Earl Lind, 1870-1950: Researching the Author

An overview of a research project in progress, created by a group effort to identify the birth name and other information about the pioneering author who went by the names Jennie June, Ralph Werther, and Earl Lind. Published originally on OutHistory in 2018; updated in 2022. For a related exhibit, see Jennie June/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind: The Riddle of the Underworld, 1921, by Randall Sell. For the most recent exhibit, which concludes that Jennie June was most likely the journalist Mowry Saben (1870-1950), see Who Was Jennie June?, by Channing Gerard Joseph, published in 2022.

Jennie June/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind: Researching the Author

The Author. From Autobiography of an Androgyne.

Last edit Oct. 10 2022

This is a research project in progress, created by group effort to identify the birth name and then other information about the pioneering author who went at different times, on different occasions, by the names Jennie June, Ralph Werther, and Earl Lind.

June-Lind-Werther published many autobiographical essays and two autobiographical books. Parts of an unpublished third volume were first published on OutHistory.org.

Discovering this author's birth name would undoubtedly lead to new, eye-opening documents of this particular individual's life, the social world June/Werther/Lind inhabited, and the whole sexual and gender "underworld" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, American and European.

One major question for this research group: which kinds of evidence and clues are most likely to yield information about June/Werther/Lind's birth name? Learning that birth name is likely to open up a valuable window on what we today distinguish as gender and sexual history.

If you can provide research assistance, or any evidence, sources, or clues that might help OutHistory identify this individual's birth name, please email outhistory@gmail.com

OutHistory is always delighted to acknowledge the help of researchers in furthering its goal of documenting, analyzing, and freely presenting LGBTQ+ history, and sexual and gender history in general.

Community members who have already helped with this research are (in alphabetical order):

Dani
Timothy Gilfoyle
Channing Gerard Joseph
Benjamin A. Kahan
Jonathan Ned Katz
Bjoern Klein
Clair Kronk
Jon O'Donnell
Kyle Phalen
Randall Sell
Arlene Shaner, NY Academy of Medicine