HIST-H549: Historic Site Interpretation
Podcast and Show Notes by Rebekah Loudenbeck & Sarah Whaley
[Intro music - “Lounge” from Bensound]
R: Hi, this is Rebekah Loudenbeck...
S: ...and Sarah Whaley...
R: ...and this is our first episode of our brand-new podcast, Archival Intimacy. We’re Museum Studies grad students at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. We were both born and raised in Indiana.
S: We both grew up hearing about Riley Hospital for Children, seeing the donation stickers at store checkouts, and visiting friends and family there. Neither of us made the connection between the hospital and Indiana’s famous poet, James Whitcomb Riley, until our Historic Sites Interpretation course this winter.
R: James Whitcomb Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana in 1849 (1). By the 1880s, he was gaining popularity as a writer of dialect and children’s poetry. He toured the country on the lecture circuit, reading his poetry aloud to large audiences, and by the age of 40 was a national celebrity (2). Even if you aren’t familiar with Riley, you’re probably familiar with his poem “Little Orphant Annie” or one of the characters the poem inspired, like Raggedy Ann and the bottom-dollar, redheaded star of the musical Annie.
[Sound clip - “‘Annie’” (1982) - Tomorrow” from YouTube]
S: When Riley died suddenly in 1916, he was grieved by the nation (3). He’s remembered as the “Hoosier poet” because his dialect poetry helped define Midwestern and especially Indiana culture and identity in the nineteenth century. Though his poetry is no longer very popular, Riley’s name lives on in the institutions named after him like the Riley Hospital for Children (4).
R: Riley is remembered as an Indiana icon, but like other historical figures, he was a far more complex person in real life. Elizabeth J. Van Allen’s biography, James Whitcomb Riley: A Life, dives into his relationships, struggles with alcoholism, and carefully curated image. Not everything about him fits neatly into the public's perception of Riley the beloved children’s poet.
S: Early in our course, we were challenged to think about historic sites as sites of intimacy. We’ve all been on tours of historic homes and walked through the bedrooms of famous people of the past, but how often have we considered the intimate relationships that took place in those spaces? In Reimagining Historic House Museums, Susan Ferentinos quotes cultural scholar Jennifer Tyburczy “‘All museums are sex museums’” (6).
R: How would our views of historical figures change if we knew more about what they did behind closed doors? We got to virtually tour the James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home with the museum’s manager, Chris Mize. Riley didn’t move into the home until 1893, spending the last 23 years of his life there (7).
S: When we first saw Riley’s bedroom, both of us were struck by its femininity. The bed, boasting a giant wooden headboard, is covered in lace-edged sheets. His hat and cane lay across the bed. On the pale pink walls hangs a portrait of Sir Henry Irving, a famous actor at the time, and a portrait of Lockerbie, Riley’s beloved pet poodle that was named after the neighborhood.
R: According to Van Allen, there’s no evidence to indicate that Riley had any serious relationships while living at Lockerbie Street (11). But the feminine aspects of his bedroom made us more curious about Riley’s sexuality. He never married, so perhaps Riley was gay.
S: When we questioned Chris at the end of the tour, he told us that many visitors to the home ask questions about Riley’s sexuality. However, he also firmly assured us it was a myth. He said Riley wasn’t gay and, in fact, Riley loved women. Chris even shared some repelling stories about Riley talking about “pulling women into bushes to kiss them.”
R: Both of us left the tour feeling disappointed and frustrated. Chris was so quick to dismiss the possibility of Riley being gay, even though the myth has persisted for more than a century after Riley’s death.
S: I think our frustration turned into a sort of determined curiosity. We wanted desperately to find incontestable evidence that Riley, if not gay, was at least bisexual.
R: According to Van Allen, “Riley had many strong same-sex relationships” throughout his lifetime. “While he carried on affairs with women, Riley was very close to [men like] Frank Hays, Charles Philips, George Hitt, and others” (12).
S: The myth of Riley being gay frequently cites an 1887 letter that Riley wrote to James Newton Matthews, an amateur poet and physician: “‘It is a natural law that men shall love women, but I love you, and ‘no knife shall cut our love in two!’’” (13).
R: Van Allen warns us not to take this language too seriously, saying that during the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for men to express friendship in this way. It also wouldn’t have been considered scandalous for men to hug, kiss, and even sleep with one another (15).
S: In the archives of Riley’s correspondence, no letters exist where he expresses explicit sexual desire for any of his male pen pals, but there are letters he wrote to women that are nothing short of...gross? (16).
R: Cringey even… In a letter to Clara Bottsford, his fiancée of five years, Riley wrote “‘Can’t tell you how I yearn to grab you up, and crush and strangle you! You—with all former experience to direct your fancy—can’t guess how I could swoop, and swirl, and storm you to death this day! I have been dying for ages to be knotted in the arms of you and tangled up and mixed and smothered out’” (17).
S: I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to be “swirled to death.”
R: I don’t either. Van Allen says Riley often likened sex to violence and death. And these kinds of associations would have been encouraged by physicians, clergymen, and teachers at the time to warn against the “consequences” of “sexual indulgence” (19).
S: Did these violent lines actually work on women?
R: Well, it didn’t work on all women. In the fall of 1880, Riley spent a night with Ella Wheeler, who was an up-and-coming writer in Wisconsin. Riley admired Wheeler’s writing but was also competing against her for acceptance in publications. At the time they met, she was more successful than Riley (20).
S: After just one night, Riley wrote to her, begging her to see him again: “‘[L]et me see you soon, and alone...I never want to see you again if not so” (22). However, Wheeler turned him down and did not agree to see him again. Later, Riley criticized Wheeler’s erotic poetry in her published anthology, Poems of Passion, saying he wasn’t sure it was appropriate for a “girl” to publish such things (23).
R: Considering Riley’s overtly sexual letters to both Bottsford and Wheeler, these statements were extremely hypocritical. While Riley and other men at the time were allowed to pursue multiple relationships and sexual partners, women could not (24). The sexual explicitness of Wheeler’s writing would have been considered “unlady-like” at the time. Less prominent women who engaged in extramarital relationships or wrote about their “passions” risked permanently damaging their reputations (25).
S: Right. And when Riley ended his five-year engagement with Bottsford in 1885, she was basically ruined for exactly that reason. During their tumultuous relationship, Riley had helped her find jobs, but when their engagement ended most employers were unwilling to hire her as a “disgraced” woman. She practically begged Riley to help her regain “some of her personal dignity and integrity,” which he ignored (26).
R: While there was no evidence of sexual desire for men in his correspondence, Riley did seem to have healthier relationships with his male friends. A lot of Riley’s writings were dedicated to his male companions, like George Hitt to whom he dedicated his 1902 poem “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” (27). He also dedicated a poem titled “The Boys of The Old Glee Club” to Booth Tarkington in 1907, whom he frequently referred to as “‘The Marvelous Boy’” (28).
S: When Van Allen discussed Riley’s relationships with Frank Hays, Charles Philips, and George Hitt, those relationships seemed more about progressing himself professionally. Many of his male friends worked at newspapers, where Riley was submitting his writing and where reporters were writing about him after he rose to fame.
R: It served him well to have friends in those circles, who could protect his reputation.
S: You did find that one curious poem in The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley though… “The Boy-Friend?”
R:
CLARENCE, my boy-friend, hale and strong!
O he is as jolly as he is young;
And all of the laughs of the lyre belong
To the boy all unsung:
So I want to sing something on his behalf --
To clang some chords, for the good it is
To know he is near, and to have the laugh
Of that wholesome voice of his.
I want to tell him in gentler ways
Than prose may do, that the arms of rhyme,
Warm and tender with tuneful praise,
Are about him all the time.
I want him to know that the quietest nights
We have passed together are yet with me,
Roistering over the old delights
That were born of his company.
I want him to know how my soul esteems
The fairy stories of Andersen,
And the glad translations of all the themes
Of the hearts of boyish men.
Want him to know that my fancy flows,
With the lilt of a dear old-fashioned tune,
Through "Lewis Carroll's" poemly prose,
And the tale of "The Bold Dragoon."
O this is the Prince that I would sing --
Would drape and garnish in velvet line,
Since courtlier far than any king
Is this brave boy-friend of mine. (31)
S: Riley uses that same term here, “fancy” that he used to describe Bottsford’s sexuality in his letter to her… “want him to know that my fancy flows…”/“with all former experience to direct your fancy,” this time to describe feelings for a man. But we struggled to find the context of this poem, or who it might have been written for. And the term “boyfriend” of course likely means something very different to us today than it meant at the time Riley wrote the poem. And Van Allen did warn about not assuming intimate language between men at the time was evidence of homosexuality.
R: Right. But we also need to think about the concept of homosexuality during Riley’s lifetime. According to Susan Fernetinos in Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites, “the first writings about homosexuality appeared [in the United States] around 1890” (32). Riley died in 1916, so for most of Riley’s life, a “medical-psychological category” that labeled same-sex affectionate behavior as “homosexual” or “abnormal” didn’t exist (33).
S: Riley was also hyper-aware of his reputation and public image. Van Allen says Riley understood what was socially acceptable at the time, so he probably acted a certain way while in public (34).
R: And we have to think about Indianapolis during that time period and the perception of cities. At this point in history, more and more Americans were moving away from rural farming communities and heading into the city to find work. Indianapolis was no exception to this and, in 1890, it would have been the 27th largest city in the country (35).
S: Ferentinos explains that homosexuality was more visible in urban areas and among the working-class. Because of this increased visibility, homosexuality (in medical terms of the time) was thought of as a malady caused by city life, and it was directly attributed to the working-class and to minorities (36).
R: Ferentinos goes on to say that homosexuality was more visible among the working-class because they tended to socialize in the public arena, whereas “middle-class gays were more likely to be mindful of their reputations and hence more discreet” (37). Riley, being of the middle-class and mindful of his reputation, would have fit this description.
S: Still, Van Allen says there’s no written evidence of Riley outright expressing sexual desires toward his male companions (38). And we weren’t able to find anything in our additional research either.
R: If Riley had homosexual desires, it would be difficult to find written proof of this. In 1873, the Comstock Law went into effect, making it illegal to circulate sexually explicit materials through the mail (39). Riley would have known about this and would have avoided writing such correspondence for fear of legal consequences and the potential impact on his reputation.
S: Even if Riley did express sexual desires for men in his correspondence or other writings, it’s possible that evidence was lost or even deliberately eliminated by publishers and historians over time. Van Allen shares that when Riley and his nephew Ed Eitel were compiling the first comprehensive volume of his work in 1913–the one you got “The Boy-Friend” poem from–Eitel found early writings that “included explicit references to sexuality, alcoholism, and other [unsavory] topics” (40).
R: Riley asked Eitel to suppress those writings, as he had become “increasingly concerned with middle-class...propriety” (41).
S: I almost feel sorry for Riley. He worked hard to maintain his reputation, but then his reputation seemed to control him as he rose to prominence. In an 1880 letter to Wheeler, Riley wrote, “‘It seems so strange! I have such brief interludes in which to be my real self–or selves’” (42). Touring on the lecture circuit, Riley had to shift personas to appeal to different audiences across the country (43). He was willing to do almost anything to advance his career, and, as Bottsford wrote to Riley’s sister, Mary, in 1903, Riley was “‘an actor first and last’” (44).
R: Riley’s choice to not marry likely had less to do with his sexuality and more to do with his ambition. Touring on the lecture circuit so frequently made it impractical for him to get married and, for the last 26 years of his life, he was constantly in the public eye (45). Perhaps he had too high of standards for women anyway, writing to Wheeler in 1880 that “‘only an angel without fleck or flaw or earthly imperfection’” could get him to make a marriage vow, as he considered himself–“‘an ambitious sort o’ prince’” (46).
S: I think we were both disappointed not to find incontestable evidence of Riley having a queer sexuality.
R: And both pretty disgusted by his views and treatment of women.
S: Definitely. But we have to acknowledge that some of Riley’s views were commonly held by men at the time, and because of the “morality” that has been associated with sexuality, clear evidence of historical figures’ sexuality is difficult to uncover (47).
R: What didn’t seem fair when we questioned Chris Mize, manager at the James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home, was how certain he seemed when asserting Riley’s heterosexuality. Even though our research didn’t confirm the myth of Riley’s queerness, it also didn’t completely rule it out. Ferentinos writes that bisexuality was not understood at the time, and that bisexuals “confound the binary world of homosexual and heterosexual as much now as they did then, and so they are quite often simply ignored” (48).
S: I feel that even as someone who identifies as bisexual in 2021. My experience has often been that people identify me by the relationships I am currently in, ignoring my own understanding of myself.
R: It’s not unreasonable to wonder if this might have been Riley’s experience, especially as homosexuality was coming to be understood as a kind of pathology at the time. And he did express feeling torn between multiple “selves” in his letter to Wheeler, which could have included sexual selves.
S: When I came out in 2017, my first instinct was to look for literature that spoke to my feelings and experience. One book that really impacted me was Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sarah Prager. It contains brief biographies of 23 LGBTQ+ figures in history, including Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt. I remember feeling so comforted when I learned there were so many LGBTQ+ people in history, including prominent people who had a huge impact on the world (49). I never learned that history in school. I shared the first couple of pages of the book with you as we were working on this episode.
R: Yeah, I really loved the introduction to Prager’s book: “Quick question: Was George Washington straight? Umm...yeah? Most of us have probably never considered our first president’s sexual identity beyond knowing that he was married to a woman” (50).
S: I definitely hadn’t! And you have to wonder if this might have been where Chris was coming from too when he asserted Riley’s heterosexuality so confidently. Evidence does exist for Riley’s sexual desires for women but is muddied when it comes to possible sexual desires for men. It is easier to talk about what we know than what we don’t know.
R: But it’s important to acknowledge what we don’t know–and may never know–about historical figures as well. The fact that so many visitors to the Riley House still ask about Riley’s sexuality means something.
S: People want to see themselves in history. And while neither of us are for deliberately misrepresenting historical figures and their sexuality, it seems that’s happening anyway through what Prager calls the “straight, cisgender mask” (51). She talks about how when we assume historical figures are heterosexual, just because we can’t find evidence to the contrary, we’re potentially “rewrit[ing] the past without even know it.” Prager challenges us to think about how our assumptions “shape the way we see the past–and our present” (52).
R: Not even being open to the possibility of historical figures’, like Riley’s, potential queerness, prevents important conversations from happening. Why are we so insistent that we know the sexuality of historic figures, when we often don’t know the sexualities of our own friends and family?
S: As an Indiana icon, it would have been and unfortunately would still be shocking to many to interpret Riley’s sexuality as anything but straight, but we think that says more about us, people today, than it says about Riley. Whatever his sexual identity, Riley was a sexual being, and the popular public image of him as a children’s poet is an incomplete one, to say the least.
R: Remaining open to the possibility of historical figures’ queerness resists the dominant narrative of history, counteracts violence towards queer people, and creates space for people to exist and be remembered as a whole person, not just how we want to see them.
[Outro music - “Lounge” from Bensound]
End Notes
Elizabeth J. Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 3.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 195-196.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 1.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 13.
Van Allen, Riley with Children, May 15, 1916, in James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), photo 49.
Susan Ferentinos, “Where the Magic Happened: Historic Homes as Sites of Intimacy,” in Reimagining Historic House Museums, eds. Kenneth C. Turino and Max. A. van Balgooy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 183.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 247.
Bedroom in the Home of James Whitcomb Riley, ca. 1910, Tuckaway House Collection, The Indiana Album, 528 Lockerbie Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, accessed January 31, 2021, https://indianaalbum.pastperfectonline.com/photo/0E83F10B-D89E-437F-B3C3-482675664207.
Julie Campbell, “Riley Home Offers Glimpse Into Life of Famous ‘Hoosier Poet,’” The Herald Bulletin, last modified July 26, 2015, https://www.heraldbulletin.com/community/riley-home-offers-glimpse-into-life-of-famous-hoosier-poet/article_5a79f09c-0f13-5f3f-b823-76130431f7f8.html.
Portrait of Lockerbie,“Lockerbie Street,” Bookmark Indy, accessed January 31, 2021, https://bookmarkindy.com/locations/lockerbie-neighborhood/.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 207.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
James Newton Matthews, 1872, University of Illinois Archives, accessed January 31, 2021, https://archon.library.illinois.edu/?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=2734.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 156.
Van Allen, Clara Louise Bottsford, ca. 1880, in James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), photo 18.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 156-157.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 166, 168-169.
Van Allen, American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, n.d, in James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), photo 19.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 169.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 169.
“Gender Roles in the 19th Century,” British Library, accessed February 4, 2021, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gender-roles-in-the-19th-century.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 168.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 206-207.
James Whitcomb Riley, An Old Sweetheart of Mine (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1902), Wikisource.
Booth Tarkington, “Letter from Booth Tarkington to James Whitcomb Riley,” written October 5, 1914, Indianapolis Public Library Digital Collections, https://www.digitalindy.org/digital/collection/riley/id/95.;Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 204.
George C. Hitt, “George C. Hitt, Who Launched Riley on Career as Poet, Dies Here at 92,” The Indianapolis Star, March 10, 1944, 4.
Letter from Booth Tarkington to James Whitcomb Riley, 1914, Indianapolis Public Library Digital Collections, accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.digitalindy.org/digital/collection/riley/id/96.
James Whitcomb Riley, “The Boy-Friend,” in The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, ed. Edmund Henry Eitel (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1913), 181-182, Google Books.
Susan Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 56.
Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History, 38.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
“Top 100 Biggest US Cities In The Year 1890,” Biggest US Cities, accessed February 3, 2021, https://bit.ly/3cFCrJG.
Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History, 59.
Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History, 59.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 171.
Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History, 56-57.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 162.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 161-162.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 163.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 164.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 266.
Ferentinos, “Where the Magic Happened,” 188-189. Per the advice of Professor Rebecca Shrum, we considered the “She never married.” questions, adapted for Riley, to come to these conclusions.
Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley, 98, 172.
Ferentinos, “Where the Magic Happened,” 190.
Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History, 58.
Sarah Prager, Queer, There, and Everwhere: 23 People Who Changed the World (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017).
Prager, Queer, There, and Everywhere, 1.
Prager, Queer, There, and Everywhere, 1.
Prager, Queer, There, and Everywhere, 1.