Forteans
Charles Fort (1874-1932) was a writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena, such as fish falling from the sky, unknown animal species, spontaneous human combustion, levitation and what later became called UFOs. He wrote four books which challenged various scientific consensuses: The Book of the Damned, 1919, New Lands, 1923, Lo!, 1931 and Wild Talents, 1932.
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| Thayer |
The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931, organized by Tiffany Thayer and attended by some of Fort's friends, including such significant writers as Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, John Cooper Powys. There were no further meetings. Five years after Fort’s death, Tiffany Thayer restarted and took over the running of the Fortean Society, and continued to do so until his death in 1959. The first six issues of the Society’s newsletter Doubt were each edited by different members, but thereafter all by Thayer.
Benjamin’s involvement
Harry Benjamin seems to have become associated with the Fortean Society by the early 1940s. How this happened is undocumented. Benjamin knew the German-American George Sylvester Viereck who had met Benjamin as an advocate of Eugene Steinach and rejuvenation in the 1920s, and worked with Benjamin to organize Magnus Hirschfeld’s US visit in 1930. Viereck specifically admired Germanic Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin, but had championed Germany in the 1914-18 war and through the 1930s spoke up for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. It was Viereck who first referred to Hirschfeld as ‘The Einstein of Sex”. Blu Buhs suggests that Viereck introduced Thayer to Benjamin. This must have happened prior to 1942 when Viereck was convicted of failing to register with the Department of State as a Nazi agent and sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison.
However Thayer and Benjamin seem to have been associated a few years earlier. Theodore Dreiser had suggested in 1931 that the English sexologist Havelock Ellis be a member of the Fortean Society. Just after Thayer restarted the Fortean Society in 1937, Benjamin visited Ellis, and suggested that he and Thayer correspond. Ellis died two years later.
Despite these connections, Benjamin never wrote anything about Forteanism. Blu Buhs wrote: “It is possible that Benjamin had some sympathy for Fort, both standing against orthodoxy of one sort or another. But it is just as possible that Benjamin became a member of the Society as a sign of his friendship with Thayer.”
In 1944 Doubt 12 contained:
SEX IN UNIFORM
That section of the book, Sex in Wartime, which was authored by MFS Harry Benjamin, M.D., has been extracted, amplified, and put up by itself in wraps. The Sex Problem in the Armed Forces, is the title, reprinted from The Urologic and Cutaneous Review. From the Society—50c.
(MFS=Member of Fortean Society)
In 1950, Benjamin was present at a Fortean Society dinner arranged to entice peace activist Garry Davis to join.
In 1953 after Christine Jorgensen returned to the US and was contacted by Dr Benjamin by mail, they then met in person at a dinner party at the home of Tiffany Thayer.
Trans persons known to be involved with the Forteans
Alexander Woollcott, known for his transvesting at parties and on stage, was a founding member while Fort was still alive. He missed the inaugural meeting of the Fortean Society as he was travelling in Asia at the time, but he wrote it up for McCall’s magazine as of he had been present.
Donald Wollheim, who in 1964 wrote the transvestite classic A Year Among the Girls, had 22 years earlier written a science fiction story gently mocking Fort’s cosmology.
Caitlin Kiernan, novelist, was born 5 years after Thayer’s death and thus never a member of the Fortean Society, but she is strongly influenced by both Fort and HP Lovecraft.
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Alexander Woollcott. “Fair, Fat and Fortean”. McCall’s. June 1931, 8, 59. Reprint.
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Harry Benjamin. The Sex Problem and the Armed Forces. 1944
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Christine Jorgensen. Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. Paul S Eriksson, Inc, 1967:191. Bantam paperback: p173. Reprinted by Cleis, 2000: p180.
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Joshua Blu Buhs. “Harry Benjamin as a Fortean”. From an Oblique Angle, 9/12/2014. Online.
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Joshua Blu Buhs. “Francoise Delisle (and Havelock Ellis) as Forteans”. From an Oblique Angle, 12/14/2015. Online.
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Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. The University of North Caroline Press, 2023: 156.
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Joshua Blu Buhs. Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers. The University of Chicago Press, 2024. (Alexander Woollcott p31, 38-40, 50, 55, 57-8,77; Donald Wollheim on p116; Caitlin Kiernan p288-292, the book’s coda; No mention of Benjamin despite Blu Buhs’ web page on Benjamin.)
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While both Jorgensen and Li mention the Thayer-Benjamin-Jorgensen meeting, neither uses the word ‘Fortean’. Jorgensen wrote: “a meeting with Dr. Benjamin, at the home of his good friend, the author, Tiffany Thayer”. Li wrote: “Mutual friends arranged for Benjamin and Jorgensen to meet for the first time at a dinner party at the home of the actor and author Tiffany Thayer and his wife, Kathleen”.
Thayer’s acting career was limited to a secondary role in The Devil on Horseback (1936).
Richard Docter’s biography of Jorgensen does not even mention either Thayer or the first Benjamin-Jorgensen meeting.
