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The 19th-Century Trans Man Who Worked As a Reporter and Went to War

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Black and white sketches of a hat wearing man taken from turn of the century newspaper pages.
(L) Jack Bee Garland as depicted in Stockton newspaper ‘The Evening Mail’ in 1897. (R) One of Garland’s own articles, written when he was using the moniker Beebe Beam. (‘From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland’ by Louis Sullivan/Alyson Publications)

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

In 1906, after the earthquake and fires ravaged San Francisco, a young man stepped up to tend to the city’s injured and displaced. Jack Bee Garland was already an accredited nurse with the Red Cross who had received a medal for his service in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war. (Women were not permitted to serve as nurses during the conflict. Garland smuggled his way there.) It came as second nature to Garland then, to help his fellow San Franciscans in a time of great crisis.

What most of the people he helped did not know at the time was that Garland had been assigned female at birth. By the time of the earthquake, he had been living as a man for over a decade. So convincingly, in fact, he routinely gained access to areas and institutions that were usually inhabited only by cisgender men.

Before he was known as Jack Bee Garland, Babe Bean frequently made headlines. An 1897 story from ‘The San Francisco Call & Post’ marveled at his gender nonconformity. (Newspapers.com)

Garland was born on Dec. 9, 1869 to San Francisco’s first Mexican consul Jose Marcos Mugarrieta and his wife Eliza Alice Garland, whose congressman father had once served on the Louisiana Supreme Court. Jose and Eliza lost two children in infancy, but also successfully provided Garland with two sisters and a brother. From the time he was very young, however, they knew Garland was different from their other children.

Garland’s mother once noted:

She was always a most peculiar, original child and a regular tomboy. The finest doll in the world had no attraction for her if a top or a kite were handy. She delighted in the company of boys; she liked them as playmates and confidents; she developed a dislike for girls in general at an early period of her existence and subsequent events have only served to strengthen that dislike … Being brave and absolutely fearless, she has always been able to take care of herself under any circumstances.

This was certainly true. Throughout his life, Garland had a habit of putting himself in harm’s way to help others. In May 1898, for example, Garland witnessed a runaway horse and buggy galloping directly towards a woman and a girl on the corner of Market and Mason in San Francisco. Garland threw himself at the animal, grabbed its bridle and clung on for dear life until the horse stopped. When it finally did, bystanders erupted into cheers for the brave young man’s actions.

When he worked as a newspaper reporter for ‘The Evening Mail,’ Jack Bee Garland, a.k.a. Babe Bean, visited a homeless encampment. (Newspapers.com)

The Stockton newspaper The Evening Mail hired Garland as a journalist that year, when he was 29 years old. He often worked to humanize the most unfortunate members of society. For one story, he went undercover at a homeless camp. For another, he visited Stockton’s State Hospital to report on “life in a madhouse.” In both cases, he wrote about the people he met with sympathy and care. What’s more, Garland’s writing was powerful enough to have a real impact. (After he wrote about the ill effects a gambling den was having on young men, an ordinance was introduced in Stockton prohibiting the playing of keno, a bingo-style game popular with gamblers at the time.)

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Before he became a reporter himself, Garland — who was, in his earlier years, nicknamed Babe Bean and Beebe Beam — frequently made the news as a figure of fascination and confusion. Despite the attention, Garland always lived alone — something women rarely had the privilege of doing unless they were widows.

Jack Bee Garland, a.k.a. Babe Bean, lived on a houseboat in Stockton, as pictured in this 1897 illustration from ‘The Evening Mail.’ (Newspapers.com)

In Stockton in 1897, where Garland lived on a small houseboat surrounded by other single men, The Evening Mail reported:

The mystery is still unsolved as to whether ‘Baby’ Bean is a boy or girl, a man or a woman, it is true that this peculiar personage could be taken for male or female. As a matter of course, people have used the pronoun ‘she’ in reference. Because of a certain feminine appearance she was arrested some days ago for masquerading in male attire. The girl-boy stated at that time that she was a woman. That, however, might have been done to deepen the doubt as to the truth of sex.

One of Garland’s most impressive feats was gaining access to male spaces (including, at one point, a bachelor’s club) while openly referring to himself as a woman. Using she/her pronouns was necessary at the time for Garland to avoid being charged with the crime of masquerading. As long as Garland referred to himself as a woman and did not deny his biological gender, authorities allowed him to wear male attire. He often justified his clothing by claiming it was for the sake of personal safety or to aid his work as a reporter.

Garland even referred to himself as a woman in his stories sometimes, noting in his article about Stockton’s State Hospital, “I am the only woman who has ever been permitted in the yards, dormitories, hospital, dining room and workshops of the male department.” As Garland got older and attracted less scrutiny, he eventually gave up on female pronouns and did his utmost to truly blend in as a man — something he was largely successful at doing until his death in 1936 at 67 years old.

After collapsing on the corner of Post and Franklin Streets that September, suffering from the effects of untreated peritonitis, doctors at SF General were stunned to find that Garland wasn’t biologically male. The coroner’s report was pointed, listing Garland as “female” and noting that: “The deceased has masqueraded as a man for the past forty years.” Before he was buried in an unmarked grave at Colma’s Cypress Lawn Cemetery, Garland’s body was put in a white satin dress.

Lou Sullivan at a book signing for ‘From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland’ at A Different Light Bookstore in 1990. From the Louis Graydon Sullivan Papers at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. (Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society)

Jack Bee Garland, though certainly famous in California in his own time, might have been forgotten if not for the work of another transgender man, Lou Sullivan. A writer, historian and founding member of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, Sullivan combed through newspaper archives and legal records to write Garland’s biography. From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland was published in 1990 and remains the definitive account of Garland’s life.

Sullivan was careful to use the book to distinguish between Garland as a transgender man and the women who wore male clothing at the turn of the century, writing:

Despite diligent efforts of families and society to erase all mention of these embarrassments, historians have identified vast numbers of females at the turn of the century who crossed over into thrall of men and lived as one of them, undetected. Most explained that they did so to obtain a man’s wage in the workplace. Many were lesbians who found they were permitted to live and love women freely if society perceived them to be men. But Bean was different. Her lifelong allegiance to men of all classes suggest her motives for joining their ranks as that of a man craving the company of other men.

Today, Garland should be remembered as a man who lived on his own terms, no matter the personal or legal risks. He should be remembered as a bold and adventurous writer who used his profession (and wages) to help others less fortunate. He should also be remembered as someone who used his unique position to challenge notions about gender in a public forum.

“I am never happy nor contented unless with a few of ‘the boys,'” Garland once wrote in The Evening Mail. “Could women see men as I have, they would love them all. Why? Because they are, with one another, open and frank. They know each other’s little secrets and altogether are congenial. But alas! When they leave their fellow men for the day or night, they are changed beings.”

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All, that is, except for Jack Bee Garland.

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