Book launch celebration for Lizzie Ehrenhalt's ROMANTIC SENSATION

Please join us to celebrate the launch of the book Romantic Sensation: The Queer Lives of Leon A. Belmont, 1853-1927, by Lizzie Ehrenhalt! The event will be held at the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub at the University of Minnesota, 120 Pillsbury Hall, 310 Pillsbury Dr. SE. Minneapolis, MN 55455 on Thursday, November 5, 2026 at 6:00 PM.

The author will be in conversation with Myra Billund-Phibbs.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of the UMN Bookstore.

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.

Myra Billund-Phibbs is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, where she was formerly Project Manager of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project.

More details:

• The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
• We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please contact Heather Skinner at presspr@umn.edu.