Sapphic Blues

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (ca. 1917)

Bessie Smith in 1936

The Blues scene of the Harlem Renaissance provided Black women with a space to explore their sexuality and gender identity outside of the white supremacist gaze, which sexualized and criminalized Black women’s bodies. Many famous blueswomen, whose queerness was frequently an open secret, sang of relationships with women.

In 1925, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (pictured right), the so-called “Mother of the Blues,” was arrested for hosting a “lesbian party” in her home. The next day, Bessie Smith (pictured left), another blueswoman and Rainey’s rumored lover, bailed her out of jail. Three years later, Rainey would write and perform the “Prove it On Me Blues,” responding to speculation about her sexuality with the words, “ain’t nobody caught me/you sure got to prove it on me.”

By 1930, Smith, Rainey, and blues singer Lucille Bogan (pictured below) were known as “the big three” of the blues scene. All three sang about sapphic love and desire. In 1935, Bogan recorded “B.D. Woman’s Blues,” singing, “comin’ a time, B.D. women they ain’t going to need no men.” “B.D.” was short for “bulldagger” or “bulldyke,” a Black slang term for a butch lesbian. The vocabulary used to speak about queerness in twentieth-century America was highly racialized. Jeanne Flash Gray, a Black woman who lived in Harlem during the 1930s, described that at the time, “we were still Bulldaggers and Faggots… only whites were lesbians and homosexuals.” “Bulldagger” was not pejorative, but rather “associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry.”