Lizzie Ehrenhalt launches Romantic Sensation with Aiden Bettine

Exploring gender and sexuality in the Gilded Age through one sensationalized life

Addie Liona Walker. Leon A. Belmont. Nova McClure Carr. Romantic Sensation tells the full story of this one ordinary person’s singular life. Assigned a female sex at birth, Addie was born in Massachusetts in 1853 and lived as a woman for twenty-five years. After transitioning in 1878, Addie became Leon and lived as a man for twenty-four years before making a second gender transition and living as a woman, Nova, for the rest of her life. Placing these milestones within the historical context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lizzie Ehrenhalt traces Belmont’s life, from child laborer to husband, from outlaw to heartthrob, and from stepfather to single mother.

Belmont was a Gilded Age celebrity: he made national news for breaking an ordinance against dressing as the “opposite” sex in Minneapolis, and he inspired a media frenzy when one of his girlfriends told police that he was a woman. While newspapers labeled Belmont a “curious and romantic sensation,” Ehrenhalt shows that he was not much of a sensation after all. Illuminating what his story can tell us about Americans’ developing understandings of sexuality and gender in the 1850s through the 1920s, she reveals how Belmont’s run-ins with police, doctors, courts, and reporters resonate in the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ identities we recognize today.

An empathetic case study of a figure often denied respect in the telling of his story, Romantic Sensation presents Belmont’s gender transitions not as puzzles in need of solving but as acts grounded in the cultural milieu of the Gilded Age. Traversing the dramatic economic upheavals of the second industrial revolution, the Era of Good Stealings, and the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, and spanning the Cult of Domesticity, the invention of sexology, and the rise of New Womanhood, Ehrenhalt uses Belmont’s example to demonstrate how trans, queer, and intersex histories are inseparable from American history.

Lizzie Ehrenhalt is an editor and public historian who specializes in the history of gender and sexuality. Since 2013, she has edited MNopedia, the encyclopedia of Minnesota history produced by the Minnesota Historical Society. She is coeditor of Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890–1918.

Aiden Bettine is the Curator of the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. He is an archivist and public historian who researches and teaches local history pertaining to race, gender, and sexuality in the Midwest. Aiden holds an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Public History and Archival Science and Master’s degrees in both Library and Information Sciences and Critical Ethnic Studies. His dissertation, "To Collect Our Own Histories: Community Archiving in the Lesbian and Gay History Movement," explores the role of community archives building in the grassroots history movement that flourished as a form of activism in Gay Liberation, centering the history of Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago.

Aiden's community work prioritizes creating generative spaces for LGBTQ people to learn, share, and research our history. He co-runs Late Night Copies Press, an independent micro press in Minneapolis that publishes non-fiction and informal research-based writing with an emphasis on local queer and trans history and queer artists through zine and pamphlet formats. Prior to joining Archives and Special Collections as the Curator of the Tretter Collection in August of 2022, he founded the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library, a community archives and lending library in Iowa City, IA.

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