An Unforgettable Transgender Trendsetter

Lobdell had lived a hard existence since starting a new life, wearing men’s clothes and a stovepipe hat. He embarked on a number of ventures, from establishing a singing school in Bethany, Pennsylvania, to becoming known as “The Slayer of Hundreds of Bears and Wild-Cats” in Meeker County, Minnesota. But in each location, he encountered trouble and was driven out.

In his 30s, Lobdell ended up in a poorhouse in Delhi, New York, where he was forced to dress in women’s clothing. He was “depressed, moody and sullen,” the New York Times would later write. That is, “until Marie entered about a year later, when [Joe] became the most cheerful person in the place.” Joe Lobdell met Marie Louise Perry at that poorhouse in 1860 and his life was forever changed.

While most scholars of queer history focus on Joe Lobdell’s status as a transgender trendsetter more than a century ago, his relationship with Marie Louise Perry merits its own digression. “When I look at the story, I see it as this epic love story that is just riddled with all these adventures and drama,” says Bambi Lobdell, Joe’s great-great-granddaughter and author of his biography, “A Strange Sort of Being.”

After leaving the poorhouse together, Lobdell and Perry embarked on a whirlwind life of living off the land (and changing locations whenever Lobdell’s sex was inevitably discovered). Early in 1862, the two moved to Whitman, Massachusetts, living on Perry’s father’s estate. Lobdell was considered a hard worker who dressed well and was “very masculine,” says Bambi, who adds, “It seems he was a flirt with the ladies, causing Marie some jealousy.”

Eventually, Perry’s family, who disapproved of their relationship, grew suspicious of Lobdell’s sex and had him arrested. In a sign of the times to come, it would require many letters to the governor before Lobdell would be released.

The scant accounts of Lobdell and Perry’s life together provide a glimpse into the reality of a queer couple trying to survive in difficult times. While in Pennsylvania, the two were called the “Romantic Paupers.” A party of fishermen discovered them living in a cave in Barrett township, and soon after, Lobdell — calling himself “Reverend” — appeared in a nearby village with his wife and a bear cub, preaching a gospel of “the new dispensation” while passing his hat around for donations.

In the fall of 1871, Lobdell, now 42, was found on the doorstep of a gentleman named E.O. Ward of Bethany, Pennsylvania, singing and dancing in scandalous fashion. Lobdell was later seen climbing and kissing the statue of a local Civil War hero, before terrorizing a class full of schoolchildren the next day. Held in a local jail, he sang bawdy songs and tore his garments from inside his prison cell.

From outside the prison, his loyal wife penned a letter — written with a whittled stick and the juice of scavenged pokeberries — to the local judge begging for his freedom. It was neither the first time Lobdell had caused a disturbance nor the first time his wife had to plead for his release. In fact, Lobdell was a regular in the newspapers — often under headlines like “The Female Hunter,” “The Wild Woman of Meeker County” and “The Lady in Pantaloons.”

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There has been some debate in scholarly circles as to whether Lobdell was transgender or a lesbian woman living a masculine lifestyle. Bambi Lobdell rejects the notion that Joe was a lesbian or bisexual. Joe told a doctor, “I may be a woman in one sense, but I have peculiar organs that make me more a man than a woman.” This doctor also noted that the patient had “an enlarged clitoris” (which suggests he was either hermaphroditic or that his sex may have been misidentified at birth).

Lobdell was sent to the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Ovid, New York, in 1880. Misled by a lie that he was dead, Perry returned to her family in Massachusetts … but not before publishing a letter to the editor in the Wayne County Herald arguing that women needed the right to vote if male politicians wouldn’t give them adequate work to support themselves. At the asylum, Lobdell told his doctor that he “had not experienced connubial content with [his] husband, but with [his] late companion nuptial satisfaction was complete.”

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