Dr. Alan Hart

Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962) was a transgender physician and author, one of the handful of trans men in the 20th century to live a public life. An expert on tuberculosis and its diagnosis via X-ray, Hart also wrote four novels and a nonfiction book; I haven't read most of his fiction yet (though the rerelease of his novel The Undaunted is sitting on my shelf), but I understand that it's about physicians, medical research, and the struggle to live a life in line with the ideals of the profession. I did crack The Undaunted and read the first few pages, which concern a strikingly queer-coded flirtation in which a woman meets a young doctor on a train, tells him at length about his sexy hands, and then is gently rebuffed because the doctor is afraid of getting close to a woman lest he disappoint her with his poverty.

In talking about transgender people's fiction, it's important to avoid the impulse to assume autobiography, but of course all writers draw on their own emotions – we don't know any others – and it's hard not to see something very personal in that drawing away. Hart was outed twice during his early career, and practiced in seven states over the next nine years, possibly because he endured further outings. It appears that only in his later career, especially after he was able to access testosterone, was he able to settle down a bit. The most commonly circulated photo of Hart shows a rather anxious-looking man with a gentle, androgynous face, though I've seen a much later photo of a middle-aged doctor with a small mustache which is indistinguishable from any other midcentury image of a distinguished male physician.

I've been researching Hart for work, and thinking about a major strain in late 20th-century amateur Hart research, which is the attempt to reclaim him as a lesbian figure. A lot of this kind of work was also done by cis men; I believe we owe the lesbian reading of Hart initially to Jonathan Ned Katz, and Allan Berubé's roadshow lecture "Lesbian Masquerade" introduced his audiences to figures like Charley Parkhurst and Jack Garland, who were presented as lesbians but who are now generally described as transmasculine. I don't know how most people received Berubé's work, although I've read a letter to him where a lesbian complains about his show's lack of femme representation and exclusive focus on cross-dressing as the marker of lesbian identity, and I also know that the trans writer Lou Sullivan befriended Berubé after seeing a performance and was inspired to write a book about Garland which presented him explicitly as transmasculine.

There is more than one correct approach to this kind of history, depending on whether you worry more about preserving ambiguity (at the risk of erasure) or avoiding erasure (at the risk of being wrong). Personally, I think it depends a lot on the subject. Hart's story is, to me, completely unambiguous. It's on the historical record that he wanted to live as a man before transitioning, was pleased with his decision to transition ("happier since I made this change than I ever have in my life, and I will continue this way as long as I live"), and continued to live as a man throughout his life despite the significant dangers and humiliations this entailed. Hart used a eugenic argument – rhetorically fascinating, hopefully disingenuous – to begin transition during medical school, requesting a hysterectomy in 1917 on the grounds that he was attracted to women and should therefore be sterilized. He endured humiliating publicity after being outed at least twice. Moreover, I assume he was familiar with the possibility of a lesbian life. Those were not kind years for queers, but lesbian community certainly existed; I think of Hart's contemporary Elsa Gidlow, for example, who had a large circle of friends and lovers and was publishing openly lesbian poetry by the early 1920s. I also think of Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, a generation older than Hart, and of another of his contemporaries, Dr. Margaret Chung. One of the ideas that's clung to Hart like static has been that, presumably, he lived as a man because lesbians (or women of any orientation) couldn't make medical careers at this time, which is demonstrably untrue. They were uncommon, but they were there. Hart could have lived as a lesbian, but he chose an even less conventional path – one that would have required a lifetime of secrecy and the avoidance of legal involvement or medical treatment, even as he was himself a doctor.

I understand why people have felt the need to claim figures like Hart as lesbians. These range from the longing for historical gay and lesbian representation to simple transphobia. From 1982 until 1995, the Oregon queer nonprofit Right to Privacy called their annual fundraiser the Lucille Hart Dinner, after Hart's birth name; this kind of "rescuing" approach is commonly seen in the contested history of gender variance. But what frustrates me about it, besides the fact that it's inaccurate, is that it’s an erasure of lesbian history. When we celebrate a figure like Hart as a lesbian, we take up space intended for lesbians. When we claim that people like Hart adopted male identities for solely professional reasons or because of an absurd claim of social or therapeutic pressure to transition, we are arguing that lesbian life in his era was impossible. By imagining that he was a lesbian, we strike a blow for lesbian unimaginability. I don’t want to live in that world – I want to live in a world that celebrates historical lesbians like Gidlow, Baker, Chung, Isabel Grenfell Quallo, Tessa Kelso, Amy Lowell, and Gladys Bentley, to name a random sampling of fascinating women born from the 1860s to the 1900s. (This, of course, presumes that all of them saw themselves as women; Chung also adopted a male name and persona during medical school, though she then lived as a woman for the rest of her life and built her practice around a specifically feminine and maternal persona.)

Hart had his letters destroyed when he died, so all we have left of him are his four novels, his book on X-rays, a case study of his transition called “Homosexuality and its Cure,” and a few other fragments. Through my day job, I’m trying to make what’s left more available, but I’m also aware that it’s probably not what Hart wanted. Destroying letters is the act of a man who wanted to be remembered through his work, not for his life. But in the absence of a definite statement from him, and recognizing our community’s desperate need for memory and for acts of unerasing, I’m going to continue to uplift his memory. It’s always problematic when we try to unerase, because the act involves deciphering faint marks, and inevitably making some of our own. But in the archives world, we’re used to balancing imperfect answers to find the one that lets us sleep easiest. For me, that’s keeping Hart’s name in a place of honor.