Read Online Labor of Love by Moira Weigel - Free Book Online Page B

Village and the constant police raids on their favorite bars. She used material and one-liners that she elicited from the cast to build her script. The Drag sensationalized gay life, but also sympathized with its challenges. The third act included a drag show. Rumor had it that a wealthy, well-connected high-society man offered West an enormous pile of money for the chance to play in it one night.
    Can you imagine? the chorus boys gossiped. Some Vanderbilt or some guy onstage! The man had been willing to pay a high sum for a chance to step out in women’s clothing. Because no one would recognize him, he could keep his desires secret, even as he boldly declared them to the world. After try-out performances in Connecticut and New Jersey, The Drag was deemed too salacious for Broadway; it soon closed. But the daydreams it inspired remained. Not only could you find privacy in public. Performing in public might also give you a chance to find new versions of yourself.
    *   *   *
    Going out to a speakeasy or a drag ball created opportunities to demand new kinds of recognition. But it had its disadvantages, too. Then, as now, you could get priced out of the very spots you had made cool.
    By the middle of the 1920s, many Harlem residents could not afford to go out in their own neighborhood. The black journalist Wallace Thurman complained that by 1927, the legendary Harlem clubs were becoming “shrines to which white sophisticates, Greenwich Village artists, Broadway revellers, and provincial commuters make eager pilgrimage … In fact,” he continued, “the white patronage is so profitable and so abundant that Negroes find themselves crowded out and even segregated in their own places of jazz.”
    In the famous cabarets, the daily wages of a day maid would hardly buy a soda. But most young black women in the 1920s and ’30s were working as “domestics.” Unlike (mostly white) shopgirls or waitresses, maids did not meet men they could date at work. If they hoped to find love, they had to go out and look for it.
    Luckily, “rent parties” offered alternatives to the pricey clubs. These gatherings took place in private homes. White landlords had long charged Harlem residents above-market rates, confident that segregation would keep black tenants from fleeing to cheaper neighborhoods. As prices rose, a new trend developed: If you were struggling to afford your rent, you might throw a party, charging a small admission fee at the door.
    These parties usually had good cheap food and drink; sometimes musicians from the expensive jazz clubs came by to play after hours. Some people even began making careers of hosting rent parties, turning their homes into permanent “buffet flats.” They distributed invitations to friends, and friends of friends.
    We got yellow girls, we’ve got black and tan
    Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!
    A Social Whist Party
    â€” GIVEN BY —
    MARY WINSTON
    147 West 145th Street        Apt. 5
    Saturday Eve., March 19th, 1932
    GOOD MUSIC                  REFRESHMENTS
    Langston Hughes went to rent parties almost every Saturday that he spent in Harlem. “I met ladies’ maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters,” he wrote. Along with writers and intellectuals and some of the best musicians of their day, these workers met and flirted at rent parties, and they took their dates to them.
    This Harlem, Hughes wrote, “didn’t like to be stared at by white folks.” These parties allowed members of the black working classes “to have a get-together of one’s own, where you could do the black-bottom with no stranger behind you trying to do it, too.”
    The hosts and guests at rent parties had discovered an important law of going out: Not everyone can rely on getting the same kind of access to