Woolner, Cookie. The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Prior to Stonewall, we’ve long known all too little about the history of Black queer women’s social networks. Of course, these women’s spaces thrived as much as white women’s spaces, and were equally daring, deeply fascinating, and terrifically important. So thank the flipping goddess that Cookie Woolner traces the lives of Black “lady lovers” from blues legends to bulldaggers, from rent parties to private salons in the 1920s and 1930s.

Woolner has every famous Black dyke of the era you’ve ever heard of, like the stud of all studs and gender outlaw, Gladys Bentley and Bessie Smith, to those lesser known powerhouses, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Howard University’s first dean of women, and all of the relationships like Ethel Wiliams and Ethel Water (The Two Ethels are a must read), struggles, advances, and even some juicy hookups between these massive networks of Black dyke.

The stories in her research are moving, inspiring, harrowing, and also sexy. We cannot help but share the incredible lyrics to Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me, Blues.” It’s pure fire!

It's true I wear a collar and a tie

Makes the wind blow all the while

Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me

You sure got to prove it on me

Say I do it, ain't nobody caught me

Sure got to prove it on me

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends

It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men

Woolner’s book also contains the definitive scoop on local papers would target lesbian rent parties as “dangerous to the health of all concerned” due to these fetes’ “combination of bad gin, jealous women and a carving knife.”

Woolner’s book is a powerful example of how lezbiqueertranssapphic nightlife, especially in non-white spaces, shapes itself in creative ways to survive while offering sites for queer peeps to politically organize, develop creative and literary partnerships, and socialize. A must read for Black queer history in the early 20th century.

Our key takeaway? Fixating on lesbian bar history alone leaves out BIPOC experiences, and private parties were the default for lezbiqueertrans life. We only just started to be fully public dykes in the 1930s.

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Image Credits (in order of appearance):

Bentley

A rent party

Ma Rainey

Smith

• The LezQueer World before Bars: 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 1)
• When Paris and Berlin Were Dyke Bars* of the 1920s-1930s with Lillian Faderman & Cookie Woolner (Part 2)
• Tea, Anarchy, and the First Dyke Bar: Eve’s Hangout 1925 with Jonathan Ned Katz (Part 1 of 2 with Katz)
• Books, Bulldaggers, and the Birth of Lesbian Research with Jonathan Ned Katz & Julie Enszer (Part 2 of 2 with Katz)

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Read the rest of the series:

Dyke Bar* History: 1920s-1930s Reading Guide
A reading guide for the decades.
by Jack Gieseking & the Our Dyke Histories podcast team




Eve’s Hangout, Greenwich Village, 1926

Le Monocle, Paris, 1932

Harlem Rent Parties of the 1920s and 1930s