Research Catalog
The famous lady lovers : Black women and queer desire before Stonewall
- Title
- The famous lady lovers : Black women and queer desire before Stonewall / Cookie Woolner.
- Author
- Woolner, Cookie
- Publication
- Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2023]
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | Sc E 23-1328 | Schomburg Center - Research & Reference |
Details
- Description
- 200 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.
- Summary
- "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"--
- Series Statement
- Gender and American culture
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Contents
- List of illustrations -- Have we a new sex problem here? -- Women slain in queer love brawl: the violent emergence of lady lovers in the 1920s northern Black press -- The famous lady lovers in the early twentieth-century Black popular entertainment industry -- A freakish party -- Black lady lovers, vice, and space in the prohibition era urban north -- Intimate friends and bosom companions: middle-class Black lady lovers crafting queer kinship networks -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
- Call Number
- Sc E 23-1328
- ISBN
- 9781469675473
- 1469675471
- 9781469675480
- 146967548X
- 9781469675497 (canceled/invalid)
- 9781469675503 (canceled/invalid)
- LCCN
- 2023014310
- OCLC
- 1374818851
- Author
- Woolner, Cookie, author.
- Title
- The famous lady lovers : Black women and queer desire before Stonewall / Cookie Woolner.
- Publisher
- Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2023]
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Series
- Gender and American culture
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Chronological Term
- 1900-1999
- Research Call Number
- Sc E 23-1328