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The U-M’s Labadie Collection Now Includes a T-Shirt That Reads, “Boys Will Be Girls.” (2004)

Posted on Oct 15, 2013 in AEGIS, Gender, History, Newspapers, NTL&A

Source: (2004, 24 May). Transgender archive: The U-M’s Labadie Collection of Social Protest Literature now includes a t-shirt that reads, “Boys Will Be Girls.” The Ann Arbor Observer.

About the Thumbnail Photo: The Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan collects material about often-unpopular social movements.

Ann Arbor Observer Article (PDF)

Transgender Archive

The U-M’s Labadie Collection Of Social Protest Literature

Now Includes a T-Shirt That Reads, “Boys Will Be Girls”

In 2000 the Labadie competed with twelve major national institutions, including the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. The trophy they all wanted was the National Transgender Library & Archives (NTL&A), the largest known cataloged collection on transsexualism and transgenderism. The U-M won the collection, which was begun by transgender activist Dallas Denny more than twenty-five years ago.

Dallas Denny, who now lives in Georgia, transitioned from male to female in her late thirties. She began the collection in the 1970s with the book The Man-Maid Doll, which she described as a “sordid autobiography of a transgendered prostitute.”

Curator Julie Herrada says the keys to the victory were the Labadie’s “history, our ability to maintain the collection, our intentions to make it available, our accessibility to scholars, and our funding security.” Herrada personally oversaw the transfer of the collection, which filled a fifteen-foot U-Haul truck. It includes more than 1,000 transgender-themed books from the nineteenth century to the present—plus magazines, newsletters, journals, newspaper clippings, garments, shoes, buttons, brochures, cassette tapes, videos playbills, photographs, postcards, comic books, sheet music, greeting cards, movie posters, and bumper stickers.

In the program for the collection’s opening, Denny recalled being “scared to death” when she went to her local library in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at age fourteen to search the subject headings “transvestite” and “transsexual.” “There were only two books listed. One was in the reference section—and I wasn’t about to ask the librarian for a book on that subject!” She never found the other book in the stacks. “It was either stolen or always checked out.”

Denny, who lives in Decatur, Georgia, transitioned from male to female in her late thirties. She began the collection in the 1970s with the book The Man-Maid Doll, which she described as a “sordid autobiography of a transgendered prostitute.” Eventually the archive outgrew her home and and became the NTL&A, under the auspices of the national group Gender Education & Advocacy, which is its official donor.

Highlights from the NL&A will be on exhibit at the Hatcher Graduate library through May 29. Denny’s own favorite item is a 1953 program from Madame Arthur’s the Parisian transvestite cabaret. Herrada points out a pair of narrow, black high-heeled sandals with peach rosettes that were worn by Virginia Prince. Now in her nineties, Prince is known as the “godmother of M-to-F cross-dressers.”