In some of these songs the characterization of the lesbian combines images of freakishness with a bravado that is at once laughable and admirable. The lesbian is ridiculed for her illicit and unorthodox sexuality. But she is also an outlaw, which makes her a bit of a culture hero in an oppressed community. In Ma Rainey’s “Prove It on Me Blues” the singer seems to invite jeers: she admits to wearing a collar and a tie, to being “crooked,” to liking “to watch while the women pass by.” But the black audience is forced to identify with her because she and they understand stigmatization. And she is also rescued from being ludicrous because she can toy with the audience. She is the jokester they must, at least grudgingly, admire. She teasingly admits that she means to follow another woman everywhere she goes and that she wants the whole world to know it. But she pretends to dangle ambiguity in front of her listeners:
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men….
They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,
They sure got to prove it on me….28
Her message is finally that she doesn’t give a damn what they think and until she is caught in flagrante delicto no one can prove anything about her anyway. But the audience is meant to understand that she does indeed “do it” and to simultaneously laugh at her and cheer her on for her boldness.
Teasing is recurrent in these blues songs, whose purpose seems often to be to worry the male listener just to the point of titillation. In George Hannah’s “The Boy in the Boat” the singer provokingly acknowledges the superiority of lesbian sex (cunnilingus) and challenges the audience:
You think I’m lyin’, just ask Tack Ann
Took many a broad from many a man.
Bessie Jackson’s “BD [bulldyker] Women’s Blues” is another provocative admonishment to heterosexual males that they are dispensable and if they will not reform women could easily do without them. She tells her male listeners that they can’t understand BD women, but in her experience, bulldykers have everything a “nach’l man” has and more. They can lay their jive, they can strut their stuff, they can drink up many whiskeys, they’re not too lazy to work and make their dough, and a woman misses nothing by chosing them over a man.29
But there is an additional dimension to Jackson’s song that can also be found in a few other blues songs about lesbianism. It can be read as a subversive statement of lesbian pride in its listing of lesbian competencies, and a prefiguration of the radical feminism of a much later era in its warning that women can find other women much nicer than cruel and selfish men:
Comin’ a time, BD women, they ain’t goin’ to need no men.
Oh, the way they treat us is a low down and dirty thing.
George Hannah’s song, too, although it seems to be bent on provoking the male listener to both worry and laughter, contains a secret message to the female listener that lesbianism can be superior to heterosexuality. The remarkable dual message that characterizes some of these blues songs is particularly clear in one lyric that baldly states that while lesbian sex is improper, it is nevertheless terrific:
I know women that don’t like men.
The way they do is a crying sin.
It’s dirty but good, oh yes, it’s just dirty but good.30
The song at once urges men to worry and women to “try it.” The humor is derived from the double discourse that pretends disapproval but hints at titillation in the face of sexual daring.
The listener to these 1920s blues apparently took whatever he or she wanted out of the songs. To the heterosexual male they were provocative. To the potentially bisexual female they were suggestive and encouraging. To the lesbian they could be affirming. One lesbian blues song, “BD’s Dream,” has been described by historians of 1920s and ’30s music as one of the most frequently heard songs in the rent party repertoire. Of course lesbians sometimes attended rent parties in Harlem (parties where the guests would pay an entrance fee to help the tenant raise money for the rent), but those gatherings were generally predominantly heterosexual, which confirms that the song must have had terrific popularity with all manner of audiences.31
It is not surprising that sophisticated heterosexuals, both blacks and the tourists who were intrigued with black life and environs, were taken with such lyrics—they were characteristic of the era: They flaunt unorthodoxy with a vengeance, but at the same time they exhibit the vestiges of discomfort toward female nonconformity and sexual autonomy that individuals who scoffed at the conventional nevertheless maintained. That discomfort, as much as it is mitigated by laughter in these songs, suggests that even those who chose to reject the mainstream culture or who were cast outside it by virtue of their race could go no further in their own unconventionality than to be ambivalent about sexual love between women.
A Note on Working-Class Lesbian Communities Elsewhere in America
While some middleclass professional women such as those described in chapter 1 lived with other women as lesbians during the 1920s, their lesbian social lives tended to be carried on within friendship circles and away from public places. They generally would not have gone to the Harlem gay bars that emerged in the 1920s, for example. Their lifestyles did not lend themselves to the construction of a distinctive lesbian subculture that broke away from the main culture in terms of dress, language, haunts, mores, etc. But there is evidence to suggest that such a subculture was slowly being established in a number of working-class communities throughout America in the 1920s.
Recent historians have suggested that it was American working-class women of the early twentieth century who first began to enjoy a broader spectrum of public amusements and brought the concept of such diverse pastimes into the lives of middleclass women later in the century. This theory is particularly revealing with regard to the development of a visible lesbian subculture in America. For example, in the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable for women other than prostitutes to frequent saloons. But by the second decade of this century, other working-class women began visiting saloons that offered food as well as drink. That new social custom undoubtedly made it easier for lesbians of the working class than it would have been for their middleclass counterparts to conceive of themselves in a saloon environment. Working-class lesbians could therefore become prominent in the establishment of lesbian bars, which became the single most important public manifestation of the subculture for many decades, eventually attracting young lesbians who were not of working-class backgrounds.32
A visible homosexual subculture centered on bars could be seen in several large cities outside of New York in the course of the 1920s. Blues singer Bertha Idaho’s “Down on Pennsylvania Avenue,” which she recorded for Columbia Records in 1929, decribes one famous gay and lesbian nightspot in Baltimore, Maryland:
Let’s take a trip down to that cabaret
Where they turn night into day,
Some freakish sights you’ll surely see,
You can’t tell the he’s from the she’s,
You’ll find them every night on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Another blues song, recorded by Ma Rainey in 1924, suggests an even earlier development of a visible black lesbian subculture on the South Side of Chicago:
Goin’ down to spread the news
State Street women wearing brogan shoes …
There’s one thing I don’t understand
Some women walkin’ State Street like a man.33
A white working-class lesbian subculture, in which butch and femme roles were clearly pronounced, also emerged in big cities by the 1920s. Such a subculture, made possible by the numbers of young women leaving their families and moving to the cities in order to find work, began to appear in areas such as the Near North Side of Chicago, a district of boardinghouses and furnished room rentals where working class women without families could obtain cheap housing. A sociologist at the end of the 1920s, researching Chicago’s Near North Side, wrote of lesbian parties that one of his female i
nformants had described to him that went on nightly in one set of rooms where “some of [the women] would put on men’s evening clothes, make love to the others, and eventually carry them off in their arms into the bedrooms.” Such butch/femme dichotomies were also manifested in the white working class lesbian bars that were established in that city by the following decade such as the Roselle Club and the Twelve-Thirty Club.34
Although the public manifestations of a working class lesbian subculture remained small throughout the 1920s, it is clear that lesbians were everywhere in the big cities. Another sociologist at the beginning of the 1920s, Frances Donovan, who studied waitresses in Chicago, suggested that lesbianism was not uncommon among them. Donovan related several stories about instances she had observed, such as catching a glimpse of two waitresses in a dressing room of a restaurant as one “passed her hands caressingly over the bare arms and breast of another.” But since Donovan was an outsider looking in and frequently rendering judgment on the lives of working class women, it is difficult to tell just how accurate her other conjectures of lesbianism among waitresses really were.35
Unfortunately, most of the information that has survived about working-class lesbians during the 1920s has come down to us through the writings of outsiders, since the women themselves seldom committed detailed descriptions of their feelings or lifestyles to paper. Outside of the blues songs it is rare that we get to hear the voices of working-class lesbians. There is only an occasional letter that is tempting in its hints about life within the subculture but is mute about the details, such as a brief note written in 1925 and “found in the room of the writer”:
Dear Mary: I am writing a few lines to let you know that I am well and hoping you are the same … But kid I’d like to go out with you again the old lady throwing me out of the house because I ain’t working for about a month now. why don’t you call me up honey did you forget about me, did you forget my phone number … Good Bye, Good Luck. From Your Loving Girl Friend, Adeline J—to Mary K—,36
Although there is not a wealth of material that has been unearthed to give a clear picture of 1920s working-class lesbians outside of Harlem (which was influenced to some extent by its appeal to wealthier tourists), it is nevertheless apparent that lesbian life and subculture were quietly flourishing among these women by this time. Generally beyond the fear or grasp of middleclass morality, not needing a “sexual revolution” to endorse their sexual expression, and freed earlier by their class to look for amusements in public places, they were more easily able than middleclass lesbians to begin trends that were later to become the most prominent public manifestations of lesbianism.
Lesbians in Bohemia
As much as many American “rebels” in the 1920s paid lip service to the necessity of breaking with the restrictive morality of the past, they were very close in time to an era that refused to allow women a truly autonomous sexuality such as lesbianism assumes. Thus they generally had imperfect success in making the revolutionary leap to genuine acceptance of sexual love between women. If there was anywhere that a non-working-class lesbian community could flourish in the ’20s, however, it should have been in an area such as Greenwich Village, where value was placed on the unconventional and the breaking of taboos. But although lesbianism was allowed to exist more openly there than it could have in most places in the United States, even in Greenwich Village sexual love between women was treated with ambivalence. On the one hand, it was an experience that the free bohemian woman should have no scruples against: it should be taken for granted as part of her liberated sexual repertoire. It was, in fact, bohemian chic for a woman to be able to admit to a touch of lesbianism, as is suggested by the panache with which Edna St. Vincent Millay is said to have answered a psychoanalyst at a Greenwich Village party who was attempting to find the cause of a headache from which she suffered. The analyst asked, with combined pride in his knowledge of the psychosomatic effects of sexual repression and trepidation at the prospect of shocking a young woman:
“I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that you might perhaps, although you are hardly conscious of it, have an occasional impulse toward a person of your own sex?”
And Millay answered with the nonchalance requisite for a true bohemian: “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?”37
But on the other hand, among bohemian men (who controlled the mores of the Village, despite their occasional pretense to sexual egalitarianism), sexual love between women was never validated as equal to heterosexual intercourse, which was now claimed to be crucial to even a woman’s good health and peak functioning.
Yet Villagers prided themselves on being “bohemian,” which meant, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, being not like the creatures of society, victims of rules and customs, but free of such limitations. Narrow-mindedness would have betrayed such a lack of sophistication as to degrade the bohemian back to the position of mere worldling.38 It was incumbent upon the Village dweller, therefore, to pretend tolerance, at least, of unconventional female sexuality. For that reason, as lesbianism started to become a lifestyle rather than a mere sexual behavior in the United States, non-working-class women who wanted to live as lesbians, as well as those who were attracted to exploring various kinds of sexuality, were drawn to Greenwich Village. It was there that some of the earliest public manifestations of a non-working-class white American lesbian subculture developed.
By the second decade of our century Greenwich Village was already well established as an offbeat community of artists and intellectuals. It was for good reason that Mabel Dodge chose to settle there on her return from Europe in 1912 and to preside over weekly salons of sophisticates and bohemians that became the center of avant-garde life. In her salons, which were attended by scruffy artists and dignified dilettantes as well as ladies with bobbed hair and “mannish-cut garments,” Mabel Dodge nurtured revolutionary causes. Homosexuality was implicitly one of them. As was the case with A’Lelia Walker in Harlem, it was Mabel’s own open bisexual behavior, which she wrote about voluminously in her memoirs, that helped to foster some sexual tolerance in Greenwich Village during those early years.39
Perhaps another reason that homosexuality became somewhat more acceptable in the Village than elsewhere was that as certain taboos began to diminish throughout America, and even people outside the largest metropolitan centers were reexamining old attitudes, the Village’s exoticism required something less commonplace than mere smoking, drinking, and heterosexual experimentation. For some Village dwellers it was homosexuality that now helped to draw the line of revolt. Characteristically, that revolt was expressed in self-conscious gestures, such as a 1923 invitation to a Greenwich Village ball, illustrated by two women dancing together—one wearing pants, the other a dress. The copy read: “Come all ye Revelers! Dance the night into dawn—Come when you like, with whom you like—Wear what you like—Unconventional? Oh, to be sure …” Suppression of The Captive in 1926 and the near-suppression of The Well of Loneliness in 1928 also contributed to making lesbianism a cause celebre for some Greenwich Village bohemians who prided themselves on being on the side of the underdog and the minority. Because of such liberality, by the end of the decade all manner of homosexual retreats flourished there, even, according to one historian who does not, unfortunately, cite his source, a brothel that catered very successfully to lesbians.40
There were other elements as well in Greenwich Village that helped to provide an atmosphere that was relatively sympathetic to same-sex love, such as the strong feminist bent of some of its women. A Village feminist club of middleclass professional women, Heterodoxy, brought together on a regular basis women who defined themselves as lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. About 25 percent of Heterodoxy’s membership was not heterosexual, but all of these unconventional women appear to have accepted each other’s differences in sexual and affectional preferences and were mutually supportive. An anthropological spoof by one of the m
embers referred to the organization as “the tribe of Heterodites” in which the strongest taboo is against taboo, because the imposition of restrictions is injurious to free development of the mind and spirit. “By preventing taboo,” the writer observed, “the tribe has been able to preserve considerable unanimity of variety of opinion.” In an unconventional women’s atmosphere such as this, despite the middleclass professional affiliations of most of the members, one even received some extra points for life choices that the outside world considered eccentric. Several of the women in Heterodoxy were acknowledged couples. Although they could have hidden from the uninitiated, since their appearance was not stereotypically lesbian, in the Village their anniversary dates were celebrated by fellow Heterodites, and during times of trial they were given emotional support as couples by the heterosexuals as well as by the other homosexuals in the group.41 Of course many of the lesbian members of this Greenwich Village club would choose to live in the Village for its ostensible laissez-faire milieu that surpassed the rest of the country, though their ties to the professional class would not permit them to participate in the formation of the more blatant lesbian bar culture that was now beginning there through the efforts of more bohemian types.
Several Village clubs that lesbians frequented were like Harlem night spots in that they also welcomed Village heterosexuals and tourists who occasionally indulged themselves in lesbian chic; others, such as the Flower Pot on Gay and Christopher Street and Paul and Joe’s on 9th, catered exclusively to men and women who identified themselves as homosexual, but there were not yet enough females to support all-women’s clubs.42 Nor does there seem to have been much of a feeling of community yet, even in these clubs, between males and females who identified themselves as homosexual. They shared a sense of their differentness, but unlike in Germany, where gay men and women since the turn of the century had banded together in organizations such as the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in order to battle homophobia, the notion of homosexuals organizing for political action was still years away in America. Lesbians still had before them the major battles of defining for themselves, on an individual level, what lesbianism meant apart from the sexologists’ views, fighting familial and societal opposition to the autonomous female, and staking out modest territories where they could make contact with one another. Although many of them might have called themselves “new women,” they were not yet bold enough to articulate the connection between feminism and lesbianism such as women of the more radical 1970s did to fuel their militant movement. They had enough to do in merely coming into existence as lesbians, even in an environment that was quasi-tolerant of their new lifestyle.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 11