What's the Matter With Gregory?

CASE ONE

Gregorius Mantos: 16 ys., 2 mos.; Greek parentage; born in Greece; in U.S. 7 yrs.

... (Oct. 1918). For the last two years Gregory had been in foster homes carefully selected and believed to be suited to his needs. From each of the four homes in which he had lived for varying periods, there came, after a time, the same complaints and demands that he be removed at once. Too impudent to be tolerated, too conceited to be amenable to ordinary family life, he was lazy, hot-tempered, generally dirty, and he was forever asserting the superiority of his own race and of communistic ideas.

...

The child-placing agency which had charge of Gregory, discouraged by his general behavior tendencies rather than by any repetition of his former offences, desired a study of him. They wondered whether he were mentally abnormal, or whether possibly their homes had been unsuited to his needs, or whether he ought not to be returned to the court as a failure and sent to a boys' correctional institution.

...

In October, 1917, Gregory was placed on a large farm where he was to go to school and work for his board. The household consisted of Mr. and Mrs. B. ... Although the visitor felt that the woman was in some ways unfair to the boy, yet we may note that she reported him dirty, saucy, and annoying in argument. She complained that he was forever extolling the Greeks as models and "holding Americans in contempt as easy marks." When told to do something, would say, "Do it yourself." When in the heat of argument would shout, "You lie."...

In both of these homes Gregory had argued much in favor of radical political ideas, which were reported to be socialistic.

Google Books: Crack for Nerds

There are days (i.e. weeks) when I have to remind myself I'm writing a dissertation. I regularly sit at my desk doing search after search on Google Books. While this has occasionally yielded important stuff (including several monographs I should not have missed while writing my prospectus, duh), most often I'm simply distracting myself and calling it research. Just one more hit off the Google Books crack pipe. Just...one...more...hit...

From when I sat down at my computer at 8 a.m. until about 5 p.m., yesterday was all about Google Books. Things I learned:

• In the 1910s, many men fretted about the state of boys. Boy experts emerged. They called their expertise boyology. For serious. Someone wrote a book about it. Don't ask me about the queerness quotient of the boyologists—yet.

• Boys had "pals," girls had "chums." (No link—snippet views only.)

• An extremely popular book featured a boy who belonged to a gang called the Centipedes.

• If you were a girl in 1916, it wasn't necessarily all that weird to want to be Teddy Roosevelt.

• I think I know Mrs. R. I think you know Mrs. R too.

Wrap Up: Midwest Adventure

You can take the girl out of the Midwest...and, as it turns out, you can take the Midwest out of the girl too. I grew up in a pretty big city, so it takes a lot to find the groove of a small town. But it turns out that in the middle of the soybean fields (apparently it's a myth that it's all corn out here), there is at least one oasis. In the three weeks I was here, I went to almost every event in the LGBT film festival, including a circuit-party-like event in the theater where the films were shown. A bevy of gender studies grad students on roller skates (Cheeseville U. women's studies ladies, get on the ball with the roller derby!) complemented the jugglers outside the theater. And while I was here, I unfortunately missed out on the action of Week of Chocolate and Eagle Watch Week. You blink and it's gone. My host and I did make room for plenty of meals that did not include pork chops. There was sledding in fresh powder. Temps ranged from 9 degrees to 57, and the university even shut down for a day—a wild few weeks during which we thankfully did not lose power.

The research, I would say, went quite well. Despite an inauspicious and inefficient start wading through almost entirely irrelevant materials, I was able to transcribe 22 tomboy case studies. I think I found more evidence about masculine women in three weeks* than certain cultural studies scholars who write extensively on the subject have managed to find in their entire careers. Oops, did I just say that?

This archive was actually a dream. It was a letdown when I first saw it—only one room with two tables. It's very small and underutilized, and it's busting at the seams because it doesn't have enough room. I was the only person there for more than one day, which astounded me. The well-scrubbed young librarians fetched me more than 200 folders of correspondence (15 at a time) without quailing. When I switched to working on the case studies, they let me have all of them at once, I guess because they were sick of getting one folder at a time for me. The head librarian was very solicitous. It's another one of those places where you can't make photocopies or take digital photos, so the work was really labor intensive. My shoulders are killing me from all that typing. Let it never be said that I don't suffer for my art. But I am already making plans to come back.

* Make that seven days—I only found the case studies after a week and a half of the other stuff.

She Was a Wharf

From tomboy case study, 1934:

[Q] 6. Did you as a child learn to associate anything unpleasant with certain words of the variety which little boys like to write on the walls of toilets, on sidewalks and elsewhere?
[A] No, except I thought the janitor should wash them off. I carefully erased them with my shoe on sidewalk.

[Q] a. Were these associations merely vague and vulgar or were they associated with facts?
[A] Associated with the only time I said something and got my mouth washed out with soap, by my sister. I said "she was a whore". Then I looked it up in the dictionary and had a terrible time with spelling, thought it was wharf.

What Do You Suppose His Hypothesis Was?

I've been investigating the sex researcher who compiled the case histories I just started reading. Apparently this was his most famous experiment. (WARNING: Not for Peta supporters.)

Do you think the women who participated in his sex interviews knew this?

I Abandon Ship, Only to Strike It Rich

I'll skip this morning's adventure with a heat-seeking shrew and a description of the extreme cold temperatures that made my host's concrete porch buckle and crack. After a stern talking-to from MNS last night (i.e. "Stop distracting yourself with all the cool stuff you're finding and look for relevant sources"—which, incidentally, is the exact opposite of what my adviser has been telling me), I stopped going through all the correspondence addressed to Dr. Famous Zoologist/Sex Researcher. (The library administrator was so disappointed: "But you're already through the S's! You're so close to finishing!) Instead, I started looking through the case files of a sex researcher I'd never heard of.

No one told me about this collection. It's not featured on the archive's website, and (not surprisingly) I didn't find it when I did a normal catalog search. But it has almost 300 sexual questionnaires and case histories, all of women, taken in the 1930s. The first one I looked at included this notation: "[I was an] atheist but would pray God would make me a boy."

I looked at nine case studies today and, besides the one who prayed to be a boy, two of them were self-described tomboys.

Case No. 2: "One of the most significant factors in the subject’s background and personality, contributing most unfavorably to sexual maladjustment, is her tomboy attitude or personality which has persisted from early childhood on...She always craved a kind of superficial affection from boys, which she attributes to not getting any affection in the home."

Case No. 3: "I [was] a tomboy and played right with boys. In adolescence [I] felt girls restrictions more. Once I went out with boys, all changed. Never went out formally till 17 yrs.... [I was] More envious of girls—for their femininity. I [was] such a tomboy. Yet [I was] inconsistent, [I] loved dolls....”

I typed straight into those carpal tunnels (no photocopying or digital photography here). Tonight I am trying to come to terms with the fact that the boxes of case studies are ginormous and I only got through nine today. I guess a return trip is possible. Hopefully during warmer weather.

The Experience of Evidence

After a week in the Midwest, I now have relevant documents for the following dissertation topics:

• Intersexed army personnel

• Chronic infections due to Lysol douching

• Unspecified queer chick magnetism

• Sexuality and religious dementia

Any takers?