Lesbian Chic: Experimentation and Repression in the 1920s
In my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace. [Lesbianism] was not then as it is now, chic … but as daring as a Crusade; for where now it leaves a woman talkative, so that we have not a Secret among us, then it left her in Tears and Trepidation. Then one had to lure them to the Breast, and now you have to smack them, back and front, to wean them at all.
—Djuna Barnes,
Ladies Almanack, 1928
The decade of the 1920s witnessed a permissiveness among the more sophisticated to experiment not only with heterosexuality but with bisexuality as well—with erotic relationships that were more specifically genital than the romantic relationships of the Victorian era usually appear to have been. Such sexual liberalization had been building in America since the previous decade, at least partly in response to the popularizers of the most important of the sexologists, Sigmund Freud, who began at that time to disseminate their mentor’s ideas to large American audiences. Even readers of tame domestic magazines such as Good Housekeeping were being informed that the sex drive led one to desire various sensory gratifications and the individual had no control over its demands: “If it gets its yearning it is as contented as a nursing infant. If it does not, beware! It will never be stopped except with satisfactions.”1
The lay public was given to understand through such oversimplifications of Freud that to fight whatever urges might make themselves felt (presumably even those that emerged out of intimate friendships between women) was counterproductive. Even those who did not subscribe to Freudianism could not escape a familiarity with it, at least in middleclass America. It permeated not only popular culture but also everyday life. The playwright Susan Glaspell, who wrote a satire on the fascination with Freud that characterized the times, Suppressed Desires, was probably not exaggerating completely when she said, “You could not go out to buy a bun without hearing of someone’s complexes.” Actions and relationships were now examined with relish for sexual meaning.2
The Roots of Bisexual Experimentation
By the 1920s there were already a few established communities of women who identified themselves as lesbians, in some astonishing places such as Salt Lake City as well as in more likely areas such as San Francisco. But few women, regardless of their sexual experiences, became part of the fledgling lesbian community. Even if they did not marry and had affectional relationships only with other women, they lived usually without a lesbian subculture. In small towns where heterosexuals often “never even knew that homosexuals existed,” according to oral histories of those who lived in such towns through the 1920s, they passed easily for heterosexual spinsters.3
But although there were no huge numbers of women who suddenly identified as lesbians, statistics gathered by a 1920s sociologist, Katharine Bement Davis, indicate that many women were giving themselves permission to explore sex between women. Davis’ study of 2200 females (primarily of the middle class) shows that 50.4 percent admitted to intense emotional relations with other women and half of that number said that those experiences were either “accompanied by sex or recognized as sexual in character.” They frequently saw the relationship as an isolated experience (or one of several isolated experiences), and they expected eventually to marry and live as heterosexuals, though the times seemed to some of them to permit experimentation.4
The etiology of “lesbian chic,” the bisexual experimentation of the 1920s, has been traced by some social critics to World War I. But the war, in which the United States was engaged for only two years, did not have so significant an effect in establishing a lesbian subculture in America as it seems to have had in some areas of Europe, where it was fought for five years and with much more female participation than American women were permitted. According to Radclyffe Hall’s 1920s works, “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” and The Well of Loneliness, for example, in World War I many English female “sexual inverts” took jobs such as ambulance driving and had the opportunity to meet others who were attracted to the active life that war service offered. It was not until the Second World War, in which American women participated on a much larger scale, that their war effort experiences actually did stimulate an unprecedented growth of an American lesbian subculture.
But while no large lesbian subculture was established in the United States as a result of World War I, the period seems to have marked the beginning of some self-conscious sexual experimentation between women. In the midst of women’s Freudian enlightenment about the putative power of sexual drives, two million men were sent overseas and many more were called away from home for the war effort. It has been speculated that women, turning to each other faute de mieux, found they liked sex with other women just fine. As one blues composer wag of the era suggested in his song “Boy in the Boat,” it was then that women learned about cunnilingus, manipulating “the boy in the boat” (the clitoris) with each other:
Lot of these dames had nothing to do.
Uncle Sam thought he’d give ‘em a fightin’ chance,
Packed up all the men and sent ‘em on to France,
Sent ‘em over there the Germans to hunt,
Left the women at home to try out all their new stunts.5
Despite the composer’s humorous intent, there is probably some element of truth in his explanation of the growth of sexual relations between women during those years when the relative paucity of men encouraged same-sex intimacy not only among middleclass college and professional women, who had had the freedom to enjoy each other’s company for some time now, but also among a broader spectrum of females who might have married (if not out of love, then out of ordinary social pressure) had it not been for the war.
In addition to the effects of Freud and the war, bisexual experimentation was also encouraged in some circles by a new value placed on the unconventional and daring. By the 1920s, young American intellectuals, bohemians, and generic nonconformists were determined to rout with a vengeance the last vestiges of Victorianism in the country. To many of them it was clear that their parents had known nothing anyway and it was that ignorance that had not only involved the world in a fruitless war but also caused untold personal suffering in the form of harmful repression and absurd legislation. In metropolitan areas these young people often determined the temper of the times through their preference for literature and art that challenged tradition, as well as through their resistance to laws such as Prohibition, their adoption of new fashions such as bobbed hair and short skirts for women, and their rejection of received notions regarding sexuality. Freud provided them with a license to explore sex openly, but there was a particular charm in explorations that would have previously been considered especially unorthodox, that would have shocked Babbit, flown in the face of convention, shown an ability to live originally and dangerously. These became goals for the 1920s rebels—and in some circles, bisexuality seemed to address all those goals.
Unlike in earlier eras, love between women was now often assumed to be sexual (perhaps even in cases where it was not), and it was popularly described by the bald term “homosexuality.” With regard to sexual awareness, much of this generation had traveled a vast distance from their parent generation and the sophisticated would now have been incredulous over the concept of romantic friendship. But not only could they not believe in platonic love; they were also voyeuristically intrigued with lesbianism. The extent to which the subject fascinated the public is suggested by its popularity in American fiction of the era. Ernest Hemingway, for example, deals with the subject both briefly and extensively in his fiction of the ’20s: in The Sun Also Rises (1926), with the character of the “boyish” Brett Ashley; in A Farewell to Arms (1929), with Catherine Barkley’s nurse friend, Fergy, who is in love with her; in the short story “The Sea Change,” which is about a woman trying to explain to her male companion her erotic involvement with another woman; and in his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden, set in the 1920s, whose major focus is a triangle that includes two women
who are sexually enamoured with each other. Sherwood Anderson shows American women “experimenting” with lesbianism in two novels of the ’20s, Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925). A bisexual woman in Dark Laughter suggests that American wives played with lesbianism with great ease since American men “knew so little” about love and sex between women.6 But the writers were working as hard as they could, along with the Freudians, to inform them. Minor novelists also, such as James Huneker (Painted Veils, 1920) and Wanda Fraiken Neff (We Sing Diana, 1928), and playwrights such as Henry Gribble (March Hares, 1921) and Thomas Dickinson (Winter Bound, 1929) all brought fascinated views of lesbians to literature and the American stage. The English novel The Well of Loneliness, published in the United States in 1928, became a huge succes de scandale.
It is difficult to assess just what that widespread interest in lesbianism meant, to American men in particular. Clearly there was ambivalence in their response. But perhaps the exoticism of the concept captured their curiosity and sexual imagination. Or perhaps the image of love between women aroused subconscious anxiety that was then cathartically soothed in these fictional works, since they almost invariably ended by confirming conventional sexuality: the girl seldom got the girl—most often a male came in and stole the booty. The old, reassuring sexual order was restored after experimentation with the new.
Although there was considerable interest in unconventional sexuality among sophisticates of the 1920s, the official voice was not remarkably different from that of earlier eras and lesbianism, while discussed more openly than it had ever been before in America, was greeted with outrage by the guardians of morality who were nowhere near ready to accept such autonomous sexuality in women. In 1923 Theatre Magazine, an important voice of Broadway, said of Sholom Asch’s God of Vengeance, one of the earliest plays with a lesbian theme to appear on Broadway: “A more foul and unpleasant spectacle has never been seen in New York.” The producer, director, and cast of twelve were all hauled off to court on charges of obscenity. Edouard Bourdet’s play The Captive, about a young woman who cannot be happy in her marriage because she is obsessed by another woman, met a similar fate in 1926 on Broadway, as well as in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit, when it appeared in those cities in 1927. Another play, Sin of Sins, opened in Chicago in 1926 and closed after a three-week run and a series of scandalized reviews such as that in Variety, which described the lesbian subject matter as being “not fit for public presentation.”7
But despite such vestiges of suppression, public curiosity about the subject could not be stopped. In cosmopolitan areas like New York, the intrigue with homosexuality for the 1920s’ “rebels” was manifested by drag balls where some men wore evening gowns and some women wore tuxedos and many came to be spectators. The balls were held in “respectable” ballrooms such as the ritzy Savoy and Hotel Astor and in the huge Madison Square Garden. Despite the voices of censorship such as those that occasionally emerged in response to Broadway plays, these events were officially sanctioned by police permits and attracted large numbers, as one Broadway gossip sheet of the 1920s announced in a headline: “6000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance.”8
Although the headline hints at a clear distinction between the “queers” and the spectators, the fiction of the period (see pp. 70–71) suggests that the lines sometimes blurred as the “heterosexual” tourists made contacts that were more than social among the avowedly homosexual participants. Such balls were for many sophisticates what the ’20s was all about—the ultimate in rebellion and a good laugh at the naive world that took as self-evident matters such as sex and gender.
But although the “heterosexuals” in such places may have played for a while with homosexuality, they generally did not see themselves as homosexual. Since “homosexual” was in the process of becoming an identity, one now might feel forced to chose either to accept or reject that label. But an erotic interest in another female, and even sex with another female, was not necessarily sufficient to make a woman a lesbian. She might consider her experiences simply bisexual experimentation, which was even encouraged in certain milieus. One had to see oneself as a lesbian to be a lesbian. But despite the apparent sexual liberalism of many in the 1920s, the era was not far removed in time from the Victorian age, and to admit to an aberrant sexual identity must not yet have been easy for any but the most brave, unconventional, committed, or desperate.
White “Slumming” in Harlem
While a lesbian identity was impossible for many women to assume during the ’20s, sex with other women was the great adventure, and literature and biography suggest that many women did not hestitate to partake of it. Of course some of the women who had sex with other women did indeed accept a lesbian identity and committed themselves to a new lesbian lifestyle. By 1922, as Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” indicates, such women were already calling themselves “gay,” as homosexual men were.9 But whether they identified as “gay” or were “just exploring,” those who wanted to experience the public manifestations of lesbianism looked for recently emerged enclaves in America. The era saw the emergence of little areas of sophistication or places where a laissez-faire “morality” was encouraged, such as Harlem and Greenwich Village, which seemed to provide an arena in which like-minded cohorts could pretend, at least, that the 1920s was a decade of true sexual rebellion and freedom.
Harlem had a particular appeal for whites who wanted to indulge in rebel sexuality. Perhaps there was a certain racism in their willingness to think of Harlem as a free-for-all party or, as Colliers Magazine said in the 1920s, “a synonym for naughtiness.” White fascination with Harlem seems to have smacked of a “sexual colonialism,” in which many whites used Harlem as a commodity, a stimulant to sexuality. And as in many colonized countries, Harlem itself, needing to encourage tourism for economic reasons, seemed to welcome the party atmosphere. Whites went not only to cabarets such as the Cotton Club, which presented all-black entertainment to all-white audiences, but also to speakeasies—the Drool Inn, the Clam House, the Hot Feet—that were located in dark basements, behind locked doors with peepholes. Whites snickered and leered in places that specialized in double entendre songs. They peeked into or participated in sex circuses and marijuana parlors. And they went to Harlem to experience homosexuality as the epitome of the forbidden: they watched transvestite floorshows; they rubbed shoulders with homosexuals; they were gay themselves in mixed bars that catered to black and white, heterosexual and homosexual. Made braver by bootlegged liquor, jazz, and what they saw as the primitive excitement of Africa, they acted out their enchantment with the primal and the erotic. They were fascinated with putative black naturalness and exoticism, and they romantically felt that those they regarded as the “lower class” had something to teach them about sexual expression that their middleclass milieu had kept from them. They believed Harlem gave them permission—or they simply took permission there—to explore what was forbidden in the white world. They could do in Harlem what they dared not do anywhere else.10
But it was not simply that whites took callous advantage of Harlem. To those who already defined themselves as homosexual, Harlem seemed a refuge, for which they were grateful. With an emerging homosexual consciousness, they began, probably for the first time in America, to see themselves as a minority that was not unlike racial minorities. They compared their social discomfort as homosexuals in the world at large with the discomfort of black people in the white world. Some sensed, as one character says in a novel about the period, Strange Brother, a bond between themselves and blacks because both groups flourished under heavy odds, and they believed that blacks also acknoweldged that bond: “In Harlem I found courage and joy and tolerance. I can be myself there…. They know all about me and I don’t have to lie.”11
In fact, however, blacks were generally as ambivalent about homosexuality as whites, but there were clubs in Harlem that did indeed welcome homosexuals, if only as one more exotic drawing card to lure tourists. Urba
n blacks in the 1920s did not all simply accept homosexuality as a “fact of life,” as gay whites liked to think they did, but Harlem’s reliance on tourism created at least the illusion of welcome.
Black novels of the 1920s show how thin that illusion really was. Claude McKay, a black writer who was himself bisexual, depicts Harlem’s ambivalence about homosexuality in his novel Home to Harlem (1928). Raymond, an intellectual black waiter, is eloquent in his romantic characterization of lesbianism. He tells Jake, a kitchen porter, that he is reading a book by Alphonse Daudet, Sapho:
“It’s about a sporting woman who was beautiful like a rose…. Her lovers called her Sapho…. Sappho was a real person. A wonderful woman, a great Greek poet…. Her story gave two lovely words to modern language…. Sapphic and Lesbian—beautiful words.”
But it is Jake who seems to speak for the Harlem masses when he realizes that “lesbian” is “what we calls bulldyker in Harlem,” and he declares, “Them’s all ugly womens.” Raymond continues his liberal defense in correcting him, “Not all. And that’s a damned ugly name.” But he realistically recognizes “Harlem is too savage about some things.” McKay illustrates more of Harlem’s ridicule, good-natured as it may sometimes have been, when he presents in this novel a nightclub called The Congo that does cater to homosexuals along with heterosexuals, but the “wonderful drag blues” to which everyone dances suggests that the heterosexuals responded to the homosexuals around them with a gentle contempt: “And there is two things in Harlem I don’t understand/ It is a bulldyking woman and a faggoty man./ Oh, baby, how are you?/ Oh, baby, what are you?”12
Other novels by black writers also make it clear that while lesbians in Harlem of the 1920s went unmolested, they were seldom approved of. In Wallace Thurman’s 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry, lesbian characters are a part of everyday Harlem, but there is always a hint of discomfort when they appear. Alva, a black bisexual who is a scoundrel, runs around with a Creole lesbian, which emphasizes his unsavory character. Emma Lou, the heroine, goes hunting for a room to rent and encounters the absurd Miss Carrington, who places her hand on Emma Lou’s knee, promising, “Don’t worry anymore, dearie, I’ll take care of you from now on,” and tells her, “There are lots of nice girls living here. We call this the ‘Old Maid’s Home.’ We have parties among ourselves and just have a grand time. Talk about fun! I know you’d be happy here.” Emma Lou is frightened off by what seems to her a bizarre sexuality, although obviously there is a whole boardinghouse full of lesbians who are allowed to live in Harlem undisturbed.13 But the tone in which this phenomenon is presented, by a black writer who was himself gay, makes it clear that Harlem sees these women as “queers.”
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 9