Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies? If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation… to insist upon the equal validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity.
Hi there! My name is Lexi and I’m a contributor here at 365 Days of Lesbians. At the beginning of the year, a group of friends (A.K. Afferez, Alexis Smithers, and Lise Koebel) and I started this blog in hopes of having a kind of “this day in history” thing where every day we post articles about women who could be identified as lesbian, bi, pan, queer, etc. We're longtime followers and we would greatly appreciate if you could share the news of our blog with your community! Thank you!
The ranchera artist with a voice “like a tremendous canyon,” Chavela Vargas, was born on this day in 1919. Though it was an open secret for most of her career, she formally came out as a lesbian in 2002.
Born Isabel Vargas Lizano in San Joaquín de Flores, Costa Rica, Chavela had a difficult childhood. Her parents divorced at an early age and left her in the care of an uncle. From an early age, she was drawn to masculine clothing and was shamed by her family, who hid her from view when guests came to visit. At the age of 17, she escaped to Mexico in hopes of finding success in the country’s burgeoning music industry.
Though she had talent and attitude, making a career as an artist was a long road. Chavela lived for many years as a street performer, prowling the city streets in her iconic red jorongo, smoking cigars, and carrying guns. Still, she became known for her haunting solo renditions of the canción ranchera, using only her guitar and her voice as opposed to a full mariachi accompaniment. By the end of the 1950s she had scored gig at the Champagne Room of the restaurant La Perla, a hotspot for international tourism.
Chavela’s whirlwind career and unique style was documented in the 2017 film Chavela.
It was at the Champagne Room when Chavela attracted the attention of renowned ranchera singer José Alfredo Jiménez. The two would go on to become lifelong friends it was Jiménez who introduced Chavela to influential artists and producers, bringing her to the forefront of Mexico’s music scene. She released her first album, Noche de Bohemia (Bohemian Night), in 1961 to critical and commercial success. By the end of her career, she would release over 80 albums total.
Ranchera music was traditionally a boys only club, populated by a culture of heavy drinking and mournful heterosexual love songs. Chavela’s visibility as a woman dressed in masculine clothing, singing love songs to women, made her a controversial figure in Mexico. She was a scandalous celebrity throughout the 1960s, though her unique style and undeniable talent garnered her a loyal audience and overwhelming success.
A snapshot of Chavela and Frida during their affair. At the time, Frida was still married to muralist Diego Rivera.
One of her most notable lovers was Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The two had a relationship for a number of years and Chavela even lived in Frida’s home for a time. After her death, letters were discovered where Frida documented their first meeting:
“I met Chavela Vargas today. an extraordinary, lesbian woman. In fact, I took a liking to her erotically. I don’t know if she felt what I did, but I think she is a very liberal woman, and if she asked, I would not hesitate a second before undressing in front of her. How often do we not just want a good lay? She is, I repeat, erotic. Is she perhaps a gift sent to me from heaven?”
Chavela’s other relationships included a brief affair with American actress Ava Gardener and a longtime partnership with Dr. Alicia Pérez Duarte. Although it was Alicia who pulled Chavela back from the brink after a fifteen year period of alcoholism, the relationship continued to be toxic and two eventually painfully parted ways. While this was all happening behind the scenes, Chavela remained closeted. Though she did not publicly come out as a lesbian until she published her autobiography at the age of 81, many fans were not surprised. Chavela had always been a queer presence in the culture simply by being herself.
On August 5, 2012, Chavela passed away from respiratory complications at the age of 93. Her last words reportedly were, “I leave with Mexico in my heart.”
Jazz icon Alberta Hunter was born on this day in 1895. A member of both the Blues Hall of Fame and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, Alberta spent the majority of her life with her partner Lottie Tyler.
Alberta is considered one of the greats of the Jazz Age, including fellow sapphics Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters.
Alberta was born in Memphis, Tennessee to working class parents. Her father abandoned the family when she was young, although her mother reported to her four daughters that he had died of pneumonia. In order to support her family, Laura Peterson found work as a servant in a local brothel and eventually remarried. After her mother’s marriage, sixteen year old Alberta set off for Chicago in hopes of becoming a singer.
She quickly found out, however, that paid singing gigs were hard to come by in the Windy City. Alberta lived with a family friend peeling potatoes by day and singing in dive bars, clubs, and saloons by night. After years of working the nightlife beat, she caught the eye of several high-profile cabaret owners. Alberta’s big break came when she was booked to sing with the famous bandleader, King Oliver, at the Dreamland Cafe. By 1917, she had a five-year contract with Dreamland.
After returning from a European tour in 1917, Alberta found that news of her talent had spread far and wide. She recorded several tracks with Paramount and Columbia throughout the 1920s, and even wrote the Bessie Smith hit “Downhearted Blues.” Although her work was often stolen out from under her by recording companies and male co-writers, her passion could not be deterred. She performed in musicals on both sides of the Atlantic, recorded hits with Louis Armstrong, and entertained troops in Casablanca on a 1944 U.S.O tour.
Alberta, far right, performs Vaudeville in the early days of her career.
In 1919, she married a former soldier named Willard Saxby Townsend. The union was short-lived, however, and many speculate that their marriage was simply a cover-up for Alberta’s lesbian affairs. Only a few months after the divorce, Alberta’s “roving eyes” caught Lottie Tyler at the Panama Cafe in Chicago. The niece of the famous black Vaudeville performer, Bert Williams, Lottie was no stranger to the entertainment business. The two quickly fell in love and would remain together until Lottie’s death many years later.
Pictured here in 1982, Alberta’s comeback was spearheaded by her album Amtrak Blues.
Paralyzed with grief after her mother’s death, Alberta abruptly retired from music in 1957. She earned a nursing degree and worked in New York City for many years. At the age of 82, she made a shocking comeback, was re-signed by Columbia Records, recorded two new albums, and became a frequent performer at The Cookery Club in Greenwich Village. A legend and artist until the day she died, Albert passed away peacefully at the age of 89 on October 17, 1984.
On this day in 1964, famed author Nella Larsen passed away in her home in Brooklyn. Her most famous novel, Passing (1929), is often considered an early work of lesbian fiction.
Nella Larsen photographed by her friend and patron of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten, on November 23, 1934.
On April 13, Nellie Walker was born in a poor area of Chicago known as the Levee. Her mother was a white immigrant from Denmark and her father was an Afro-Caribbean immigrant hailing from the Danish West Indies, though he died not long after her birth. Her mother, Pederline, soon remarried a fellow white Danish immigrant. Nellie Walker then became Nella Larsen, adopting her stepfather’s surname. The couple had a second daughter and moved to a predominantly white immigrant neighborhood and often encountered discrimination from their neighbors due to Nella’s skin color. As the only black member of her family, critic Darryl Pinckney writes,
“[Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.”
Nella began her adult life as a nurse, enrolling in school at the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. She began by treating elderly black patients at the Lincoln Nursing Home and then later cared for white patients inflicted by the Spanish flu. In 1915, she relocated to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and eventually became the head nurse. After a few years, however, she became disillusioned with the poor working conditions for nurses and left the profession.
In her second act, Nella became the first black woman to graduate from the NYPL Library School. Stationed as a librarian in Harlem at the onset of the 1920s, she arrived at just the right time to witness the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. She began her writing career in 1925 and became friends with many key figures in the arts community, including photographer Carl Van Vechten. Throughout her life, Nella would publish two novels and one short story: the autobiographical Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929), and “Sanctuary” (1930).
While Nella never had any known relationships with women, her 1929 novel Passing has become a tenet of the lesbian literary canon. Set in Harlem, the novel focuses on the relationship between two childhood friends, Clare and Irene. After losing touch in adulthood, the two are later reunited in a chance encounter only for Irene to discover that Clare has been “passing” as white amongst her wealthy husband’s social circle.
When discussing Passing, scholars often focus on the novel’s homoerotic subtext. Upon their first reunion, Irene is struck by Clare’s beauty and is “drawn to Clare like a moth to a flame.” Throughout the novel, Irene becomes increasingly obsessed with Clare and imagines her to be having an affair with her husband Brian, who himself is coded as queer.
Literary critic Deborah McDowell argues that Irene’s jealousy and delusion is a product of her own “awakening of ... erotic feelings for Clare” and that Passing was an opportunity for Nella to "flirt, if only by suggestion, with the idea of a lesbian relationship.” Overall, many believe that that novel’s central metaphor of “passing” pulls double duty in relation to sexuality as well as race.
A film adaptation of Passing starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson premiered at Sundance in January 2021 and will be released by Netflix later in the year.
The mother of Hollywood icon Dorothy Dandridge, Ruby Dandridge was a formidable actress in her own right. In addition to her roles on hit radio shows like The Beulah Show and Amos ‘n Andy, she was also involved with a female lover for the majority of her life.
Born on March 3 in Wichita, Kansas, Ruby was one of four children. Her mother was a maid and her father worked several blue collar jobs in addition to being “a famous minstrel man.” When she was nineteen, Ruby married a man named Cyril Dandridge and the two moved to Cleveland. They would have two children, Vivian and Dorothy, before divorcing in 1922. After her divorce, Ruby began a relationship with her life partner Geneva Williams.
Dreaming of making it big in Hollywood, Ruby created a song-and-dance act for her two young daughters called The Wonder Children. The act was a success along the southern touring circuits, but work soon dried up after the Great Depression hit. In 1930, Ruby and Geneva relocated the girls to Los Angeles. It was there where Ruby got her own start as a “native dancer” in the 1933 production of King Kong. She would go on to play supporting roles in several Hollywood films, such as Three Little Girls in Blue (1943) and Tap Roots (1948). In 1943, she played the role of Mrs. Kelso in Cabin in the Woods, a Broadway film adaptation that featured an all-black cast including Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Louis Armstrong.
Ruby is most well-known for playing various roles on the radio show Amos n’ Andy and Oriole in both radio and TV versions of The Beulah Show. As the years went on, Dorothy began to branch out from The Wonder Children and became a celebrated actress in her own right. Ruby eventually took a backseat to her daughter’s skyrocketing career. Later in life, Dorothy would remark that Ruby’s partner Geneva was a cruel disciplinarian and that both her mothers had abusively pushed her into show business.
In 1987, Ruby passed away in 1987 from a heart attack in her home in Los Angeles. She was interred next to Dorothy, who had passed in 1965 from an accidental overdose. She was played by Loretta Devine in the 1999 film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.
One of the first Black women to ever be published in the United States passed away on this day in 1911. Writer, abolitionist, teacher, and public speaker, Frances Harper was a prolific and important figure in the early fight for Civil Rights.
Having begun her career an unmarried woman, much of Frances’s work was published under the name Frances Ellen Watkins.
Frances was born free on September 24, 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents sadly passed away when she was only three years old, leaving her to be raised by her maternal aunt and uncle. Her Uncle William was a minister and an abolitionist who would go on to shape her politics for years to come. As a teenager, Frances earned money as a seamstress and a nursemaid, jobs that allowed her time to cultivate her writing career. Her first poetry collection, Forest Leaves, was published when she was twenty-one.
In 1850, she moved to Columbus, Ohio to become the first ever female teacher at Union Seminary. She would teach throughout her life while simultaneously producing prolific amounts of poems, stories, and political writings. Her creative and activist work lived side by side. In 1858, Frances refused to give up her seat in the “white section” of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia, earning her wide public attention ninety-seven years before Rosa Parks. Immediately following this, her most famous poem, “Bury Me in a Free Land” was published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle. The very next year, The Anglo-African Newspaper printed her story “The Two Offers,” making Frances the first Black woman to ever publish a short story.
In her mid-30s, she married a widower named Fenton Harper. The two had one daughter, Mary, before Fenton’s death four years into the marriage. Outside of this recorded union, little is known about Frances’s love life. Because of her close association with the early feminist movement and her work alongside noted sapphics, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (as well as countless other suffragists), many have speculated that Frances engaged in relationships with other women. In 1990, a cultural anthology titled Lesbian Lists included Frances as an “early Black lesbian and bisexual writer.” After Fenton’s death, she moved to the East Coast with her daughter and set up a permanent home. She would never remarry.
While Frances eventually split from the white suffragist movement due to disagreements regarding the fifteenth amendment, she continued to fight for the suffrage and liberation of Black women across America. One of her most notable achievements was the founding of The National Association for Colored Women alongside Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, the daughter of Frederick Douglass. After a lifetime of social activism and writing, Frances passed away on February 22, 1911 at the age of eighty-six.
