Harry Allen In The Northwest And The Slow History Of Trans Acceptance

 

Harry Allen lived as a man in the Northwest in the 1900s. He took jobs as a bartender, bronco buster, longshoreman and barber. WSU Historian Peter Boag explores how examples of people from the past who had trans identities, resisted social convention, and endured incredible difficulties, gives strength and hope to people today.

 

RAMELLA: When thinking of workers in the historic Pacific Northwest, we might imagine loggers, longshoremen, ranch hands, and fishermen. Among such laborers were people assigned the female sex at birth, but who later identified as men. Peter Boag, professor of history at Washington State University in Vancouver, recounts the story of Harry Allen, a pioneer in the region’s trans history. 

BOAG: One evening in 1912 police in Portland raided a rooming house in a lower-eastside working-class neighborhood.  They arrested Harry Allen, who recently arrived from Seattle with his female companion, a known sex-worker. They suspected Allen of white-slavery, something criminalized by federal law. Allen endured fierce questioning by local police until the arrival of Charles Pray, a federal officer. Within moments, Pray recognized Allen, whom he first saw a few months before in Spokane, where Allen was arrested for selling alcohol on an Indian reservation – also a federal crime.  Pray knew Allen’s given name. When he called the prisoner by it, Allen broke down. “I am not a white slaver,” he sobbed, “and I am not Harry Allen.  I am Nell Pickerell, and I have been posing as a man for more than 12 years.”  The shocking revelation dumbfounded the local authorities; they claimed that the suspect’s disguise had been perfect, complete with “long stride and basso voice.”  Federal authorities dropped the white-slave charges.  But the Portland court, which looked askance at people who wore clothes inappropriate to their sex, convicted Allen of vagrancy and sentenced him to ninety days in the city jail. 

Today we would recognize Harry Allen as transgender. That term and concept did not exist in 1912, but there were many people in the past who had been assigned one sex at birth, but later in life transitioned to the sex that they more readily identified with. 

Washington State has made progress in the last several years on recognizing and protecting the rights of trans people, which naturally enhances everyone’s freedoms. For example, here people can change the sex on their birth certificates. They may also use public restrooms that correspond with their identity. People may choose an X rather than an F or M to indicate sex on their driver’s license. The state hate-crimes law also covers gender identity. The list continues. 

And yet, being trans is still fraught with difficulty. Harry Allen’s enduring strength from 100 years ago can provide hope to others today. He was born in 1882 in Indiana and moved with his parents to Washington in the 1890s. Allen gave birth to one child in 1898; the child was then raised by Allen’s parents. That same year, Allen also chose to transition permanently to a man. As a member of the laboring class, who also repeatedly endured the discovery of his female body, Allen traveled constantly around Washington and Oregon in search of employment, which he found as a longshoreman, a bronco buster, a barber, and a bartender. When his infamy caught up with him, he moved on. But he persisted in who he was, even as his story spread to newspapers across the country. In 1908 a paper in far distant Washington, D.C., carried an apocryphal story, with illustrations, of two Seattle women who had fallen in love with Allen and who supposedly committed suicide once they discovered Allen was not whom they thought him to be. The story was designed as a cautionary tale about women who fell in love with women. 

Allen died in Seattle in 1922 at only forty years of age from syphilitic meningitis. Several local newspapers carried the story. He was cremated, but what became of his ashes, I don’tt know. 

RAMELLA: That was Peter Boag, professor of history at Washington State University in Vancouver. Boag is the author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, focusing on people like Harry Allen in the American West between 1850 and the 1920s.  Boag is working with the Washington State Historical Society on an exhibit based on his book and will feature Harry Allen in the exhibit, which, at least before the onset COVID-19 health crisis, we planned to open in 2021. 

About the Author:

 

Dr. Boag received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1988. His teaching and research interests focus on society and culture in the U.S. (1850-1950), the Pacific Northwest, and the American West. He is currently working on three projects—a book on parricide and the American agrarian crisis, 1873-1900; a biography of the early Pacific Northwest landscape painter, William Samuel Parrott (1844-1915), and a study of his own ancestors’ story in the context of world history. He is the author of three books, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon (University of California Press, 1992), Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (University of California Press, 2003), and Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (University of California Press, 2011). He has also written articles, essays, and book chapters on the history of gender, sexuality, the environment, and culture in the American West and the Pacific Northwest.

 

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