“A Very Enjoyable Stay in Gay Paree”: African American Women Performers and Queer Interracial Circuits in the Jazz Age

This paper will examine how the queer circuits of performing women in the black popular entertainment industry interacted with those of European literary lesbians in the 1920s and 30s. African American performing women such as Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, and Ada “Bricktop” Smith performed, toured and lived in Europe, forming networks with queer European women and white American expatriates such as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and Natalie Barney. Blues singer Alberta Hunter, who spent much time performing in Europe in the 1920s, brought her American girlfriend Lottie Tyler abroad with her and wrote a column for the black newspaper Chicago Defender detailing her experiences. Like many African Americans, Hunter found there to be less racial prejudice abroad than in Jim Crow America, yet she also had to encounter more explicit exoticization and racial fetishism than was openly acceptable in the States. Singer Ethel Waters who toured in Europe extensively in the late 1920s, noted in her autobiography, “I met a lot of people in Paris, and Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, was the most interesting of them.” This has led some to speculate that the two women had an affair, as Hall was also said to have written an unpublished story about interracial lesbian love. This paper will examine the possibilities for interracial queer connections during a time of heightened racial antagonisms in the U.S. and a fascination with “the primitive” in Europe and the States, all the while as lesbianism was becoming an increasingly visible subject in Europe and the United States.