“Never No Wells of Lonelinesses in Harlem:” Black Lady Lovers in Prohibition Era New York
By Cookie Woolner
In 1928, the British novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in the United States, which brought conversations on the topic of lesbianism into the mainstream like never before. The book was one of the first on the subject written by someone who openly identified as queer. Although the novel was deemed controversial and became the object of censorship trials in the United States and at home in Britain, this notoriety helped it become a best seller in bookstores nationwide, including in Harlem.[1] In February 1929, African American journalist Geraldyn Dismond reviewed the annual masquerade ball at the Hamilton Lodge, which had become one of the preeminent institutions of queer life uptown. After describing the gender-transgressive crowd in their gowns and tuxedos, she closed off with the line, “Never no wells of lonelinesses in Harlem.”[2] Here the journalist spoke to the influence of the lesbian-themed novel but even more to the flourishing queer culture of Harlem in that moment. Indeed, queer flirtations and gender inversion were so prominent in many of the gathering spaces of the district, that to love the same sex was no longer equated with a life of isolation.
In the 1920s and 30s, factors such as the Great Migration, Prohibition, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality set the stage for the emergence of Black queer women’s social networks. “Sophisticated ladies” with “boyish bobbed hair” and young women “bedecked in male attire” could be seen “perambulat[ing] with a distinctive and well practiced swagger” down Seventh Avenue in Harlem.[3] Performer Gladys Bentley, a tuxedo-clad “bulldagger who sang the blues” became one of the most popular performers of the era, as her appearance on a 1932 map of Harlem’s night life suggests.[4] Comedian Jackie Mabley’s house parties also became renowned Black queer gathering spaces for theatrical types.[5] Black “lady lovers,” as such women were now known, were full participants and historical actors in the vibrant, working-class Black neighborhoods that southern migrants helped fashion in New York and other northern cities.
Mabel Hampton Collection, Lesbian Herstory Archives
Women gathered, met, danced, and flirted in Harlem spaces like speakeasies, buffet flats, and rent parties. Buffet flats, which mixed queer behavior and commercial sex, had begun to flourish prior to Prohibition and became even more common during this era, as locals sought to distance themselves from the racial voyeurism of white “slummers.” Rent parties, where attendees all chipped in to help the hosts pay their rent, were historically connected to the economic circumstances of segregation and racial inequality, and arose as a communal solution to high rent prices. These parties were also “recommended to newly arrived single gals as the place to go get acquainted.”[6] On the day in 1932 that queer Harlemite Mabel Hampton first met Lillian Foster, who became her partner for over forty years, Foster gave her a card for a rent party she was throwing (see image). The two women had met at a bus stop and struck up a conversation. The card Foster presented to Hampton enticed readers to attend the rent party with rhymes while conjuring the financial difficulties of the Great Depression as a reason to gather.
These spaces stimulated the emergence of Black queer networks, but they were also renowned for their lack of respectability due to their geographic proximity and connection to illicit urban underworlds. In the eyes of reformers, anti-vice committees, judges, and religious authorities, Black urban life was intimately tied to commercialized vice. This was in part because Black migrants were forced to live in or adjacent to red-light districts due to segregation, as well as due to longstanding racial ideologies that imbued African Americans with lesser morals and values than whites.[7] While white slummers could anonymously visit queer spaces in Harlem and then return to their far-off homes, to patronize known queer gathering spaces in the same neighborhood one lived in could be dangerous to Black women’s reputations and livelihoods.
Due to the perceived disrespectability of Harlem’s entertainment venues, in 1928, a New York City vice commission, the Committee of Fourteen (COF), hired a Black male investigator to visit, evaluate, and document the district’s nightlife underworld. The City Club and the Anti-Saloon League – both of which played a significant role in creating Prohibition laws – founded this Progressive era vice commission in 1905.[8] Curbing prostitution was the COF’s central concern, yet as their investigators sought out illegal sex economies, they often came upon queer gatherings which they described in detail, creating an important archive for historians. These reports were used as evidence to help shut down these spaces to end the illegal activities taking place within their walls. Black queer gathering sites were therefore both documented and destroyed through the work of the Committee of Fourteen.
Speakeasies were most often white-run spaces, yet many earned reputations as welcoming to same-sex loving African Americans. Here, women who wished to go out on the town could congregate, drink, and dance in an illicit setting that accepted a range of “deviant” activities, from queer dancing to playing sexual songs and highlighting queer performances. After going to the Elks Speakeasy on 7th Avenue at West 143rd Street around 1:30am, COF investigator Raymond Claymes wrote the following: “while visiting here, eight colored women entered, all intoxicated, and ordered drinks which were served to them. They played the automatic Victrola and danced among themselves, doing eccentric dancing, and ballroom dancing, which was very indecent. They patted one another on the buttocks, and went through the motions of copulation.”[9] While Claymes did not describe who, if anyone else, was in the speakeasy at this time, the Elks was white-owned and both Black and white men and women patronized the venue. This report described what thus may have been an ordinary scene, in which queer women could enjoy each other’s company out at a local speakeasy, just like any of their neighbors. That Claymes did not describe any men interrupting the female couples is notable, as going out in public often meant tolerating attention from men. For this reason, some lady lovers much preferred to socialize at private parties instead of in spaces like the Elks.[10]
Music was another essential element of the speakeasy, generating an atmosphere that enabled women to sensuously engage with one another through dance. At the Elks, one could “put a nickel in the electric phonograph.”[11] By playing music, customers generated additional profits for the venue, which gave the owners another reason to ignore the type of dancing or the makeup of the couples that took to the floor. While patrons could not select their own song prior to the creation of jukeboxes in the 1930s, Harlem speakeasy phonographs were filled with popular blues records. Since this type of music was rarely played on the radio in the 1920s, going out on the town to drink and dance to the blues was another reason for local queer women to venture to a speakeasy.
The women at the Elks speakeasy also took part in what the vice investigator called, “eccentric dancing,” which referred to a genre of dances like the cakewalk. Vaudeville performers noted for this specialty often performed gymnastically spectacular dances involving high kicks, twirls, and flips. Raymond Claymes tried to use detached, scientific language to describe their “ballroom dancing” that went “through the motions of copulation,” which was likely a dance called “the slow drag.” This popular speakeasy dance to slow blues songs was very sensual, as partners would merely embrace and move back and forth in the same spot for hours. When this dance was performed in the 1929 Broadway musical Harlem, one white critic referred to the actors as “writhing lustily through their barbaric dances.”[12] The female couples at the Elks were acting no different than straight couples usually did in a speakeasy, and no one aside from inspector Claymes seemed to care. Like most Harlem speakeasies, white proprietors ran the Elks, but unlike the larger and more established nightclubs, in these smaller illegal spaces, Black and queer patrons could claim a presence.[13]
While the Prohibition era’s permissive air helped usher in a period of increasing visibility for queer behaviors and identities, the onset of the Great Depression and the following repeal of the Volstead Act caused a backlash that further demonized queer women for rejecting traditional maternal femininity and usurping male privileges. Further, lady lovers’ implicit association with the underworld contributed to their demonization by those concerned with the social ills that the world of vice brought into the Black community. Despite this, during Prohibition, women were able to experiment with new identities and relationships in liminal Harlem spaces, and while the cultural institutions of the era may not have withstood the Depression, the social networks that emerged were maintained. As women met on the street and at rent parties, and female couples danced the slow drag in speakeasies, Black lady lovers carved their own worlds out of a segregated city.
Cookie Woolner is an Assistant Professor in the History department at the University of Memphis. Her current manuscript, “The Famous Lady Lovers:” African American Women and Same-Sex Desire Before Stonewall (under contract with UNC Press), explores the lives of Black women who loved women in the interwar era.
[1] Theophilus Lewis, “The Harlem Sketchbook, The New York Amsterdam News, Aug 27, 1930, p. 9.
[2] Geraldyn Dismond, “Social Snapshots,” The Inter-State Tattler, Feb. 29, 1929, p. 5.
[3] Marcus Wright, “The Talk of the Town,” The New York Age, August 18, 1934; Ralph Matthews, “Women in Pants—Old Stuff Say Our Girls,” The Baltimore Afro-American, Mar. 18, 1933, p. 8.
[4] “Bulldagger” was a term for a masculine lesbian that was especially used in the Black community in the first half of the 20th century. Eric Garber “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues.” OUTLook: National Lesbian & Gay Quarterly 1 (Spring 1998): 52-61.
[5] 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 (Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies). Martin Duberman, ed. New York: New York University Press, 1997, p. 267.
[6] Willie “The Lion” Smith, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist. New York: Doubleday, 1964, p. 156.
[7] Cheryl D. Hicks, “‘Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl’: Black Women’s Sexuality and ‘Harmful Intimacy’ in Early-Twentieth-Century New York,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2009, p. 419; Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Summer 1992, pp. 740, 751-52.
[8] Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early 20th Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 21.
[9] Committee of 14 records, Box 82, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
[10] “LFL Coming out Stories,” 21 June 1981, p. 9, Box 3, Mabel Hampton Collection, Lesbian Herstory Archives.
[11] Committee of 14 records, Box 82, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
[12] Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan, 1968, p. 153.
[13] “Bandits Hold Up Elks' Speakeasy: $138 Taken in Seventh Avenue Resort-Man Shot,” The New York Amsterdam News, Oct 12, 1927, p. 2. This article notes that the bartender was “Frank Autullo, white.” Another article noted that both Black men and white women were socializing at Elks during a robbery. See, “Two Negros Rob Café,” New York Sun, Oct. 5, 1927, p. 5.