Out Spotlight LXXXVIII

Today's Out Spotlight is about an out neighborhood, pre-Stonewall. 40 years before Stonewall in fact, and no not in New York, but Chicago, and predominantly an African American community on Chicago's West Side.

Roughly seven million African-Americans migrated out of the Deep South to the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1930, to better their lives, with employment, education, and to escape racism. Many headed due north from the Delta up the mighty Mississippi to relocate in Chicago.
On the south side of Chicago neighborhood known as Bronzeville, a small but powerful queer subculture emerged similar to that which was taking place in Harlem in New York.

The Bronzeville neighborhood,’s homosexual population grew rapidly. Like the millions of African-Americans who left behind the poverty and racism for life in the North, Black homosexuals not only came to find better-paying jobs, but to take advantage of the opportunities for homosexual encounters, which they knew were often more abundant in large cites. "In an environment of relative sexual freedom, African-Americans in Bronzeville could establish relationships with members of the same sex, and these relationships were often accepted by the neighborhood authorities and by its residents."

From State Street to Cottage Grove Avenue, along 43rd and 47th Street, the jazz-influenced urban culture offered African American gays and lesbians several venues where homosexuals and heterosexuals interacted across the color line at places such as the Plantation Café, the Pleasure Inn, the Cabin Inn, and Club DeLisa, yearly popular Halloween “Drag Balls” popularized by Black gay hustler Alfred Finnie, semi-safe locations for encounters such as the Wabash YMCA, The First Church of Deliverance, Washington Park, and Jackson Park, and a “vice district” which facilitated prostitution.

"Homosexuality was quietly accommodated. Bronzeville’s most powerful inhabitants (Reverend Clarence Cobb, Reverend Mary G. Evans, and possibly Louise Smith Collier) and its most famous musicians (Tony Jackson, Rudy Richardson, Sippie Wallace, Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, and George Hannah) were homosexuals. Joe Hughes, owner of a popular homo-friendly bar, was elected honorary mayor of Bronzeville in 1940. Journalist Theodore Jones regularly hired drag queen Valda Gray’s troupe of female impersonators for parties given for Bronzeville’s upper class."

Blues singers, such as Gladys Bentley, Alberta Hunter, and ‘Ma’ Rainey, who were all popular at the end of the 1920’s, often performed in Chicago and had recorded numerous sexually explicit songs that included descriptions of homosexual acts. The blues reflected a culture that accepted sexuality, including homosexual behavior and identities, as a natural part of life.

Bronzeville continued to flourish until when acceptance of homosexuality in the African American community began to change. One of the crucial shifts in this mentality came when the Civil Rights movement began. "Oftentimes, Black people, in order to gain acceptance, had to play to white heteronormativity. Ebony published an article in the 1960s where MLK took questions from young people, and one person asked him about being gay. King suggested that he seek the help of a doctor. This is when the discourse begins to shift." When people began to write black history, they tried to use the templates for white history, and that doesn't really work." Some historians have noted that LGBT people, particularly African Americans, began to lose their sexual freedom when they began to work toward equality, because the civil rights movement mostly worked to uplift the race.

A tremendous indepth look at the Bronzeville neighborhood, and the source of much of this information can be found at OutHistory.com