On Valentine’s Day in 1930, the Hamilton Lodge at the Rockland Palace in Harlem hosted a masquerade ball that was billed as a “rendezvous for the frail and freakish gang,” according to a pithy dispatch
from The New York Age, the prominent Black newspaper of the era.
At the event, the Age report read, “it was difficult to distinguish sexes.” Women were “rigged up” in masculine attire, while “scores of males of pronounced effeminate traits gracefully disported themselves in beautiful evening gowns.”
Although many people associate the history of queer culture (a descriptor whose original negative usage has been transformed over time) in New York with Greenwich Village, events like the ball were not uncommon in Renaissance-era Harlem, where the L.G.B.T. population socialized in a variety of spaces, some of which were interracial. Their lives were frequently viewed as scandalous for the mores of the time.
Over roughly two decades, Harlem became home to Black artists, musicians, authors and socialites of all sexual stripes. In a 1993 essay, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. stated it bluntly: Harlem was “surely as gay as it was Black.”
A map shows the borders of Harlem, which, south to north, extends from the top of Central Park to the area above 145th Street, and, west to east, from St. Nicholas Park to Fifth Avenue.
In the years since, the Renaissance has increasingly been seen as having created “modes of kinship that far exceeded nuclear families,” in the words of Clare Corbould, an African-American history scholar and associate professor at Deakin University in Australia. “Scholarship on the Renaissance has dovetailed with queer theory and studies to deepen and broaden our understanding of the Renaissance,” she said.
The map and descriptions of figures and venues below aim to capture that reality.
A black-and-white photograph of Ma Rainey’s Georgia Jazz Band. Ma Rainey, in a dress and headband, is surrounded by five Black male musicians playing, from left, trombone and trumpet.
