The Famous Lady Lovers: An Interview with Cookie Woolner

Interviewed By Katie Uva

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva interviews Cookie Woolner about her recent book, The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall. The book traces the lives and communities of Black queer women in the 1920s and 1930s.

In your introduction you describe your book as a “contrast and complement” to existing scholarship on African American queer women–what would you say is your unique intervention here?

My book centers intimate stories of Black lady lovers — as queer women were then known — and their increasingly visible social worlds in the early twentieth century. I take the reader through different settings, from Chicago boarding houses where women lived with other women after leaving their husbands, through sensational newspaper articles depicting violence at Black lady lovers’ gatherings, as well as into the entertainment world, Prohibition’s liminal spaces, and settings like Harlem Renaissance literary salons and even Howard University. Through detailing women’s relationships and the strategies they used to survive and even thrive in the Jim Crow era, I show the multiple ways that Black lady lovers played a central role in American interwar culture.

The Famous Lady lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall
by Cookie Woolner
University of North Carolina Press
2023, 210 pp.

What do you see as the major factors making queer Black women’s relationships more possible and more visible in this era? 

I see the post-World War One confluence of the Great Migration, the liminal gathering spaces of Prohibition, changing ideas of sex and gender in the Jazz Age, and the growth of the Black popular entertainment industry as central factors creating the possibilities for these new identities and social networks. The Black press was important as well, as newspapers wrote about multiple 1920s “queer love brawls” that occurred at women-only gatherings in northern cities like New York and Chicago, which introduced Black readers to this new figure of the “lady lover” but represented her as violent and criminal. However, newspapers were also filled with record ads and gossip columns about queer performers like Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley, who brought modern new ideas about Black women’s autonomy and sexuality to the public in the interwar era. 

How does the issue of “respectability” shape the story you tell in your book?

Respectability politics are interwoven throughout the book, since presenting oneself as visibly “respectable” in the Jim Crow era was a key strategy employed by Black women as they fought for equal treatment and full citizenship rights. Respectability politics were a big part of the reason the “classic blues women” recorded and made money for white-owned record companies, as the few Black-owned labels, like Black Swan Records, sought to distance themselves from most of these performers, whom they saw as too southern, too rural, and not “lady like” enough. Most infamously, Bessie Smith was not signed to Black Swan after a recording audition where she spit between takes, which was much too uncouth for owner Harry Pace. 

Another chapter focuses on “middle class” lady lovers, like Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first dean of women at Howard University in the 1920s-30s. She was one of the rare Black women we know of who had a “Boston marriage” style relationship with another woman at this time, which was common for wealthy white women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Slowe and playwright/teacher Mary Burrell made a home together in Washington, D.C. for years, but only referred to one another as close friends and having a sister-like relationship. Their home and gardens served as a respite for female Howard students, whom they entertained regularly, creating a Black feminist intellectual community that the male authorities of Howard viewed as suspect. For years, male administrators sought to make Slowe live in the women’s dorms, which reflected their beliefs in the need for female students’ protection and their lack of support for faculty who did not hew to norms of the heterosexual nuclear family. Slowe fought back and never left her home with Burrill until her early death in 1937 at age 52. Despite the pressures on Black college-educated women to appear respectable, some nonetheless carved out nontraditional lives while modeling them for future generations as well. 

Your book focuses on the urban North, but could you highlight for our readers some of the ways New York City in particular shaped and was shaped by queer Black women in this period?

New York City, and Harlem specifically, are quite central to the book, and I also lived in Brooklyn for two years while working on the dissertation that came first, so archives from the area are prominently featured in it. Performer Gladys Bentley moved to New York from Philadelphia in the late 1920s and quickly became a fixture of Harlem’s Prohibition era nightclub and speakeasy scene. She was written about by white newspaper columnists that brought out “slumming” crowds in droves to venues like The Ubangi Room and the Clam House where Bentley played dirty versions of popular songs on the piano late into the night and flirted with the women in her audience. She became a symbol of Prohibition-era Harlem, but not one that Black elites were proud to promote.

By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” [1] This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women. 

An oft-mentioned issue in queer studies is the unevenness of the archival record, and the difficulty of using sources that are often condemnatory or at least generated from a point of view external to the community. How did you navigate this issue in your work?

Indeed, the more marginalized in society one’s historical subjects are, the harder it can be to find sources in their own words, as until recently their stories were rarely valued and sought after by institutions and archives. This is definitely the case when researching Black queer women’s lives a century ago. Along with Black male newspaper journalists who wrote disapprovingly of queer women, another important source base in my book is vice reports created by concerned citizens groups like the Committee of Fourteen, who sent Black male investigators into Harlem’s Prohibition-era nightlife spaces to root out prostitution, but in the process they came across and described in detail multiple queer women’s gatherings. Historians refer to this process as “reading against the grain,” which is a method central to my work. This refers to extracting details from “outsider” sources created to patrol and regulate and using them for an unintended purpose: to shed light on the lives of “everyday” people.

I was also lucky to work with some important “insider sources,” that allowed me and my readers to learn more about the lives of queer Black chorus girls who worked in popular Harlem theaters like the Lafayette, thanks to the Mabel Hampton Oral History Collection, an important holding in Brooklyn’s Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). Mabel lived in Harlem for decades with her partner, Lillian Foster, and she shared her memories in the 1970s-1980s with LHA co-founder Joan Nestle about the house parties she attended in Prohibition era Harlem. Hampton noted they were filled with “bulldykers” and “their women” and she also recounted attending the very queer and even clothing optional gatherings thrown by “the joy-goddess of Harlem,” A’Lelia Walker, the daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker. [2]

Despite the negative reception they received from the larger Black community, religious leaders, and male journalists, Black lady lovers played central roles creating and maintaining the emerging Black queer worlds of Harlem and beyond.

Cookie Woolner is a cultural historian of race, gender, and sexuality in the modern U.S. She is an Associate Professor in the History department at the University of Memphis.

[1] “Dr. A.C. Powell Scores Pulp Evils,” The New York Age, Nov. 16, 1929, p. 1.

[2] Joan Nestle, “I Lift My Eyes to the Hill: The Life of Mabel Hampton as Told by a White Woman,” Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures. Martin Duberman, ed. New York University Press, 1997, p. 267; Langton Hughes, The Big Sea. Hill and Wang 1993, p. 245.