Factors in Rollin’s Transitions: Rurality
Rollin’s race and socioeconomic class seemed to give him some advantages during his feminine-to-masculine transitions. By contrast, his rurality—that is, his home in the sparsely populated, intimate region of southern Vermont—offered challenges for him, even though it ultimately served him well.
Though cities have long been viewed by scholars as epicenters of queer and trans culture, more recent studies have centered rural queer identities and communities. In works like Men Like That: A Southern Queer History and others, John Howard raises one of the earliest scholarly arguments for considering queer identities and communities—twentieth-century gay men in Mississippi in this case—in the rural milieu.[1] More recent works, including Emily Skidmore’s True Sex[2] and Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History,[3] examine trans lives and communities in rural settings. Both books demonstrate how some trans men willingly and happily blended into small towns by seeking community with cisgender, married couples of similar socioeconomic class and assuming the social and familial roles expected of the masculine gender. Understanding the possibilities and perils of rural queer and trans life is essential to understanding Rollin’s story.
For example, Rollin’s mother Mary’s interview in the Deerfield Valley Times after his first feminine-to-masculine transition indirectly pointed to the loss of privacy Rollin faced as a forcibly outed trans man in rural Vermont. In such a close-knit area, information traveled fast. News of Rollin’s New York City transition hit Vermont on October 12, 1901, likely through the New York Sun. Mary’s interview, published six days later on October 18, indicated that Rollin’s first feminine-to-masculine transition had obsessed the minds and conversations of the Morgans’ regional community. People across the state now knew that Rollin had been “masquerading.” For Mary, this meant that her family’s reputation was impugned. As for Rollin, because so many people knew of his New York City transition, he was now associated in people’s minds with wearing men’s clothes and having a masculine identity. Greater public attention to his trans status threatened his ability to live a private, unmolested life.
The high level of scrutiny in rural communities caused further difficulties for Rollin during his second feminine-to-masculine transition in Brattleboro in 1903. People in the towns of southern Vermont were familiar with each other, and a local with a drastically altered gender presentation could not necessarily blend in unremarked. Aware because of his New York City sojourn that Rollin had a history of socially transitioning, those around him apparently paid more attention to him. Even if Rollin moved to the next county over, as he did for his second feminine-to-masculine transition, he was not free from escalated scrutiny. In fact, while he was working in Brattleboro, an acquaintance of the family recognized Rollin but did not tell his family, suggesting that news of Rollin’s first feminine-to-masculine transition had primed Vermonters, especially those nearby, to watch for his future transitions.[4]
Reaction to Rollin’s second feminine-to-masculine transition showed that members of his local and regional community characterized each other based on a years-long, collective memory of a person’s past actions. They also observed each other’s appearances keenly and added their evaluations to these collectively created histories about a person. Southern Vermont in 1903 had a long communal memory and an attention to novelty, both of which made Rollin’s Brattleboro social transition, in which he endeavored to become just another laborer in Brown’s livery, difficult.
When Rollin came home after his third feminine-to-masculine transition and first marriage in California, Vermonters’ long memories and watchful eyes kept him from going unnoticed. The news coverage in the Bennington Banner, the largest newspaper in the Morgans’ home of Bennington County, clearly delineated how Morgan’s third feminine-to-masculine transition was received in southern Vermont. The article’s concluding sentence—that Rollin was “well known in that section [i.e., the Heartwellville area]” —could have served as a thesis statement for the article. Locals were described as knowing all about Rollin’s actions, including his “alleged” New York City transition, his “sensational” voided marriage, his self-representation as a medical doctor, and his “weird tale” of robbery by masked men in Stamford.[5] These events, qualified with adjectives to make them sound strange, attention-getting, and dubious, formed, in the Banner’s opinion, an obvious pattern of lies and fraud. The Banner article never stated outright that Rollin was a liar and a fraudster but presented his history in loaded language to guide readers to that conclusion. The Banner’s coverage showed a potentially dangerous side of close-knit, small-town life: Rollin could have a reputation of dishonesty and prevarication if he stayed in the area.
Nevertheless, despite the heightened examination he underwent in rural Vermont, Rollin used the setting to his advantage during his fourth feminine-to-masculine transition in Heartwellville in 1910. Public opinion about Rollin in sparsely populated southern Vermont clearly followed what Rollin’s mother and father thought. (When, especially after Rollin’s first two feminine-to-masculine transitions, his parents denied the legitimacy of his masculine identity, local papers followed suit.)
In 1910, Rollin deployed his parents’ influence on local opinion to facilitate acceptance of his fourth feminine-to-masculine transition. Once he received his parents’ support, their approbation prompted their local community to acknowledge and accept him as well. Rollin’s acceptance by his parents conferred broader social respectability on him by extension. Rollin’s accepting parents—yet another source of privilege besides his White race and white-collar socioeconomic class—apparently forced Heartwellville to respect Rollin’s fourth feminine-to-masculine transition.
Rollin’s behavior after his final feminine-to-masculine transition—accepting an officially recorded place in the census as “son” of the family and attending a funeral of a respected citizen with his mother—likely contributed to his acceptance. Skidmore posits that social acceptance of a rural trans man in Rollin’s time depended on his fulfillment of the local community’s expectations of masculinity.[6] By performing in ways that his rural community expected him as a respectable man, Rollin helped his final feminine-to-masculine transition along.
Rollin’s experience, at least during his final feminine-to-masculine transition, was arguably analogous to that of two earlier queer rural Vermonters who also pushed the boundaries of gender norms. Between 1807 and 1851, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, two White, middle-class women, lived as a couple and were socially accepted by Weybridge, Vermont. In Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Rachel Cleves observes that Bryant and Drake risked condemnation from their neighbors for their relationship but avoided it just as Rollin did in the end. Cleves suggests that Bryant and Drake contributed so beneficially to Weybridge society that they convinced their neighbors to avoid mentioning their iconoclastic relationship.[7] Bryant and Drake’s “acceptance within their town,” says Cleves, “should be understood as the result of their persuading others to choose ignorance by not asking about their sexuality.”[8] Decades later, residents of Heartwellville and environs acted similarly toward Rollin’s transitions, ceasing to interrogate his gender (at least in print). Rollin’s parents may have exerted their social authority to convert Rollin’s feminine-to-masculine transitions from scandalous history to open secret.
Notes
[1] John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[2] Skidmore, True Sex.
[3] Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (New York UP, 2021).
[4] “Girl Wearing Male Attire,” St. Albans Daily Messenger, 30 June 1903, 4.
[5] Details in the previous three paragraphs come from “Highwaymen,” Bennington (VT) Banner, 2 December 1909, 1.
[6] Skidmore, “Beyond Community: Rural Lives of Trans Men,” chap. 2 in True Sex.
[7] Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford UP, 2017).
[8] Cleves, Charity and Sylvia, xii.