Unrecoverable Lives: The Supposed Self-Immolation of Thomas Oliver Mapes
A handful of newspaper headlines, all published on the same day in 1951, describe with very little detail the supposed suicide by fire of Thomas Oliver Mapes.[1] Press accounts of his death offer a confusing and implausible order of events: journalists report, for example, that Mapes intentionally lit himself on fire while driving and then crashed his car into a tree. Beyond these articles, there are few records of Mapes’s life and death. Was this a suicide, an accident, or perhaps even a murder? However limited the information in police and coroner reports might have been, they were reportedly lost in a fire.[2] This section thus meditates on how to grapple with unrecoverable histories.
Grasping for Facts
I first learned of Mapes through a single newspaper article on the website of the Digital Transgender Archive.[3] The article stuck out because it was shocking and horrible. The title was “County Woman Kills Herself.” The first line stated, “MUSKEGON. Mich.—(U.P.)— Authorities reported today a 29-year-old woman apparently doused herself with gasoline and died in flames because she feared her masquerade as a man would be betrayed.”
Further research in U.S. Selective Service records led me to a draft card showing that Mapes registered for the army as a man in September 1943.[4] It appears that Mapes was responding to the sixth draft call of World War Two, which began in late 1942. Had Mapes been born two weeks later, he would not have been subject to this final draft. Of course, that Mapes was born female also exempted him from the call. The U.S. government did not have a list of men who were to be drafted into the armed services. Rather, men were required to register themselves in response to the call. Presumably Mapes registered either because he wanted to join the military or because he experienced some social or legal pressure to do so because he presented as a man.
The words “Cancelled 10-15-43” are written across the card in red ink.[5] Draft cards could be cancelled due to deferment, exemption, voluntary enlistment, shifting military needs, or death. It is also possible that at some point during the draft process, such as the mandatory physical examination, Mapes’s assigned sex was discovered. In any case, there is no record that Mapes ever served in the armed forces, but the 1950 U.S. Census shows him still living “as a man” on his grandfather’s farm seven years later.[6]
Upon further scrutiny, the articles describing Mapes’s death offer a confusing account of the events. I question how the police were able to identify Mapes as the person born “Myrtle Olive Mapes”; the reasons for Mapes’s bizarre suicide note; and how exactly Mapes carried out his supposed suicide. According to two newspaper accounts, Mapes’s body was burned so badly that it could not be identified when firemen pulled it from the car.[7] The car’s paperwork and Mapes’s personal identification were said to have been destroyed in the fire.[8] This left local sheriffs to track his vehicle’s registration, which listed “Thomas Oliver Mapes” as the registrant. Yet somehow, between Mapes’s death after midnight and the newspapers’ print time that morning, local authorities figured out Mapes’s “masquerade.” How could this have been confirmed in the middle of the night if no one on the scene knew Mapes?
There is also the issue of Mapes’s suicide note. Sheriff officers told the press that Mapes visited a friend on the afternoon of his death and left a suicide note addressed to a local doctor. The friend described Mapes, whom he knew as Tom, as “afraid” and “despondent” when he arrived that day.[9] Mapes allegedly divulged that he “had an awful fight with [his] girl friend” and she was threatening to reveal that he was assigned female at birth. Mapes gave his friend the letter and explained, “Don’t open this unless I don’t come back.”[10] Other sources report that Mapes asked for his friend to mail the letter if he failed to return, not open it. The only direct quotations shared from the letter are that Mapes was “tired of living” and felt that he “wasn’t doing any good.”[11]
It seems odd for someone to leave a suicide note with a doctor who had no known relationship to the deceased. It is possible that this doctor was one of the few people who knew of Mapes’s assigned gender and had been supportive of his transition. As often as doctors from this time rejected their patients’ pleas for help to medically transition, a few assisted their trans patients in accessing care by contacting experts in trans medicine for advice or suggesting that their patients solicit this information themselves.[12] It is also possible the two were personally close, even if there is no record of that relationship. It is unusual, however, to leave a suicide note for one’s doctor, opening the possibility that this was not a suicide note. Mapes’s directive that his friend was to mail the letter only if he did not return is also curious. This request might indicate that Mapes was unsure himself about whether he would be coming back. Perhaps Mapes was undecided about killing himself, or maybe he was afraid of someone else harming him.
Based on the available press accounts, it is also unclear exactly how Mapes ended his life. Mapes’s car was discovered ablaze and upside down in a ditch. A gas can was found in the front seat of the vehicle, and police said the interior of the car was “doused with gasoline.”[13] The official narrative of events is that Mapes both lit himself on fire and crashed his vehicle intentionally, meaning that he either lit himself on fire while driving or did so after he turned upside down and crash landed in the ditch. Both possibilities—striking the fatal match while driving or just after such a significant collision—are awkward at best and improbable at worst.
While the newspaper accounts treat Mapes’s manner of suicide as an obvious choice for someone “masquerading,” I think it deepens the mystery surrounding his death. Self-immolation is most often associated with political protest, having been linked to some of the most well-known political events in history. Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in Saigon in 1963 to deplore the religious persecution of monks by the South Vietnamese government, which culminated in the murder of hundreds of Buddhists. In 2010, the series of democratic revolutions known as the Arab Spring were begun by the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in protest of police brutality. More recently, on February 25, 2024, U.S. military service member Aaron Bushnell set himself ablaze in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As he burned, Bushnell screamed, “Free Palestine!”
Why might Mapes have chosen this visceral and agonizing form of suicide in the absence of any apparent political motive? Journalists at the time suggested that he was trying to erase evidence of his “masquerade”—his body. This version of the story indicates that historical invisibility might have been a privileged or aspirational position for transmasculine people in the mid-twentieth century.[14] But since the details of Mapes’s death do not fit neatly together, and because no more information is available, it is also possible that Mapes was killed for his gender nonconformity, a romantic relationship, or some combination of the two.
Grappling with What Has Been Lost
In his 2000 book about gay and lesbian history in Philadelphia, Marc Stein expresses skepticism about LGBTQ discourses of “erasure.” He argues, for example, that tropes of “lesbian erasure” in the 1950s and 1960s are not always accurate or useful. In his research, Stein addresses a 1967 local magazine article about lesbians entitled “The Invisible Sorority,” demonstrating that discussions of erasure are themselves a form of visibility.[15] I take this to imply that addressing the ways in which transmasculine people are erased, as this exhibit aims to do, becomes one way that transmasculine people can be seen: exposing our erasure becomes, paradoxically, a kind of visibility. In this case, first, Thomas Mapes was not completely erased. If he had been, I could not write about him here. Second, bringing attention to where and why he was erased makes his life visible in new ways.
In her seminal article on the lost histories of enslaved people, Saidiya Hartman writes, “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.”[16] Mapes’s death was not widely noticed in a national or historical sense. But his death was noticed on smaller scales. I have spoken to his living relatives, who still avoid the pain that the precise description of what happened to him might invite. They offer a family history of intersex conditions and deep traumas as possible explanations for Mapes’s unorthodox life. I balance these stories with Hartman’s warning not to try and fill in the gaps of histories that are unrecoverable, as well as her encouragement to grapple with the discomfort of a lost life, and, in Mapes’s case, a lost death. Hartman’s work urges us to sit with both presence and absence, both historical visibility and erasure. Hartman also, controversially, seeks to recover some of what appears lost through her method of critical fabulation: in the simplest of terms, she suggests using historical context to ask, “What might have been?” In this vein I ask whether locals could have discovered that Mapes was assigned female and sought to punish him for his gender transgression? Or could an enraged husband, boyfriend, brother, or father have learned of a romantic relationship with the “girl friend” Mapes mentioned? It is impossible to know, but transmasculine people have long been vulnerable to violence.
[1] “5 Year Pose as Man Ends in Suicide,” The Herald-Palladium (Benton Harbor, MI), January 29, 1951; “County Woman Kills Herself,” Manistee News Advocate, January 29, 1951; “Flames Kill Woman Masquerading as Man,” Courier-Post (Camden, N.J.), January 29, 1951; “Takes Life in Flaming Auto,” The Herald-Press (Saint Joseph, MI), January 29, 1951; “Woman, 29, Burns Self to Death,” Detroit Free Press, January 29, 1951; “Woman Commits Suicide by Setting Car On Fire,” Lansing Journal, January 29, 1951; “Woman’s Suicide Ends Masquerade,” Battle Creek Enquirer, January 29, 1951.
[2] In January 2024, I sought records related to Mapes’s death. My Michigan Freedom of Information Act requests to the Muskegon County District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Office were both denied, with both offices citing a lack of records from that far in the past. I called the medical examiner of Muskegon County and was told that records from the 1950s had been lost in a fire.
[3] "County Woman Kills Herself.”
[4] Mapes registered for the draft as Myrtle Mapes, since Myrtle was sometimes, although rarely, used as a man’s name during this period. However, he changed his middle name from “Olive” to “Oliver.”
[5] “WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940–03/31/1947,” September 14, 1943, Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box 747, National Archives at St. Louis, Missouri.
[6] “1950 United States Federal Census,” 1950, National Archives at Washington, DC.
[7] “Woman, 29, Burns Self to Death”; “Woman Commits Suicide by Setting.”
[8] “Woman, 29, Burns Self to Death.”
[9] “Takes Life in Flaming Auto”; Flames Kill Woman Masquerading.”
[10] “Flames Kill Woman Masquerading.”
[11] “Woman’s Suicide Ends Masquerade.”
[12] There are many examples of this in Jules Gill-Peterson’s work on medical archives during this period. See Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
[13] “Takes Life in Flaming Auto.”
[14] Emily Skidmore shows that trans men in the early 20th century were able to find a surprising degree of acceptance in rural communities by integrating into heteronormative social structures, sometimes even experiencing inclusion despite their “true sex” being revealed. Mapes’s experiences both affirm and refute this narrative: he seemed to have lived successfully as a man for a time, but he also experienced a violent death due to fear of his community’s reaction to his gender or because of violence committed by others. See Skidmore, True Sex.
[15] Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
[16] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.