Black queer women have shaped American culture since long before the
era of gay liberation. Decades prior to the Stonewall Uprising, in
the 1920s and 1930s, Black "lady lovers"—as women who
loved women were then called—crafted a queer world. In the
cabarets, rent parties, speakeasies, literary salons, and
universities of the Jazz Age and Great Depression, communities of
Black lady lovers grew, and queer flirtations flourished. Cookie
Woolner here uncovers the intimate lives of performers, writers, and
educators such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Alice
Dunbar-Nelson, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, along with the many everyday
women she encountered in the archives.
Examining blues songs, Black newspapers, vice reports, memoirs,
sexology case studies, and more, Woolner illuminates the
unconventional lives Black lady lovers formed to suit their desires.
In the urban North, as the Great Migration gave rise to increasingly
racially mixed cities, Black lady lovers fashioned and participated
in emerging sexual subcultures. During this time, Black queer women
came to represent anxieties about the deterioration of the
heteronormative family. Negotiating shifting notions of sexuality and
respectability, Black lady lovers strategically established queer
networks, built careers, created families, and were vital cultural
contributors to the US interwar era.
