Long before Stonewall, a series of violent demonstrations by LGBTQ+ people against a police raid in 1969, sparked the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights queer people were creating their own safe havens and communities through rent parties and secret gatherings in the early 20th century. But where did they find each other? How did they form community when queerness was unspeakable and outlawed?

It was in these times in our nation’s history where cities were sprawling up across the landscapes, hidden spaces, secret parties, and coded language became lifelines for LGBTQ people seeking connection in a heterosexist society. They forged their own communities through rent parties, sex work, shared living spaces, and the unifying power of music and nightlife.

But these stories have long been buried in the annals of history, hidden from mainstream narratives. That is, until now. Cookie Woolner, a punk rock drummer turned scholar, has unearthed these hidden gems in her groundbreaking book, The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall. Through meticulous research and a passion for uncovering untold stories, Woolner has shed light on the vibrant and resilient world of Black lesbian life in the early 20th century.

In this exclusive interview, Reckon sat down with Woolner to delve into the fascinating details of her research. She’ll take us on a journey through the archives, sharing the untold stories of thriving queer communities in the US pre-1960s.

Reckon: Cookie, please tell us what led you to writing about The Famous Lady Lovers?

Woolner: So, this book started out as a dissertation. I hope it doesn’t read like one too much now. It started about 15 years ago, and I came to the project as somebody who had been a queer performer myself. I spent my twenties living in San Francisco. I was a drummer in an “all girl” punk band. I was a burlesque dancer with other fat women, and part of the queer dyke Mission scene in the late 90s and Y2K era. And that’s when I started learning about queer history and noticed that it often centers the stories of white lesbians.

Reckon: What are some ways that you found queer history includes women of color?

Woolner: For example, the first social group for lesbians is the Daughters of Bilitis, but many people don’t know that the group was initiated by women of color: namely a Filipino woman, Rosalie “Rose” Bamberger (1921-1990). Rose had the initial idea to form a private lesbian social club, and the first meeting was held in her apartment. They made huge strides in history, including research that led to removing homosexuality as a psychiatric issue.

Reckon: This is remarkable. Your being in a punk band, women of color leading the charge. What about fatness? And your now fascination with blues women - how do you tie it all together?

Woolner: I’d already been interested in the blues women cause I had learned about them in my undergrad studies. I was doing work on what we would now call fat studies, very cutting edge work for an undergrad in the early 90s! That’s when I learned about Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Smith has one famous song where she sings about weighing 200 pounds. They’re singing about their sexual desires in this very unabashed way. I was really inspired.

Reckon: That song is great, but it’s about a man! Were Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith lesbians or queer women?

Woolner: Great question! One of the first things I started to focus on in grad school was learning about queer history, looking at the queer blues women and what their experiences were like in the entertainment world. Answering that question is what brings us to the archives.

Reckon: For us archive nerds out there, I know entering the archive is pushing through autobiographies, biographies, oral histories, news clippings, reports, and sociological studies. What was it like for this research project?

Woolner: This is the Jim Crow era in the early 20th century, so everything is segregated. And race records is the music industry category putting out blues records, and the white- dominated record industry realizes by 1920 that there’s a demand for blues, especially by Black women. So I had wrongfully assumed that there’d be a ton of sources by men in the music industry about the queer behaviors of the blues women, but those barely existed at all. But thanks to footnotes in books like George Chancey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Kevin Mumford’s Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, I found sources that led me in other directions, to the lives of lesser known, “everyday” Black women. I also searched newspaper articles in the Black press, like the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News. and here I found lots of alleged acts of violence occurring in all-women’s gatherings in Harlem or Bronzeville–a Black district on Chicago’s South Side--for example.

Reckon: Share a story of what you found when you encountered the Black lady lovers in the archives.

Woolner: I like to highlight desire, sex and community. The way women met each other. One good example is the moment in which Mabel Hampton meets her partner, Lilian on the street for the first time. Lillian is throwing a rent party. It’s 1932. The depression is still going on. She hands Mabel a card, just slips it to her. It says, hard times are here, but come and enjoy yourself! Let’s all gather together in this challenging time. The fact that they meet on the street, they flirt with each other. She gives her a card. Historically that’s more of a way that we associate how men would meet if we think of the history of public cruising on the street or meeting in a park.

So I love this moment. Mabel and Lilian go on to have a relationship together for over 50 years, which is much more of a lesbian thing to do. But you know, really great for them. And I’m so glad we know about their story.

Reckon: Say more about these rent parties!

Woolner: In these rent parties the archive reveals overlaps of queerness and sex work. We find stories of Mabel Hampton being arrested, going out with men (she was a lesbian or she was bisexual or working). There is also really great work written about, sex work in relation to lesbianism. We have these long standing associations of negativity and stigma because lesbianism and sex work are both seen as non-reproductive forms of sexuality. They don’t create more heterosexual families or workers. They’re both a part of an underground economy, for folks who have trouble finding work elsewhere, especially due to issues of gender transgression, leading further to the disrespectability of queerness. Being queer and being a sex worker, or both are seen as shady vice underground associations, along with, drug use, gambling, and other forms of social life associated in the Prohibition Era which overlaps with the Jim Crow era, all of this is this very hyper racist and conservative time of our nation’s history, which was not so long ago.

Reckon: So you see this as a political and economic phenomenon in addition to a sexual one?

Woolner: Perhaps yes. In an economic depression, there’s a focus on mandated masculinity. If men are losing their jobs, they’re feeling emasculated. The fragility of masculinity coupled with Prohibition led to the creation of all these spaces for people to drink in, coined as a speakeasy. Americans love alcohol, and they were really able to kind of bond over Prohibition. These hidden speakeasy spaces are where people from all walks of life gathered. And maybe, being in the same space together for the 1st time, allowed us to bond over their hatred of the 18th Amendment, the 1st law that actually curbed Americans’ rights by limiting their access to alcohol. Breaking the law for drinking likely loosened the ability to break it for other reasons, like desire.

Reckon: One more story?

Woolner: Another story I found is of two Black women from Kentucky, Ida Mae Robinson and her partner, who moved to Chicago in 1920. They moved separately, and met there. The one who moved first is married to a man. She separated from her husband to live with another woman in a boarding house. The Black journalist who wrote about this in the Chicago Whip is shocked, has never heard of such a thing as a woman, you know, leaving her husband to be with another woman. The sensational title. “Have We a New Sex Problem Here?” shows the intensity of concern. White women have just received the right to vote (though not Black women in the South). This new era of women’s independence, coupled with the Great Migration brings lots of stories where women move to the North to take part in queer relationships. What happened after Robinson and her partner had their names in the paper? That’s another story that we don’t get to actually know.

Reckon: Thanks for chatting with me Cookie. And for walking us through your dig into the archive. Happy Pride!

Woolner: It was a pleasure! Happy Pride to you too!.

Further Reading:

• George, Leigh-Michil. “I Would Like to Know Her: On Cookie Woolner’s ‘The Famous Lady Lovers’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 May 2024.
• Manoukian, Marina. “The Untold Truth of Ma Rainey.” Grunge, 12 October 2020.
• Thorpe, Rochella. “‘A House Where Queers Go’: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940-1975.” Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America. Ed. Ellen Lewin Beacon Press, 1996. Pages 40-61.
• Woolner, Cookie. The Famous Lady Lovers Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall, UNC Press, 2023.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is a volunteer-coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and co-editor of a two-volume series, Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Archives and Practice and Queer Conversations in Identity and Libraries from Litwin Books/Library Juice Press. Shawn is an associate dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement at New York University Division of Libraries and an adjunct assistant professor at Pratt School of information, teaching Reference & Instruction.