Leon Belmont: Gender and Celebrity in Minneapolis in 1880 (episode 108)
In 1880, a court case rocked Minneapolis society, and ruled the newspaper headlines. It was the case of Leon Belmont, a man accused of fraud. Authorities claimed that he was a woman wearing men’s clothing, passing herself off as a man. Why so much uproar over this particular case? And was it for the reasons we’d expect?
Historian and host Dr. Chantel Rodríguez explores what life looked like in late 1800s Minneapolis, why fraud might’ve been top of mind, and how historians make responsible histories. To get more insight into these questions and more, Chantel sat down with public historian Lizzie Ehrenhalt and PhD candidate Myra Billund-Phibbs.
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Transcripts
Guests
Lizzie Ehrenhalt
Lizzie Ehrenhalt is a public historian. Her book about Leon Belmont (Romantic Sensation: The Queer Lives of Leon Belmont, 1853–1927) will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2026.
With Tilly Laskey she is the co-editor of Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890–1918 (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2019).
She has edited MNopedia, the digital encyclopedia produced by the Minnesota Historical Society, since 2013.
Myra Billund-Phibbs
Myra Billund-Phibbs is a historian, library worker, and PhD student at the University of Minnesota interested in the relationship between people’s social and sexual lives, legal and political advocacy, and psycho-medical entanglements in 20th century American cities.
She was previously Project Manager of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, an archivist for the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies and Hennepin County Library Special Collections, and presenter on LGBT histories in the Upper Midwest.
She is the author of the only published article on the University of Minnesota’s mid-century transgender surgical program and a recipient of the LGBTQ+ History Association’s Estelle Freedman Award.
Primary Sources
“The Belmont Mystery.” Minneapolis Tribune, November 12, 1880.
“In Disguise: The Curious and Romantic Sensation that was Developed in the City Yesterday Afternoon.” Minneapolis Tribune, October 30, 1880.
“A Double Character.” St. Paul Daily Globe, October 31, 1880.
“A Female Man at Large.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 30, 1880.
“Mary Belmont.” St. Paul Daily Globe, November 4, 1880.
“Who Is She?” Minneapolis Tribune, November 1, 1880.
Secondary Sources
Bayker, Jesse. “Before Transexuality: Transgender Lives And Practices in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD diss., Rutgers University, May 2019.
——— . “Regulating Public Gender and the Rise of Cross-Dressing Laws.” In Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, edited by Jen Manion and Nicholas L. Syrett. Cambridge University Press, preprint, submitted in 202.
Boag, Peter. Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. University of California Press, 2011.
Cleves, Rachel Hope. “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 27, no. 1 (January 2018): 34.
Halberstam, Jack. “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton and Transgender Biography.” Auto/Biography Studies 15, no. 1 (2000): 68.
Heyam, Kit. “‘A Feminine Soul Confined by a Masculine Body’: The Entangled History of Gay and Trans Experience.” In Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Seal Press, 2022), 112–136.
Larson, Scott. “Laid Open: Examining Genders in Early America.” In Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska (Cornell University Press, 2021), 350–365.
Mak, Geertje. Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories. Manchester University Press, 2012.
Malatino, Hil. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
——— . “Something Other Than Trancestors: History Lessons.” In Trans Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 47–59.
Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Maude, Ilya. “‘Selective Historians’: The Construction of Cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist Texts.” Gender & History 36, no. 1 (March 2024): 37.
Pyle, Kai. “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 574–588.
Reis, Elizabeth. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Skidmore, Emily. True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York University Press, 2017.
Thomas, Morgan. “A Snapshot Diagnosis.” Guernica, September 13, 2022.
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