in the police surgeon, who referred the case to the Insanity Commission, located in a small basement room in city hall. The two-member commission reviewed the case, declared Ruble insane, and ordered his/her indefinite commitment to the Stockton Asylum, where the admitting doctor noted that Ruble “imagines she is a hermaphrodite. Wears male clothing. Wishes to have legal authority to wear men’s clothing.” Such “evidence of insanity” doomed Ruble to life in the asylum; s/he remained there for eighteen years, until dying from tuberculosis in 1908. [...]

Similarly in 1899 the commission found Sophie Lederer to be insane, noting that the twenty-three-year-old domestic worker “talks irrationally— acts silly and claims to be a boy.” Pohlmann spent two months in the Stockton Asylum before being deported to Germany, while Lederer effectively received a life sentence, dying in the asylum of heart disease in 1908.

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