LESBIANS, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY
In the 1950s, the concept of same-sex marriage was largely inconceivable; interracial marriage wouldn’t even be legalized across the United States until 1967. Homosexuality was categorized as a psychological disorder until 1987, and laws against homosexual sex only began to be repealed in 1962. These legal restrictions didn’t mean that gay people did not exist, but being gay was not culturally acceptable, and that meant the gay and lesbian community was largely underground and had its own coded language.
Within San Francisco’s white lesbian community in the 1940s and ’50s, women used terms such as butch and femme in ways that could indicate gender expression and sexual preferences. At this time, gender was perceived as a predominantly binary concept. Although people certainly crossed gender boundaries and existed between them, the terminology available to Lily’s community was black or white: men or women, butch or femme. Butches were lesbians with masculine appearances; femmes were traditionally feminine; and butches usually had relationships with femmes. “Butch/femme” has sometimes been misunderstood as an imitation of heterosexuality, but in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain: “Butches defied convention by usurping male privilege in appearance and sexuality, and with their fems, outraged society by creating a romantic and sexual unit within which women were not under male control. . . . Butch-fem roles were the key structure for organizing against heterosexual dominance.”
Expressing a butch identity involved cultivating a masculine appearance, which could involve wearing men’s clothing. Many cities outlawed cross-dressing in public; San Francisco’s law was not repealed until 1974. As lesbian Reba Hudson relates in Wide-Open Town, gay men and lesbians were often harassed by police for cross-dressing in the 1940s and ’50s, but women who cross-dressed would wear women’s underwear, because then “they couldn’t book you for impersonating a person of the opposite sex.”
Cross-gender impersonation was all right, however, onstage. Male and female impersonation had long been part of theater, and it differed from what we today call drag. Impersonation was not queer-coded in its early days and was usually performed by heterosexuals. By the 1920s, however, mainstream male impersonation fell out of vogue, possibly due to changing ideas about sexuality that linked cross-gender performance with homosexuality. Male impersonation did not end, though; it continued and transformed in marginalized spaces. In 1920s and ’30s Harlem, African American singer Gladys Bentley performed in menswear, and at the time she didn’t hide her queer identity. When her Harlem career began to fizzle in the 1940s, Bentley went west, eventually landing at Mona’s, the lesbian nightclub in San Francisco. Mona’s featured other male impersonators who, like Bentley, dressed in tuxedos and often replaced standard lyrics in their songs with openly gay ones. Clubs featuring male impersonators continued to advertise in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications well into the 1950s, and heterosexual tourists went to the shows seeking exotic entertainment, just as they visited Chinatown for a taste of the Orient.
The early 1950s was a period of relative freedom for San Francisco gay bars, because the 1951 Stoumen v. Reilly decision legalized public assembly of homosexuals in California. Homosexual acts, however, remained illegal, and as the decade wore on, police crackdowns would start to focus on homosexual activity. In September 1954, police raided 12 Adler, a bar owned by butch lesbian Tommy Vasu. Several teenage girls were also arrested, and newspaper accounts played up a scandalous cocktail of drugs, homosexuality, and cross-dressing. In 1956, a new mayor launched an anti-vice campaign to put many gay bars out of business. It’s no coincidence that 1956 was also the year that the Daughters of Bilitis （DOB） was founded; this early gay rights organization aimed to provide a way for lesbians to socialize outside the bar scene.
The DOB and the lesbian bars described in Wide-Open Town seemed to be predominantly white. It has been difficult for me to find evidence of lesbians of color in this time period, although Kennedy’s and Davis’s research does include black women. Finding any history of queer Asian American women has been even more difficult, but tantalizing clues have surfaced in many sources. Wide-Open Town, of course, mentions Merle Woo, who was an Asian American activist in the 1970s and ’80s, and it also mentions the existence of Filipina lesbians. Incidentally, a Filipina lesbian named Rose was the originator of the idea for the DOB, though the DOB’s white cofounders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, have become far better known. Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, USA, a documentary and accompanying book about the Chinatown nightclub, includes gay Asian American performers, but they don’t speak about their experiences in detail. The Chinese lesbian that Lily’s father mentions was inspired by Margaret Chung, who was the first Chinese American woman doctor and was rumored to be a lesbian who had a relationship with singer Sophie Tucker. Chung never came out. Historian Amy Sueyoshi put me in touch with Crystal Jang, a Chinese American lesbian who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and went to Galileo High School in the late 1950s and ’60s. I also spoke with Kitty Tsui, a lesbian poet who was active in the 1970s and ’80s with Merle Woo. Tsui and Jang both told me that they were often the sole Asian American lesbian in the room.