NYC Politician Murray Hall Dies in 1901
Murray Hall was a NYC politician who died on this day in 1901 after battling cancer. Hall was known as a whiskey drinking, poker playing man about town. The coroner was surprised to discover he had been assigned female at birth. The news came as a surprise to his daughter.
Born in Govan, Scotland, Hall lived as a man for nearly 25 years, able to work as a politician and vote in a time when women were denied the right to vote.
At the time of his death, he resided with his second wife and their adopted daughter. Hall had breast cancer but resisted seeing a doctor as it would have exposed that he was assigned female at birth.
Eliza McCormick is arrest in Ontario in 1847
Also on this day in 1847 Eliza McCormick, who had spent the previous three years living as a man, was arrested in Ontario Canada and taken into custody after proposing marriage.
Newspapers dubbed McCormick “the female lothario”, she had been living as man using several different names. During this time McCormick had courted six women and proposed to three of them. It is understood that after his imprisonment McCormick was forced to conform to gender expectations.
Author Susan Sontag was born in 1933
American writer, filmmaker, and political activist Susan Sontag was born on this day in 1933. While she’s remembered for her essays, she also wrote several novels.
Notes on Camp, published in 964 was one of her groundbreaking observations. She wrote extensively about the conflict of war, culture and the media, the IADS pandemic, human rights and left-wing ideologies.
Sontag, who was bisexual, had relationships with many other prominent artists and thinkers including artists Jasper Johns, Paul Thek, writer Jospeh Brodsky, actor Lucinda Childs and photographer Annie Leibovitz.
This post was first published on 16 January 2020 and has subsequently been updated.
