A01=Cookie Woolner
African American history
African American lesbian history
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Author_Cookie Woolner
Bessie Smith
Black history
Black popular entertainment industry
Black queer history
blues music
blues women
Category=JBSJ
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHK
Classic blues women
Dorothy West
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethel Waters
Gladys Bentley
Great Depression
Great Migration
Harlem Renaissance
history of sexuality
Interwar era
Jazz age
LGBTQ history
Lucy Diggs Slowe
popular music and performance history
Prohibition era
queer history
women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9781469675480
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 12 Sep 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Cookie Woolner is associate professor of history at the University of Memphis.
