Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (14 page)

But it was also easy for black lesbians to form a subculture in Harlem relatively early because although many Harlemites treated homosexuality with some ridicule, there was nevertheless more tolerance there than elsewhere for what the world of Babbit would have seen as outcasts and oddities, since blacks in general felt themselves to be outside the pale in white America. While homosexual men were sometimes being run out of small white towns, as Sherwood Anderson suggests in his post-World War I collection of stories
Winesburg, Ohio
(“Hands”), in Harlem tolerance extended to such a degree that black lesbians in butch/femme couples married each other in large wedding ceremonies, replete with bridesmaids and attendants. Real marriage licenses were obtained by masculinizing a first name or having a gay male surrogate apply for a license for the lesbian couple. Those licenses were actually placed on file in the New York City Marriage Bureau. The marriages were often common knowledge among Harlem heterosexuals.
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Such relative tolerance permitted black lesbians to socialize openly in their own communities instead of seeking out alien turf as white lesbians generally felt compelled to do. While heterosexual Harlemites often made fun of lesbians, they were willing to share bars and dance floors with them. There were thus plenty of places where black lesbians could amuse themselves and meet other lesbians in Harlem. The nightclubs that catered to gays and straights together that were described in novels such as
Home to Harlem, Strange Brother, The Big Money,
and Carl Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
all had counterparts in reality. The Lobster Pot, where Sybil sings and dances in
Strange Brother,
for instance, was probably the Clam House, where Gladys Bentley entertained for many years. There were numerous other bars and dance places, such as Connie’s Inn, the Yeahman, the Garden of Joy, and Rockland Palace, where homosexuals and heterosexuals rubbed shoulders, although, as Van Vechten shows in
Nigger Heaven,
heterosexuals sometimes quit a club when they perceived that “too many bulldikers” were taking over.
²⁰

Institutions that had no counterparts in the white world also flourished in gay Harlem of the 1920s. “Buffet flats,” apartments where sex circuses were staged, cafeteria style, for a paying clientele, occasionally catered to homosexual audiences. Ruby Walker Smith recalls such establishments where there were “nothing but faggots and bulldaggers…. everybody that’s in the life…. everything goes.” According to Smith, people would pay as they came in and then be free to roam around: “They had shows in every room, two women goin’ together, a man and a man goin’ together…. and if you interested they do the same thing to you.” While buffet flats appear to have begun as a heterosexual institution, there were enough individuals who were interested in homosexuality to make a gay buffet flat a profitable proposition. Equivalent buffet flats still catered to heterosexuals as well, not only in New York, but in the ghettos of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington.
²¹

While there were black lesbians in 1920s Harlem who committed themselves to “the life” and sometimes lived with other women in butch/femme couples, many who had affairs with other females were married to men, either because they were bisexual, they needed to marry for economic reasons, or front marriages permitted them to continue functioning with less stigma in the very sexually aware and ambivalent black community. Among Harlem women of wealth or fame, bisexuality was not uncommon, though few would have admitted to exclusive homosexuality. Perhaps to Harlem sophisticates, who in this respect do not appear to have been very different from white sophisticates of the 1920s, the former seemed like adventure while the latter seemed like disease. In any case, there is a good deal of evidence of bisexuality among Harlem entertainers in particular. For instance, blues singer Bessie Smith’s lesbian interests were well known among her show business intimates, although she was a married woman and took pains to cultivate that image as well. Many of the women in Bessie’s mid-1920s show,
Harlem Frolics,
were also known to have had relationships with each other.
²²

It was popular knowledge among those in the show business world of Harlem that Bessie was initiated into lesbianism by her old friend and mentor Ma Rainey, another bisexual, whose “indiscreet” lesbian behavior even got her into trouble in 1925 when she was arrested for a lesbian orgy at her home involving the women in her chorus. A neighbor called the police because of the noise. Reports say the women scrambled for their clothes and ran out the back door, but Rainey’s escape was foiled when she fell down a staircase. She was accused of running an indecent party and thrown in jail, from which Bessie Smith bailed her out the following morning.
²³

The news of her arrest did not hurt Ma Rainey, however. Like Gladys Bentley, she even capitalized on the shock effect that could be produced by hints of her bisexuality. Her recording of “Prove It on Me Blues,” a blues monologue by a woman who prefers women, was advertised with a picture of a plump black woman, looking much like Ma Rainey, in a man’s hat, tie, and jacket, talking to two entranced feminine flappers. In the distance, observing them, there is a policeman. The copy that accompanies the picture tries to pique the potential buyer’s salacious interest by hinting at the possible autobiographical nature of the song: “What’s all this? Scandal? Maybe so, but you wouldn’t have thought it of ‘Ma’ Rainey. But look at that cop watching her! What does it all mean?”
²⁴
The record company rightly assumed there were enough buyers in the 1920s who would not only understand the image and the implications but would be intrigued. But Ma Rainey was also sure to let the public know about her interest in young men and even to cultivate that heterosexual image of herself so that it largely undermined the other.

Similarly, Alberta Hunter, another blues singer, married in 1919 to obfuscate the conclusion she knew many people drew that she was a “bulldiker,” and she apparently reasoned that although she did not live with her husband, marriage gave her a protective coloration—not of heterosexuality, which would have been going too far in favor of conservatism, but of bisexuality. She thus felt free to continue in her lesbian pursuits without excessive discretion and was known to have been the lover of Lottie Tyler (the niece of black 1920s comedian Bert Williams). She also kept company with other black show business luminaries who were not excessively careful to hide their bisexuality in Harlem, such as Ethel Waters and her lover of many years, Ethel Williams.
²⁵
These women, who did not take great pains to pretend to exclusive heterosexuality, must have believed that in their own sophisticated circles of Harlem, bisexuality was seen as interesting and provocative. Although unalloyed homosexuality may still have connoted in 1920s Harlem the abnormality of “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” bisexuality seems to have suggested that a woman was super-sexy.

Among some sophisticated Harlem heterosexuals in the ’20s the lesbian part of bisexuality was simply not taken very seriously. Even housewives occasionally indulged in lesbian affairs, with the open approval of their husbands. One Harlem resident of the 1920s remembers frequent lesbian parties and dinners thrown by a wealthy married woman with a big house and a lavish garden: “Her husband didn’t mind her with the girls,” she recalls, “but he said if he ever caught her with a man he’d cut her head off.”
²⁶
No less than among white libertines for centuries, some Harlemites believed that real sex was penetration by a penis and love between women was just fooling around.

Liberality toward bisexuality bespoke an urbanity that had special appeal for upper-class Harlemites, no less than for white worldly continentals and rebels against American Babbitry. Perhaps the tone was set for Harlem’s upper class by A’Lelia Walker, who inherited a fortune from her former-washerwoman mother, inventor of a hair straightener that made millions. A majestic woman, nearly six feet tall, A’Lelia often went around with riding crop in hand and jeweled turban on her head. Though married several times, she was attended by a circle of handsome women and effete men, and as one of her contemporaries observed, “all the women were crazy about her.” Some believed that her various marriages were “fronts” and her husbands were themselves homosexuals, but like many of the sophisticated bisexual Harlemites, she felt it desirable to be married, regardless of what she did in her affectional life.

A’Lelia held salons that were attended by French princesses, Russian grand dukes, men and women on New York’s social register, Prohibition czars, Harlem Renaissance writers, and world-renowned intellectuals. But she threw other kinds of parties as well. Mabel Hampton, a Harlem dancer in the 1920s who attended some of Walker’s less formal gatherings with a white lesbian friend, remembers them as

funny parties—there were men and women, straight and gay. They were kinds of orgies. Some people had clothes on, some didn’t. People would hug and kiss on pillows and do anything they wanted to do. You could watch if you wanted to. Some came to watch, some came to play. You had to be cute and well-dressed to get in.

A’Lelia Walker probably had much to do with the manifest acceptance of bisexuality among the upper classes in Harlem: those who had moral reservations about bisexuality or considered it strange or decadent learned to pretend a sophistication and suppress their disapproval if they desired A’Lelia’s goodwill.
²⁷
Although many were undoubtedly no less ambivalent about lesbianism than Jake, the kitchen porter in
Home to Harlem,
through Walker’s example and influence they learned at least to tolerate it.

The complex attitudes with regard to female homosexual relations that were prevalent among sophisticated Harlemites in the 1920s are sometimes reflected in lyrics of the blues. Those songs, which are often satirical or funny, do not deal with bisexuality, perhaps because that affectional preference lent itself less readily to humorous caricature than did blatant lesbianism. Instead, they sometimes present extreme lesbian stereotypes (especially the mannish lesbian image that the term “bulldiker” connoted), which allowed the listener to recognize the situation without introducing subtle complications and to laugh at the in-joke. With the usual goal of titillation, the songs also satirically probed masculine uneasiness about the suspicion that women know how to “do it” better to each other than men do. And they frequently admitted to an ambivalent fascination.

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: