Beemyn unpacks how all four struggled to different degrees with the competing needs to pursue various types of same-sex relationships while still appearing publicly respectable within a tight-knit African American social world. Beemyn grounds the narrative in this chapter in the experiences of several significant cultural figures, the best known of whom is Alain Locke, but also including Angelina Weld Grimké and the couple of Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Powell Burrill. This is particularly reflected in its chapter about “the black elite” in early twentieth century Washington.
Some of A Queer Capital’s most engaging storytelling involves its discussion of black LGBT people in D.C. Their different public spaces, different ways of organizing their lives and communities, and different ways of relating to the overall social structure of the city are given careful attention. have often conducted lives in parallel to white LGBT people. Beemyn is to be commended for not allowing white LGBT experience to serve as a stand-in for everyone’s lives, instead delineating the ways in which African American men and women in D.C. Beemyn has the additional challenge of Washington being a socially stratified and racially segregated city throughout its history (even after the formal legal end to segregation in public accommodations in 1953), necessitating multiple narratives that rarely intersect.
With a century’s worth of time and material to cover, however, this sort of thing is inevitable, even in books that do aspire to be comprehensive. (Beemyn acknowledges this, calling A Queer Capital “an episodic, rather than a comprehensive, history.”) As a result, there are occasionally odd emphases or gaps, as when The Furies, admittedly a culturally influential radical lesbian separatist collective, receive virtually all attention given to white lesbian life in D.C., or when post-1950s drag culture and communities go unremarked, or when the impact of AIDS is only tangentially addressed. (One instance of a “heteronormative paradigm” is as bad as it gets.) That’s not to say that this isn’t an academic book it’s extensively researched, heavily footnoted, and its chapters can occasionally read like separate, discrete essays that have been loosely combined into a narrative. While A Queer Capital is obviously an extension of Beemyn’s thesis, it thankfully avoids the queer studies jargon and thornily obtuse style often burdening books that find their origin in academia. Beemyn previously edited the groundbreaking anthology Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, whose table of contents reads like a murderers’ row of important LGBT historians (Boyd, Chauncey, Davis and Kennedy, D’Emilio, and the list goes on) and where this thesis was excerpted.
This ended prior to the development of an organized political movement in D.C., which most date to Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols’ founding of the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 the current version of A Queer Capital brings the story of LGBT life in D.C. began its life as one of those, covering the years 1890-1955.
Genny Beemyn’s new book, A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C. Johnson’s impressive The Lavender Scare uncovered the deep and disturbing Cold War history of gays and lesbians in the federal government whose lives were destroyed under McCarthyism.īroader social histories of LGBT D.C., on the other hand, have been nonexistent outside the pages of heretofore unpublished Ph.D. because of its national political importance, and David K. When it has received attention, that has generally been for the connection between sexuality and politics: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney’s Out for Good, about the development of the gay rights movement, gave significant space to D.C. It’s possible that D.C.’s public reputation as a dry, buttoned-down town works against it. When all these other cities and towns (and even the state of Minnesota or the region of the South) have had their own book-length LGBT histories, it’s difficult to say exactly why it has taken so long for Washington to receive similar treatment. (Full disclosure: Philip Clark is on the board of directors for Washington, D.C.’s Rainbow History Project and helped the author access some research materials.) ‘A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C.’ by Genny Beemyn