Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (13 page)

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.
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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 middle-class 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.
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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.”
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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. Urban 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?”
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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 boarding-house full of lesbians who are allowed to live in Harlem undisturbed.
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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.”

Yet most white writers who dealt with gay Harlem of the 1920s preferred the illusion of an “anything goes” atmosphere in which no one blinks an eye or expresses disapproval. In Blair Niles’
Strange Brother
when a white woman begs “to see the other Harlem” she is taken to the Lobster Pot, which vibrates with variety, both in color and sexual orientation. At the Lobster Pot,

three white women had just taken the table next to [several Negro] dandies. One of them was a girl, rather lovely, with delicately chiseled features and short dark hair brushed severely back from a smooth low forehead. From the waist up she was dressed like a man, in a loose shirt of soft white silk and a dark tailored coat. She sat with one arm around the woman beside her.

No one makes wisecracks or exhibits disdain at such a sight. The most prominent lesbian figure in
Strange Brother
is Sybil, the black piano player at the Lobster Pot, perhaps modeled on Gladys Bentley, a lesbian transvestite Harlem entertainer. Sybil is a totally happy soul. She “filled the room with her vast vitality” and performed “as though to live was so gorgeous an experience that one must dance and sing in thanksgiving.” She lives with another woman, her “wife,” whom she married in a lesbian wedding, Sybil in tuxedo, the other woman in bridal veil and orange blossoms. A white character says, “They’re happy and nobody they know thinks any the less of them.”
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But as black novelists suggested, such uncomplicated acceptance was less than certain.

In reality as well as in fiction, whites were reluctant to see Harlem’s ambivalence toward homosexuality. Instead, they saw that Harlem appeared “wide open” sexually and, typical of many who enjoy the fruits of colonialism, they did not analyze why or even question Harlem’s limits. They “slummed” in Harlem as though they were taking a trip into their id. The white women who went to Harlem to “be lesbian” were sometimes only “trying it on,” taking advantage of what they assumed was the free spirit of the 1920s in Harlem to explore a variety of sexual possibilities. Some of these women considered themselves bisexual. More often they simply considered themselves adventurous, since there was not yet a pressing need to declare, even to one’s self, one’s “sexual orientation.” They were frequently married or looking for a husband but saw that as no obstacle to their right to explore, either with the black women or with other white women they might meet in Harlem. In John Dos Passos’
The Big Money,
a novel about America after World War I, Dick Savage is implored by Patricia Doolittle (puns intended), one of the Junior League women in his group of wealthy friends, “Do take me some place low…. I’m the new woman…. I want to see life.” They end up in a black, homosexual basement bar in Harlem, where Patricia dances with “a pale pretty mulatto girl in a yellow dress,” while Dick dances with a “brown boy” in a tight suit who calls himself “Gloria Swanson.” When Dick insists on taking Patricia home so that he can carry on without her as a witness, she screams at him, “You spoil everything…. You’ll never go through with anything,” piqued because she too had intended something further with her female partner. He later returns to the bar alone and takes “Gloria” and another young man, “Florence,” home with him.
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It is night time Harlem that unleashes inhibitions in these repressed whites. They permit themselves to live out fantasy in a world that is not quite real to them. They no longer have to “behave” as they do in white society which “matters.”

Such fiction appears to have accurately reflected real life, in which wealthy whites were fascinated with “seeing life” and playing at it in various Harlem night spots that were open to displays of unconventional sexuality. Libby Holman, the celebrated singer of the ’20s, who was married to a man, nevertheless came to Harlem, where she could not only act as a lesbian but even be outrageously gay. With one of her lovers, Louisa Carpenter du Pont Jenney, heiress to a great number of the du Pont millions, she visited Harlem almost nightly during one period, both dressed in identical men’s dark suits and bowler hats such as they probably could not have worn with impunity in most other areas of the United States. There they were joined by other women celebrities and high-livers, most of them also married to men but out for a good time with other bisexual females: Beatrice Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead, Jeanne Eagles (who was Sadie Thompson in the first version of
Rain),
Marilyn Miller (the quintessential Ziegfield girl), and Lucille Le Sueur (who later became Joan Crawford). Sometimes they went to the Lafayette to listen to another bisexual woman singer, Bessie Smith, or they visited Helen Valentine, the famous entrepeneur of 140th Street who staged sex circuses that featured homosexual as well as heterosexual acts.
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They encouraged some Harlem entertainers even to flaunt lesbianism, to make it a spectacle and an attraction to those who expected the
outre
from Harlem. Gladys Bentley, a three-hundred-pound “male impersonator” who sometimes played under the name Bobby Minton, appeared in men’s suits not only onstage at the popular Clam House and the night spot she later opened, Barbara’s Exclusive Club, but also on the streets of Harlem. It was said that her appearance “drew celebrities like flies.” Dressed in a tuxedo, she announced her homosexuality by marrying a woman in a New Jersey civil ceremony, like her fictional counterpart Sybil in
Strange Brother.
Her blatant transvestism and homosexual behavior were part of her risque appeal. She was the epitome of the stereotype of the lesbian that the public came to Harlem to gawk at. Gladys was in reality bisexual, but in her exceptional case it was more profitable to hide that aspect of her life from the public, which was fascinated with her outrageous image.
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That whites permitted themselves to act in Harlem as they probably would not elsewhere was obviously not without opportunism and a racist conviction that nothing really counted in the fantasy world of tourist Harlem. Perhaps their behavior can be attribtued to a feeling that their skin color served as armor here, making them impervious to any manner of attack or insult. But what they saw as the greater vitality of black people, “their more basic and healthier eroticism,” permitted these white women to reach into those areas of their psyches (whose existence the Freudians had recently charted like a newly discovered planet) in order to discover and express desires they might have suppressed elsewhere. Many of them must have been grateful for the permission Harlem appeared to give them.

Black Lesbians in Harlem

A black lesbian subculture could be established fairly early in Harlem for several reasons. One root of that subculture might have been the demiworld. Black women who had been to jail learned there not only about lesbian sexuality but also about “mama” and “papa” sexual roles that had developed in institutionalized situations in America by the beginning of this century.
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They sometimes established similar “butch/femme” arrangements once they were released from the institution, and perhaps they helped to bring such patterns into the fledgling subculture and to give it a clear, identifiable image.