Antiquarian-minded visitors to Georgetown may have heard of the Halcyon House, a mansion on Prospect Street. The majestic Federal-style structure was built in the 1780s by Benjamin Stoddert, the first secretary of the Navy, and dramatically expanded in the 1900s by Albert Clemens, the nephew of Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain).
Jennifer Porter-Lupu, an archaeology doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, recently delivered a lecture on the Halcyon House to the Georgetown Neighborhood Library. We were a little nervous when we read that Porter-Lupu’s research was made possible by grants from the Sexualities Project at Northwestern, but all our skepticism of the modern university didn’t prepare us for the content of this talk. “Her take on the Halcyon House is that it may have been a queer community space,” according to a local news report. “Porter-Lupu found evidence in trash buried in the backyard that she says suggests Clemens dressed as a woman. Female lingerie items such as garters, stockings and metal clips from corsets were among the objects found in the dig.”
Some in the audience politely suggested that the presence of discarded ladies’ undergarments doesn’t mean the house’s male owner wore them. Still, the lesson is clear: Be sure to clean up the backyard when you move houses, or who knows what some academic will be saying about you a century hence.