Originally an anarchist journal, Der Eigene published its first gay-themed short story Echte Liebe (Real Love) in 1898. Publishing the magazine was a courageous move, as sex between men was punishable by a stiff prison sentence. The offices of Der Eigene and the home of its publisher Adolf Brand were frequently the targets of homophobic abuse, and police raided Brand’s home on many occasions. However the magazine managed to keep going until 1907, when Brand was sent to prison for 18 months after claiming in print that German Chancellor Prince von Bülow had a long-standing homosexual relationship with Privy Councillor Max Scheefer.
Der Eigene resurfaced immediately after the First World War, and if Prohibition kick-started the Pansy Craze in the United States, then the equally liberated scene enjoyed by LGBT people in Berlin was fuelled by the end of hostilities in Europe. The country was broke: millions were unemployed and inflation soared to unprecedented levels. Yet the chance to build a new society gave the German people the perfect opportunity to re-examine their traditional values, and a greater tolerance towards LGBT people emerged. Although it was still illegal for two men to have sex, the police tended to look the other way, and it has been suggested that there were more gay and lesbian bars in Berlin during the 1920s than there were in New York in 1980. In the city’s cabaret bars you could hear singers performing ‘Das Lila Lied’ (‘The Lavender Song’) which, with its repeated refrain ‘We are just different from the others,’ is quite probably the first song to directly reference and celebrate homosexuality. With music by Mischa Spolianski (under the pseudonym of Arno Billing) and lyrics by Kurt Schwabach, several versions of ‘Das Lila Lied’ were recorded in 1921, the year that Berlin hosted the First International Conference on Sexual Reform, an instrumental by Marek Weber on Parlophon and one by an unnamed vocalist on Homokord among them. Lyricist Schwabach would later write the words for Germany’s entry for the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Bonne Nuit, Ma Chérie’.
LGBT artists enjoyed fame and freedom, yet many others regarded the Weimar Republic’s tolerant attitude towards homosexuals as a sign of the country’s decadence. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 brought about the closure of gay and lesbian bars, bathhouses, hotels, clubs and cafes; the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research was ransacked by stormtroopers (led by a gay man, Hitler’s close friend Ernst Röhm) and its archives – including thousands of books, magazines, films and other irreplaceable items – were burned. Luckily, Hirschfeld himself was out of the country at the time; he remained in exile until his death (in Nice, on his 67th birthday) in 1935. Max Hansen, the cabaret star who in 1932 recorded ‘War’n Sie Schon Mal In Mich Verliebt?’ (Weren’t You Ever In Love With Me?), which depicted Hitler as homosexual and a drunk, was forced to make a quick exit from Germany, first to Vienna and then to Denmark. Rumours had circulated for years about Hitler’s own sexual proclivities: ‘in the Munich days of 1920-22, before the abortive Putsch, everyone knew of his homosexual activities. It was only after he felt certain he was to become a dominating figure in the public eye that he took pains to indulge his vice in secret,’ wrote one British newspaper columnist.22
Over a six-month period, Adolf Brand’s home and offices were raided five times by the Nazis, and his files, equipment and personal archive were impounded. Röhm and his deputy Edmund Heines (who was also gay) were singled out by the British press as being behind the burning of the Reichstag.23 In October 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality; LGBT people were forced out of the country or back into the closet, and those who did neither were at risk of being rounded up and sent to the concentration camps. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of LGBT people (the vast majority men: Hitler did not seem to see lesbians as a major threat) were sent to the camps and forced to wear the pink triangle: many were subjected to humiliating medical ‘experiments’ and at least 55,000 died, including Berlin cabaret artists Willy Rosen, Max Ehrlich, Kurt Gerron (the star of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera) and Paul O’Montis.
Paul O’Montis (born Paul Wendel in Budapest in 1894) had been one of the biggest stars of the era, recording around 70 songs for the Odeon label, including German-language versions of American hits such as ‘Ist Dein Kleines Herz Für Mich Noch Frei, Baby’ (‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’). Raised in Hanover, he tried his hand at scriptwriting before first appearing on stage in Berlin in 1924. By 1932 he could regularly be heard on radio across Europe.
Openly gay, after the Nazis seized power O’Montis was banned from performing in Germany and fled the country. He went first to Vienna but after the Germans annexed Austria he escaped to Prague, and was arrested there when the German army invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. He was deported first to Zagreb and then to Lødź in Poland before being sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 30 May 1940, just 20 kilometres or so north of the cabaret stages he had once commanded. O’Montis died in Sachsenhausen just six weeks later, aged 46. The official reason given for his death was suicide.
Luckily, many of Berlin’s lesbian entertainers escaped persecution. Claire Waldoff (born October 1884 as Clara Wortmann), another well-known cabaret performer, lived happily and openly with her lover, Olga von Roeder, in Berlin during the 1920s: the pair were a common sight at the city’s many lesbian bars, including the famous Damenklub Pyramide. Unusually for the era, she shunned the sophisticated manner and double entendres that the city’s cabaret stars were noted for, instead adopting a mannish, direct approach which often got her into trouble. A contemporary of Marlene Dietrich (the pair shared a stage on more than one occasion), her best-known recording is probably ‘Ach Gott, Was Sind Die Männer Dumm’ (Oh God, Why Are Men So Stupid). Dietrich, a bisexual who was known to have enjoyed the thriving gay scene and drag balls of 1920s Berlin (she is reputed to have said that ‘only pansies know how to look like a sexy woman’),24 had appeared in a number of cabaret revues, but she had already started to establish herself on the silver screen and moved to the United States in 1930 after her career-defining appearance as Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. The icon is said to have met theatrical costumier James Stroock on her passage to New York and to have tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce his wife Bianca. When the shocked Mrs. Stroock rebuffed her advances, Dietrich simply told her that: ‘In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.’25 In her first American movie, Morocco (1930), Dietrich, who began her recording career in 1928 but who will be forever associated with her theme song ‘Falling in Love Again’, caused a scandal for the scene where, dressed in a man’s black tails and top hat, she kisses another woman. More than half a century later another icon would shamelessly copy Dietrich’s style: Madonna’s ‘borrowing’ of Dietrich’s look for photo shoots, video performances and the like may be simply seen as an homage, but coming at a time when she was also flirting with lesbianism – suggesting that she was in a relationship with actress and comedian Sandra Bernhard – it seemed more like an attempt to grab headlines than to pay tribute to an inspiration.
Dietrich got out of Germany before the Nazis came to power, but Claire Waldoff ran foul of them on several occasions: a performance at a fundraiser for the communist party earned her a temporary ban, and after further bans, she and Olga left Berlin in 1939, settling in Bayerisch Gmain, near Salzburg. While she was in London to film Alexander Korda’s Knight Without Armour, Nazi officials approached Dietrich and offered her lucrative contracts should she agree to return to Germany. They promised her that she would become the foremost film star of the Third Reich. Dietrich refused their offers and instead applied for US citizenship. The women survived the Second World War and, after her movie career was over, Dietrich returned to the stage, forging a successful second career as a cabaret singer. Waldoff, who had lived in quiet semi-retirement, lost her money in the West German monetary reform of 1948 and they had to rely on financial support from the state. Waldoff died in 1957 and von
Roeder in 1963, and the pair are buried together in Stuttgart. Dietrich lived until she was 90, and died in Paris in 1992.
Liberace, as he appeared on a postcard given away to viewers of his hit TV show in the 1950s
CHAPTER 6
Strange Fruit
‘“I made you a man. When your momma brought you home she brought a boy. If you hadda been a girl she would have named you Martha. You are a boy.” My daddy wanted seven boys, and that I was messing it up’
Little Richard26
Unlike the period following the 1914-1918 conflict, in the years immediately after the Second World War, LGBT performers were sent scurrying back into their respective closets. Post-war culture emphasised strong, virile men as being the providers for their families, with women encouraged to stay at home, cook hearty meals and raise the kids. Any kind of gender deviance was deemed criminal. Austerity, coming on the heels of the pre-war Great Depression, only helped further the ‘us and them’ mentality.
Where once difference had been embraced, during the post-war period people were actively encouraged to be suspicious of anything outside the accepted norm. Deviance was not to be entertained. In Britain, a series of high-profile court cases and a marked increase in the number of gay men prosecuted and imprisoned drove the country’s gay elite and ‘bright young things’ underground. In 1950s America, homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder; homosexuals were categorised as sexual perverts and it was widely believed that homosexuality was a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a threat to the family and to the security of the country. The FBI began to keep lists of people in the public eye and government office that they identified as homosexual, believing them to be weak and easily indoctrinated by the enemy. McCarthyism was putting what would seem to be the final nail in the coffin for the LGBT community. The Cold War, allied to the fear of the spread of communism and the near-certainty of an all-out nuclear war in the not-too-distant future, saw a new wave of conservatism masquerading as patriotism drive suspected commies and queers from Hollywood, from the radio and from the recording studio.
Yet in spite of this, an underground gay movement sprang up which gave birth to a new language: Polari, a type of slang which had been used in Britain for decades but that reached its apotheosis from the 1930s to the early 1970s in gay pubs, among theatre crowds and on merchant ships. New LGBT-friendly bars opened in cities around the world, there were new publications – such as the rash of pocket-sized physique magazines which legitimised the ownership of cheesecake portraits of virtually naked men – and a market for discs and magazines sold ‘under the counter’ and through specialist outlets. LGBT people created their own subterranean world, where risqué cabaret performers pushed boundaries (and ran the risk of arrest) and – just as during the years of prohibition – bars were run by a criminal class who cared not where their money came from as long as it came.
In the 1940s, Edythe D. Eyde was 25 years old and working as a secretary at the RKO film studios in Los Angeles. By her own account, she had a lot of time to herself in the office,1 and so twice a month Edythe ‘typed out five carbons and one original of Vice Versa,’ the world’s first lesbian newssheet. Subtitled ‘America’s Gayest Magazine,’ Vice Versa (whose first issue appeared in June 1947) was begun by Ms Eyde initially as a way of expanding her social circle: ‘I was by myself, and I wanted to be able to meet others like me. I couldn’t go down the street saying, “I’m looking for lesbian friends”.’ She published nine issues of Vice Versa before RKO was sold and she was forced her to change jobs. ‘I did eight copies at a time (and) I’d run it through twice, that made 16 copies. And after I was through I would just give it to my friends. I never sold it.’
In the 1950s, Edythe began writing for The Ladder, the first nationally available lesbian magazine, published by the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights organisation in the United States. It was while she was writing for The Ladder that she adopted the name Lisa Ben (an anagram of ‘lesbian’); all nine issues of Vice Versa had been published anonymously. While working with the Daughters of Bilitis (and billed as ‘the first gay folk singer’) Lisa issued her first 45, her own composition, ‘Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard’ backed with a lesbian version of the standard ‘Frankie and Johnny’: ‘I started writing parodies to popular tunes in 1948,’ she told writer Kate Brandt.2
‘I listened to a lot of different artists,’ says queer singer-songwriter Blackberri, ‘I’m really eclectic when it comes to music, but my favourite vocalist of all time was Billie Holiday. I love her voice. She sings like Satchmo’s horn! Her voice has got that kind of feel to it, it’s just amazing’. Throughout her tempestuous career, Billie Holiday was openly bisexual and was rumoured to have dated many notable characters, including the actress and wit Tallulah Bankhead. Frank Sinatra called Billie ‘the greatest single musical influence on me,’ adding ‘I think anyone listening to Billie sing can’t help but learn something from her’.3 Etta James was a huge fan, as was Ray Charles, who performed with her at Carnegie Hall in 1959. Diana Ross portrayed her on the big screen in Lady Sings the Blues, a highly fictionalised version of her life.
Billie and Tallulah first met in the 1930s, a period when Bankhead could often be found slumming it in Harlem. After suffering a difficult and abusive childhood (she spent long periods in care and had was the victim of an attempted rape when she was just 11) in 1929, Holiday, who was born in Philadelphia in 1915, moved to Harlem, where she worked as a teenage prostitute. Imprisoned for soliciting when she was still only 14, once out of jail the girl born Eleanora Harris began singing, adopting the stage name Billie Holiday from actress Billie Dove and the musician Clarence Holiday, her biological father. By 1931 she was singing professionally, and in 1933 she made her recording debut as vocalist for the Benny Goodman Orchestra’s ‘Riffin’ The Scotch’. She shone at the Café Society in New York, where she introduced one of her best-known songs, ‘Strange Fruit’, a stinging depiction of a lynching. In the early years of her career she often crossed paths with Bessie Smith, and Holiday cited the Empress of the Blues as a major influence.
It seems that Holiday and Bankhead were more than just friends, and by 1946 they had become lovers: ‘It was Billie’s deep feeling and originality which moved me from the first time I heard her,’ Bankhead revealed.4 By this time, Holiday had become a major – albeit troubled – star, recording such classics as ‘God Bless The Child’ (a million-seller in 1941), ‘That Ole Devil Called Love’ and the haunting ‘Strange Fruit’. Working with the best jazz musicians of the day, including Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday was earning more than a thousand dollars a week (according to a 1947 news report she made $250,000 in the three years up to 1947),5 but she spent a great deal financially supporting her mother and most of what was left went on heroin. Bankhead often attended Holiday’s shows, and on several occasions she attempted to sort out her messy life: after Holiday was busted for opium possession, it was Bankhead who posted bail, and it was she who paid for a psychiatrist when Holiday threatened suicide. After Holiday was sent to the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, Bankhead pleaded with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (himself rumoured to be gay, although there has never been any real evidence to back up the often-repeated stories about him being a transvestite) that she be spared jail: ‘Miss Holiday is a very great artist. She doesn’t need to be confined within prison walls. What she needs is understanding, medical help and the warmth of a loving home’.6 In early 1959, Holiday was arrested again, this time along with her manager John Levy, for the illegal possession of narcotics. Her attorney, Jake Ehrlich, successfully argued that the hearing be delayed so that Lady Day could fulfil a series of live dates already arranged for cities including Seattle, Vancouver and Portland.7
By 1952, when Bankhead issued her autobiography Tallulah, things had soured between the two women. The book, published at a time when Bankhead was becoming something of a television celebrity and was desp
erately trying to clean up her act, hardly mentioned Holiday at all, yet when Holiday was featured in a TV special in October 1953, Bankhead was just one of the many celebrities (including Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and Count Basie) queuing up to sing her praises.8 Three years later, Holiday issued her own autobiography (like Tallulah’s, ghost-written); Bankhead was furious with Holiday over ‘unkind’ mentions of her in Lady Sings the Blues, and threatened to sue. Bankhead called Lee Barker at Doubleday, Holiday’s publisher, and warned him ‘If you publish that stuff about me in the Billie Holiday book, I’ll sue you for every goddam [sic] cent that Doubleday can make.’9
Billie Holiday’s life ended ignominiously in New York in 1959; she was just 44. She died handcuffed to a bed in the Metropolitan Hospital, having been arrested on yet another narcotics charge while she lay dying. Legend has it that she only had 70¢ in the bank, but an hour before she died she gave a nurse a roll of $50 bills wrapped tight in Scotch tape that she had kept secreted in her vagina, which she asked her to give to Bill Dufty, the journalist friend who had ghost-written her autobiography and who had been present at the hospital throughout her stay. For many years, Dufty kept the location of Holiday’s stash a secret, initially claiming that a nurse had found it taped to her leg. Bankhead sent a wreath of red roses for the casket, which was buried in an unmarked grave next to her mother’s: the coffin was exhumed in 1960 and reburied with a headstone which read ‘Billie Holiday, known as Lady Day. Born April 7 1915, Died July 15 1959’. Bankhead, who never publicly described herself as being bisexual (she did, however, describe herself as ‘ambisextrous’ and ‘as pure as the driven slush’), died in New York in 1968.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe has been hailed as the ‘woman who invented Rock ’n’ Roll’; her extraordinary electric guitar-led, gospel-influenced performances were a massive influence on Elvis and any number of early Rock ’n’ Rollers. Little Richard called her his favourite singer: in 1947 she heard Little Richard singing and invited him to join her on stage at the Macon City Auditorium. That show was Little Richard’s first public performance. When Rosetta decided to pay him, her generosity inspired him to become a performer. Johnny Cash was a fan; Bob Dylan still is.
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 9