Considered by some to be America’s “golden age,” the Art Deco era of the 1920’s and 1930’s has been romanticized ever since the Great Depression as a time of relaxed social restriction.[i] It was a time of “New American Women,” a period when African Americans migrated to northern cities from the south, and an explosion of new cultural expression.  The  latter two phenomena created an often-overlooked and occasionally-ignored facet of the “Harlem Renaissance.”  In many U.S. cities, large African American districts—then referred to as “negro areas”—supported smaller queer cultural circles.  Most notably in Harlem, these undergrounds centered on “rent parties,” drag balls, and particular entertainment venues.[ii] Gladys Bentley sang dirty songs (with a sophisticated voice) in a white tuxedo at the Clam House,[iii] while Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent partied with other “gay” (in the sense that they had sexual relationships with other of the same gender) literary greats in private apartments.[iv] While Minneapolis was a little too far upriver to enjoy the same kind of cultural output of New York City or Chicago, and the associated “out” LGBTQ communities there, among the scraps of evidence left by local Jazz Age partiers, we’re left with a few hints of the “gays” that might have been.

That is not to suggest that the Twin Cities were completely bereft of black folks or queer undergrounds, but the evidence is scant.  Roy Wilkins, future president of the NAACP, grew up in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood – at the time, the capital’s most integrated neighborhood and arguably one of its most culturally vibrant.  While Wilkins was a youth, the neighborhood was home to numerous “good time parties,” which were Minnesota’s nearly-identical answer to more famous rent parties out east.[v] Little information, and certainly no known written accounts, attest to the existence of a queer subculture in old Rondo’s party scene.  Minneapolis’ northside also supported a larger black neighborhood near Sumner Field on the North Side, but scholars again run into a similar dearth of information about LGBTQ life in this neighborhood.

I found one clue in old issues of the Minneapolis Journal. In January of 1924, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake brought their Broadway show, titled “Chocolate Dandies,” to the Metropolitan Theater in the Gateway District (located at 320 Marquette, if you’re a geography nerd like me). Among the show’s dancers was none other than Josephine Baker, who challenged gender roles and had numerous affairs with other women during the 20s.  The show was well-received locally by an entirely white audience,[vi] but some critics believed that it presented white stereotypes of black people to entertain white audiences.[vii]

Another piece of the puzzle sits within an old book at Hennepin Central Library.  In 1937, years after the Stock Market Crash, Calvin F. Scmid wrote an impressive sociological analysis of the Twin Cities area.  The project, funded by the Works Progress Administration, used an entire chapter to describe the “negro areas” of St. Paul and Minneapolis.  The study interestingly framed these areas as part of a greater series of “Vice areas;”[viii] Schmid noted that black citizens were socially forced to live in “marginal areas of the city, in which vice, crime, disease, bad housing, dependency, and other forms personal and social disorganizations are prevalent.”[ix] Other vice districts included the Gateway District, Loring Park, and the “Seven Corners” created by Washington Avenue and Cedar Avenue—each of these vice areas had a queer future ahead of them.

Great steps have been taken to note the significance of LGBTQ people of color in queer history, but our society still runs the terrible risk of losing a century’s work of queer life experiences, if only because so little has been recorded about the experiences of people of color.  Queen Latifa may have sang a single number in Chicago as Matron Mama Morton, but few can identify her character as a reference to (a definitely lesbian) Ma Rainey.[x] Likewise, we can draft a comparison between Harlem’s rent parties and Rondo’s good time parties, but without personal accounts, this remains a conjecture.

If you know a longtime local resident who is LGBTQA and lived near Rondo Avenue or on Minneapolis’ northside during the 1930s-1960s, please contact me at [email protected].  I would love to include their stories in my upcoming book.

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[i] Lawrence R. Broer and John D. Walther, editors. Dancing Fools and Weary Blues: The Great Escape of the Twenties (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1990)

[ii] Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18-25

[iii] James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 174

[iv] Wilson, 27

[v] Evelyn Fairbanks. Days of Rondo: A Warm Reminiscence of St. Paul’s Thriving Black Community in the 1930s and 1940s, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1990) page 153.

[vi] “Sissle and Blake at Metropolitan: ‘The Chocolate Dandies’ Latest of the Colored Musical Shows,” The Minneapolis Journal, February 23, 1924.

[vii] Nadine George-Graves, “The Chocolate Dandies,” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 223-224

[viii] Calvin F. Schmid, Social Saga of Two cities: An Ecological and Statistical Study of Social Trends in Minneapolis and St. Paul (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies, 1936) Chart 195

[ix] Calvin F. Schmid.  “Your Minneapolis: An Abstract of Social Saga of the Two Cities” (Minneapolis: Minneapolis council of Social Agencies, 1938), 41

[x] Of course, this is a suggestion.  Take a close look at Latifa’s costume and bawdy performance, and then take a look at photos of Rainey in action.  The similarity is unmistakable.