Hall, Murray H.

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HALL, Murray H.

HALL, Murray H. (b. c. 1831; d. 19 January 1901), political official.

Reliably accurate information about Murray Hall is scarce, as most existing accounts of his life are based on unreliable newspaper reports published after his death, when the discovery that he was female generated sensational publicity. Probably born Mary Anderson in Govan, Scotland, then orphaned and employed as a man in Edinburgh, Hall surfaced in New York during the mid-1870s. Accompanied by a woman identified as his wife, he opened an employment bureau. After complaining that he flirted with too many other women, his wife disappeared three years later. By the mid-1880s Hall and his second wife Cecilia Hall had informally adopted a daughter Imelda, known as Minnie. During this period Hall became a bail bondsman and found a niche with the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine in New York City. He associated with a wide circle of the city's political figures and developed a reputation for cigar chomping, poker playing, and being "sweet on women" (Katz, p. 235). His second wife, who also reportedly complained about his attentions to other women, died a few years before Hall's own death in 1901. Upon his death, his physician, Dr. William C. Gallagher, revealed to a surprised public that Hall had, in fact, been born a female.

The revelation that Hall was "really" a woman generated scandalous headlines and many newspaper accounts of the stunned surprise of his associates. The New York Times report of 19 January 1901 proclaimed that "Murray Hall Fooled Many Shrewd Men" and detailed the reactions of many, including state senator Bernard F. Martin who declared, "I wouldn't believe it if Dr. Gallagher, whom I know to be a man of undoubted veracity, hadn't said so"; and Martin's aid, Joseph Young, who said, "A woman? Why, he'd line up to the bar and take his whiskey like any veteran, and didn't make faces over it, either. If he was a woman he ought to have been born a man, for he lived and looked like one" (Katz, p. 234).

The story of Hall reappeared in the press following the inquest into his death on 28 January and when his will was filed on 19 March. His daughter Imelda, then twentytwo, testified at the inquest that she had not suspected her father was a woman. When the coroner corrected her reference to Hall as "he" with "Wouldn't you better say she?" Imelda reportedly replied, "No, I will never say she"(Katz, p. 237).

Hall's birth as a female and adult life as a man were recounted by Jonathan Ned Katz in 1976 in Gay American History. Katz included documents concerning Hall's life and death in a section of his book titled "Passing Women" that emphasized the probable lesbianism of born females who lived and worked as men and married women. Since 1976 political activists, historians, and commentators have debated possible interpretations of Hall's life. Might she best be understood as a woman who passed as a man in order to make a decent living in a world where orphaned young women, and single women generally, had great difficulty living independently? Or might she be considered a lesbian, who lived as a man in order to flirt with and marry women without persecution? Or might he be included in a history of female-to-male transgenderism? Was Hall's masculinity a "disguise" employed by a woman, or the deeper "truth" of Hall's lived gender identity? Can Hall's life be viewed as an implicitly feminist critique of the male-dominated world of politics, or as an antifeminist rejection of women's efforts to be included in political life as women ? Or, are none of these interpretations persuasive? Whatever the interpretation offered, there can be no dispute that Hall carefully hid his female body, even as he died of breast cancer over a period of approximately six years, and that he lived persuasively as a philandering married man in the world of homosocial urban politics.