Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  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, 19
59), 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.

  44. Ann Cheney, Millay in Greenwich Village (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1975), p. 16; Elizabeth Atkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 37–38. Atkins was the first to suggest that while The Lamp and the Bell purports to be set in the ancient kingdom of Fiori, it is really Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson that Millay is describing. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), pp. 92, 84–85.

  45. “Virgin” quoted in Humphrey, p. 224. “Fonder of women” quoted in Emily Hahn, Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemians in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 241.

  46. Millay on psychoanalysis in Cheyney, p. 65. Millay on Eugen Boissevain, her husband, in Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), p. 189.

  47. See, e.g., “The Button” and “The Tigress” in Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village (New York: George H. Duran, 1926). Ellen Kay Trimberger points out that Dell was not alone among Greenwich Village men who in practice fell considerably short of their ideals concerning women’s freedom. Trimberger discusses Max Eastman and Hutchins Hapgood, who were leaders of Greenwich Village Bohemia, along with Dell, in “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1901–1925,” in Ann Snitow et al., eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 131–52. Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, 1939), p. 320.

  48. Village gay areas cited in Churchill, p. 320; Ware, p. 237.

  49. Clarence P. Oberndorf, “Diverse Forms of Homosexuality,” Urologic and Cutaneous Review (1929), 33:518–23. A. A. Brill, “The Psychiatric Approach to Homosexuality,” The Journal-Lancet (April 15, 1935), 55:249–52.

  50. The 1925 team is Irene Case Sherman and Mandel Sherman (“The Factor of Parental Attachment in Homosexuality,” Psychoanalytic Review [1925] 13:34; other warnings in George W. Henry, M.D., Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941; reprint, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1960), p. 1025; Winifred Richmond, The Adolescent Girl: A Book for Parents and Teachers (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 124–25.

  51. On the campaign for intercourse see Morton M. Hunt, The Natural History of Love (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), pp. 344–45; William J. Fielding, Sex and the Love Life (1927; reprint, New York: Ribbon Books, 1930), pp. 120–21; Walter M. Gallican, The Poison of Prudery: A Historical Survey (Boston: Stratford, 1929), p. 135. “Flaming bright red” quotation in Lorine Pruette, “The Flapper,” in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds., The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Their Children (1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971), p. 581. “Excess” quotation in Samuel D. Schmalhausen, “The Sexual Revolution,” in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen, eds., Sex in Civilization (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishers, 1929), p. 416.

  52. “Outworn traditions” statement by Stella Browne, quoted in Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 117; see also Floyd Dell, Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Non-Patriarchal Society (1930; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 238. William Alger, The Friendships of Women (Boston: Roberts, 1868), p. 364.

  53. For a discussion of the effects of companionate marriage on views of lesbianism see Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (Fall 1979), 4(3):54~59. For examples of marriage manuals that promoted performance see Maria Stopes, Married Love (London: A. C. Fifield, 1918); Theodore H. van de Velde, Ideal Marriage (1926; reprint, New York: Covici Friede, 1930); Gilbert van Tassel Hamilton, A Research in Marriage (1929; reprint, New York: M. D. Lear, 1948); G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth Macgowan, “Physical Disabilities in Wives,” in Calverton and Schmalhausen, eds., Sex in Civilization; Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1926; reprint, New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942). Women’s “failure” is discussed in Dell, Love in the Machine Age, p. 239.

  4. Wastelands and Oases

  1. Thomas Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps in America (New York: Farrar, 1934); Callman Rawley, “A Glimpse of the Unattached Woman Transient in New Orleans,” Family (May 1934), 15:118; Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), pp. 33–34; Box-Car Bertha, As Told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman, Sister of the Road: An Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (1937; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 65–67.

  2. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: 1975), pp. 126 ff. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 259–60, 263, 270–71. The number of women librarians, nurses, and social workers decreased only slightly or held steady during the decade of the depression, but there was a dramatic decrease in the number of women teachers, administrators, professors, clergywomen, etc. Women also made considerably less than men in identical professions. For example, in 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953, female teacher $1,394; Male social workers averaged $1,718, female social workers $1,442. According to an AAUW survey during the depression, 80 percent of the female respondents said they received less pay than men for equal work. A 1931 study also found that the percentage of female unemployment was highest in the higher income professions, with a considerable drop between 1929 and 1931. American Women’s Association, The Trained Woman and the Economic Crisis: Employment and Unemployment Among a Selected Group of Business and Professional Women in New York City (New York: American Women’s Association, 1931); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Woman’s Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 7; Ware, op. cit., pp. 69, 71–73

  3. Robert Latou Dickinson, “The Gynecology of Homosexuality,” in George W. Henry, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941; reprint, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1960), p. 1070. Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten [Youth and Sex: A Study of 1300 College Students [New York: Harper, 1938], p. 118) also conclude, rather simplistically, that lesbianism in the 1930s was less prevalent among college women than it had been in the 1920s, “when a few campus leaders in several of the larger women’s colleges made it something of a fad.”

  4. For late 1920s objections to working women see Henry R. Carey, “This Two-Headed Monster—The Family,” Harpers (January 1928), 15:1
62–71, and Anon. “A Case of Two Careers,” Harpers (January 1929), 17: 194–201. Quotations from the 1930s: Frank L. Hopkins, “Should Wives Work?,” American Mercury (December. 1936), 39:409–16; Norman Cousins, “Will Women Lose Their Jobs?,” Current History and Forum (September 1939), 41:14.

  5. Barnard dean quoted in Edna McKnight, “Jobs—For Men Only? Shall We Send Women Workers Home?,” Outlook and Independent, September 2, 1931, p. 18+. Sarah Comstock, “Marriage or Career?,” Good Housekeeping (June 1932), 94:32–33 +.

  6. “What Do the Women of America Think About Careers?” Ladies Home Journal (Nov. 1939), 56:12; Claire Howe, “Return of the Lady,” New Outlook (Oct. 1934), 164:34–37; Jane Allen, “You May Have My Job: A Feminist Discovers Her Home,” Forum (April 1932), 87:228–31.

  7. Henry, Sex Variants, and George Henry, “Psychogenic Factors in Overt Homosexuality,” American Journal of Psychiatry (January 1937), 93(4):889–908.

  8. Personal interview with M.K., age 79, San Francisco, October 22, 1988.

  9. Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 95–96, and Give Us This Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 25, 249–50, 359–63, 421–22.

  10. Sheila Donisthorpe, Loveliest of Friends (New York: Charles Kendall, 1931); William Carlos Williams, “The Knife of the Times,” in Knife of the Times (Ithaca, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1932); Dorothy Parker, “Glory in the Daytime,” in After Such Pleasure (New York: Viking, 1934); Ernest Hemingway, “The Sea Change,” in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (New York: Collier, 1938). Barbara Goldsmith, Little Gloria—Happy at Last (New York: Knopf, 1980).

  11. Quoted in Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend (New York: William Morrow, 1980), March 4, 1933 (p. no); December 5, 1933 (p. 152), January 27, 1934 (p. 161), September 1, 1934 (p. 176).