Drag Balls in Harlem
While British sexologist Havelock Ellis and other sexologists highlighted the likely biological basis for sexual inversion or homosexuality, by the 1920s some psychologists, basing their approach on the work of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, looked instead to the mind and environmental influences as central to shaping individuals’ sexual choices. In focusing on and creating detailed criteria for defining deviance, sexologists clarified implicitly the criteria defining “normal” sexual behavior — opposite sex partners and sex engaged within marriage.
In contrast, Freud and his American followers sought to define the normal — seeing it as a category that itself required analysis and critique, and in providing criteria for this normal simultaneously defined those whose sexual choices did not fit such categories as deviant. In the end, by the 1920s sexologists and psychologists defined inversion more in terms of same-sex desire or sexual object choice and the concept of homosexuality was adopted as more accurate in encompassing a variety of same-sex orientations that sexologists confronted in their clinical practice. As the new binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality emerged, bisexuality was effectively removed from the discussion—an erasure that has continued to this day.
Performance and musical expression joined fiction as possible “unconventional” sources for excavating the stories of LGBTQ people of color. For example, the musical performances carried out by female blues singers during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910s and 1920s. Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues,” openly references intimate relationships between women, has become a staple of lesbian genealogy. Gladys Bentley performed during the 1920s and early 1930s in full male regalia (a tuxedo and tails) and explicitly identified and was understood as a lesbian during that period.
To complicate these racial ethnic narratives and directly challenge the black/white binary within sexuality studies, historian Emma Pérez draws our attention to corridos, narrative songs or ballads generated by Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicana/os throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These musical performances speak to significant themes in Mexican and Mexican American history including immigration, border crossings, and the dangers of love and war, and offer valuable tools for exploring the LGBTQ histories heretofore hidden, only hinted at, or willfully ignored in these communities.
The complexities of the idea of “community” in LGBTQ history is highlighted by scholarship done on cities as the place where, during the twentieth century, queer subcultures have formed and found spaces. “Gay New York” boasted an effervescent and highly visible “gay world” in the early twentieth century, years before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion that for some has symbolized the beginnings of LGBTQ liberation. In this world gay men were not isolated from one another or from the broader culture within which they lived, rather they were visible to the “outside” world and they also were not self-hating (as some contemporaneous medical opinions held).
New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Atlanta (among others) had neighborhoods within which gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians lived and thrived—leaving markers of their presence by wearing red ties or “dropping hair pins” so others could find them and identify the spaces they frequented. Moreover, during the first third of the twentieth century, the stunningly rendered, highly visible, and well-attended drag balls of the 1920s in these cities made the visibility of LGBTQ people explicit.
Predominantly put on by and for members of the African American drag communities, drag balls were also attended by well-to-do whites, who would travel to Harlem to observe and take part in the gender-bending and queer culture. Webster Hall and Annex, famous in the 1910s and 1920s as a site of masquerade and drag balls, is located at 119-125 East 11th Street, New York City, New York. Rockland Palace, 280 West 115th Street, New York City, New York (demolished in the 1960s) was another well-known location of drag balls. Organized by the black fraternal organization, Hamilton Lodge No. 710 of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, balls here drew up to eight thousand attendees — participants and observers (it was fashionable for white and black social leaders to attend these balls as observers. Visitors to the Rockland Palace balls of the 1920s and 1930s included Tallulah Bankhead and members of the Astor and Vanderbilt families).
One of New York City’s most historically and culturally significant large 19th -century assembly halls, Webster Hall (1886-87, 1892, Charles Rentz, Jr.) became famous in the 1910s and 20s for its masquerade balls that attracted the Village’s bohemian population, which nicknamed it the “Devil’s Playhouse.” The hall was significant as a gathering place for the city’s early 20th -century lesbian and gay community, who felt welcome to attend the balls in drag, and then sponsored their own events by the 1920s.
By the 1920s, the South Village emerged as one of the first neighborhoods in New York that allowed, and gradually accepted, an open gay and lesbian presence. Eve Addams’ Tearoom at 129 MacDougal Street was a popular after-theater club run in 1925-26 by Polish-Jewish lesbian emigre Eva Kotchever (Czlotcheber), with a sign that read “Men are admitted but not welcome.” Convicted of “obscenity” (for Lesbian Love, a collection of her short stories) and disorderly conduct, she was deported.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), both born in the United States, were very public about their relationship both here and in France. They were quite an unusual pair for their era, or any era, and Stein documented their Paris years in the fictional book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in her partner’s voice.
The Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 in Chicago by the Bavarian-born Henry Gerber (1892-1972), was the first American homosexual rights organization. Gerber had been an American soldier occupying Germany following World War I, and had come in contact with the rights movement there. Within a year of its creation, the Society for Human Rights disbanded due to Gerber’s arrest, and although he was acquitted, he lost his post office job. Gerber reenlisted and spent much of the 1930s on Governor’s Island, where he wrote essays on homosexuality and published several newsletters.
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