You tell the stories of so many individuals in The Women’s House of Detention — revisiting names we already know and illuminating the lives of those we might never otherwise have known. What were the stories that surprised, touched, or challenged you the most as you were working on the book?
The ones that surprised me the most were those that felt like outliers. Like the story of Honora, a Black upper-middle-class woman in the 1950s who had been dating other women since she was 13, and had a supportive family and a butch girlfriend she’d been with for years. The social workers are sort of afraid of her almost. They don’t want to offend her. They don’t want to push her on homosexuality, uh, because she is this figure who is beautiful, educated, cultured, experienced, and very knowledgeable about sexuality. She was willing to push back.
Some of the other stories that really surprised me are the stories of women talking about being attracted to trans women before there’s really language for that. You don’t expect that, in the 1930s, a 19-year-old girl would be trying to explain to her social worker that she had read all of these famous 19th-century sexologists and that she dates certain homosexual men whom she uses female pronouns for.
What really makes those documents sing is that it’s not done in a way — like in some television programs or film — where it feels like, oh, we’re just taking our modern queer selves and putting them in period drag. No, these are real people articulating experiences and identities that allow us to see the roots of our experiences in the past. That is exciting and surprising — to see that far from being modern inventions, intersectionality and the vast range of queer experience has always been there. It’s just named in different ways.
Given that these subjects don’t have access to modern identity labels like “gay” or “lesbian” or “transgender” in the ways we understand those terms today, how do you approach the work of telling their stories as a historian of a rather slippery identity?
I always say that my history is materialist, not identitarian. I think that identity is actually a really bad ground from which to try to do historical work. You can never go back to a historical figure and be 100 percent certain that their identity is how we today think of their identity. It’s also too easy to say, “Well, if they just had access to my language, then they would identify how I would identify them.” Historical figures are always more complicated than that.