Free Stonewall by Martin Duberman Page A

only up side was that her physical problems turned her into a lifelong reader. She was especially drawn to Faulkner, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Hesse. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House excited her incipient feminism, and Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris her wanderlust (though his descriptions of rat-infested pantries kept her from eating in restaurants for years).
    When the acne finally receded, and Yvonne was willing to venture out of the house, she enrolled at New York University in Greenwich Village to complete her B.A. Billy, a gay male friend, took her on a tour of the Village clubs, and she quickly became a regular. She went occasionally to a few places on Eighth Street, including the famed Bon Soir, but soon developed a special fondness for Lenny’s Hideaway and, somewhat later, the Grapevine, an interracial, upscale bar, just off Seventh Avenue, that had dancing and catered to both men and women. But there weren’t many such places in the Village; the barriers of race, class, and gender that centrally characterized mainstream American culture in the fifties were also decidedly in place, though perhaps marginally less noticeable, in the gay subculture.
    As Yvonne became increasingly comfortable with a lesbian identity, she continued to travel—much more than most—between several worlds that straddled racial and class divides. She spent at least asmuch time in the working-class bars and after-hours places of Harlem and Brooklyn as in the middle-class Greenwich Village clubs. A lesbian subculture seems to have developed earlier in Harlem than elsewhere, probably because blacks, knowing the pain of being treated as outsiders, had developed an attitude toward homosexuality relatively more tolerant than was characteristic of white heterosexual circles, with their unrelieved insistence on “sickness” and “degradation.” Harlemites might ridicule stereotypic bulldaggers or drag queens, but in the twenties especially, bisexuality had a certain cachet in sophisticated circles, and in the world of show biz the rumored lesbianism of such favored entertainers as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters tended to be ignored as irrelevant. 2
    Given this complex set of attitudes, heterosexual Harlem was sometimes willing to share nightclub and bar space with gays and lesbians. That included, in the 1920s, such well-known hangouts as Lulu Belle’s, Connie’s Inn, and the Clam House (which featured the 250-pound, tuxedo-clad singer Gladys Bentley belting out her raucous double-entendre lyrics), as well as the drag balls that attracted thousands to the huge arenas, like Rockland Palace, in which they were staged. Subsequently, Harlem clubs like Snooky’s, the Purple Manor, and the Dug-out continued to mix straight and gay, thereby providing homosexuals with a proportionately greater number of gathering spots than were available in the more uptight downtown white world. When Yvonne arrived on the scene in the early fifties, these traditions, though diluted, were still intact. One of her favorite Harlem hangouts, the Wellsworth, on 126th Street and Seventh Avenue (just behind the Apollo Theater), was in fact two bars: a straight bar in front, and then behind it, with a separate side entrance, a black lesbian bar.
    Harlem became a retreat from the endemic racism of the Village scene. Going into one of the few lesbian bars in the Village—the Seven Steps, Bagatelle, Swing Rendezvous, Pony Stable, Page Three, Laurel’s (famed for its free Chinese food on Sunday afternoons)—meant essentially going into a white women’s bar and finding herself ignored or treated like an oddity. That is, if in the first place she got by the Mafia thugs at the door, who often turned away, and sometimes insulted, anyone with black skin. The male bouncers were supposedly there to keep out straight men keen to convert a “lezzie,” but it was also their job to keep out