Book Shelf

The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall

Description

Author

Cookie Woolner

Publisher URL

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469675480/the-famous-lady-lovers/

The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall examines the worlds that Black queer women created in the interwar era and their important role in American culture at this time. From famous blues singers and performers like Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith, to activists and club women like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and educators like Lucy Diggs Slowe, Black “lady lovers” were at the forefront of the changes in gender and sexuality that accompanied the Jazz Age. The book’s title speaks to the common notion that modern gay history doesn’t begin until the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, which is often held up as the beginning of queer activism and visibility in the US. However, the story in my book begins a hundred years ago, in the early 1920s, focusing on how factors from the Great Migration to Prohibition and the rise of the popular entertainment industry created a fertile ground for Black queer women’s social networks to form in northern cities like New York and Chicago.

The first chapter looks at a series of 1920s newspaper articles about violent acts between alleged Black lady lovers, which did the cultural work of introducing the concept of “the lesbian” to Black readers as an inherently criminal figure. While the first chapter is more about representation and discourse, the second chapter turns to the Black popular entertainment industry, and specifically the “race records” industry which took off in 1920 with the popularity of Black female blues singers. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Alberta Hunter all had relationships with women – or were rumored to have – during the beginning of their popular recording careers in the 1920s. The significance of the entertainment world for Black women, both as a work alternative to domestic service and as a gathering place for lady lovers, is focused on along with the experiences of the classic blues women mentioned. While touring involved constant travel around the North and South, the next chapter focuses specifically on northern Prohibition-era spaces like speakeasies, rent parties, and buffet flats, and their roles in Black lady lovers’ lives. Gladys Bentley, one of the most popular performers in Harlem at this time, who wore men’s clothing on stage and flirted with the women in her audience, is a central figure here. The relationship between sex work and Black lady lovers’ worlds is also examined, as both were overlapping forms of “outlaw” behavior associated with vice underworlds at this time, which allowed women to make independent lives from men. Chapter four turns to Black lady lovers in “high society” from Lucy Diggs Slowe, the dean of women at Howard University, to write and club woman Alice Dunbar-Nelson, dramatic actress Edna Thomas, and literary host and heiress A’lelia Walker, daughter of Madame CJ Walker. This chapter along with chapter two both focus on the strategies women used to take part in queer relationships in a time when they were largely deemed abnormal if not unimaginable.

The conclusion then examines how themes from sexual fluidity to alternative forms of kinship are just some of the central contributions of interwar era Black lady lovers to modern queer culture and life for American women more broadly. It also gestures towards these women’s influence on the next generation of queer spaces, the working-class lesbian bars of the postwar era. Overall, The Famous Lady Lovers aims to introduce readers to the vibrant worlds made by Black queer women in the Prohibition and Great Depression eras, and the important mark they made on American culture in this time, that has influenced generations.