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The Trouble With History...
by Rainbow Williams
The trouble with history is trying to find the lesbians. I found a clue that a song called “Bull Dyke’s Dream” was played at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893. Musician Eubie Blake thought it was a pre Civil War creation. He renamed it “The Dream Rag,” probably in an attempt to clean it up for public consumption (but erasing our existence)!
But there is a new way to look for us in the past: Wikipedia being the hip and cool reference book-in-progress on the web. When you ask this lesbian-friendly search device, you get friendly answers.
In 1991, Lillian Faderman’s “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” was published by Columbia University Press. She declares that we must reclaim the past and cites many Black Women Blues Singers. Wikipedia gives credit to Faderman’s research.
Ma Rainey, in 1912, took young Bessie Smith into the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and trained her. They were lifelong friends, wrote songs together, and probably were occasionally lovers. Rainey celebrated the lesbian lifestyle in “Prove It On Me Blues,” was bisexual, and “hid behind a cross-dressing, man hating persona that was quite distinct from her regular public image.”
“Prove It On Me” by Ma Rainey:
Went out last night with a bunch of my friends,
Must have been women, cause I don’t like no mens.
It’s true I wear a collar and a tie, Make the wind blow all the time,
They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me, Sure got to prove it on me!
Ethel Waters (one of her movies was “A Member of the Wedding”) was longtime lovers with Ethel Williams. I get a kick thinking about their monogrammed towels, both would be E W.
Alberta Hunter, and her lover Lottie Tyler, hung out with all the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance folks in their day. Ma and Bessie, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Janis Joplin, Josephine Baker, Frida Kahlo - all enjoyed liaisons with both sexes.
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