Did you know the Savoy Ballroom also hosted
gala drag balls read on!
Where does one start with Jazz but in Harlem.
Harlem was transformed by a large migration
of southern African Americans (Queer and
not) in the opening decades of the twentieth
century. The neighborhood north of Manhattan's
Central Park became the most popular African
American community in the United States.
By the 1920's Harlem's nightlife, for African
Americans and even whites had emerged as
a center of Black American music, literature
and art; known culturally as the Harlem
Renaissance. The Jazz Age offered Harlem
a license that combined with both art and
sexual ambiguity to members of their own
sex. In Harlem the Jazz Age brought a period
of political and intellectual ferment. Many
of the leading figures were primarily inclined
towards members of their own sex. They were
"In The Life" as they called it
in Harlem (from an essay by Margaret Graham
1998).
Advertised largely by word of mouth to
those "in the life," Queer nightlife
thrived in Harlem. Greenwich Village and
Harlem were the city's main areas that countenanced
homosexual gatherings. Richard Bruce Nugent,
himself gay, recalled that the two bore
many similarities. "You didn't get
on the rooftop and shout, 'I fucked my wife
last night.' So why would you get on the
roof and say 'I loved prick.' You didn't.
You just did what you wanted to do. Nobody
was in the closet. There wasn't any closets."
Harlem churches were strictly anti-homosexual,
but the community provided a model of tolerance
(according to some research).
Many of the Harlem Renaissance's key literary
figures were Homo- or Bisexual (among them
Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke,
Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and
perhaps Langston Hughes) as were many of
Harlem's best-known performers (among them
Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Jackie "Moms"
Mabley, Mabel Hampton, Ma Rainey, and Ethel
Waters). Dancing was an expression of the
music so vital to the African American;
dancers like Leon James and Al Minns were
rumored to be in the life of the sexual
ambiguity of the time (check out the Queer
Swing Dancing Old Timer's page). Though
rarely identified as homosexual, same sex
relationships were fluid in Harlem. Men
and women were expected to marry. But in
their circle, performers such as Bessie
Smith " The Empress of the Blues,"
Ma Rainey " The Mother of the Blues,"
Alberta Hunter, Jackie "Mom" Mabley,
Josephine Baker and Ethel Waters all cultivated
a lesbian or bisexual image. For female
jazz and blues singers, being attracted
to other women was chic.
Ma Rainey several times was in trouble
with the police for her lesbian behavior.
In 1925, she was arrested for taking part
in an "orgy" at home involving
women in her chorus. Bessie Smith bailed
her out of jail. Ma Rainey's album "Prove
to Me Blues," a monologue about women
who love women, showed reference of a women
in appearance to Rainey, in hat, tie and
jacket talking to a flapper. In the distance
a policeman observes. The copy reads "What's
all this? Scandal? To look at the words,
the song goes: "Went out last night
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 to me..."
Bessie Smith " The Empress of the
Blues" auditioned for Moses Stoke's
traveling show at 18, through her brother,
Clarence, a dancer and comedian with the
show. Among the cast was Ma Rainey. Rainey
was a Lesbian who had no children of her
own. She took Smith under her wing to introduce
her to the world of professional singing.
Although married Smith had an on going affair
with a chorus girl named Lillian Simpson.
Smith's husband Jack Gee, married in 1922,
tried to bring balance to her life even
though Smith did hanker to the "life."
Smith would disappear for weeks on end,
ending up in jail, only to have Gee bail
her out. The excitement of young people
and parties she claimed was part of the
"life on the road" and that wasn't
any of his business.
Three of Bessie Smith's Nobody-titled songs
seem to sum up a working woman's experience
in the Sporting Life (though all were actually
written by men). These would be: "Nobody
In Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like
Mine," by Clarence Williams; "'Tain't
Nobody's Business If I Do," written
by Porter Grainger (her homosexual African
American pianist remembered for gentlemanliness,
pressed suits, spats and walking stick);
and Jimmy Cox' Depression-era lament of
an ex-big spender, "Nobody Knows You
When You're Down and Out."
In 1923, Frank Walker's studio cut Smith's
first record in Columbia's "Race Records."
Smith's records each sold 20,000 copies
or more. Frank Walker had struck out the
royalty clause in Smith's contract, she
was only to receive a fraction of the money
she could have earned. Bessie Smith's career
rode on the fortunes as well on the Theater
Owner Booking Association (TOBA) in the
south. TOBA sponsored and booked African
American singers and entertainers throughout
the 1920's. To the less successful African
American entertainers TOBA was know as "Tough
on Black Artists." For Bessie Smith
mobs of patrons stood in line for hours
to hear her strong & powerful voice.
Another of the well known performers of
their time was Gladys Bentley, a three hundred
pound alto singer and piano player who dressed
in a white tuxedo and top hat. She performed
at Harry Hansberry's Clam House and was
famous for inventing obscene lyrics to popular
songs. She is said to have married a woman
in a Jersey ceremony. Some say she was the
only performer to publicly exploit her Lesbian
identity. She belting out double-entendre
Lyrics to popular songs like "My Alice
Blue Gown," or "Sweet Georgia
Brown," and encouraging her audiences
to join in on the lewd choruses. "If
ever there was a gal who could take a popular
ditty and put her own naughty version to
it," observed one journalist, "La
Bentley could do it."
The Clam House the best known of the Queer
hangouts was the long, narrow room on 133rd
Street's Jungle Alley, described in Vanity
Fair as "a popular house for revelers
but not for the innocent young." Downtown
celebrities went on bisexual sprees- among
them were Beatrice Lillie, Tallulah Bankhead,
Jeanne Eagels, Marilyn Miller, Princess
Murat from Paris, and-dressed in matching
bowler hats-came chanteuse-Libby Holman
and her heiress lover, Louisa Carpenter
du Pont Jenney.
In the homosexual iconography of the period,
the African American male vied with the
swarthy Italian youth and the sailor in
uniform as the iconic love object. "Negroes"
were also regarded as sexually flexible.
(A common pickup line at that time among
available African Americans: "I'm a
one-way man-now, which way would you like?"
And in a period when syphilis was rampant,
sex between men was popularly rationalized,
"Better a little shit than a chancre."86)
The Mafia looked upon African American men's
attractiveness to white men as a phenomenon
to exploit (nor did it hurt that Al Capone's
cousin was homosexual and poet Parker Tyler
reported numerous attempted seductions by
gangsters)..
Harlem's homosexual haunts were varied
bars like the Yeahman and the Garden of
Joy catered to mixed crowds; "pansy
entertainment" spots such as The Ubangi
featured a sepia- toned female impersonator
called Gloria Swanson, who belted out "Hot
Nuts, get 'em from the peanut man!";
buffet flats such as Hazel Valentine's Daisy
Chain offered sexual tableaux-both hetero
and homo- staged in apartment chambers;
homosexual house parties like those hosted
by Casca Bonds and Alexander Gumby.
The most spectacular homosexual events
were the costume balls held at the cavernous
Rockland Palace on 155th Street. "Of
course, a costume ball can be a very tame
thing," reported the gossipy Black
weekly The Interstate Tattler, "but
when all the exquisitely gowned women on
the floor are men and a number of the smartest
men are women, ah then, we have something
over which to thrill and grow round-eyed."
These drag balls were reported in the Black
press and surrealistically dramatized in
America's first unashamedly Homosexual novel,
Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's "The
Young and Evil" (1933). 'Not all the
guests were homosexual; many came to gawk.
These onlookers ascended a gold-banistered
staircase to the box seats that ringed the
huge ballroom and looked down on the Grand
March of ersatz divas promenading beneath
a colossal crystal chandelier and a sky-blue
ceiling. The women mostly dressed in drably
colored loose-fitting men's suits (rarely
a tuxedo) while the men outdid themselves
as extravagant Señoritas in black
lace and red fans; as soubrettes in backless
dresses and huge spangles; as debutantes
in chiffon and rhinestones; and as a creature
called "La Flame" who wore only
a white satin stovepipe hat, a red beaded
breast plate, and a white sash.'
The Savoy Ballroom also hosted gala drag
balls, where the sartorial achievements
were given prizes. (Artist "Sheriff"
Bob Chanler, hostess Muriel Draper, and
Carl Van Vechten comprised one panel of
judges, and they awarded first prize to
a man who wore only a cache-sex, silver
sandals, and apple-green paint).
Harlem's gaudy conglomeration of Homosexual
and Lesbian hangouts reflected a zone in
which sexual ties of all stripes could flourish.
"In Harlem I found courage and joy
and tolerance," observed a Homosexual
character in Blair Niles's 1931 novel "Strange
Brother." "I can be myself there....
They know all about me and I don't have
to lie."
Queers would be found at private residents
like the "Rent party's" too. These
were private affairs held in flats whose
tenants needed to pay the rent, and in which
each room featured a different pleasure--sometimes
very different ones, as in bull-dagger "jaspers"
or "freakish" men, drag queens
waiting and available, even erotic animal
acts. "Rent parties" were among
the few racially-mixed venues of their time,
and one of the gayer aspects of the literary
and cultural era that later came to be called
the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem was also a magnet for the best and
brightest in all of America's African American
communities. When a fresh-out-of high school
kid in Pittsburgh met Duke Ellington on
tour and played him a few of his songs,
the great bandleader wrote out directions
to his home and told the black teenaged
prodigy to visit if he were ever in New
York. The young Billy Strayhorn TOOK him
literally, then on the train ride there
turned the scrawled note's text into the
lyrics for a song. And that's how "Take
the A Train (If You Want To Go To Harlem)"
was born, along with a lifelong musical
relationship between the young gay songwriter
and his Sugar Hill mentor.
The bruiser as male ideal was deflated
by the androgynous influence of Rudolf Valentino.
The whole nation (women especially) fell
under the sway of his overly-pretty "Sheik,"
and all of a sudden it was "okay"
to be a lover man. Cliff "Ukelele Ike"
Edwards, who later became best known as
the voice of Jiminy Cricket, in the Twenties
did vocal drag imitations of Mae West and
was heard to wink while singing to the young
college bearcats, "If you can't land
her on the old verandah, then you can't
land her at all!"
Eddie Cantor would open his eyes wide as
saucers to complain saucily in 1921 that
"Ma! (S)he's Makin' Eyes At Me."
Three years later in Ziegfield's "Kid
Boots" he was singing "He's the
Hottest Man in Town" with a verse that
includes the electrifying line, "He's
got 'em guessin', he's incandescent."
Then he made himself top banana on Broadway
with Walter Donaldson's music, Gus Kahn's
1928 lyrics about infidelity and alimony
in "Makin' Whoopee!"
Mrs. Vincent Astor: "How do you know
me, young man?" Grand Central Station
porter: "Why, ma'am, I met you last
weekend at Carl Van Vechten's." "You
can see I am hardly seeing any white people
at all!" - Carl Van Vechten to Fania
Marinoff. A dance and music critic, a popular
novelist, later a photographer, Carl Van
Vechten used parties as a means of connecting
people from all his different worlds, and
in the process made a significant contribution
to American culture. Primarily Homosexual,
he nonetheless sustained a marriage (to
actress Fania Marinoff) for nearly a half
Century. During the 1920s he was particularly
interested in the cross-fertilization of
African-American culture and the progressive
white culture exemplified by Vanity Fair
magazine.
There were and are several Queers in Jazz
History. If you know of any, have stories
or even rumors Contact the Queer Jitterbugs
and we'll get our crack reporters on it!
Information on this site gathered from
several sources. The following are a few
of such resources:
http://members.tripod.com/%7Elaurencefrommer/celebrity/celebrity2bentley.html
http://frontpage.erie.net/tex/jazz.htm
http://www.darmstadt.de/kultur/musik/jazz/
http://www.101pop.com/ch2.html
http://www.thewildparty.net/wp.s.party2.html
Urban Sophisticates: Devoted to the Jazz
Ages cultivation of an elegant Homosexual
esthetic! HOMOSEXUAL AND LESBIAN NIGHTLIFE
from article on The Harlem Renaissance.
Steve Voce: Scratching the Surface. Vanity
Thy Name Is Hajdu, in: Jazz Journal, 52/6
(Jun.1999), p. 14-15 There is a feature
article: Homosexual relationship between
Ellington and Strayhorn.
From Zora Hurston bio Lesbian in the life
1925 -27: Josephine Baker, Gladys Bentley,
Bessie Smith, Zora Hurston, and Ma Rainey.
Gay Black Jazz Action: http://www.soulforce.org/nolainvite2.html
\
