“Homosexuality was clearly part of this world. ‘There’s two things got me puzzled, there’s two things I don’t understand,’ moaned blues great Bessie Smith, ‘that’s a mannish-acting woman and a lisping, swishing, womanish-acting man.’ In ‘Sissy Blues,’ Ma Rainey complained of her husband’s infidelity with a homosexual named ‘Miss Kate.’ Lucille Bogan, in her ‘B.D. Women Blues,’ warned that ‘B.D. [bulldagger] women sure is rough; they drink up many a whiskey and they sure can strut their stuff.’ The ‘sissies’ and ‘bull daggers’ mentioned in the blues were ridiculed for their cross-gender behavior, but neither shunned nor hated. ‘Boy in the Boat’ for example, recorded in 1930 by George Hanna, counseled ‘When you see two women walking hand in hand, just shake your head and try to understand.’ In fact, the casualness toward sexuality, so common in the blues, sometimes extended to homosexual behavior. In ‘Sissy Man Blues,’ a traditional tune recorded by nurnerous male blues singers over the years, the singer demanded ‘if you can’t bring me a woman, bring me a sissy man.’ George Hanna’s ‘Freakish Blues,’ recorded in 1931, is even more explicit about potential sexual fludity. The blues reflected a culture that accepted sexuality, including homosexual behavior and identities, as a natural part of life…
Somewhat more public-and therefore less abandoned-were Harlem’s speakeasies, where gays were usually forced to hide their preferences and to blend in with the heterosexual patrons. Several Harlem speakeasies though, some little more than dives, catered specifically to the ‘pansy’ trade. One such place, an ‘open’ speakeasy since there was no doorman to keep the uninvited away, was located on the northwest corner of 126th Street and Seventh Avenue. It was a large, dimly lit place where gay men could go to pick up ‘rough trade.’ Artist Bruce Nugent, who occasionelly visited the place, remembered it catering to ‘rough queers . . . the kind that fought better than truck drivers and swished better than Mae West.’ Ethel Waters remembered loaning her gowns to the transvestites who frequented Edmond’s Cellar, a low-life saloon at 132nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Lulu Belle’s on Lenox Avenue was another hangout for female impersonators, named after the famous Broadway melodrama of 1926 starring Leonore Ulric. A more sophisticated crowd of black gay men gathered nightly at the Hot Cha, at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, to listen to Jimmy Daniels sing and Garland Wilson play piano.
Perhaps the most famous gay-oriented club of the era was Harry Hansberry’s Clam House, a narrow, smoky speakeasy on 133rd Street. The Clam House featured Gladys Bentley, a 250- pound, masculine, darkskinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat. Bentley, a talented pianist with a magnificent, growling voice, was celebrated for inventing obscene Iyrics to popular contemporary melodies. Langston Hughes called her ‘an amazing exhibition of musical energy.’ Eslanda Robeson, wife of actor Paul Robeson, gushed to a friend, ‘Gladys Bentley is grand. I’ve heard her three nights, and will never be the same!’ Schoolteacher Harold Jackman wrote to his friend Countee Cullen, ‘When Gladys sings ‘St. James Infirmary,’ it makes you weep your heart out.’
A glimpse into a speakeasy, based in part on the Clam House. is provided in Blair Niles’ 1931 gay novel Strange Brother. The Lobster Pot is a smoky room in Harlem, simply furnished with a couple of tables, a piano, and a kitchen, where white heterosexual journalist June Westwood, Strange Brother’s female protagonist, is first introduced to Manhattan’s gay subculture. The Lobster Pot features a predominantly gay male clientel and an openly lesbian entertainer named Sybil. ‘What rhythm!’ June comments to her companions. ‘And the way she’s dressed!’ Westbrook finds the atmosphere intoxicating, but abruptly ends her visit when she steps outside and witnesses the entrapment of an effeminate black gay man by the police.”
(Eric Garber, A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/blues/garber.html)
“George Chauncey’s innovative and prodigiously researched Gay New York belies the myth of the pre-Stonewall closet and unearths a thriving gay culture in Gotham in the half-decade before World War II, before ‘the decline of the fairy and the rise of the closet.’ Contrary to Whiggish notions of severe homosexual repression up until the liberating 1970s, Chauncey argues that ‘the gay male world of the prewar years was remarkably visible and integrated into the straight world’ in the first decades of the twentieth century. In fact, it was not until after the close of Prohibition that new social norms and cultural anxieties forced a restructuring of urban gay life. ‘To use the modern idiom,’ Chauncey writes, ‘the state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.’
Chauncey’s book is rife with fascinating insights and conclusions, perhaps none so immediately surprising as the discovery that ‘in important respects the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.’ Tracing the rise of the word gay to encompass all homosexual men (be they previously classified as queers, fairies, trade or another term now considered much more perjorative), Chauncey argues that ‘the ascendancy of gay reflected…a reorganization of sexual categories and the transition from an early twentieth-century culture divided into ‘queers’ and ‘men’ on the basis of gender status to a late twentieth-century culture divided into ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ on the basis of sexual object choice.’ Put another way, Chauncey argues that ‘homosexual behavior per se became the primary basis for the labeling and self-identification of men as ‘queer’ only around the middle of the twentieth century; before then, most men were so labeled only if they had displayed a much broader inversion of their ascribed gender status by assuming the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women. The abnormality (or ‘queerness’) of the ‘fairy,’ that is, was defined as much by his ‘woman-like’ character or ‘effeminacy’ as his solicitation of male sexual partners; the ‘man’ who responded to his solicitations — no matter how often — was not considered abnormal, a ‘homosexual,’ so long as he abided by masculine gender conventions. Indeed, the centrality of effeminacy to the representation of the ‘fairy’ allowed many conventionally masculine men, [especially] unmarried men living in sex-segregated immigrant communities, to engage in extensive sexual activity with other men without risking stigmatization and the loss of their status as ‘normal men.’
Besides uncovering this striking shift in gender and social norms, Chauncey accomplishes similar linguistic feats in his study of the term coming out. ‘Gay people in the prewar years,’ he notes, ‘did not speak of coming out of what we now call the ‘gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called ‘homosexual society’ or the ‘gay world,’ a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as ‘closet’ implies.’ Indeed, ‘like much of campy gay terminology, ‘coming out’ was an arch play on the language of women’s culture — in this case the expression used to refer to the ritual of a debutante’s being formally introduced to, or ‘coming out’ into the society of her cultural peers.’ As the debutante connotation indicates, the prewar gay world of drag balls and speakeasies was one much more open and public than the prevailing trope of the closet suggests.”
(Kevin C. Murphy’s discussion/review of: George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, http://www.kevincmurphy.com/chauncey.html)
For more reading:
London: “Pride and prejudice in the gay 1920s“
Machinal (pres. by Skull and Dagger) 
Thoughts? Questions? Complaints/Corexions?