Hall-Troubridge Teaching Guides

Unidentified photographer, Radclyffe Hall, 1936.

This picture of Radclyffe Hall shows her in her trademark tailored suit. A British writer, she published one of the most notable works of unambiguously "queer" literature in the modern age, The Well of Loneliness.

Hall enjoyed a critically and commercially successful career as a writer prior to the book's publication. She wrote other texts with implied LGBTQIA+ themes, and won awards and notoriety for her 1926 novel, Adam's Breed.

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, manuscript, undated.

Controversial upon its release, The Well of Loneliness, depicted here through a manuscript excerpt, created considerable controversy and sparked censorship and legal challenges in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

While critical response to the writing itself was mixed, the text had an enduring legacy as a watershed piece of literature for the lesbian community.

With allusions to other queer women influencing English and French literature during the 1920s and 1930s (such as the lesbian American salon host Natalie Barney), the text provides a guide to queer identity at the time, while also revealing a range of complicated and problematic scientific and political opinions that influenced Hall as an author.

Una Troubridge, Notes on Colette, undated.

A gifted sculptor and translator, Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge was Hall's romantic partner. She is widely credited for translating the writings of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, better known as Colette, into English. By doing so, Troubridge introduced her pioneering work to a broader audience of English-speakers. Known for her prodigious skills as a writer and her relationships with other women, Colette was critically acclaimed. She cut her teeth as a modernist author writing books that her first husband published under his name and then crafting stories and novels under her own name in the 1920s and 1930s.

Taking advantage of her fame and the more lax urban attitudes towards lesbian relationships in Paris, Colette was part of a circle of lesbian authors and intellectuals in Paris, including Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes.

Sylvia Beach, Letter to Italo Svevo regarding Ulysses petition, December 28, 1926.

A hugely influential figure in the rise of the modernist literary movement, bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach undertook considerable personal and financial risk when she chose to publish James Joyce's controversial magnum opus, Ulysses, in 1922. She undertook this daunting task from her Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris after publishers in England and the United States refused. Beach was motivated by her deep, personal affection for Joyce and her commitment to what she perceived as the genius of the experimental book. After Ulysses proved successful with English-speaking audiences and following a decade of legal battles over censorship, Joyce took the book to a different publisher. This choice saddled Beach with tremendous debt and almost wiped out her business. The Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second World War shuttered Shakespeare and Co. permanently. However, from 1919 to 1941, Shakespeare and Co. was an icon for modernist writers living in Paris's Left Bank. During this time in France, she lived with her partner, Adrienne Monnier, until the latter's death by suicide in 1955.

In this letter, Beach is attempting to shore up support for Joyce's text by soliciting signatures for a petition against the text's censorship in the US, which would later be the subject of a 1933 court case in which American courts determined the book was not obscene, opening up American audiences to modernist texts from Europe that had previously been banned due to "explicit sexual content."

Harcourt, Brace & Company, Advertisement for Orlando by Virginia Woolf, November 4, 1928.

Based on her long-term relationship with author Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's Orlando follows the story of an English nobleman who transforms into a woman. Woolf, herself bisexual, challenged gender and sexual conventions in her published texts in the 1920s, such as her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, which featured a same-sex kiss between two women. The New York Times 1928 book review of the novel praises the experimental nature of the text's attitude towards gender, time, and bodies. Illustrations show Orlando in a range of times from the Court of Elizabeth I to a modern woman living in 1920s England and married to a similarly gender non-conforming sea captain.

Critically well-regarded and re-assessed since her 1941 death, Virginia Woolf is today recognized as one of the most gifted and innovative English writers of the 20th century. Orlando, highly influenced by Woolf's own aesthetic as a modernist writer, sidestepped the challenges that The Well of Loneliness faced, and both Virginia Woolf and her husband, the publisher Leonard Woolf, spoke out against the censorship controversy that Hall experienced and the subsequent obscenity trials in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Langston Hughes, Scottsboro Limited (New York City: The Golden Stair Press, 1932).

While American poet and author Langston Hughes offered no concrete evidence regarding his sexuality, biographers and those who personally knew him have intensely debated his private life since his death in 1967. Several of his unpublished poems seemingly allude to sexual relationships specifically with Black men, and a short story, Blessed Assurance, challenges constructions of masculinity and "manliness" through an effeminate black male child. Others, however, have argued that the author was in fact asexual. Regardless, Hughes's own prominence as a Black writer in pre-Civil Rights Era America and his own financial hardships did not offer him the privileges of openly expressing his sexuality that wealthier White authors might have enjoyed.

In Scottsboro Limited, Hughes focuses on the false accusations of sexual assault made by two young white women against nine Black male teenagers in 1931 Jim Crow Alabama. The 1930s-40s case involved several re-trials due to flimsy evidence, all-White juries, and mob violence. The story of these young men is remembered today as an example of the consistent miscarriage of justice against Black Americans in the United States, particularly when it came to white women falsely accusing Black boys and men of sexual assault.

Guy Davenport, Review of Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, manuscript, undated.

The Chilean Nobel Prize-winning author, Gabriela Mistral, is widely recognized as one of South America's most important poets and has a nationally beloved reputation in her home country. Her life marred with tragedy, she wrote innovative, culturally significant poems for five decades until her death in 1957. Protective of her private life, she was posthumously discovered to have had relationships with women after the death of her long-time partner in 2006 and the subsequent publication of her private letters. Publicly remembered as a tragic, celibate Catholic figure, the existence and publication of the letters altered public memory of the poet, known as the "Mother of the Nation."

For queer writers and archivists, the 2007 publication of the author's private letters proves challenging. What obligations do archivists have to respect privacy, particularly after death? Furthermore, scholars debate whether or not Mistral would identify as a lesbian, bisexual, or queer at all in the present day, as political and social definitions of those identities have dramatically shifted since Mistral's death in 1957. Doubtlessly, both Mistral and Doris Dana, her partner who rejected claims that the two had formed a romantic relationship until the letters were unearthed after the latter's death in 2006, had their reasons for keeping their relationship private. How then do contemporary readers approach private material that had been tightly guarded by its owners while they lived? Does death overrule respect for privacy even if the richness of the letters between the two women and the ability to better understand the complex life of an incredibly gifted poet might otherwise remain secret?

Nickolas Muray, photographer, Willa Cather, undated.

American author Willa Cather experimented with clothing while attending the University of Nebraska, wearing men's suits and cutting her hair short. Known to refer to herself as "Willie" or "William" as a young person, her personal life and her relationships with women, both of which she guarded with fierce privacy, continue to spark debate and conversation in literary and historical scholarship. While some argue that her personal life offers unambiguous evidence that she was a lesbian, others argue that she would not have identified as such, regardless of her personal life.

While she did not explicitly take up queer themes in her texts, many literary scholars have interpreted the short stories Paul's Case and Tommy, the Unsentimental as queer.

She lived with her long-term partner Edith Lewis for four decades, had intimate relationships with several other women, including Louise Pound, the first woman president of the Modern Language Association. Recognized as one of the 20th century's best American writers, she won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

Cather's Alma Mater, the University of Nebraska, is in the process of digitizing her private letters and papers as part of the Cather Project and the Willa Cather Archive.

New York Journal-American, photographers, World War I soldiers dressed in drag, undated.

Archives across the world have ample photographs of people dressing in "drag." However, without full context, it is difficult to categorize these images as "queer" or not. For many LGBTQIA+ people, dressing in stereotypically "male" or "female" clothes offered a form of self-expression, comfort, and an opportunity to display gender in a way that made them comfortable.

However, non-LGBTQIA+ people frequently used and continue to use drag as a joke to reinforce sexist stereotypes. Men performing shows in dresses might include comedy based on misogynistic tropes, such as emphasizing ideas that women were overly-emotional, materialistic, or not to be taken seriously through comedy and jokes. Men in dresses in these contexts were typically meant to be funny and did not challenge cultural expectations of gender. Similarly, early 19th century minstrel shows, featuring white performers in blackface, frequently used drag and racist tropes to demean, humiliate, and emasculate Black men and portray Black women as either sexually promiscuous or domineering. Furthermore, Black men who wished to have any career on the stage were essentially compelled to participate in these sorts of shows if they wished for a career in professional acting. These kinds of performances were tolerated and not seen as obscene, as women were not allowed in minstrel shows until the 1890s, and the army would not have had women performers in World War One. Context matters, though it is frequently difficult to identify, especially considering that dressing in clothes not assigned to one's gender was illegal in many places until the late 20th century.

Further exploration into the Harry Ransom Center's vast collection of minstrelsy might be of interest to those wishing to further examine sexuality, gender, and race in American performance history.

Guillermo Kahlo, photographer, Frida Kahlo and family, February 7, 1926.

A young Frida Kahlo is photographed with her family, standing to the far left in a suit and with her hair slicked back. Openly bisexual, the Communist painter frequently used her trademark fashions as not only a form of self-expression, but as a recurring theme in her self-portraits. Disabled from polio and a bus accident in her youth, she was known as an adult for wearing colorful, pre-columbian skirts that covered her injured legs, but would also wear men's suits, especially in her self-portraits, and cut her hair short after her first divorce from her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.

Unidentified photographer, Radclyffe Hall reading newspaper, undated.

Hall is seen here reading a newspaper in one of her trademark tailored suits. While short hair and wearing a combination of tailored men's jackets and shirts with a skirt was a somewhat popular fashion statement for those female-assigned people in post-World War I Europe and North America, queer women frequently used subtle choices in fashion to signify lesbian or bisexual identity to other lesbian and bisexual women. Hall included details about queer women's dress in The Well of Loneliness, causing a polarized reaction to the text from queer women who felt their identities, long "hidden in plain sight" and only noticeable to others within their community, were now publicly available and would expose them to harassment.

Unidentified photographer, Marlene Dietrich in film Morocco, 1930.

Bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich stars as cabaret singer Amy Jolly in the 1930 film, Morocco. The film, featuring a same-sex kiss between Dietrich and another actress, was made prior to the Hays Code. This production code dictated what could and could not appear in American movies from 1934 to 1968. Under these rules, queer characters could only appear in films as villains and had to be punished in some way by the end of the film.

Dietrich, however, drew inspiration for this role from her time in Berlin's cabaret nightclubs of the 1920s, which gave birth to a thriving community of queer artists and performers known collectively as the "Weimar period" in Berlin. Dressing in drag was not uncommon and art and performance regularly challenged popular notions about gender and sexuality.

Romaine Brooks, artist, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924.

Painted by American lesbian artist Romaine Brooks, this likeness of Una, Lady Troubridge features her in the tailored suits of the day that provided some recognition of queerness. While Hall wore tailored suits, Troubridge typically appeared in feminine attire. However, for this painting, Troubridge adopts a modern wardrobe that contains multiple levels of subtext. Similarly, Romaine Brooks frequently wore clothing usually worn by men, capturing herself and several other women subjects in tailored suits painted in her signature gloomy palate of black, white, and grey. Subjects include not only Troubridge, but also Brooks's lover Ida Rubenstein.

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, photographer, Rosa Bonheur, undated.

Rosa Bonheur was one of the most commercially successful women artists of all time and one of the few to achieve success in her life. Living relatively openly as a lesbian, she obtained special permission to wear trousers in 19th-century Paris so she could walk through the muddy fields where she painted horses. However, she also would wear ties, waistcoats, and dress-shirts even when not painting, citing the comfort and practicality of such clothing, particularly when compared to restrictive women's fashion of the time.

Unidentified photographer, Radclyffe Hall with dachshunds, undated.

Late Victorian England saw an overlap between rising popularity in Darwin's theories of evolution and the early eugenics movement. Eugenics, the idea that a species can be "purified" by only letting "fit" members of it breed, led to widespread harm as it began to be applied to humans. However, upper-class Victorians relished in the thought of having "pure-bred" dogs, going so far as to start "kennel clubs" to certify a dog's pedigree.

While Hall expressed at least some support for eugenics, her obsession with "pure-bred" dogs was not unique to her. Countless people with the funds to do so invested heavily in dog breeding, causing significant health problems for puppies who stood higher chances of genetic mutations due to a large reliance on inbreeding.

Unidentified photographer, Una Troubridge with dachshunds, undated.

Here we see Lady Troubridge walking two of the pair's dachshunds. Not unlike clothing, dogs offered fashion-conscious, urban, upper-class people a chance to make dog breeds part of their "aesthetic."

Sport & General Press Agency, Ltd., Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with their dachshunds at Crufts Dog Show, February 1923.

Here we see Hall and Troubridge, both wearing more conventionally masculine ties and hats, holding their beloved dachshunds.

Giuseppe Magrini, photographer, Radclyffe Hall with poodle, undated.

A member of the Zoological Society and an animal lover, Hall is depicted here with a white poodle. Victorian and Edwardian England saw a significant shift in attitudes towards animals. As the violence and terror of European and American Colonization became increasingly clear, many White Europeans and Americans who benefited from settler colonization, sweatshop labor, and other human rights abuses emphasized their benevolent attitudes towards pets and animals to "soften" their images and distract from the racism and cruelty they weaponized against other people.

Americans, for example, emphasized their bans on cockfighting and bullfighting in territories seized from the Spanish after the Spanish-American War. British readers turned Anna Sewall's Black Beauty into a global best seller, causing a strong public reaction in favor of preventing animal cruelty, while British colonization ravaged human populations and ecosystems across the world.

For Hall, her adoration of dogs and other animals did not always extend to her views on humans. She held controversial right-wing opinions and offered some degree of support to both fascism and anti-Semitism at different times in her life.

Cannon, manufacturer, Hand towel with embroidered poodle owned by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, undated.

Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, known for their Paris home that became a beehive of modernist artists and writers, were also the doting owners of several dogs, most famously their standard white poodle.

Their toiletry set, featuring a hand towel with a black poodle on it, demonstrates not only their love for their pet, but also the poodle's unique overlap between pet and fashion accessory.

Like Hall and Troubridge, however, Stein and Toklas held racist and ableist beliefs that manifested in their personal politics and their creative writing. Concerned about interracial marriages and immigrants moving to the US, Stein hints towards sympathies for eugenics and vocally supported the fascist government in Vichy France, going so far as to offer her services as a "propagandist" for Philippe Pétain, a Nazi collaborator and leader of Vichy France. While modern Stein scholars debate her reasons as a queer, Jewish woman for offering to collaborate with the Nazi puppet state, it none-the-less clouds her legacy for contemporary readers.

Unidentified photographer, Sylvia Beach with dog, undated.

Sylvia Beach is pictured here with a dog. Both she and her partner, Adrienne Monnier, were noted dog lovers and frequently traveled with their pets on their vacations.

Her interaction with animals was not limited to pets. After refusing to sell books to the Nazis occupying Paris and threatened with arrest and forced closure of her store, Beach hid her book collection and painted over the name of Shakespeare and Co. Later, she spent several weeks imprisoned with other American women in cages at the Bois de Boulogne zoo in Paris.

Gerschel, photographer, Colette with dog, undated.

Here we see the French writer Colette photographed with a dog. The dog here serves a dual purpose. It is both an affectionate companion and a fashion accessory, matching the author's dark dress as she sits posing on a table.

Julia Margaret Cameron, photographer, Charles Darwin, 1868.

Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, sent shockwaves through Europe's scientific community. It sparked new interest in zoology and gave rise to anthropology, two subjects that deeply fascinated Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge. However, it also re-ignited conversations about "scientific racism." The Victorian Era saw a boom of advances in science and medicine. However, those fields, dominated by white men of the upper class, frequently sought to give scientific authority to concepts like sexism, racism, and ableism.

Using Darwin's theories on "survival of the fittest," scientists, psychologists, zoologists, and anthropologists frequently used "scientific" racism to argue that there were innately "fit" and "unfit" people.

Unidentified photographer, Medium Mina Crandon, also known as Margery, during séance, undated.

Both Hall and Troubridge were members of the Society for Psychical Research, along with author and spiritualism enthusiast Arthur Conan Doyle.

While the Society was interested in any "psychic" or paranormal concepts, it became most closely associated with its role in debunking spiritualists. Born out of mid-19th-century fascination with communicating with the dead, spiritualism and its practitioners adopted scientific innovation to speak to those "beyond the grave." Doyle attended numerous seances, recording them, interviewing mediums, and attempting to find a scientific method of contacting the dead, or at least giving the now-debunked field some air of scientific authority. He left the society due to what he felt was a sense of hostility and skepticism towards spiritualism.

This photograph, taken of a medium during a seance, marks the manner in which technology and spiritualism developed. Both deep believers in Spiritualism, Hall and Troubridge used seances to attempt to contact Hall's deceased partner, Mabel Batten. Hall's involvement in the society was also the source of scandal. Seeking a leadership position, she faced harsh criticism from a friend of Troubridge's ex-husband, who threatened to publicly accuse her of "immoral behavior."

Desmond Harmsworth, artist, Drawing of Havelock Ellis, 1932.

Interests in psychology in the late 19th century created complicated situations for queer people. While queer relationships have existed as long as human relationships have, it was not until the Victorian era that many terms used today became popular. "Homosexuality" as a term came from psychology, in which it was classified as a disorder, and has since fallen out of popular usage. Hall and Troubridge used the term "inverts." Sexologists, those who studied human sexuality through psychology and behavior, popularized the term, specifically Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis (drawn here), who wrote the foreword to The Well of Loneliness. The protagonist of the text, Stephen Gordon, is described as a "sexual invert," a term broadly used to define people whose sexuality and gender-related behavior transgressed social boundaries for the time.

Within The Well of Loneliness, Stephen reads about "inversion" from a book by Krafft-Ebing, helping her define her lesbian identity in scientific terms of the day.

The term, however, was not innocent. While Ellis did not regard "inversion" as a deficit and simply regarded it as "different," psychological debates over human sexuality and LGBT identity had lasting consequences. The American Psychological Association did not change this categorization until 1975. Psychiatrists practiced a range of medical experiments searching for a "cure," and conversion "therapy" and other quack science is still used today, drawing on now debunked early psychiatric opinions about same-sex attraction and transgender identities.

Unidentified photographer, Spirit Exposé, circa 1920s.

While spiritualism was undoubtedly in decline by the mid-point of the 20th century, passionate spiritualists still remained. Harry Houdini, a believer in spiritualism but notorious for attempting to expose quack mediums, frequently butted heads with other prominent spiritualists who he felt were too gullible in their willingness to accept dubious evidence as proof of contact between the living and the dead.

Havelock Ellis, "The Place of Eugenics," manuscript, 1934.

In addition to his work as a sexologist, Havelock Ellis was an outspoken supporter of the eugenics movement. This movement, born out of "social Darwinism" and the belief that genetics and selective breeding could perfect the human race, was a widely popular field of interest during Hall's and Troubridge's lifetime. While the movement lost popularity in Europe and North America following Nazi attrocities in World War II, eugenics had a popular following in the United States and England. This led to forced sterilizations, state laws that banned "ugly" people from appearing in public, and advocacy for euthanasia in some circles. People of color, particularly those who were disabled and low-income, were frequent targets for eugenics advocates, whose political sympathies ranged from left to right. Famous eugenicists included Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Bernard Shaw.

While eugenics was an unambiguously harmful and violent movement that led to forced sterilizations in the US and Europe, many eugenicists did not necessarily believe in the widespread genocide and murder that the Nazis later committed.

However, while popular, this movement had notable opponents who argued that the practice was racist, damaging, and a poor substitute for poverty elimination and social reforms.

Unidentified photographer, We-wha weaving, undated.

Ihamana, such as the diplomat and artist We'wha, became something of a fixation for White anthropologists in the late 19th century. A gifted weaver and potter, We'wha joined communities of other Zuni Ihamana people who engaged in crafts, arts, and Zuni cultural preservation. Globally, sexualities and genders beyond European binaries and expectations of heterosexual monogamy existed and thrived in numerous cultures throughout history. With the growing influence of colonization, however, these identities became regulated and punished by White, Christian missionaries and legal governments. Vast troves of queer history were deliberately destroyed and lost through colonization and genocide against indigenous people. Similarly, museums frequently acquired artifacts from wiped-out indigenous communities without much regard for culturally responsive display or treatment of those artifacts or the people who created them. While we do have historical records of a few notable people who practiced traditional beliefs that did not comply with gender binaries and Christian sexual ethics, it is impossible for modern audiences to know how many of these stories were deliberately or inadvertently erased from history.

Carl Van Vechten, photographer, Bessie Smith, February 3, 1936.

Singer Bessie Smith was one of the most highly regarded and highly paid blues and jazz performers of her time. Openly bisexual, she had numerous romantic partners over the course of her life.

She grew up in poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee, performing on street corners and in vaudeville and minstrel shows. Fellow queer blues pioneer Ma Rainey mentored Smith in her early years, and by the time of her premature death in a car accident in 1937, she became globally known for her gifts as a musician.

Despite her popularity, she was buried in an unmarked grave until 1970 when former employee Juanita Green and bisexual singer Janis Joplin (who cited Smith as a major influence) purchased a grave stone for her.

Similarly, pioneering blues singer Big Mama Thornton (whose recording of "Hound Dog" is excerpted here) transgressed expectations for Black American women, frequently dressing in men's clothing and performing in an industry dominated by men. While many biographers speculate that she was a lesbian, her personal style of wearing fedoras, slacks, and men's button downs certainly challenged the more feminine aesthetics that dominated dress and behavior for Black women in mid-century America.

Polygoon-Profilti, producer, Newsreel of Josephine Baker arriving in The Hague, August 1, 1928.

An icon of 1920s Paris, a Civil Rights advocate, and a French Resistance member, Josephine Baker's fascinating life as a queer woman of color made her a lasting emblem of Black art and culture in the jazz age and a tireless soldier in the fight for equal rights.

Known for her innovative and provocative dancing that made her a superstar in pre-World War II Europe, Baker commented publicly on the challenges she faced as a Black entertainer in the United States and refused to perform in segregated venues, despite highly lucrative offers to do so.

She was decorated by the French government for her efforts in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s, using her celebrity to spy on high-ranking officials and pass along secret messages. After the war, she performed for a range of audiences, including sold-out performances for Castro in Cuba and Tito in Yugoslavia.

Committed to the American Civil Rights movement, she spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 while wearing her military medals, one of the few women to speak at the event despite the presence and planning of Black women civil rights leaders.

John E. Palmer, photographer, Preacher with electric guitar, undated.

Photographed by Galveston photographer John E. Palmer, this preacher with an electric guitar marks the rise of Gospel and Rock-n-Roll as musical genres in which a range of Black artists rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.

Widely influential to later rock-n-roll artists such as Elvis Pressley, Little Richard, and Johnny Cash, Sister Rosetta Tharpe scandalized and delighted audiences by appearing as a woman singing gospel while playing the electric guitar. Her innovative fusion of gospel music and her skills as a guitar player helped define rock-n-roll in its early years. Speculation around her sexuality persists, including a possible relationship with fellow gospel singer Marie Knight, with whom she toured.

Black excellence in music and art was not exclusive to urban areas. Popular across the country, Sister Rosetta's music appealed to a range of communities, including countless queer people of color, and her considerable talents as a guitarist and singer provided incalculable influence to later rock-n-roll artists.

Unidentified photographer, Claude McKay, undated.

Jamaican author Claude McKay, a Harlem Renaissance writer, wrote and collaborated with a range of writers experimenting with meter, rhythm, and subject matter during the 1920s. A frequent attendee to openly gay L. S. Alexander Gumby's studio, McKay met fellow queer, Black writers, such as the philosopher, university professor, and "Godfather of the Harlem Renaissance," Alain LeRoy Locke. Locke served as a literary and personal mentor to many Harlem writers, queer or not, and edited The New Negro (1925), an anthology of Black poetry, fiction, and essays.

Both McKay and Locke spent time in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, where McKay became fascinated with modernist art and architecture, such as works of the Dada movement. A great many Black artists and thinkers spent time in Europe, including educator Jessie Redmon Fauset, who also mentored McKay, to not only escape the enormous challenges of life in Jim Crow America, but also to further study and experiment with new artistic and intellectual movements.

Unidentified photographer, Ma Rainey, circa 1923.

Pioneering blues singer Ma Rainey recorded the "Prove it On Me Blues" in 1928, the same year that Hall published The Well of Loneliness. The song includes explicit references to lesbian attraction to women and dressing in men's clothes, both risky lyrics that could have resulted in legal consequences. Rainey herself was arrested in 1925 in Chicago for hosting a lesbian party. Police arrived at Rainey's residence responding to a noise complaint and found several naked women in "intimate" poses. She was bailed out the following morning by her friend Bessie Smith. An icon in R&B music and a mentor to other women blues singers, Ma Rainey's openly queer persona and lyrics during the 1920s and 1930s remains an important piece of queer cultural history. Her song, "Cake Walk," demonstrates her style as a performer, mixing humor and her skills as a musician to fit the early style of blues performance.

Radclyffe Hall, "The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes," manuscript, circa 1914-1915.

Racism still persisted in queer communities. White queer people did not hesitate to use White privilege when it suited them, and many were openly racist and hostile to people of color, Hall being no exception.

Hall was certainly aware of the contributions of Black artists in America, citing Harlem Renaissance performers in her writing.

Though she believed herself to be writing progressively about race and though she was familiar with the work of Black thinkers like Booker T. Washington, Hall had limited contact with people who were not White. Her text makes references to racial essentialism, classifying Black Americans as a "race born of slaves," and would widely be regarded as racist by modern readers. Though she felt she was writing about other "misfits," with whom she claimed to feel kinship, Hall held deeply racist and classist beliefs that, while typical of women of her race and class at the time, manifested themselves through harmful stereotypes in her writing and personal politics.