‘More Butch Heroes’
By Ria Brodell
Foreword by Chris E. Vargas
MIT Press, 96 Pages

In this sequel to “Butch Heroes” (2018), the author uses succinctly written biographies and gouache on paper paintings to recover the obscure lives of women who dressed or otherwise presented themselves as men, or behaved in roles typically chosen by men. Included are 15 painted portraits of transgender figures in Germany, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, Spain, and South Africa.

The paintings have the kind of careful simplicity of the frescos Fra Angelico created for his friary in Florence. Ria Brodell does not mention the early Renaissance artist, but his legacy has been filtered through the “holy cards” that became the inspiration for “Butch Heroes.” The author is no longer Catholic, yet the paintings and biographical portraits are a catholic way of observing the variegation in human sexuality.

Of the holy cards, the author recalls: “How much I loved their beauty, and the often humorous and dignified way they depicted the early saints and the violence they endured. They seemed to show examples of strength, of standing strong in one’s convictions despite hardships. Using the format of the Catholic holy card for these paintings seemed the perfect choice to me.”

Fra Angelico painted not only biblical scenes — an angel in the room with the Virgin Mary, say — but domestic scenes that in their pastel-like quality and luminous colors anointed his human figures with a glow, a vividness that has never faded in my memory of seeing them on my first visit to Florence and feeling that I was in the room with the artist.

The paintings in “Butch Heroes” do much the same for the artist’s subjects — many of them women who stood out for wearing men’s clothes, yes, but even more for their insistence on being themselves and wishing to be part of their heterosexual communities. Of course, some women disguised themselves: That is, they did not disclose their gender and did not have the term transgender to call upon, while others boldly declared themselves and were often persecuted and imprisoned for their openness.

Many of this book’s subjects were happily married, and respected members of their societies, though many came to grief, as in the case of Hans Kaiser, whose wife discovered that her husband had “once been known as Agatha Dietschi.” The diction is important as, really, a sign of respect. Hans refused his wife’s offer of women’s clothing and said he could “never live as a woman or love a man.” The painting is captioned “Agatha Dietschi aka Hans Kaiser c. 1547 Germany.” Notice the word order, which is in accord with the subject’s presentation as a robust-looking farm laborer — just as people saw Hans — with a rake in hand that is on the diagonal in a dynamic re-creation of the work that made Agatha a man.

Many of the author’s subjects barely register in the historical record, like this short report in a North Carolina newspaper (September 20, 1879): “There is a colored woman here who was raised as a boy; does not recollect when she began wearing male clothing; still dresses and acts like a man; does man’s work and bears a man’s name. She has an aversion to being with women, or doing their kind of work, and says she would go to the penitentiary before she would wear a bonnet. She is a mother but not at all motherly, and her child calls her papa.” She is given no proper name, and no comment is made on her conduct.  

This book includes an interview with the author, who confides: “Just when I felt my most hopeless and helpless, I found Butch Heroes, and in the process found myself in the pages of history. I was starving for connection, thirsting for some evidence that I was not alone. I found comfort in the stories of people like me who rubbed others wrong just for being themselves—people who didn’t fit, weren’t legible, were considered profane.”

This beautifully presented book enacts biography as a process of self-discovery — without, in this case, the kind of speculation that would have defaced the exquisite simplicity of the art presented in its pages.

Mr. Rollyson has written about Fra Angelico and other figures of Western art in “Essays in Biography.”