Confronting Erasure, Rejecting Visibility, and Demanding to Be Seen: Transmasculine Stories from U.S. Archives, 1940-1975, by Sam Brooks

Title

Confronting Erasure, Rejecting Visibility, and Demanding to Be Seen: Transmasculine Stories from U.S. Archives, 1940-1975, by Sam Brooks

Subject

Arts and Culture

Biography

Identities

Media and Communications

Movements and Activism

Race and Ethnicity

Science, Medicine, and Health

Sexuality / Sexual Behaviors

Transgender

Description

This exhibit explores how transmasculine people in the mid-twentieth-century navigated being seen by their communities, medical professionals, the press, and future historians. It examines the horrific and untimely death of Thomas Mapes, an assigned female person living as a man in rural Michigan; jazz performer Gladys Bentley's public rejection of queerness during the Lavender Scare; activist Pauli Murray's bus desegregation protest; and trans medicine doctors' clinical discussions of their transmasculine patients. Its themes are historical loss and how visibility is alternately wielded, resisted, and refused in personal and political contexts. Published originally on OutHistory in August 2026.

Time Period

1920-1940

1940-1960

1960s

1970s

Person

Benjamin, Harry

Bentley, Gladys

Erickson, Reed

Murray, Pauli

Belt, Elmer

Brooks, Sam

Money, John

Place

Michigan

Virginia

Muskegon, MI

Petersburg, VA

slug

confronting