Today’s post comes to you by popular demand — which makes sense because she was very popular, and she also knew what she wanted and demanded it! Well, okay, mostly she just got it herself. She knew exactly who she was from a remarkably young age and never wavered.
Isabel Vargas Lizano was born on April 17, 1919 to Francisco Vargas and Herminia Lizano in San Joaquin de Flores, Costa Rica. As far as I can tell, it was a pretty unremarkable event. She was frequently called “Chavela” by her family. Despite that affectionate nickname, things would take a turn for the worse — her very religious parents were embarrassed by Chavela’s tomboy-ishness, going so far as to hide her when they had visitors to their home. They ultimately divorced, leaving her to be raised by her uncle, and then she contracted polio. Chavela managed to survive the illness relatively unscathed — she and her family credited this to the rituals and talismans of shamans and witches, rather than the scientific medicine of doctors.
By seventeen years old, Chavela was fully aware that she wanted a career in music and — since there weren’t many musical opportunities in Costa Rica — she moved to Mexico. Initially, she sang on the streets — dressed in traditionally masculine clothing, wearing the red poncho (or more specifically a jorongo) that would become a signature part of her performance “look” in her professional years. The look was a conscious decision — Chavela felt she looked “like a transvestite” in women’s clothing and had trouble walking in heels. To fit into the masculine music scene she was attempting to break into, she began smoking cigars, drinking heavily, and making sure to keep a gun on her at all times. During this period of her career, sometime in the mid-1940s, she had an affair with Frida Kahlo — the romance was relatively brief, but intense. Chavela even lived with Frida and her then-husband Diego Rivera for more than a year. And Frida expressed in letters to her friends that she was very attracted to Chavela. (And yet, there are — of course — scholars who are certain they were just good friends.)
In her thirties, she became a professional, becoming known for her own unique take on ranchera — singing solo, with only her guitar as accompaniment instead of a mariachi band, and slowing down the tempo for more dramatic tension or so they could come across as more humorous and, y’know, suggestive. These songs were typically sung from a man’s perspective ( a straight man’s, I should say) and Chavela Vargas refused to change the genders in the songs when she sang them. While her homosexuality certainly would not have been approved of offstage, on stage it was all part of an entertaining act that audiences embraced.
Towards the end of the 1950’s, her reputation began to expand greatly — particularly in artistic circles. She was a popular performer in Acapulco, singing in the champagne room of La Perla, frequently in front of tourists from other parts of the world. She was so well regarded that she was hired to sing at the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd on February 2, 1957. Chavela would later claim that she slept with Ava Gardner at that wedding — I haven’t found an corroboration of that, nor have I found any other examples of Ava Gardner having dalliances with women, but I suppose we all have to experiment at least once in our lives and if Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding isn’t the time and place to do it, when is? She is known to have had numerous romances after this — including, apparently, with some very famous people, but she would never share their names. A few have stepped forward, including American author Betty-Carol Sellen, but Chavela was very careful to keep these things private (particularly, I assume, because very few if any of them would have been open about their sexuality at the time!)
In 1961, with the help of José Alfredo Jiménez, Chavela’s first album was released: Noche de Bohemia. This was the first of more than 80 albums that she’d release over the course of her career. Later that year she released Con el cuarteto Lara Foster. Rumor has it that although her career was just beginning to take off, Chavela began a short-lived affair with Arabella Árbenz Villanova in 1964 after their paths crossed coincidentally — the problem being that Arabella was also having a torrid romance with Televisa executive Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, also known as “El Tigre.” When El Tigre learned of this affair he was infuriated and tried to destroy her career. Despite his pretty powerful influence in Mexico, he very nearly did. although Chavela Vargas is — as far as I can tell — still banned from appearing on Televisa in any capacity.
Her next album, Hacia la vida was released in 1966. By the time her fourth album Corridosde la revolución came out in 1970, Chavela had become quite popular, though she still wasn’t invited to headline concerts — but as her popularity grew, so did her alcoholism. Despite her struggle with drinking, Chavela managed to release three albums in 1973 and one more in 1975. However, due to her constant battle with addiction and El Tigre’s continuing campaign against her — Chavela was forced to retire and completely disappeared from the public eye.
The details are a little bit sketchy here, but according to Chavela while she was “submerged in an alcoholic haze” — as she would later describe it — she was found and taken in by a family of Native Mexicans who attempted to help nurse her back to health. It would be decades before the public learned any of this, and at the time many assumed she had died. She had very little money at this time, and sometimes only ate when friends invited her to their homes for meals.
On September 2, 1988, at the request of mutual friend Patria Jiminez, lawyer Dr. Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte arrived at Chavela Vargas’ home in order to stop her from drunkenly signing some legal documents. This began an intense romantic relationship, which both Chavela and Alicia would describe as “something greater than love.” Chavela moved in with Alicia and her four kids — but Chavela’s reliance on alcohol, and her great attachment to firearms, put a heavy strain on the relationship. Although Chavela did manage to quit drinking — which she credits to a shamanistic ritual (though Duarte has publicly disagreed with that statement) — it turned out her violent streak and penchant for guns was not dependent upon alcohol at all. Alicia ended the relationship, though she remained Chavela’s legal representation.
In 1989, a couple of Chavela’s albums were rereleased, sparking renewed interest in the singer. When the nightclub El Hábito opened in Mexico City in 1991, they invited her to perform after spotting her in their audience. Eventually, she agreed — though it was her first time performing on a stage since the 70’s and she was 72 years old at the time. It was also her first ever sober performance. This launched a full revival of her career, which involved several more albums and also international fame the likes of which she had not experienced before. She performed not just in Mexico but even performed numerous sold out shows in Spain and France. And finally, she was the headliner of these shows — an honor she had certainly earned.
She also provided music for several films during this period, primarily at the behest of Pedro Almodóvar who was a fan, a friend, and a champion for her career after meeting her in Madrid in 1992. Chavela once described him as “my husband in this world.” He traveled the world with her, pushing greater and greater opportunities towards her. Despite his best efforts, she insisted that she did not want to begin a career as an actress — although she did appear in the 2002 biographical film Frida about her former lover Frida Kahlo, singing her song “La Llorona.”
That was the same year Chavela published her autobiography Y si quieres saber de mi pasado (which translates to And if you want to know about my past). Although her sexuality had been a fairly open secret for decades — her relationships with women were fairly well known rumors, not to mention her refusal to ever change the genders or pronouns in the songs she sang — it was within the pages of her autobiography that she finally, publicly came out as a lesbian.
The following year on September 15, at age 83, Chavela Vargas had her debut performance at Carnegie Hall. The performance was recorded and released as an album creatively entitled Chavela at Carnegie Hall. The performance was considered groundbreaking given her age and sexuality in a musical genre that generally would have denied her for either of those, and in 2019 the album of the recording was named on Mitú’s list of Spanish-language albums that “Changed the Face and Feel of the Music Industry” calling it “the stuff dreams and legends are made of.”
In 2012, just months after releasing her final album Luna grande, the 93-year old Chavela Vargas was hospitalized in Cuernavaca, Mexico for respiratory problems. Several weeks later, on August 5, she passed away. It’s comforting, I think, that when she did pass away she knew it was coming and seemed to have made peace with it. She spent her final days making statements like “My name is Chavela Vargas, don’t let them forget!” Her final words, according to her Facebook page, were “I leave with Mexico in my heart.”
But truthfully, it’s hard to “leave” if your music is as significant as hers remains to this day, and there’s certainly no way to forget her. Aside from the longevity of her own music, she’s received a lot of tributes — Joaquín Sabina’s song “Por el Boulevard de los Sueños Rotos” is dedicated to her, Juan Carlos created a series of portraits of Chavela which were presented at the Centro Cultural de España en México in Mexico City in 2012. One of the characters in Sergio Ramírez Mercado’s novel La Fugitiva is based off of Chavela. And in 2017, the biographical documentary Chavela was released. She’s even had a Google Doodle in her honor! In 2019, she was commemorated on the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco, which is a “walk of fame” type of thing for LGBTQ+ people who have “made significant contributions in their field.” Given that she essentially reinvented ranchero music, opening it up to women performers, I’d call “significant contributions” an understatement. She remains one of, if not the, most celebrated lesbian in Mexican history.
Okay, so, we left off last time and, frankly, things were looking up for queer people in comic books, right? All the major comic book publishers were telling stories about LGBTQ+ people, they’d not shied away from talking about the AIDS crisis and other issues that were important to the queer community. So things are looking up right? Well buckle up, this ride is about to get bumpy.
There’s a pretty strong start to these years — Judd Winick created the non-fiction graphic novel Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned about his friendship with AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, a friendship spawned by their time together on The Real World: San Francisco. The work would go on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and actually win eleven other awards including the GLAAD Outstanding Comic Book Media Award and the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor Award.
Dark Horse Comics had begun publishing comic books telling additional Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel stories. Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay appeared in both series of comics, beginning in 2001, giving some much needed lesbian representation to the brand.
DC apparently did not take well to not getting the Outstanding Comic Book award, as the following year in Green Lantern (vol 3) #137 Kyle Rayner’s assistant Terry Berg came out of the closet. The book did earn DC another Outstanding Comic Book award from GLAAD. (Green Lantern would actually win it two years in row, after Terry survives a brutal hate crime in issue #154.) DC also published an arc in their American Century series about the Red Scare, and how it ended up being wielded against the gay community. This didn’t end up winning any awards, but it is a pretty insightful piece on an often overlooked aspect of that part of US history.
Shortly after finally officially confirming that Mystique and Destiny were lovers in X-Treme X-Men #1, Marvel handed off the reigns of their series X-Force to Peter Milligan, who created a number of queer characters including Bloke, who died pretty much right away, and Vivisector and Phat who pretended to be in a relationship for media attention and then both realized they were actually gay in a storyline that carried through 2002. When X-Force was cancelled, they were introduced in the new X-Statix series to continue that plotline. In fact, 2002 was a pretty gay year for Marvel all around. In Citizen V and the V Battalion, they revealed that “best friends” Roger Aubrey and Brian Falsworth — classic heroes from the 1970s, the latter of whom had died in 1981 — were actually lovers. Retroactively, that made them Marvel’s first gay characters. Meanwhile, Moondragon began a romantic relationship with her female roomie Marlo — which means that old storyline about Cloud turning into a man because they were in love with Moondragon is actually even worse than we knew, but clearly Marvel has put in a lot of effort to move past that. Meanwhile, Image Comics was busily churning out Age of Bronze, a comic book retelling of the Trojan War, which included Achilles and Patroklus, and it did not make any effort to straightwash them.
In 2002, DC introduced a superhero team designed like a law firm, the Power Company led by Josiah Powers, who also had a relatively quiet domestic life with his partner Rupert. Meanwhile, in Hellblazer #173 John Constantine actually landed a boyfriend named Stanley Manor. Like all of Constantine’s relationships, it ends badly (in the very next issue). But we have much, much, much bigger news to cover in topic of “gay things DC published in 2002.” On July 1, 2002 The Authority #29 was released….after the team defeated their latest “big bad,” Midnighter and Apollo got married! Not only is it super sweet in a way that’s kind of weird for that particular series, it also has the distinct honor of being the first same-sex marriage in mainstream comic book history.
Much like the Comics Code Authority, underground comix were fading out as well — partially because distribution had changed in the 90’s, and it was easier to have things published “above ground” so to speak. Paige Braddock had been publishing Jane’s World independently for some time, but in 2002 she started her company Girl Twirl Comics primarily to get her work more widely distributed. It worked. Also, by now, a lot of self-published or independently published comics were just being distributed as online comics — like the online strip Young Bottoms in Lovewhich began in 2002 as well. It was an anthology strip collecting a lot of creator’s work, edited primarily by Tim Fish (who also did a lot of the artwork).
In 2003, Marvel began releasing a sort of reimagined Rawhide Kid miniseries, which was an Old West comic series that originally debuted in 1955, produced by the now defunct Atlas Comics. Marvel had taken over the series in the 60’s, and turned him into a soft-spoken but energetic gunslinger from a fairly standard wild west action hero and then left the title abandoned for a while. With the new series, Marvel decided to add one more characteristic to set the hero apart from other heroes of the genre: they made the Rawhide Kid gay. Although they definitely played off of stereotypes for laughs, the presentation was generally applauded for its positive portrayal of a gay man in a genre that we really hadn’t been part of before. (I’m not entirely sure we’ve been a part of it since, to be honest.)
Other than continuing the aforementioned storyline between Phat and Vivisector, Marvel really only dabbled a bit in other LGBTQ+ stories in that year — revealing that the Black Cat was bisexual, and having the Punisher have some dealings with a gay sheriff. It was also kind of a quiet year for DC, aside from the aforementioned hate crime story in Green Lantern, though they also gave Dick Grayson (the most objectified man in comic books) a story pretending to be the romantic partner of his police partner Gannon Malloy to protect him from homophobic harassment from other cops. The more stunning moment was in the pages of Gotham Central #6 — the last panel of which showed a picture of Renee Montoya kissing a woman, outing her as a lesbian to the rest of the precinct. The story would continue on for several issues, revealing it was done by an old enemy, Marty Lipari, as part of an even larger scheme by Two-Face. (Renee, interestingly, is the first of the characters created in Batman: The Animated Series to make their way into the comics and end up an iconic queer character. Not the last though!) There’s also a neat juxtaposition when compared to the Dick Grayson storyline, since Renee’s captain on the force is none other than Maggie Sawyer so she had a lot more support than Gannon Malloy did.
One other pretty big thing that happened in that year was the formation of Prism Comics, which is a non-profit organization to help LGBTQ+ comic creators network, and to spread information and increase availability of LGBTQ+-related comics. They do a lot of panels at conventions like San Diego Comic Con and New York Comic Con. They also award the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant to an aspiring comic creator every year. And their web site was also one place I got a fair amount of the information that I’ve been presenting to you over this whole series of posts, so you should probably check it out.
In 2004, DC tried launching an imprint called “DC Focus” that wasn’t going to tell superhero stories. It didn’t sell, but one of their series — Hard Time — was about a men’s prison. One of the inmates was actually a transgender woman named Cindy Crane. While her placement in the prison suggests that she’s been misgendered by the system, the inmates all treat her and refer to her consistently as a woman. Also, in the Vertigo imprint’s series Y: The Last Man they revealed that one of their three leading characters, Dr. Allison Mann was not just queer but also real sassy about it.
Meanwhile, Marvel was starting to dabble with making some of their classic X-Men characters queer — they made Angel gay in an alternate universe set in the year 1602, and set the stage for a romantic relationship between Northstar (who, I guess, is gay in every universe) and Colossus in their Ultimate Universe. They also created the, as far as I know, first ever pansexual superhero in the shapeshifting genderfluid Xavin in Runaways (vol 2) #7. (Runaways in general is a pretty queer series, with two of the major characters being lesbian and literal rainbow Karolina Dean and bisexual witch Nico Minoru.) But maybe the most memorable thing that Marvel did was in 2005 — which was to re-introduce us to Billy Kaplan, better known as Wiccan. I say “re-introduce” because his history with Marvel goes back to 1986 but he wasn’t actually real, and then he died….it’s a long story. But it would have to be when your mother is Scarlet Witch and your dad is Vision. Anyways, his reintroduction was in Young Avengers #1 and by Young Avengers #6 he was in a romantic relationship with his teammate Hulkling. While at the time this was just adding two new gay characters to their existing repertoire, they rapidly became fan favorites, and their inclusion earned Young Avengers the 2006 Outstanding Comic Book award from GLAAD, and also got them a Harvey Award for Best New Series.
DC dove hard into its sassy lesbian thing that it had begun with Allison Mann, by revealing Scandal Savage was a lesbian in a relationship with fellow supervillain and teammate Knockout. The following year, in their 52 series they brought back a new incarnation of an old character: Katherine “Kate” Kane. While the previous Batwoman had been established pretty much solely to prove how straight Bruce Wayne was, this Kate Kane was like….almost an apology to the queer community for erasing us during the decades they followed the Code. While they didn’t give too much information about Kate all at once, one of the very first things they revealed was that she was Renee Montoya’s ex-girlfriend, but eventually as her backstory was revealed readers learned that Kate was an out and proud lesbian who’d been booted from the military thanks to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And unlike the previous Batwoman, this Batwoman was a very independent superhero who seldom crosses over with others — even Batman only worked with her a handful of times.
That was the same year, by the way, that Alison Bechdel released her autobiographical comic Fun Home: A Family Tragicomicwhich focused on her relationship with her closeted father. The graphic novel was critically acclaimed, being officially listed as one of the best books of 2006 by The New York Times, The Times, Publisher’s Weekly and Amazon. Entertainment Weekly said it was the best non-fiction book of the year, but Time said it was the best book of the year, period. It was nominated for a whole mess of awards I won’t even list, but it won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book, the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, the Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction, the Publishing Triangle-Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and the Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir and Biography category. It got turned into a musical, which launched off-Broadway in 2013 and has also won and been nominated for a ton of awards. And the praise and attention have barely slowed down since — in 2019, The Guardian placed Fun Home at #33 in its list of the 100 best books of 21st century. Most mainstream comics about straight people can’t even garner that much attention, and this was getting noticed by everyone, from comic book fans to literary academics. So, when I say that Fun Home is an important piece of LGBTQ+ history and culture….believe me, and go read it or see it on stage. Or better yet, read it and then see it on stage.
I guess everyone was pretty lesbian-ed out after 2006, though, because barely anything happened with queer women in comics the following year. However, Midnighter got his own series by DC’s WildStorm imprint at the very beginning of 2007 which focused heavily on his relationship with Apollo and with their adopted daughter. It was the first mainstream series with a queer character’s name as the title, the first mainstream solo superhero series with a queer lead, and the first mainstream series with a gay man as the lead. (Well, okay, technically, Northstar had gotten his own miniseries in 1994, but it completely ignored his sexuality which is why I ignored it. And I stand by that decision.) So, y’know, kind of a big deal. Apparently this gave publisher’s the idea that queer characters could be strong enough to be leads in their own right — the end of the following year Top Cow Comics released a story arc in Witchblade wherein the lead, Danielle Baptiste, would question her sexuality and begin a relationship with her roommate Finch. IDW Publishing confirmed the homosexuality of Duncan Locke in Locke & Key – Head Games #4 only four months later. As far as I can tell, those were the first queer characters for either of those companies and both of them are leading characters.
Marvel even decided, by 2009, that it might just be time to make some of their longstanding X-Men characters actually be queer in their primary universe, instead of just in alternate ones. In June, they introduced Kyle Jinadu, who is (I believe) main continuity’s Northstar’s first ever actual boyfriend since he came out of the closet over a decade prior! X-Factor (vol 3) #45 featured the first kiss between characters Rictor (who’d been introduced in 1987) and Shatterstar (who’d been introduced in 1991). I’d like to say this made a big splash — I have been a fan Shatterstar specifically since about 1991, so I was certainly charmed. but it simply couldn’t compete with what DC was doing with their queer characters that year.
At literally the same time as that kiss, Kate Kane made waves again by taking the leading in Detective Comics. That’s big because Detective Comics is one of — if not the — longest running comic book series in history. And it’s still going after launching in 1937. It was literally the series that founded DC Comics. (DC is short for Detective Comics — which makes the company’s name actually Detective Comics Comics if you think about it.) It was an anthology series for a while, until they introduced Batman in 1939 in issue #27 (which is the most valuable comic book in history) and he was essentially the star of the series after that. For seventy years and 827 issues. In 2009, the series took a brief hiatus for three months because of various other story arcs going on with the Bat family, and then they released issue #854, with Batwoman taking the lead. There was also a ten page back up strip featuring Renee Montoya, who was now the superhero known as the Question. So, yeah, they took essentially the most important series in DC Comics and handed it over entirely to lesbian characters. Batwoman remained the lead until issue #863.
In 2010, one of the last major American comic book producers finally introduced its very first LGBTQ+ character. That would be Archie Comics, who finally gave us Kevin Keller in Veronica #202. I gotta be honest, I can’t tell you too much about him. I don’t read Archie Comics much. But, in 2012 — just two years later — in Life with Archie #16, which is a sort of flashforward to adulthood series — Kevin Keller got married in the second same-sex marriage in mainstream comics. (Except for a nameless gay couple getting married in Ex Machina #10, technically they were second. But they didn’t have names.) Kevin, and his husband Clay Walker, also had the first same-sex interracial marriage in mainstream comics. So, they may have gotten a slow start with queer characters, but they really decided to jump in and go straight to doing something that Marvel comics had still not done. That issue, by the way, was boycotted by the One Million Moms because it was sold in Toys’R’Us stores which led to the comic completely selling out, and subsequently inspiring Kevin to get three solo comic book series. Thanks One Million Moms!
As a side note, the Comics Code Authority — which had ben increasingly irrelevant has it was abandoned by publisher after publisher, some of whom were adopting a ratings system that Marvel had created essentially out of spite when the CCA had demanded changes to an X-Force story in 2001. DC Comics, which was only submitting some stories to the CCA by this point, announced they were completely discontinuing use of the CCA on January 20, 2011. That left Archie Comics as the only publisher still using the CCA….for exactly one day before they also announced they were stopping that practice. So that was, at long last, the end of that.
Anyways, it was only a matter of months after Kevin Keller’s wedding when Marvel would go ahead and have their first same-sex marriage. Although Wiccan and Hulkling got engaged first (in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #9 — also their first depicted kiss), the first wedding would actually be between Northstar and Kyle Jinadu. Here’s the thing, and maybe it’s because I was mostly a Marvel fan at the time, or maybe I’m having some Mandela effect thing, but I really recall Marvel advertising Astonishing X-Men (vol 3) #51 as being the first gay marriage in comic books. They sent out “Save the Date” cards. They made it a really big deal. And I can give them a pass on not including anything from underground comix but…really, they were third (or fourth, depending on if we’re counting that nameless couple in Ex Machina.) They didn’t even manage to have the first interracial same-sex wedding. Still, it was a first for Marvel and for Marvel fans and specifically Northstar fans, this was pretty exciting and it was very cool that Marvel made an extremely big deal about the fact it was happening. They had like….basically every superhero that had ever been in any comic book Northstar was ever in appear, or at least show up on the cover. (I’m not even sure if Kyle actually had any guests at the wedding, just all Northstar’s superfriends.) This was such a big deal, the original proposal for the splash cover art sold on eBay for more than $2,100.
Also by Marvel, and I’m including it here solely because the second panel is so great, in Avengers Academy #23, the character Striker came out to his bisexual teammate Lightspeed. Just look at her face. (And in case you weren’t convinced about how very LGBTQ+ this all is, Lightspeed’s superpower involves leaving a rainbow behind her when she flies.)
So, you may be wondering, what was DC doing right about now? Right? Well, as it turns out, rebooting their entire continuity. Okay, technically that began in 2011 but this is like a whole thing to talk about so I wanted to get those marriages out of the way first. So, basically, DC does this every once in a while where they kind of “start over” their whole universe, and this time in 2011 they also merged it with some of their offshoot imprints like WildStorm and some of their Milestone and Vertigo content. This led to some good stuff for queer people in comic books….and it also led to some bad stuff. I’m going to dissect that in entirely too much detail for you right now.
So, to start with, part of this “The New 52” branding they were doing as they reset the continuity was that they were launching with only 52 series to like establish their remade universe. (And to be clear, “resetting” doesn’t mean, in this case, erasing all of the history of every character and starting from scratch. A lot of important and memorably storylines and moments were kept as part of their character’s backstory – like they did not retell Batman’s origin story.) One of the first of these series was Stormwatch — starring, among a handful of others, Midnighter and Apollo. Unfortunately when they decided to reset the continuity….DC also decided to drop their wedding from their history, they’re just dating. It’s fine, it’s not like that was a major moment in their character’s histories and also an important moment in LGBTQ+ comic history… And for the record, as of my writing this in 2021, they still have not married again. (Maybe that’s why Marvel advertised Northstar and Kyle’s wedding the way they did, since DC had already been like “no wait, that never happened.”)
The next week after launching that series, they launched Batwoman (vol 2) — a permanent solo series, not miniseries like volume 1 had been, all about Kate Kane who remained pretty much exactly as she was prior to the reset. This series also included Maggie Sawyer, with whom Kate begins a relationship. Two weeks after that, the new Teen Titans series began which would quickly introduce Bunker, a gay Latino character, as one of their team members. That was released roughly the same time as Justice League Dark which brought back John Constantine. So they relaunched with four series, pretty much right off the bat, featuring LGB characters in leading roles. And that’s it — that’s the good news. Pretty much none of their otherwise established queer characters were anywhere to be found until 2012, when they brought back the Pied Piper, and in their series about Earth 2 (which is an alternature universe) they did reveal that the Green Lantern Alan Scott was gay. But, if you were noticing, there’s still a demographic that was completely missing: they now had no transgender characters. At all. And only one of their LGB characters wasn’t white. So what I’m saying is, it kinda seems like a backslide, right?
In fact, there wouldn’t be a transgender character in DC Comics at all until Batgirl #19 in 2013, when Barbara Gordon’s roommate Alysia Yeoh came out. She was a minor character, and was both a lesbian and transgender, as well as being Asian. DC apparently thought this scored them major diversity points (I guess it actually kind of did) and so they went on to advertise her as their first ever transgender character….despite the fact that they’d previously had a whole bunch like Coagula, Lord Fanny, and Shvaughn Erin. As a side note, this was about the time DC’s character Tremor stated she was asexual in The Movement (vol 1) #10 — something that I believe was actually a first, because I can’t find any other superhero (or even comic book character) who had claimed that identity for themselves before that.
2013 was also the year that Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer got engaged — exciting! The first mainstream same-sex marriage between two women! But DC co-publisher Dan DiDio pulled the plug on that plotline, causing enough of a stir that Batwoman writers J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman quit the series. DC’s public explanation was, essentially, that superheroes can’t get married so their books don’t end up being about their marriages. While there’s a certain argument there that I can follow, it was pretty gross to cancel that same-sex marriage in comics so soon after retconning out the first same-sex marriage. (It looks even worse when you consider that married heterosexual heroes Adam and Alanna Strange were introduced in Justice League United #0 the very next year.) Like I said, a backslide.
Fortunately, DC wasn’t the only comic book game in town. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Nicole George‘s memoirs in comic book form with Calling Dr. Laura. Image Comics gave us Betty — essentially a queer gnome — in their new fantasy adventure series Rat Queens. The following year, Fantagraphics published Julio’s Day — a story that follows a fictional, closeted Mexican-American man and his family for 100 years. Parts of it had been published previously, but the story had never been completed until this. Shortly after that, Northwest Press began their 1940’s noir series Dash — the main character of which was gay private eye Dash Malone. Hill and Wang finished up 2014 by releasing Second Avenue Caper, based on a true story of a group of friends illegally importing experimental HIV medicines from Mexico during the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
That year, DC gave us the first glimpses of an extremely open romantic relationship between longstanding Batman villain Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn — a villain imported to the comic books from Batman: The Animated Series (just like Renee Montoya was!) in the pages of Harley Quinn (vol 2). In 2015, Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) got a new roommate after Alysia moved out to live with her new girlfriend. This new roommate, Frankie Charles, was openly bisexual. If it seems like Batgirl is going to be the salvation of DC Comics though — guess again! Just two issues later, they’d kick up a whole mess of controversy by giving us a story in which a guy dressed up as Batgirl and attempted to replace her. It seemed to play off the deeply inaccurate and offensive idea, often trotted out anytime one of those “bathroom bills” gets proposed by conservative politicians, of men dressing as women to commit crimes. In the end, the creators of the story apologized for the story. Just a few issues later Alysia Yeoh would get married to her girlfriend Jo Muñoz in the pages of Batgirl (vol 4) #45 — marking the first same-sex wedding in the new DC continuity, between two minor characters in a book that is almost entirely focused on Barbara Gordon’s relationship with Dick Grayson. If that sounds like I’m judgey and bitter, like when I talk about it I’m thinking about how great a Maggie Sawyer/Kate Kane wedding would have been and it would hav focused on the people actually getting married….well, there’s a reason for that. (The reason being that I’m judgey and bitter.)
I have to be honest. This is pretty much where the sources I’ve been using stop. But a lot has happened in the past few years, so there’s more to tell. So I’m going to go off of my very fallible memory. Like, I’m going to research the things I remember, but like…if I don’t remember that it happened, it’s going to be tough for me to research. And I pretty much only read DC and Marvel so….I’m sure other publishers had things they did. I just don’t really know what it was. So, there’s going to be probably a lot of things I’m missing. (Not that I covered literally every moment before this, either.) If you know of something that I’m missing (or something that got skipped over even before this in the series), please leave a comment about it and let us all know!
Anyways, 2015 was also the year we sort of kind of got second ever pansexual superhero. Supervillain? Depends on the day. That would be Marvel’s Deadpool. Deadpool himself, of course, had been around since 1991. And he’d been flirting with, y’know, everyone since pretty much that time. And it had been said before by Deadpool writers that his type was “anyone with a pulse” but in 2015 was the first time his sexuality was actually given a label — on Twitter, when writer Gail Simone confirmed that she had “always thought of Deadpool as pansexual.” Granted, in the actual pages of comics, Deadpool’s love interests have always been women or female-presenting cosmic entities. But that hasn’t stopped him from flirting with well, basically everyone but most especially Spider-Man and Wolverine. And Cable. And Colossus. And Thor. And….yeah, everyone.
This was the same year that Marvel went fully into their “make a classic X-Men gay” thing they’d dabbled in with alternate universes before. This time, they picked Iceman. They’d hinted, once, kind of obtusely, that he wasn’t straight back in 1994 and then completely dropped it ever after. In 2015, they had the original X-Men team — as teenagers — brought forward in time which led to a lot of confusion when you’re trying to tell someone about what plotlines were happening, so bear with me. Jean Grey telepathically learned that Iceman was gay, and told him so. This led teen Iceman to ask a very good question: “how can my older self not be, but I am?” And, honestly, LGBTQ+ readers like myself were kind of nervous about what Marvel was getting at. In November of that year we actually found out, when teenage Iceman confronted adult Iceman and adult Iceman finally came out in the first issue of his own series, Iceman #1. Honestly, it’s a pretty great scene but it’s kind of important because it’s Marvel’s first queer-led solo series. But it was also a game changer in that Iceman had been a main character in their comic books since 1963, one of the original five X-Men. And, frankly, it was seamless, it made perfect sense with the decades of character development he’d had — given that his parents had been portrayed as ultra-conservative that whole time. Five issues later, Iceman told his parents he was gay… and it didn’t go well. (This all, once again, retroactively changed who Marvel’s first gay character was!)
Speaking of first gay characters, DC made a bold move in 2016 by bringing a completely reenvisioned Extraño back into the picture in Midnighter & Apollo (vol 1). This was actually an incredible move on their part — no longer the flamboyant mashup of offensive stereotypes, now he chose to go exclusively by his real name Gregorio de la Vega, and was a much more serious and in many ways jaded sorcerer. But! He was married to Tasmanian Devil — the first member of the Justice League to come out! And despite the fact that I don’t think they ever interacted, I somehow feel like that’s perfect. Anyways, Midnighter & Apollo needed a character with mystical powers for the story arc they were telling and they could very easily have gone with anybody. Even if they specifically wanted a queer one, Constantine would have been an obvious choice. But the writers decided they wanted to bring more queer people into the new continuity — something desperately needed — so they dipped into DC’s history and brought us some. Aside from his appearances in that series, Gregorio has since shown up in issues of Justice League and Justice League Dark.
Over the next few years, Marvel would introduce a bunch of LGBTQ+ characters. None of them come to mind as being especially noteworthy, but I’ll highlight a few. First, from Marvel: former Dora Milaje (who MCU fans should be familiar with) soldiers Ayo and Aneka abandoned their positions in 2016’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda #1 to join together both as lesbian lovers and freedom fighters. In 2017, America Chavez would become Marvel’s first queer woman to lead a solo series in America, which also explained her backstory as being from an entirely female alternate reality. In 2018, we were introduced to Darnell Wade — a mutant with teleportation powers and also an NYC drag queen who became one of the X-Men and would go on to emcee Iceman’s birthday celebration — and Dr. Charlene McGowan — a transgender woman whose skills as a scientist have made her an invaluable ally to the Hulk. The book’s creators brought in Crystal Frasier to help make sure they had an authentic trans voice behind the character. The next year, Mystique and Destiny were confirmed to have gotten married at some point “offscreen.”
In 2019, there was confirmation — first on Twitter and then in the X-Factor and Lords of Empyre books — that Tommy Shepherd, aka Speed, Scarlet Witch and Vision’s other reincarnated kid, was bisexual, and recently has been dating X-Factor’s Prodigy. Speaking of X-Factor, this latest incarnation of the team is led by none other than Northstar which, if I’m not mistaken, makes him the first queer superhero to officially be a team leader. Also, back to discussing Scarlet Witch and Vision’s kids, Vision made a daughter with a robot named Virginia who was programmed with Scarlet Witch’s brainwaves, right? That daughter, named Vivian, declared in 2019 that while she hadn’t fully explored what her sexuality might be that she was absolutely not attracted to boys. She later followed that up by kissing her female teammate Ironheart. That’s three for three on Vision and Scarlet Witch having queer kids. (They’ve have other kids who’ve all died before their sexualities were explored at all. So we can just assume they must’ve been queer too.) Get those two to a PFLAG meeting asap. If they needed to have a straight child to save the world, that would be the end. I love them. And Billy and Hulkling — who, remember, got engaged in 2010 even before Northstar did — finally actually tied the knot in 2020. Just a ten year engagement. (The reason I’m focusing on these kids is because WandaVision was the impetus for me writing this whole series.)
Not everything Marvel has decided to do has been great, or met without controversy. They announced the introduction of their first non-binary superhero in a sibling duo featuring the non-binary Snowflake and their twin brother Safespace. And, like, okay, I get what Marvel was trying to do by kind of reclaiming those terms that are often used to disparage liberals. But doing that with what you’re advertising as your first non-binary character? There was TONS of criticism that it actually implied that non-binary people were the oversensitive types of people the term “snowflake” is often meant to attack. The book they were supposed to be in has yet to appear, and might have been cancelled. Thing is….they also are not the first non-binary character Marvel’s had. This year they quietly introduced two character named Cam and Monica Sellers, two young mutants who identify as non-binary. Minor characters I’ll grant you, but they exist. Not to mention that a lot of the shapeshifters in the Marvel universe — Xavin, Mystique, Loki, etc — are pretty clearly genderfluid, and have been for a long time.
While Marvel was finally diving into introducing plenty of LGBTQ+ characters, DC was actually focusing more on the already established queer characters. I mean, they definitely introduced new ones too, don’t get me wrong. But the highlights, for me at least, were putting lots of effort into Midnighter’s adventures, and a lot of development of the unconventional open relationship between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy — including giving them a wedding in 2020’s Injustice: Year Zero series (that’s in an alternate universe, not the mainstream one). They also took some longstanding characters like the villain Cheetah and gave her a romantic history with Wonder Woman supporting cast member Etta Candy. They did bring Doom Patrol’s Rebis back as a non-binary hero, though eventually the “component parts” split up and they just became Negative Man and not non-binary. In 2018, they reintroduced Alan Scott in the prime continuity, and made him gay (again…or still….alternate timelines can be so confusing.) One thing they did, which I have to assume was a sweet homage to the work of Neal Pozner and Phil Jiminez, was make their newest incarnation of Aqualad, Jackson Hyde, a gay teenager. They’ve also recently reintroduced some of their queer characters from before the 2011 reset, such as Obsidian. Despite that, as of my writing this, there is still not even one transgender superhero in DC’s new continuity.
So while I’ve been churning out this series, Marvel made one big announcement that I have to include even though, technically, nothing has come to fruition yet. Apparently, this June, someone new will take on the title Captain America in a new series called United States of Captain America and this time it’s going to be gay teenager Aaron Fischer, a character created by Jan Bazaldua — one of only a handful of openly transgender creators at Marvel. This looks like they’re going to dive into a story about homeless queer youth — a really serious issue that has, to my knowledge, never really been address in comics before. It is an issue that primarily effects queer people of color, and it looks like Aaron’s white, but I guess we have to start somewhere? So, I do have high hopes for this and we’ll just have to see where that goes. But, I do think it’s a very cool full circle kind of moment to give the title to a gay guy, when that series was where Marvel first began giving our community any real representation way back with Arnie Roth in 1982.
So, now that you’re pretty much all caught up to where we are now….let’s talk about where we should go from here — in the hopes some head honcho from a major publishing company is reading this…. Here’s what I think needs to happen, and if you have your own ideas, tell me about them in a comment.
Hire more transgender creators. Marvel has only ever had 7 openly transgender creators and 4 non-binary creators. DC has had one single non-binary creator, and also only 7 transgender staff members.
Bring queer characters back from the dead. Everyone dies in comics, so I’m not going to complain about the number of queer characters who’ve died. However, there’s a saying I came across a lot while I researched this series: “The only people who stay dead in comics are Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben.” But two of those people have come back from the dead. And you know who hasn’t? A long, long, long list of LGBTQ+ characters.
But especially, DC, bring back Coagula or Lord Fanny. Or both. Don’t just ignore that before you reset continuity, you had some awesome trans superheroes and since you reset your continuity you have free reign to bring them back. (While we’re on the topic of bringing people back, bring back Fade too.)
The vast majority of LGBTQ+ characters in comics are white, cisgender, and wealthy or at least middle class. There needs to be more diversity than that, there’s so many more stories to tell. I can’t stress this one enough.
We need more human transgender, genderfluid, or non-binary characters. Like, there’s not that many out there already and a significant number of them are aliens or actual shapeshifters, or both. Just don’t name them Snowflake, and it’ll be fine.
DC, you gotta give us a wedding between either Midnighter and Apollo (to get them back where they were) or Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer (to make up for teasing us so!) One or the other. Or both. Just give us something.
This might only be on my wishlist, but I’d love to see a mainstream publisher give us an all queer superhero team. Found families are such an important part of the queer community and queer experience, I’d love to see that reflected in comics.
Okay! Phew! We made it. This is the end. I don’t usually do this because it can make this blog, which is a hobby, feel like a job, but in case you want to look at some of the things I skipped over or breezed past without much detail, I’ll give you the main sources I used. Also the places where I snagged a lot of the images — usually I just do a Google image search and call it a day, but this series was way more work than I thought it was going to be. But also lots of fun, so it was worth it! Anyways, those sources are: Queer Comics History, Gay League, and Prism Comics. I also dipped into the Marvel Database and DC Database, mostly to confirm dates of issues of their comics. If you’re interested to know the pretty much complete list of every LGBTQ+ character that’s been in those company’s comics, they do have categories for those characters to make them easy to find. Here’s Marvel’s. Here’s DC’s.
Anyways, we’ve come a really long way in comic books since characters were changing genders because they were bored on Mars. And that’s largely because of queer creators making their voices heard, even if they had to do it underground spaces. Now, with no Code and online distribution making it publishing even easier, I’m sure we have a lot more quality queer content on the way, and I for one can’t wait to read it.
So, last time we talked about the Golden Age of Comics and the subsequent Silver Age of Comics — the era ruled over by the Comics Code Authority. When the Code loosened up in 1971, the world of comic books entered a new era: the Bronze Age of Comics. (I don’t know who decided that all these periods needed to be named like this, but…it’s getting to be a bit much, isn’t it?) The Code was still not ready for LGBTQ+ people to appear in the pages of comic books…but the people making underground comics did not care. They were ready to go for it — and queer artists, emboldened by the growing gay rights movement — were ready to push the envelope even farther.
In October of 1971, artist Rand Holmes tackled the homophobia in the book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) — which we will some day talk about in greater detail some day when I tackle the sordid history of conversion therapy — stating that it sets psychiatry back by 50 years, and going so far as to have the lead character of his “The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd” engage in explicit oral sex with another man before blatantly calling out the book’s author David Reuben M.D. by saying “you are rilly fucked up man.” I’m not sure if word ever got back to David Reuben but the whole thing was a pretty fantastic call out.
The following year, the feminist comic book Wimmens Comix began its run — being published initially by Last Gasp though it would change hands over the years. As if to exemplify how much they did not care about the status quo, the first issue included a story called “Sandy Comes Out” by Trina Robbins — featuring the first openly lesbian character in comics. Despite breaking new ground, the comic was not especially well received by the LGBTQ+ community — in part because Trina Robbins is a straight woman, but mainly because it simplified the complexities of coming out. And so in 1974, Mary Wings entered the world of underground comix by self-publishing the entirely lesbian-focused book Come Out Comix.
1974 was also the year that Steve Glanzman’s story “Toro” was published — one of his U.S.S. Stevens stories that were printed in Our Fighting Forces by DC. Toro is a tragic story — and ostensibly a true on (as all of Glanzman’s war comics are believed to be), but there’s little question that the character it is about is not a straight man. Being published by a mainstream publisher, this was toeing the line of what the Code would allow. It managed to eke out a Code seal by never really going farther than referring to the character as a “fairy” in a way that might have implied that he was magic rather than gay.
Though 1975 was something of a quiet year — with the exception of a lesbian being introduced in the second issue of Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp by Lee Marrs, and the character Pudge getting almost arrested at a gay rights rally. Howver, 1976 was a banner year for gay comics. It kicked off in February with the first recurring openly gay character in mainstream comics — comic strips, that is — when Garry Trudeau introduced the character of Andy Lippincott to his daily strip Doonesbury.
That same year Howard Cruse had the continuing character of Headrack come out in the second issue of Barefootz Funnies. Headrack, while not the central character, was the best friend of the central character and so was a continuous presence in the series. Which meant, officially, the first gay recurring character had appeared in comic strip and comic book format. Pretty important, but there was more ahead for 1976. Roberta Gregory — one of the contributors to Wimmen’s Comix — began self-publishing her own work, centered around lesbian characters, called Dynamite Damsels and Larry Fuller put together an anthology series featuring all gay male characters called Gay Heart Throbs. All of these, of course, were underground comic that did not need to meet the Code’s standards and intentionally did not. So, despite the fact that 1976 was a pretty impressive, groundbreaking year….most of the United States only knew about Andy Lippincott.
In 1977, Gerard Donelan (often just called “Donelan”) — a fan of Joe Johnson‘s cartoons — submitted work to The Advocate, disappointed that they weren’t continuing to run Johnson’s work. After they ran his first cartoon, they hired him to create a regular strip called “It’s a Gay Life” — which would run for 15 years. This, perhaps, was the inspiration Rupert Kinnard needed to begin creating “Cathartic Comics” for Cornell College’s student newspaper, which featured the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé — the first gay and lesbian (respectively) black characters in comics. This is often overlooked, because there’s no actual crime fighting or supervillains in the strips, but Brown Bomber is also the first gay superhero — he transforms into his superheroic identity through the power of magic hiccups. Of course.
The following year, a book of gay cartoons from the magazine Christopher Street was released. It was advertised as “The World’s First Gay Cartoon Book!” which, as we’ve seen, was not strictly speaking true. But I’m including it in this article primarily because the title of the book makes me laugh every time I see it: And God Bless Uncle Harry and His Roommate Jack Who We’re Not Supposed to Talk About. Other gay magazines, such as In Touch For Men would also soon release their own cartoon collections in 1978. But without the funny titles.
Meanwhile, still in 1978, DC was working hard to counteract various rumors about some of their characters being gay. To that end, they introduced a woman named Shvaughn Erin — an officer of the Science Police, very capable woman — to be the love interest of Element Lad who had been continuously subjected to rumors of being gay since his creation. Despite this, the rumors persisted. It’s like the people at DC had never heard of a beard before.
Anyways, with queer cartoonists taking the lead in telling queer stories with underground comix, Denis Kitchen decided his publishing company, Kitchen Sink Press, could help get those stories out there even more. In 1979, he asked Howard Cruse to help him put together Gay Comix — an anthology series exclusively featuring LGBTQ+ stories by openly LGBTQ+ artists. Gay Comix would run for 26 issues, ending its run in 1998. It would go on to feature Jerry Mills‘ series “Poppers,” and so many others I could probably write a whole article just on it.
By 1980, the Code itself had lost much of its sway. Major publishers were starting to get books sold at comic book stores without with the CCA seal, simply by marketing them as “for mature audiences”, and the CCA was putting its stamp on books that would never have been allowed before. Eclipse Comics published the graphic novel Detectives Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green (by Don McGregor), which featured lesbian characters and Stewart the Rat (by Steve Gerber) which also featured a little bit of queer content. Even Marvel, I guess, tried to dabble in queer content. Kind of. It was a deeply offensive story (especially if its your first time having gay men in a story) called “A Personal Hell” from Hulk! #23, written by Jim Shooter. Again, deeply offensive, so we’re going to breeze on past it. I wish we could pretend it never happened but….we’re not done with Jim Shooter yet.
Kitchen Sink Press and Eclipse Comics both, apparently, discovered they could make money from unabashedly presenting queer characters. In 1981, Kitchen Sink Press introduced a recurring strip called “Omaha, the Cat Dancer” in its anthology series Bizarre Sex. Several characters engaged in homosexual activities throughout the course of the strip, but it kicked off with the openly bisexual character Shelley Hine in that very first strip.
Also in 1982, Marvel comics tried the whole “gay characters” thing again, with much more success. They introduced the character Arnie Roth, who had been friends with Steve Rogers before he became a superhero, defending him from neighborhood bullies. Arnie ran into Captain America, revealing that he had long ago guessed Cap’s secret identity. Captain America and Arnie set off on an adventure to rescue Arnie’s “roommate” Michael Bech. When they succeed and Arnie and Michael are reunited, Captain America figures out pretty quickly that they’re actually a couple. It’s a sweet little story, and gives Arnie Roth the distinction of being Marvel’s first gay character. And, because he’s a minor character and he’s not shown kissing, and because Michael is consistently called his “roommate”…he also has the distinction of being the first gay character to have his story told with a CCA seal of approval. (Marvel made a recent announcement regarding Captain America while I was researching this…which I found particularly interesting because of this…but that’s for the end of this series. If I talked about it while it was news, it wouldn’t be history, right?)
DC began publishing stories without the CCA seal — marketing them as being for “mature readers.” These included Camelot 3000, in which the Knights of the Round Table are reincarnated in the year 3000 AD. The knight Sir Tristan, when his memories awaken, finds he has been reincarnated in the body of a woman named Amber. Tristan gets more upset when he discovers Isolde, his great love, has also been reincarnated…also as a woman. Isolde helps Tristan come to terms with the situation and the two become lovers again. Despite the fact that Tristan has kind of medieval attitudes about sex, gender, and sexuality (which is kind of understandable since Tristan is from that time period) it’s actually like pretty good transgender representation. A gigantic leap forward since the last major transgender representation in comics was decades earlier and was….oh right….a bored guy on Mars.
Also in 1982, something new and important happened very quietly in the underground comix scene. Gay Comix #3 incuded a story entitled “I’m Me!” by David Kottler appeared, his only credited work in comics of any kind, at least under that name (as far as I’ve found). The story is a brief one about his transition. David seems to have been the first openly transgender comic creator and the first to tell a story about an actually transgender person (not some wacky sci-fi/fantasy genderbending hijinks) in that format.
Not to be outdone, in December of that year, Eclipse Comics series SABRE by Don McGregor introduced two gay characters, named Deuces Wild and Summer Ice, who were presented as lovers basically as soon as they appeared. A year later, the same series featured the first gay kiss in mass-produced comics — by the same characters, unsurprisingly. Underground comix had, of course, had plenty of gay kisses by this point, but those were not mass produced by any definition. Eclipse Comics was operating somewhere between underground and mainstream — they were able to mass produce comics but, obviously, did not care at all about the Code. Their books would sell anyways.
1983 was also the year that Alison Bechdel began publishing her comic strip series “Dykes to Watch Out For” in the magazine Womannews. If Bechdel’s name sounds familiar, that’s either because you already know her work, you love the Broadway musical Fun Home, or because the Bechdel Test is widely used to sort of gauge the quality of female representation in pieces of media. The test — if you haven’t heard of it — is basically, are there two named female characters who speak about something other than a man. That test is named after her, despite her crediting her friend Liz Wallace for the idea, because it was first described in — you probably guessed this already — the strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (But not until 1985, at which point Bechdel was self-syndicating the strip.) The strip would run continuously until 2008, at which point Bechdel decided to retire it, except for occasional special ones like the “Postcards from the Edge” story she published in 2017 for the “Ides of Trump” campaign.
Bechdel was not the only queer artist putting out new, gay work in 1983, however. In the UK, David Shenton published his first graphic novel, Stanley and the Mask of Mystery. Howard Cruse, though still producing Gay Comix began publishing a strip called “Wendel” in issues of The Advocate, and the series “Jayson” by Jeff Krell began appearing in Philadelphia Gay News (it would later be published in Gay Comix and Meatmenas well.)
Also in 1983, was the first issue of Alpha Flight — a Marvel comic book series about a Canadian superhero team. They’d been introduced as enemies of the X-Men back in 1979, but now they were getting their own series. And one of their founding members was Northstar. Now, one of the problems with taking bad guys from a single comic book issue four years prior and making them stars of their own book series was….you had to make up backstories for them. Creator John Byrne was convinced that Northstar was a closeted Olympic athlete — and also secretly a superhero, and was determined to tell that story. Now, the Code and also executives at Marvel — primarily editor-in-chief Jim Shooter (I told you we weren’t done with him) — prevented him from telling it as plainly as he’d have liked. It’s been said that Shooter was determined to have “no gays in Marvel Comics.” The comics were full of hints about how Jean-Paul Beaubier (that’s Northstar’s secret identity) was too busy with Olympic training to be interested in girls, how he would ignore his throngs of female fans, etc. Like, it wasn’t spelled out but it was hard to miss. But outside of the pages of the comic, Byrne would tell pretty much anyone that Northstar was gay. As a result, Northstar is pretty widely considered to be the first gay superhero from a mainstream comic book publisher (despite not actually be out in the comic book).
But one thing Marvel did manage to do in this year without any concern about the Code was to use the word “gay” — meaning homosexual — for the first time in a mainstream comic book. It’s a subtle little thing — a bit of dialogue I’m sure many straight women will have lived through themselves. It appears in Fantastic Four #251, when the characters of Julie D’Angelo and Sharon Selleck are discussing their new friend Grey Landers (whom Julie is all about) right before Johnny Storm — the Human Torch — comes over to ask her out. They’re setting up a whole love……some sort of geometric shape….but, alas, a purely heterosexual one.
The next year, in Vigilante #5 DC introduced the freelance mercenaries Henry Cannon and Marschall Saber (or simple, Cannon and Saber). Although their being a gay couple was presented as like a minor detail that didn’t matter, probably to sneak it by the Code, really the whole plotline wouldn’t work if they were not. Despite the subtlety, they didn’t get this approved by the Code. The story is, basically, that a D.A. has arranged for them to go into witness protection together if they kill each other’s bosses. They do so, but before they can be entered into Witness Protection, they get attacked in their home by the Vigilante. In the ensuing fight, Cannon and Saber were actually winning until the fight was interrupted by the Electrocutioner. The story almost managed to get a CCA seal, primarily because the gay characters were villains but their relationship is actually pretty wholesome — they work as a team, they protect each other over anything else, and they support each other’s goals. There are good guy gay couples in the media now that don’t have relationships this healthy.
Marvel, meanwhile, revealed that their character Cloud was transgender…..uhm….kind of. You see, they introduced a plotline wherein Cloud was falling in love with Moondragon, one of her female teammates on the Defenders…..so she began shapeshifting into a man. This story did not get approved by the Code, but still managed to get sold in stores. Some stores, anyways. It would later turn out that Cloud was actually a nebula from space that had taken on human form, lost their memories, and become a superhero. The Marvel Database officially lists Cloud as “genderfluid” and, in this sense, that’s pretty literal. Still don’t think this storyline was quite up to par with the one in Camelot 3000 but that’s not up to me, is it?
There was a bit of a minor shakeup in the comic book world, as two new publishing companies were trying to make room for themselves in the industry. One of them was Megaton Comics — who we’ll follow up with later — and the other was First Comics. Among the various hurdles First Comics was dealing with was their own unwillingness to abide by the rules of the Code. For example, in Sable (vol 1) #15, the lead character Jon Sable assured Grey Adler, his love interest’s best friend, that he didn’t judge homosexuals. Grey would become a major recurring character, leading Sable into various adventures pertaining to issues facing the gay community.
Though Marvel and DC were just beginning to put their toes into the big LGBTQ+ representation pool, the underground comics scene was really getting the hang of it. 1984 was the year that Tim Barela debuted his strip “Leonard & Larry” in Gay Comix. The strip would later also be published in The Advocate and Frontiers— and it would run in Frontiers until 2002! The strip featured a wide variety of characters, all falling under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and was praised for its depiction of queer families and for the fact that the characters in it aged realistically over the years.
By the end of 1984, there had been at least one queer character introduced in virtually every area of comics — there was still a long, long, long way to go between where we were then and where we are now (and where we still need to go!). And we’ll go over more of that journey in the exciting next episode!
Queer history, as we all know, can be difficult to track down. Sometimes that’s because the language we use now didn’t exist, so it’s hard to identify queer people. Sometimes it’s because people actively tried to suppress the information. And sometimes, unfortunately, its because no one was paying attention. The Sydney Cliff Murders are one such instance — even today, this doesn’t even have a half-assed Wikipedia page. (Yet. I’m betting that will change after this though. Fingers crossed anyways.)
The Sydney Cliff murders were a string of murders from the 80’s through the 90’s against gay men in the of Sydney, Australia which may have had as many as 90 victims — primarily in Marks Park at the top of the Bondi Beach cliffs, which was a popular cruising spot for gay men, but also in some other areas that were popular “gay beats”. The police hardly ever investigated the crime scenes, just took a cursory glances and declared them suicides or accidents. Those weren’t totally off-the-wall or impossible suggestions, but let’s be honest: the police would have actually investigated them anyways if it weren’t for who the victims were and where the victims were. According to retired High Court justice Michael Kirby, the police viewed gay men as low level criminals (even though sodomy was decriminalized there in 1984) and thought that homosexuals should pretty much expect to be hurt or killed.
But it wasn’t a rash of suicides plaguing the gay community of Sydney. It was murder. And, no, it wasn’t a serial killer on the loose or anything nearly that dramatic — it was groups of violent, homophonic teenagers who knew that crimes against gay men would never be taken seriously by the police. For the most part they were right — only a handful were arrested for the murders specifically, though a number were arrested for other crimes and then later were discovered to have been involved in a murder at Bondi Beach. “Poofter bashing,” as it was called, was something of a sport.
The earliest one of these deaths that I can find is that of David Williams. He was found, naked, at the bottom of the cliffs in the area of Manly. His clothes were neatly folded at the top of the cliffs. No investigation was made, no coroner made any report about his body.
Scott Johnson was a 27 year-old American “brilliant” mathematician (some of us can do math! Not me, but….some of us!) who had graduated the University of Cambridge and moved to Sydney in 1986 to be with his partner Michael Noone. He had applied for permanent residency and had nearly completed his PhD at the Australian National University by the end of 1988, when his naked body was found at the bottom of the North Head Cliffs in Manly. His clothes were in a folded pile, with his student ID, a ten dollar bill, and his watch nestled on top of them. Police called it a suicide. Neither Michael Noone or Scott’s brother Steve believed that for a minute and made sure the police of New South Wales knew it.
On July 22, the following year, Ross Warren — a discreet but not exactly closeted television news anchor — disappeared. His car was found near Marks Park, and his keys were found in rocks at the top of the cliffs. Police reasoned he must have accidentally fallen off the cliff into the water, and on July 28 they announced they expected his body would wash up soon. It didn’t. Nevertheless, police declared that his death had been accidental, there was no foul play, and he also hadn’t faked his death. His mother Kay began writing frequently to the police, insisting they actually investigate his disappearance. Warren’s body has still never been found.
On November 23 of 1989, John Russell — a local Sydney bartender — was found dead at the bottom of the cliffs on the Bondi Beach side of Marks Park. Police investigated enough to discover he had a high concentration of alcohol in his system, and ruled he had accidentally fallen off the cliff. Not quite a month later, on December 18, Alan Boxsell was attacked by a group of teenagers in Marks Park. He managed to flee his assailants and even, surprisingly, reported the attack to the police. He identified some of the bashers. Days later on December 21, David McMahon was assaulted by a group of teenagers in almost the same place where Russell would have fallen from — one of the attackers even suggesting “Let’s throw him off where we threw the other one off.” McMahon managed to escape, and identified some of his assailants to police. Some of them were the same people identified by Boxsell. None of them were arrested due to a “lack of evidence.”
In 1990, a Thai man named Krichakorn Rattanajurathaporn was attacked with a hammer and knocked off the cliff. This one — as a nice change — was investigated and three teenagers were arrested. They would be known as the “Tamarama Three.” Despite the fact that one of those teenagers was reported saying to the police “The easiest thing with a cliff is just herding them over the edge” the police didn’t begin investigating the rash of murders.
Five months later, in December of 1990, eight boys discovered a phone number written in the toilets in Alexandria Park, and used it to lure Richard Johnson to the park after dark. There, they beat him to death. The eight boys — who would be called the “Alexandria Eight” were arrested and eventually convicted of the crime. Homicide detective Steve McCann secretly recorded conversations the boys had with each other and other inmates — they bragged about killing gay men at the cliffs at Bondi Beach. Despite this, only McCann was interested in looking into the deaths of gay men in that area. His investigation was hampered by resistance from his fellow police officers. He turned to lawyer, and official liaison between the New South Wales police and the gay community, Sue Thompson for help but even so there was only so much they could do. Through their investigation they learned that “poofter bashing” was something of a widespread sport — a gang of at least thirty teenage boys and girls, called the “Bondi Boys” frequently engaged in it as a form of initiation.
As an aside, there’s a lot of victims or possible victims here. I could not talk about them all while also talking about the police action (or lack of action, as the case may be) and keep this post to a relatively reasonable size. But I don’t want to overlook them, as so many of them have been continuously overlooked. So I am promising that there will be a follow-up post (posts?) about the victims. All 88 if I can find all of their names. I’m still making working on that list. Anyways, back to what the police were doing….
By 2000 — after eleven years of hearing from Kay Warren — one of her letters (which contained copies of all of her previous letters) caught the attention of the police. It was handed off to Detective Steve Page. He noticed what McCann had noticed — a lot of gay men were dying or disappearing around Marks Park. He picked up where McCann’s investigation had left off. Page was able to prove, through reenacting the scene with a dummy on December 9 2001, that John Russell was thrown from the cliff he was found at the bottom of — there was nothing accidental about his death after all. This opened the doors on many more closed “investigations” (if you can really call them that). Revisiting these cases was a major undertaking, and so it became a full-fledged project named Operation Taradale. The task force interviewed the Tamarama Three and the Alexandria Eight — all of whom denied any involvement in killing John Russell, Ross Warren, or any of the others
In 2012, at the request of Steve Johnson — now a wealthy former AOL executive — and his family, an inquest was made into the death of Scott Johnson. It was determined that the original investigation had not been thorough, and that the death should be re-investigated. As a result of this, the New South Wales police began Operation Parrabell, a review of 88 investigations into various deaths of gay men — trying to determine if the crimes should be classified as hate crimes. That list of 88 deaths is based on recommendations by Sue Thompson and criminologist Stephen Tomsen going as far back as David Warren’s death, but Parrabell met criticism — even from Sue Thompson — for their methodology. Of the 30 unsolved deaths in that list, she and Tomsen found compelling evidence of foul play in 22 cases. The Operation Parrabell task force for unsolved homicides accepted eight of those as potential anti-gay hate crimes that needed to be investigated. Those eight did not include Scott Johnson.
In 2015, another inquest into Scott Johnson’s death was made — also recommending the case be investigated again, as a homicide. In November of 2017, a third inquest formally declared that Johnson had been the victim of a hate crime. As a result, the following month a reward of one million Australian dollars was offered by the Australian government for any information leading to conviction. With no information forthcoming, the Johnson family doubled the reward in March 2020 — and in May, a man named Scott Price was finally arrested for the murder of Scott Johnson.
These cases inspired a television miniseries in Australia called Deep Water. A documentary was also made that year, to go alongside the fictionalized show, called Deep Water: The Real Story.
As of now, 22 of the Sydney cliff murders remain unsolved. A parliamentary inquiry regarding the New South Wales police’s response to hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals in Sydney between 1970 and 2010 is currently underway. We may never see justice for all of those many queer individuals who were lost in these murders, but I take some comfort in knowing that, finally, there are at least some people who are trying.
With his literary success following 1891’s publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde returned to writing for the theater. He penned the tragedy Salomé, but quickly turned to comedies. Lady Windermere’s Fan debuted at the St. James Theatre on February 20, 1892 and proceeded to tour England — despite the outrage of more conservative critics. He followed this work up with the 1893 comedy A Woman of No Importance. He was then commissioned for two more comedies. By now Wilde was earning approximately 100 pounds each week — by today’s standards that’s about 12,211 pounds or 15,756 US dollars a week. No longer tied to John Gray, Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas turned romantic, and Wilde used that ample income to spoil his new beau.
In many ways, Douglas quickly became the center of Wilde’s entire world. Douglas and several of his friends founded a magazine called The Chameleon, which was as pro-gay as any publication could be at the time without being shut down by law enforcement. Wilde was a regular contributor. Douglas also led Wilde into the seedy underground of London’s gay prostitution circles. Every time he rendezvoused with a prostitute, it followed the same pattern — Wilde was introduced to a young man by a fellow named Alfred Taylor, Wilde would take the young man to dinner, and then to a hotel room. Sometimes, Douglas would meet them there too.
Douglas’ father was John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (more commonly known just as Queensberry). He’s mostly known in history for being cruel to his family and for creating the Queensberry Rules which, apparently, are what modern boxing rules are based around. Oh, and all of the stuff we’re going to talk about. He’s known for that too. (Spoiler alert: it’s not good.) Now, Queensberry and his son fought like all of the time even before Wilde entered the picture — and even though Queensberry was initially charmed by Wilde, it didn’t take him long to piece together what was actually going on with the two. He was not having any of it. He cornered Oscar in the Wilde family’s London house and threatened him — the initial description of this encounter ended with Wilde giving a clever retort (“I don’t know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight”) but later accounts by both Wilde and Queensberry make Wilde sound much less assured and much more afraid — and with good reason.
On February 14 of 1895, Wilde’s greatest script premiered in London at the St. James Theatre — The Importance of Being Earnest. The cast was led by popular actor Allan Aynesworth, who later stated that the first night of that show was his greatest triumph on stage. The show itself was hailed as a massive success, even by most critics. Queensberry had planned to attend the premier and publicly humiliate Wilde by throwing a bouquet of rotting vegetables onto the stage — but Wilde had made sure to ban him from the theater — which didn’t actually help calm things down at all.
Four days later, Queensberry left a calling card for Wilde at a club he was known to frequent. The card read: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.” (Perhaps history’s most infamous spelling error.) Wilde’s friends, including Robbie Ross, begged him to let it go, but Douglas urged him to sue Queensberry for criminal libel. The problem with that was, in order to avoid going to prison, Queensberry would have to publicly prove that Wilde was a sodomite. (Or a somdomite, I guess.) Wilde had been sleeping with men for years and basically wrote about it in a very popular novel (Dorian Gray), so like not really a bright idea to challenge this. But Douglas hated his father, and was also all too happy to disagree with Robbie Ross — who he often butted heads with. Wilde was all too eager to give Douglas anything he wanted, and so he sued for libel.
Queensberry went for Wilde’s jugular almost immediately. He hired Wilde’s former college friend Edward Carson to represent him in court, and hired a number of private detectives to investigate. They amassed a veritable mountain of evidence. Wilde’s lawyer opened the trial on April 3 by preemptively asking about letters Wilde had written to Douglas (letters which Carson had procured) — Wilde claimed the letters were innocent, “prose sonnets”. Carson, meanwhile, opened by stating that he’d located several male prostitutes who were willing to testify against Wilde. Carson’s cross examination was even more brutal — and although Wilde gave sassy answers that got a lot of laughs, they didn’t help the outcome of the trial.
In the end, Carson discredited Wilde by proving he had lied about his age under oath. He also, using text from The Picture of Dorian Gray, managed to successfully paint a picture of Wilde seducing Douglas (which was almost the opposite of what had actually happened.) Moving on from this, Carson started asking about facts — inquiring about his friendships with lower-class men that he had been seen with at dinner. Wilde insisted they were merely friends and that he did not believe in social barriers.
Then, Carson directly asked Wilde if he had ever kissed a certain man — Wilde proclaimed in no uncertain terms that he had not because “he was a particularly plain boy – unfortunately ugly – I pitied him for it.” Carson demanded to know why that was relevant, and for the first time Wilde didn’t really have any answer. Wilde dropped the charges, and Queensberry was found not guilty. This was disastrous for two reasons: the first being that Wilde was responsible for all of Queensberry’s astronomical legal fees, which was more than he could afford — and the second being that the courts issued a warrant for his arrest on the charges of sodomy and gross indecency almost as soon as Wilde had left the building.
Robbie Ross and another friend named Reginald Turner tried to get Wilde to flee the country, and arranged for a train and a boat to take him to France. Meanwhile, Wilde’s mother wanted him to fight. He was basically paralyzed — either with fear or indecision — until all he could say was “The train has gone. It’s too late.” He was arrested on April 6. Ross and Wilde’s butler, under strict instructions, went into the Wilde family house and packed up all of his letters, manuscripts, and some personal items. While Wilde awaited trial in prison, Alfred Douglas visited him every day — which was nice since this was actually pretty much all Douglas’ fault, and he hadn’t done anything to help out during the criminal libel trial.
When the new trial opened on April 26, Wilde plead “not guilty”. Douglas left for Paris at the urging of Wilde. Several of Wilde’s other “somdomite” friends also left the country for their own safety — including Ross. This trial had captured the attention of the public around the world, even as far as the United States. While being cross examined, Oscar was asked to explain “the love that dare not speak its name” — a phrase originating in a poem written by Douglas. (And that’s the most Douglas participated in this trial, I’m just saying.) Oscar responded with this speech that literally brings a tear to my eye every time, so I’m going to share it here verbatim even though it’s kind of long:
“‘The love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
While this was, in my opinion, a beautiful speech….it reallydidn’t help out with the whole “not guilty” thing. Nevertheless, the jury failed to reach a verdict. Wilde’s friends were able to post bail, and Wilde was free. Sort of. He was shunned by nearly everyone; his wife wouldn’t let him back into the house. He was forced to stay with two of his few remaining friends, Ernest and Ada Leverson. At this point, even Carson attempted to intervene on Wilde’s behalf — asking the Solicitor General Frank Lockwood if they could “let up” on Wilde. Lockwood replied he would have liked to, but that the trial had been so publicized and so politicized that it was not going to be possible.
A third trial followed, taking place on May 25. This trial was against both Wilde and Alfred Taylor, who had also been arrested for procuring prostitutes for Wilde but who refused to turn state’s evidence against the writer. Sir Alfred Wills presided, and gave the harshest punishment the law allowed: two years of hard labor. He was also very clear that he would have given a harsher punishment if he’d been able to, claiming the sentence was “totally inadequate” for what he considered “the worst case [he had] ever tried.” After the sentence came down, Wilde asked, “And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?” But his question was completely drowned out by the very large crowd that had come to see this beloved celebrity’s downfall.
Wilde was immediately sent off to Newgate Prison for processing, and then was sent to Pentonville Prison. His “hard labour” there was walking on a treadmill and separating rope fibers — so, y’know, really productive for society and all. He was later transferred to Wandsworth Prison. While there, he collapsed from hunger and ruptured his right ear drum.
On November 23 1895, Oscar was transferred to Reading Gaol by train. While he was waiting on the platform for the train to arrive, a crowd gathered to spit on him and ridicule him. At Reading Gaol, he was eventually allowed a pen and paper, he wrote a 50,000 word letter to Alfred Douglas (which he was not allowed to send until he was released and which, later, Douglas would deny ever receiving.) Over the course of the self-reflective letter, Wilde does forgive Douglas for his involvement in getting Wilde into this position. The letter was partially published in 1905 under the title De Profundis.
Throughout the trials and his imprisonment, all eyes — even internationally — were on Oscar Wilde. LGBTQ+ people across the Western world, but especially in Europe, in particular were watching with a sort of horrified fascination. Just before the end of Wilde’s sentence, inspired in large part by the writer’s legal troubles, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee in Germany — the first organization to work towards securing legal rights for queer people.
After his release on May 18, 1897, he immediately went to France and never went back to Britain or Ireland. He took the name Sebastian Melmoth, and began to advocate — through letters to English publications — for prison reform. He also wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol about a man who was hanged while Wilde was imprisoned there. Also, at this point, Wilde’s wife had gotten him to relinquish parental rights to their kids and had changed their last names to “Holland” (and, yet, poor Vyvyan was still named Vyvyan.) They never divorced but were completely estranged.
In August, he reunited with Douglas, but the two were only together for a few months. There’s differing explanations as to why they didn’t stay together — the truth is probably a combination of both. Some say that, after everything that had transpired in their lives, they weren’t able to get their relationship back to what it had been before the trials. Others say that Douglas’ family threatened to cut him off financially. Personally, I can’t imagine that their relationship wasn’t full of resentment, probably on both sides — and if you’re struggling with a relationship that seems like it’s failing and then your family says to break it off or spend the rest of your life completely broke? Yeah, it makes perfect sense to break it off.
Wilde was impoverished for the remainder of his life, and had only a small collection of friends left to him. With nothing left to lose, he was very much open about his sexuality for the years he had left. By the fall of 1900, Wilde was fighting with illness which physicians later stated was from an infection of his right ear drum — the illness left him weak and depressed and frequently unable to leave the bedroom of the hotel he was living in. He famously quipped, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” On October 12, he sent a telegram to Robbie Ross saying “Terribly weak. Please come.”
By November 25, 1900, Wilde’s illness had developed into meningitis (the same illness that struck down his little sister so many years earlier). Robbie Ross arrived on November 29, and immediately sent for a Catholic priest. The priest performed a conditional baptism, and Wilde died the next day. His friends Reginald Turner and Robbie Ross were with him when he died. Wilde’s tomb, which is in Paris, was commissioned by Ross, who also requested a compartment be built for his own ashes — which were dutifully placed there in 1950.
In the years since his death, Oscar Wilde has become arguably one of the world’s most celebrated queer figures. In 1967, Craig Rodwell named his LGBTQ bookstore the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in order to make sure it was recognized as a safe place by others in the community. In 2014, Wilde was one of the first honorees of the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco. He was also one of 50,000 men posthumously pardoned in 2017 under the Policing and Crime Act, also known as the Alan Turing Law.
Although she regularly said her middle initial stood for “Pay it no mind”, Marsha P. Johnson proved to be a difficult person not to notice. Though Johnson is commonly referred to using female pronouns (she/her/hers) — and I’ll be doing that here — her actual gender identity is a bit of a mystery. She variously described herself as gay, a transvestite, and as a (drag) queen — though words like “transgender” really weren’t being widely used yet during her lifetime. My personal opinion is that she would probably identify as gender non-conforming or non-binary, but make your own judgments.
Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on August 24, 1945 — one of seven children — and was named Malcolm Michaels Jr by her parents, Malcolm Michaels Sr and Alberta Claiborne. They were not, from all accounts, a particularly open-minded family and Claiborne was said to believe that being a homosexual was like being “lower than dog.” Johnson was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and remained a devout, practicing Christian for her entire life.
At the age of five, Johnson began to wear dresses — but stopped because she was harassed and teased by neighborhood boys. Some time during this period, Johnson was sexually assaulted by a boy who was roughly the age of 13. In 1963, Johnson graduated from Edison High School and promptly moved to New York City with $15 and a bag of clothing. By 1966, she was waiting tables, engaging in sex work, and living on the streets of the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
She also began to perform as a drag queen — initially going by the name “Black Marsha” before settling on Marsha P. Johnson. She was often recognizable for having flowers in her hair — something she began doing after sleeping under flower sorting tables in Manhattan’s Flower District. She usually had on bright colored wigs, shiny dresses, and long flowing robes. Marsha was known to be peaceful and fun, but there was a violent and short-tempered side to her personality (which her friends commonly called “Malcolm”) — leading some to suspect that she suffered from schizophrenia. Between her sex work and her occasional violent outbursts, Johnson claimed to have been arrested more than a hundred times.
When the Stonewall Inn began to permit women and drag queens inside, Johnson was one of the first to begin regularly visiting the bar. Some witnesses have even credited her with starting off the riots in 1969. Although this claim has certainly gained traction and become the popular version of events, she likely was not the woman who sparked off the Stonewall Riots by throwing the legendary “first brick” — this was also rumored, and was perhaps more likely to be Jackie Hormona or Zazu Nova by eyewitnesses — Johnson did have one particularly iconic, though unconfirmed, moment in the riots. She is said to have shouted “I got my civil rights!” and thrown a shot glass at a mirror. ( Some said this — the “shot glass heard round the world” — was the moment that started the riots, but Johnson herself disputed this. According to Johnson, word of the riots reached her and she immediately went to collect her friend Sylvia Rivera so they could join in — but Rivera was sleeping on a bench. According to Johnson, she arrived at about 2:00 am, forty minutes after the riots began. (I guess word traveled fast!) There are many reports that on the second night of rioting, Johnson climbed up a street lamp with a purse that was loaded down with a brick — which she dropped through the windshield of a police car. Though there’s a lot of stories about those riots, and a lot of confusion about the details it is very clear that Johnson was there and made a noticeable impact.
Although she’d been an activist before, Johnson became a real leader in the LGBT movements that followed the riots. In 1970, she and Sylvia Rivera founded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) — an organization that provided community support for transgender youth. She also joined the Gay Liberation Front and participated in the Christopher Street Liberation Pride rally that commemorated the first anniversary of Stonewall (and was, essentially, the creation of the Pride festivals we celebrate.) At one rally in the early 70’s, Johnson was asked by a member of the press what they were protesting for –Johnson shouted into the reporter’s microphone “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”
Johnson once said, “I was no one, nobody, from Nowheresville until I became a drag queen. That’s what made me in New York, that’s what made me in New Jersey, that’s what made me in the world.” In 1972, she began to perform periodically with the international drag troupe Hot Peaches. She was also continuing to work as a sex worker, taking the money she (and Rivera) earned from that business to help pay the rent for the housing for transgender youth that STAR had established that year. Johnson also took on an active role mentoring all of the youth in their care, becoming a “drag mother” even to those who were not performers. Although STAR declined and closed in 1973, it was a groundbreaking organization and the shelter that it provided queer youth was truly revolutionary.
In 1973, Johnson also performed with the Angels of Light drag troupe — taking on the role of “The Gypsy Queen” in their production of “The Enchanted Miracle”. That same year both Johnson and Rivera were banned from participating in New York’s gay pride parade — the committee organizing the parade felt that drag queens and transvestites brought negative attention and gave the cause “a bad name.” In response, Rivera and Johnson marched ahead of the beginning of the parade.
In 1975, Andy Warhol took pictures of Johnson for his “Ladies and Gentlemen” series. Johnson’s success as an activist and a performer, as well as her regular appearances throughout the decade, earned her the nickname “Mayor of Christopher Street.”
By 1979, Johnson’s mental health was beginning to decline quite severely. Her aggressive side was coming out more often, and a Village Voice article called “The Drag of Politics” listed all of the Manhattan gay bars from which Johnson had been banned. In 1980, a friend named Randy Wicker invited Johnson to stay with him for a particularly cold night and the two remained roommates for the rest of Johnson’s life. This was — as far as I can tell — the first time Johnson had a permanent address since moving to New York in 1963.
In the 1980’s, Johnson began to work with ACT UP as an organizer and marshal, and was a prolific AIDS activist. She made this her primary focus for the last few years of her life. On July 6, 1992 — just after that years New York Pride festivities — she was found dead in the Hudson River with a large wound in the back of her head. The police ruled her death a suicide — despite pressure from the community and the fact that she had a wound in the back of her head. One witness had spoken of Johnson’s fragile mental health to the police — which was all the police, who had no interest in investigating a black queer person’s death, needed despite witness testimonies also describing Johnson being harassed by a gang. Another witness claimed to have heard a man brag about killing a drag queen named Marsha. The police did allow Seventh Avenue to be closed so that Johnson’s friends could spread her ashes out over the river.
In 2012, an activist named Mariah Lopez was finally successful in convincing the police to re-open Johnson’s case and investigate it as a homicide. That was also the year that the first documentary about Johnson was released: Pay It No Mind — The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson. This documentary included footage from an interview that had been filmed only ten days before Johnson’s death. Fictionalized versions of Johnson also appeared in the films Stonewall (released in 2015) and Happy Birthday Marsha! (released in 2016.) In 2017, another documentary was released — The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — which followed the Anti-Violence Project’s Victoria Cruz investigating Johnson’s death on her own. Despite all of these tributes, it wasn’t until 2018 that the New York Times published an obituary for her.
Johnson — with her friend Sylvia Rivera — will be honored with a monument in Greenwich Village, near Stonewall. This is perhaps most fitting for Johnson, since she was quite insistent about moving the Stonewall monument from Ohio to Christopher Street in New York City in 1992 — famously saying “How many people have died for these two little statues to be put in the park to recognize gay people? How many years does it take for people to see that we’re all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take for people to see that we’re all in this rat race together?”
Johnson may not have “thrown the first brick” at Stonewall, but she led the fight for LGBTQ+ equality in every other way. Randy Wicker said of Johnson that she “rose above being a man or a woman, rose above being black or white, rose above being straight or gay”, while Rupaul described her as “the true Drag Mother.”
So, while we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, let’s all pay plenty of mind to Marsha P. Johnson — and to the other heroes who stood up that day and said “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”
Most Americans are aware of the Red Scare — the witch hunt for Communist agents in the US led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite the infamy of that event, there was a notable queer element that often gets overlooked, despite lasting longer and impacting a greater number of government employees: the Lavender Scare. Gay men and lesbians were said to be communist sympathizers and dangerous security risks. Given that the 1947 Sex Perversion Elimination Program had already seen to legally labeling homosexuals as dangerously mentally ill, so these assertions fed into growing public unease. There was a national call to fire them from employment in the Federal government — which made it even more difficult for queer people to be out of the closet anywhere in the United States. Though the official Lavender Scare was focused on Federal government and armed forces employees and contractors, you can be sure that thousands more across the country lost their jobs simply because of the fear that McCarthy and his allies were stoking.
In February, 1950 McCarthy announced that he had a list of Communists that worked for the government. Two names on that last were homosexuals who had been fired and then rehired. Senators Kenneth S. Wherry and Senator J. Lister Hill interrogated these two individuals — called “Case 14“and “Case 62“. I can’t find real names for those two, but they were dismissed from their positions — the first official victims of the Lavender Scare. A week later Deputy Undersecretary of State John Purefoy testified before the Senate Committee on Appropriations that the State Department had actually fired, and later hidden, 91 suspected homosexual employees they had flagged as security risks. In truth, the Senate Committee was not shocked to learn this, since they had essentially given the State Department leeway to purge homosexuals from employment in 1946. However, the testimony revealed this information to the public and granted legitimacy to all of McCarthy’s claims — strengthening public support for his Red Scare.
On April 15, 1950, the Republican National Chair Guy George Gabrielson (a name that truly sounds fictional, but it isn’t) made the claim that “sexual perverts” who had infiltrated the government were “perhaps as dangerous as actual Communists.” He argued that homosexuals were susceptible to blackmail and therefore a great risk to national security. (Later investigations found that not a single person who lost their job during the Lavender Scare ever revealed classified information, and most never had access to any. In case there was any confusion, this was never actually about national security!)
In a somewhat ironic twist, McCarthy hired Roy Cohn — a closeted homosexual — to be the chief counsel of the Congressional subcommittee. (Cohn was also a terrible, terrible human being. We can’t all be winners, I suppose.) Working alongside J. Edgar Hoover, they fired multitudes of accused gay men and lesbians. They also used rumors of homosexual activity to coerce their opponents and to smear those they suspected of being communists.
In March of 1952, the Federal government fired 162 employees because they might have been gay. On April 27, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 which — among other effects — led to a ban on gays and lesbians working for the Federal government of the United States altogether and even more heightened drive to uncover homosexual infiltrators. Suspected homosexuals were interviewed and surveilled for signs of gender non-conformity — as were their roommates and friends. Investigators relied on “guilty by association” — anyone with ties to homosexuals must be one as well. People were given lie detector tests and grilled with questions about their personal sexual history. Police were asked to raid gay bars and homosexual meeting places, and then share their arrest records. Within its first year 425 suspected homosexuals were fired from the State Department alone. Over 5,000 Federal employees were fired because of suspicions that they were homosexuals. Every single one of them was not only lost their job, but was publicly outed as well. Many more were pressured into resigning.
McCarthy effectively convinced the government and the media of a connection between homosexuality and Communism — calling them both “threats to the American way of life” and even blatantly telling reporters “if you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” He repeatedly referred to homosexuality as an invasion. The rhetoric caught on. Those who’d been removed from their jobs found it impossible to get hired anywhere else — a few resorted to suicide. Federal investigators later covered up most of those deaths.
The effects of the investigations rapidly expanded out from just government work, leading to an untold number of homosexuals (and suspected homosexuals) being fired and denied employment from even ordinary, non-government jobs — even in Hollywood. Gay and lesbian bars were raided by police with an ever-increasing regularity. Even queer organizations like the Mattachine Society (which was founded partially in 1950 partly in response to the Lavender Scare) were forced to adapt by 1953, adopting specific policies that specified they were loyal to the United States and forcing out founder Harry Hays — who happened to actually be a gay Communist.
The discriminatory practices destroyed lives and families, even among the most powerful people in the country. After Lester “Buddy” Hunt Jr. was arrested for soliciting prostitution from a male undercover police officer, his father Senator Lester Hunt was blackmailed and attacked by his political opponents (which included McCarthy) — destroying his political career and tearing apart his family. On June 19, 1954, he sat down at his desk in his Senate office and shot himself in the head with a rifle.
It wasn’t until Frank Kameny was fired from the United States Army Maps Service that anyone sought to challenge these firings in court. He brought his case all the way up to the Supreme Court — making him the first person to argue in United States courtrooms that homosexuals were being treated as second class citizens. They decided against him in 1961. (This would be the beginning of Kameny’s profound influence over LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. — but he would never hold another paying job for the rest of his life, and survived only on the generosity of his friends.) In 1969, the Supreme Court had realized the error of its ways and ruled differently in a similar case. Of course, that didn’t help Kameny much.
Between 1947 and 1961, more Federal employees had been fired for being suspected of being homosexual than were fired for being suspected of being Communist. Records of the number of people who were fired as part of the Lavender Scare get more than a little fuzzy after that, but it was hardly over. Even after the end of McCarthy’s career in 1957, the tactics used in the Lavender Scare remained in effect for several more years. In fact, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (aka the Johns Committee after state senator Charley Eugene Johns) officially began using these same practices to drive the queer population out of state universities in 1958. They pursued students and professors for doing such suspiciously homosexual behaviors as wearing Bermuda shorts on campus. Professors were immediately removed from their positions for even being suspected on queerness, students were allowed to remain on campus only if they routinely visited their school’s medical facility for routine psychological treatments. In 1964 the Committee began printing pamphlets entitled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida — or colloquially known as the Purple Pamphlet. Because it included pictures of homosexual activity, it was immediately considered controversial and called “state-sponsored pornography” — ultimately leading to the dissolution of the Committee in 1965.
Executive Order 10450 was struck down in court in 1973 but not formally repealed. Parts of it were undone by President Bill Clinton, through the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and Executive Order 13087 — the latter of which officially ended the FBI’s and NSA’s discriminatory hiring practices. The Executive Order was not truly repealed until 2017, when — in one of his last acts in office — President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13764. At about the same time, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry finally issued a formal apology on behalf of the State Department for the discrimination that occurred.
The long-lasting effects of the Lavender Scare drove the queer community of the U.S. deeper underground, turned public sentiment against the LGBT+ community for decades, and to this day continues to impact hiring policies, and public ideas about homosexuality, around the country. Congress is, even now, preparing to decide on whether or not to pass the Equality Act — which would, among other things, protect LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination. I would say that almost seventy years after the beginning of the Lavender Scare, it’s about time.
Jackie Shane was an R&B singer who was a sensation in the music scene of Toronto, and was a nationally charting artist in Canada — and broke new ground as an openly queer performer.
Jackie Shane was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 15, 1940. She would later explain that she began dressing as a girl when she was 5, and that she identified herself as a woman in a man’s body by age 13 — but openly she described herself as gay. Her mother supported her, and Shane would later say she never had any problems in school — at least, not because of her sexuality or gender identity.
As a teenager, she played the drums and was a regular sessions player for gospel and R&B record labels in Nashville. Through this, she met various famous musicians including Jackie Wilson.
Nevertheless, she was a black queer kid living in the south during the Jim Crow era. In 1959 or 1960, she moved to Montreal — still fully presenting as a man. She was brought by a local saxophonist to see Frank Motley and the Motley Crew perform. Frank Motley invited Shane on stage — and quickly became the band’s lead vocalist. She traveled with them, recording with them in Boston and performing in Los Angeles and Nashville.
Shane moved to Toronto in 1962, where an R&B scene was emerging on Yonge Street, and went solo. Shane’s arrival in Toronto has been described as a “revelation” — her sound was unlike anything else in the city. The way it’s described, she appeared on the scene and instantly became a legend. She was still presenting as a man, though she clothes were becoming more androgynous, and she typically dodged the question of gender altogether when asked. Canada may not have been as oppressive as Tennessee, but they wouldn’t decriminalize homosexuality until 1969 and were decades away from acknowledging transgender identities at all. Her performances had a profound impact on the Toronto Sound and on the queer community and culture that would develop in the city over the next decades.
For live performances, Shane was a performer through and through. She would tour with around 20 trunks of outfits, and insert monologues and comedy bits into her songs.
In 1962, Shane released her first solo recording — a cover of the song “Money (That’s What I Want)” with a B-side recording of “I’ve Really Got the Blues.” “Money (That’s What I Want)” was later re-released as the B-side on a recording of “Have You Ever Had the Blues?” The same year, she released her second single — “Any Other Way”, which almost instantly became the #2 hit on Toronto’s CHUM Chart of the top 30 songs being played on local radio stations. It is probably her most famous song.
During live performances of “Any Other Way”, she would add quips that were usually used to underline the subversive subtext of the lyrics “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay.” (Her live album is available on Spotify and on iTunes, so you don’t even have to take my word for it, you can hear it for yourself.)
“Any Other Way” was followed by releasing the single “In my Tenement”, which did not do nearly as well and only charted in upstate New York. She began to focus on performing and touring, and did not make any new recordings for several years.
In 1965, Jackie Shane returned to Nashville, where she performed “Walking the Dog” on Night Train. I don’t know that this was a particularly huge moment in her life, but there’s video that I thought I’d share.
Two years later, “Any Other Way” was re-released and this time it rose to #68 on Canada’s national RPM chart. This seems to have encouraged Shane to return to recording new music, as she released “Standing Up Straight and Tall” later that year. This was followed by a live album. In 1969, she released “Cruel Cruel World” — this would prove to be her last recording. (Although, some tracks from the live album would later be re-released on the Motley Crew album “Honkin’ at Midnight.”)
Her prominence began to fade in 1970, and in 1971 she moved to Los Angeles to take care of her mother. She turned down an offer to be part of the band Funkadelic and all but disappeared from public consciousness. Her mother passed away around 1996, and Shane moved back to Nashville.
At this point she literally disappeared for years. Rumors persisted that she had committed suicide or been stabbed to death — in truth, she was just living a quiet life at home. Frank Motley managed to connect with her, and relayed the news that she was alive. Some of her musician friends attempted to reconnect, there were discussions about a reunion tour — and then her phone number was reassigned and she disappeared again.
But she was not forgotten. In 2010 CBC Radio released a documentary about her called I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane. The producers had sent a letter to Shane asking if she would participate — but she never responded, leaving question as to whether or not she was even alive. A 2011 documentary called Yonge Street: Toronto Rock & Roll Stories included Shane. These documentaries were very well received, and the media began attempting to contact Shane for interviews but to no avail.
In 2014, a scout for the reissue record label Numero Group finally managed to reach Jackie Shane by phone, very much alive — although none of her staff had ever even see her face. The scout, Douglas Mcgowan, built a friendship with her over the phone and convinced her to allow his label to re-release her recordings. Though Shane was able to retain her privacy, she was no longer hidden from the world.
Her live album was reissued and shortlisted for a Polaris Award in 2015 (and again in 2016 and 2017). In 2017, her influence on Toronto was remembered in an anthology of essays entitled Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer. That same year, a compilation album of many of Shane’s recordings was released and called Any Other Way. The album was nominated for “Best Historical Album” at the 2019 Grammy Awards.
In 2019, Jackie Shane finally granted an interview to Elaine Banks. The interview was aired on the CBC Radio program Q on February 8. This would be the first publicly broadcast interview Shane had given in decades — and it would also be her last. In February of 2019, Jackie Shane passed away in her sleep. She was found in her home on February 21. She was 78 years old.
With everyone’s minds on yesterday’s general election I thought I’d delve into the world of politics. The Boston Globe has called her the “most perennial of perennial candidates” but her mark on politics is perhaps greater than the credit they give her — Althea Garrison was the first transgender person (that we know of) elected to a state legislature in the United States. Though her tenure was brief, the barrier she broke is undeniable — even if she never meant to or wanted to.
Garrison was born in Hahira, Georgia on October 7, 1940. At nineteen years old — still living in the closet as a man — Garrison moved to Boston to attend beauty school — but it turned out she didn’t like being on her feet all day. So she enrolled at Newbury Junior College and earned an associate’s degree. She followed that by attending Suffolk University and earning a B.S. in business administration, and then an M.S. in management from Lesley College. After this, she got a certification in management from Harvard University. Afterwards, she decided she didn’t actually need to attend every college in the Boston area, and didn’t earn any more degrees.
In or around 1976, she transitioned into living as a woman and asked the courts to change her name. The court documents read that the name Althea Garrison “is consistent with petitioner’s appearance and medical condition and is the name by which he will be known in the future.” It’s a bit unclear what “medical condition” they’re referring to — and honestly, we’ll probably never know. To this day, Garrison has never publicly acknowledged her transition,
In 1980, Garrison volunteered with Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign. She says, this is when her interest in politics was sparked. When he lost, she reasoned that if she could campaign for him, she could just as easily campaign for herself. In 1981, she began working at the comptroller’s office and campaigned for a seat on the Boston city council. She was not elected. The next year she ran as a Democrat for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and was not elected. She ran for city council again in 1983 and 1985, and then ran for the Massachusetts House of Representatives again in 1986. She tried for city council again in 1987 — and then left the Democratic party. She ran for city council as an independent in 1989.
She must have also run for office some other times, because in 1991 — running as a Republican for the city council — the Boston Herald stated she had run for office nine times. Garrison herself thought it was somewhere around ten or eleven. I only count eight, including the 1991 campaign but I’m admittedly really terrible at math. Anyways, in 1991 she came in third during the preliminary election for her district.
In 1992, she hit the campaign trail once more — still as a Republican, and gunning once again for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She took incumbent Nelson Merced to court, challenging some of the signatures he’d used to qualify for the Democratic primary. The court ruled in Garrison’s favor, and Merced was taken off the ballot. Irene Roman became the candidate for the Democratic party. Roman garnered 2,014 votes. Garrison beat her by a narrow margin of 437 votes — totaling 2,451.
Garrison quickly fell under attack. Many criticized that she had won disingenuously because she’d kept Merced off the ballot. (But, really, the court did that.) A reporter for the Boston Herald named Eric Fehrnstrom already had her in his sights. You may recognize his name — he was a top aid for Mitt Romney during his 2012 campaign. Fehrnstrom had discovered the court documents regarding Garrison’s name change — and according to colleagues he was positively gleeful. Two days into her tenure, the Herald published a front page story speculating about her gender.
I should note here, that technically Garrison still hasn’t come out. Even in the face of the ensuing scandal, and the remarkably unkind comments of her political opponents at the time in regards to her gender, Garrison has only ever stated that she is a woman. She has never addressed this, and probably never will address this. And that’s okay. Admittedly, it has made me feel awkward about writing this but at the same time the extremely ugly circumstances of her outing don’t take away from Garrison’s accomplishments, her impressive persistence, or the barriers she helped break down for transgender people in the United States. Because of Fehrnstrom, she’s part of our nation’s strong queer history.
Anyways, Garrison finished her term and developed a reputation for voting in favor of unions, and frequently reaching across the aisle and voting with Democrats. At the same time, she voted against marriage equality, against gun control, and against legalized abortions. When it came time for re-election in 1994, eight unions in Boston strongly backed her — as well as the Massachusetts branch of the AFL-CIO. Nevertheless, she was defeated. Charlotte Golar Richie, the Democratic candidate, won with 2,108 votes to Garrison’s 1,718 — an even narrower margin than her skin-of-her-teeth victory in 1992.
Since that time, Garrison has consistently run for office, running variously as a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent. She has run for Boston City Council in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. She ran for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 2000, 2006, and 2010. She also ran in a special election for state Senate in 2002, and for mayor of Boston in 2001.
She did not win any of these elections. However, she is positioned to take over Ayanna Pressley’s seat on the Boston City Council when Pressley moves to serve in Congress.
In 2018, after 37 years, Garrison has retired from the comptroller’s office. But she has not retired from her political aspirations — despite being up for a position on the Boston City Council, Garrison ran as an independent for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the 2018 general election — which she lost to Liz Miranda.
I know this sounds like a whole lot elections that Garrison didn’t win — but the take away here is that she has never given up. Even when attacked for who she is, she never gave up. And that, if nothing else, broke down barriers and proved transgender people could hold office — allowing for Stacie Loughton‘s election in 2012 and Danica Roem‘s election in 2017 (both of which are whole other stories.)
UPDATE: Since writing this post, Althea Garrison was sworn into her new seat on the Boston City Council on January 9, 2019.
It’s been a really great month for queer music — we’ve got a new album from country’s first openly gay singer Steve Grand; a new album from British synthpop band Years & Years, led by the openly gay Olly Alexander; and Panic! at the Disco’s lead singer Brendon Urie came out as pansexual. With all this new news, I — of course — wanted to check out some old queer music history. It’s no surprise that led me to the incomparable Mother of Blues herself: Ma Rainey.
Born Gertrude Pridgett on April 26, 1886 in Georgia or possibly in September of 1882 in Alabama (depending on if you believe Gertrude or the U.S. census — researchers seem generally not to believe her). She was the second of five kids (the other four were pretty definitely born in Alabama — and her parents lived in Alabama. I’m just saying.) At 12 or 14 years old, Gertrude performed at a talent show in Columbus, Georgia and then began performing in black minstrel shows. According to Gertrude, she first heard blues music in 1902. The story goes that she heard a performer singing a blues song at another minstrel show — Gertrude was entranced, committed the song to memory that day, and immediately began using it as an encore to her own performances. Of course, she also claimed to have invented the name of the blues genre (she didn’t) so she’s not always the most reliable source of information. Just sayin’.
Two years later she married William “Pa” Rainey — a traveling comedian and vaudeville performer. Some time shortly after that, she and her husband formed a company called the Alabama Fun Makers Company. The troupe was short-lived, and in 1906 they both joined Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit’s Foot Company where they both performed and became quite popular.
In 1912, the Rabbit’s Foot Company was taken over by F.S. Wolcott. The Raineys stuck with the company for two more years before joining Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza — which billed the duo as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues”. The name stuck, and the two were soon using it on their own without being part of a troupe of performers. Soon after that, Gertrude was getting bookings all on her own — using the name Madam Gertrude Rainey, or “Ma”.
When Ma took the stage, she was a sight to behold — adorned in a diamond tiara, a necklace made out of $20 pieces, rings on each finger, wearing a golden gown with gold-capped teeth. She carried a gun and an ostrich plume. Audiences were enthralled. In fact, even though she was in the deep south, her shows were peacefully integrated between black people and white people. She was sometimes hired by wealthy white people to play private parties, but after every single one of these she would go out dancing and socializing at the local black café.
The Raineys spent winter in New Orleans, where they met a large number of blues performers — including Louis Armstrong, Pops Foster, and another queer blues singer Bessie Smith. (A story later came about that Ma had kidnapped Bessie, forced her to join the Rabbit’s Foot Company, and made her sing the blues but even Bessie’s family denied the story.) In 1916, Ma separated from her husband, ending both their working and romantic relationships.
Her star continued to rise, and in 1923 Paramount Records asked her to record songs for them. With Paramount, over the next several years, she released more than 100 singles and sold so many of them that she has been credited with saving the company single-handedly. The recordings were very popular — but, you know how some performers are better live than if you’re just listening to them? Ma Rainey was universally considered one of those — and audiences became even more eager to see her, and even more excited at her shows.
Ma was not as open about her sexuality as some of the women of early blues — Gladys Bentley for instance — however, she wasn’t in the closet either. In 1925, neighbors called the police when one of her parties became too raucous. The officers arrived just as things were beginning to get shall we say intimate with the all-female group. Ma Rainey was arrested for “running an indecent party” but was bailed out by Bessie Smith the next day. This may have been one reason Rainey’s guitarist Sam Chatmon thought the two were romantically linked.
This incident may have been part of the inspiration for “Prove It On Me Blues”, which Rainey recorded in 1928. The lyrics are a fairly explicitly about lesbianism and of breaking gender norms. As far as I can tell, this was the first recorded piece of music to celebrate a queer sexuality.
“Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.
It’s true I wear a collar and tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while.”
Paramount ran an ad for the song — a drawing of Ma Rainey in a three-piece suit (albeit, with a skirt and heels) and a fedora, talking to a group of women with a policeman watching from across the street. The ad said “What’s all this? Scandal? … Don’t fail to get this record from your dealer!”
1928 was Ma Rainey’s last year as a recording artist. Popular music styles were changing, so her contract with Paramount ended. She toured a little bit longer, before settling down back in Columbus, Georgia. It was about this time (1932) that Sterling A. Brown wrote a poem about her called “Ma Rainey”, describing how powerful her performances were. In her later years, she opened a handful of movie theaters — the Lyric, the Airdome, and the Liberty Theatre. On December 22, 1939, she had a heart attack and died but her legacy continues to this day.
Six months after Ma’s death, Memphis Minnie wrote a tribute song called “Ma Rainey”. It was the first such song, but it would not be the last. In 1965, Bob Dylan paired Ma Rainey with Beethoven in his song “Tombstone Blues”. In 1982, August Wilson published a play about her called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In 1983, Ma Rainey was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame. In 1994, the U.S. Post Office released a commemorative stamp in her honor. Ten years later, her song “See See Rider Blues” (recorded in 1924 — you can hear it below) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was also added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. In 2015, a film about Bessie Smith was released (Bessie) in which Mo’Nique played Ma Rainey, and one year later the First Annual Ma Rainey International Blues Festival was held in Columbus, Georgia. Last year (2017), in the same city, the Rainey-McCullers School of the Arts opened — named after Ma Rainey and Carson McCullers.
In 1952, Langston Hughes released a poem called “Shadow of the Blues”, in which one character proclaims of Ma Rainey: “To tell the truth, if I stop and listen, I can still hear her!” I think we still hear a bit of Ma every time an artist releases a song about queerness — and if that’s the case, I hope we never stop hearing her.