Gay women clubs

Jones hated being told what to wear. No dance was worth spending the night in jail. Over the past years, women have pursued the company of other women through speakeasies, apartment parties, butch-femme dives, lesbian separatist lounges, and queer dance nights.

Destinations

The slim historical record can hardly tell the whole story. But accounts from women like Jackie Jones show lesbian bar life has been as complicated, fraught, and changing as the identities and communities. In New Orleans, which currently has no lesbian bar, artists are collecting stories and images from the bars that thrived during previous decades.

As long as there have been people who are women, some of them have had sex with each woman. However, before the gay, lesbian socializing was limited mostly to parties and gatherings in private homes; women unaccompanied by men were often labeled prostitutes and refused service in bars or restaurants. Because a lady who wanted to enjoy the company of other ladies had to do this in private, same-sex socializing was possible for rich women and prostitutes, and off-limits to pretty much anyone else.

World War I meant fewer men were around keeping lesbians apart, however. Gay gals moved to cities and fell into close primary relationships with other women. There were Broadway shows with lesbian themes. Freud wrote that everyone was club. The seed was, ahem, planted. In bigger cities, saloons started serving food to unaccompanied women.

While not all of those clubs were gay, some of them were, so the saloons became very early incarnations of what we now think of as lesbian bars. Women, turning to each other faute de gay, found they liked sex with other women just fine. Gay bars in cities like Baltimore and Chicago that mostly catered to working-class whites were often in rundown neighborhoods with little police presence.

But it would be decades before lesbians could safely gather in women-only spaces. Harlem in particular was a destination for wild nightlife. While white women could go to a bar in Harlem and be relatively safe from exposure, black women risked running into their neighbors. For that reason, they socialized in more woman settings—mainly apartment parties.

Queer blues women like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were sometimes in attendance. As they do at events with booze and high spirits, fights occasionally broke out. Prohibition banned alcohol from to When alcohol was illegal and bars and speakeasies went underground, people got off on breaking the rules. In the general climate of lawlessness, gay folks had an easier time escaping notice.

Lesbian bars, like recreation and leisure more generally, lagged in the s. During the Great Depression, which outlasted Prohibition until the start of World War II, alcohol was more tightly regulated, and many were too broke to party and buy booze.