Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (61 page)

8
.  Quoted in “That Was New York,”
New Yorker,
Feb. 1940, pp. 35–38.

9
.  Gertrude Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” (1922; reprinted in
The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein,
ed. Carl Van Vechten [New York: Random House, 1962], pp. 561–68).

10
. “Synonym” quoted in John B. Kennedy, “So This Is Harlem,”
Colliers,
October 28, 1933, p. 27 +. Straight/gay Harlem in the ’20s described in George Chauncey, Jr., “The Way We Were,”
Village Voice,
July 1, 1986, pp. 29–30 +; Blair Niles,
Strange Brother
(1931; reprint, New York: Arno, 1975), p. 210; Milt Machlin,
Libby
(New York: Tower, 1980), p. 59.

11
. Niles, p. 151–52.

12
. On Harlem Renassiance homosexuality see Eric Garber, “‘Tain’t Nobody’s Business: Homosexuality in Harlem in the 1920s,”
Advocate,
May 13, 1982, pp. 39–43 +. On McKay’s homosexuality see Wayne F. Cooper,
Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), passim. Claude McKay,
Home to Harlem
(1928; reprint, Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham 1973), pp. 128–29, 91–92. Bessie Smith recorded a slightly different version of the song called “Foolish Man Blues”:

“There’s two things got me puzzled,

There’s two things I don’t understand,

That’s a mannish-acting woman,

And a skippin', twistin,’ woman-acting man.”

In Chris Albertson,
Bessie
(New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 125. In Smith’s version its razzing nature is mitigated through the title, which laughs at the speaker, and through the fact of the singer’s own bisexuality.

13
. Wallace Thurman,
The Blacker the Berry
(1929; reprint, New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 211, 135–36.

14
. Niles, pp. 47, 56, 155–56.

15
. John Dos Passos,
The Big Money
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), pp. 5H-I7-

16
. Machlin, pp. 69–71. See also Mercedes de Acosta,
Here Lies the Heart
(1960; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), p. 128, and Lee Israel,
Miss Tallulah Bankhead
(New York: Dell, 1973), pp. 68–70.

17
. Jervis Anderson,
This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 169; Roi Ottley and William Weatherby, eds.,
The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History
(Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1967), p. 249; Gladys Bentley, “I Am a Woman Again,”
Ebony,
(August 1952), pp. 92–98; personal interview with Mabel Hampton, cohort of Bentley, age 85, New York, October 4, 1987.

18
. Margaret Otis discussed early twentieth-century black and white lesbian behavior in jails in “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
(June-July 1913), 8(2): 113–16.

19
. Luvenia Pinson, “The Black Lesbian—Times Past, Times Present,”
Womanews,
May 1980. See also Niles, for Harlemites’ knowledge of black lesbian marriages.

20
. Gloria Hull, in “Under the Days: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke,”
Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue
(Autumn 1979), 2(2)123, suggests that Grimke was not more prolific because she felt she had to hide her lesbianism. But it is actually unclear to what extent Grimke felt it necessary to be secretive about her affectional preference. Some ostensibly lesbian poems by Grimke did appear during her lifetime, such as “Mona Lisa,” in Countee Cullen, ed.,
Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets
(New York: Harper and Row, 1927), p. 42. See also the poems of May V. Cowdery, who published frequently in
Crisis
during the 1920s. Cowdery’s book of collected verse,
We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems
(Philadelphia: Alpress, 1936), contains several poems that appear to be lesbian, such as “Insatiate,” a sardonic poem about how only jealousy can keep the speaker faithful to her woman lover (pp. 57–58). Information about clubs from Bentley; Machlin, pp. 69–70; Garber, p. 41; and personal interview with Mabel Hampton, Carl Van Vechten,
Nigger Heaven
(rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 12, 137.

21
. Interview with Ruby Smith by Chris Albertson, 1971,
AC-DC Blues,
side A. See also Albertson,
Bessie,
p. 123. History of buffet flats in Garber, p. 41; McKay, p. 103; Machlin, p. 71.

22
. Elaine Feinstein,
Bessie Smith
(New York: Viking, 1985), p. 38. Albertson,
Bessie,
chapter 5.

23
. Sarah Lieb,
Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 17, 18.

24
. Ad for “Prove It on Me Blues,”
Chicago Defender,
September 22, 1928, 1:27. Hazel V. Carby briefly discusses “Prove It on Me Blues” and Ma Rainey’s lesbian relationship with Bessie Smith in “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometimes: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,”
Radical America
(1986), 20(4):9–22.

25
. Frank C. Taylor with Gerald Cook,
Alberta Hunter: A Celebration in Blues
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), passim.

26
. Personal interview with Mabel Hampton, cited above.

27
. A’Lelia P. Bundles, “Madame C. J. Walker to Her Daughter, A’Lelia—The Last Letter,”
Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women
(Fall 1984), 1 (2):34–3 5. Personal interview with Mabel Hampton, cited above. David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1981), pp. 165–68.

28
. Ma Rainey, “Prove It on Me Blues,” on
AC-DC Blues: Gay Jazz Reissues,
side A, Stash Records, St-106.

29
. Bessie Jackson, “B.D. Women’s Blues,”
AC-DC Blues.
Transcribed in a slightly different version in Paul Oliver,
The Meaning of the Blues
(1960; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1972), pp. 137–38. See also references in Leib, p. 123, to “BD Women” and “BD Dream,” which confirm that the “bulldyker” was a recurrent figure in the blues.

30
. “It’s Dirty But Good,” in Jonathan Katz,
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 77.

31
. W. T. Kirkeby and Sinclair Traill,
Ain’t Misbehavin'
(New York: Peter Davies, 1966), p. 41. Paul Oliver,
Aspects of the Blues Tradition
(New York: Oak, 1970), p. 203. An earlier version called “The Bull Diker’s Dream” had been written by Jesse Pickett and was circulated by the beginning of the 1920s. It is described as starting out at a fast tempo and moving into a slow drag style “where it got mean and dirty. It was one of those ‘put out the lights and call the law’ things that went over big just before dawn”; in Willie Smith and George Hoefer,
Music on My Mind
(New York: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), pp. 55–56. These blues songs with homosexual references were not limited to the 1920s. Perhaps motivated by male anxiety about going off to another war, Memphis Willie B complained in the early ’40s:

Women loving each other, they don’t think about no man. (twice)

They ain’t playing it secret no more. These women playing a wide open hand

I buzzed a girl the other day,

I wanted a little thrill,

She said, “I’m so sorry,

My missus is putting out the same thing you is.”

Quoted in Samuel Charters,
The Poetry of the Blues
(New York: Oak, 1963), PP. 82–83.

32
. Lewis Erenberg,
Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Joanne Meyerowitz,
Holding Their Own: Working Women Apart from the Family in Chicago, 1880–1930
(Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983); Kathy Peiss,
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

33
. Lyrics quoted in Oliver, 207, 225–26.

34
. Harvey Warren Zorbaugh,
The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). Chicago lesbian bars discussed in newspaper article about a police raid: “Shut Two Night Clubs With Girls Garbed as Men,” in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1930s.

35
. Frances Donovan,
The Woman Who Waits
(1920; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974), pp. 143–44.

36
. Quoted in Meyerowitz, p. 175.

37
. Millay quotation in Max Eastman,
Great Companions
(1942; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus, Cudahy, 1959), p. 83.

38
. The Village in 1860 is discussed in Allen Churchill,
The Improper Bohemians: A Recreation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), p. 25.

39
. Dodge’s salons are discussed in Carl Van Vechten,
Peter Whiffle
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1922); Robert E. Humphrey,
Children of Fantasy: The First Rebels of Greenwich Village
(New York: John Wiley, 1978), pp. 26–27; Churchill, pp. 54–55; Albert Parry,
Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America
(1933; reprint, New York: Dover, 1960), p. 273. In addition to Mabel Dodge’s own discussion in her memoirs of her various lesbian experiences they are also discussed in more recent biographies of her, e.g., Emily Hahn,
Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Winifred L. Frazer,
Mabel Dodge Luhan
(Boston: Twayne, 1984). Dodge lived closely to male ambivalence over lesbianism. Her third husband bragged to Djuna Barnes that he succeeded in destroying a lesbian relationship by making love to both women: quoted in Andrew Field,
Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 48.

40
. Invitation in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1920s. Retreats mentioned in Caroline F. Ware,
Greenwich Village, 1920–30: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post War Years
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935)> pp. 96, 238. Brothel reference in Field, p. 79. Parry also refers to “Lesbian harems that were open to the knowing,” again, unfortunately, without documentation (p. 327).

41
. Judith Schwarz,
Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912–1914
(Norwich, Vt.: New Victorian, 1986).

42
. Chauncey. Personal interview with Mabel Hampton, cited above.

43
. Ware, pp. 55, 237, 252–53.