Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Now that we know that the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance was not heteronormative, how do we analyse the cultural movement's fluid performance of sexuality and race without fixing and normalizing its queerness? How do we begin to develop a language that does not name the unnamed and unintentionally translate the performance in cultural movements into a non-moving object of study?

In Harlem Renaissance studies, we have "looked for Langston" and "queered the color line," and now we need more studies like James Wilson's Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance that approach a queering of the queer. Wilson does not make a meta-claim about the queerness of the Harlem Renaissance. As opposed to a relying on the frame "queer," he foregrounds "drag" as he makes us think about drag as, literally, the "underground" weight countering the ascendancy of racial uplift.

Wilson's study ranges from the drag of Lulu Belle (the white woman impersonation, in blackface, of a sexually free, black working class woman) to the "bulldagger" drag of Gladys Bentley. His focus on the drag of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the touristic aspects of the movement, leads to an appreciation of the drag performances by white and black performers as the deformation and slowing down of the normative white viewer / black performer tourist show. He reads Alice Handy (W.C. Handy's daughter) as the "Madam" (a most respectable one) who promised to provide "thrills" during her guided tours of Harlem. As he uncovers the eroticism in advertisements, like Handy's, for Harlem tours, he opens up a new way of thinking about the tourism that shaped this movement. There were constant detours, taken by white and black people, during the tours. People took everyday detours around the tours that have now become the dominant archive of the cultural movement. Wilson uses the term "semi-private" as he moves away from the rent parties that can be documented through public invitations to the rent parties that were "semi-private," anti-heteronormative, and advertised through word-of-mouth underground channels, invitations that cannot now be translated into a concrete archive. These other rent parties remain semi-private as Wilson analyses them. The beauty of the text is his impulse not to convert the happenings into a normative archive.

As he explores the happenings, some of the most compelling parts of the text are the stories and figures that can only be partially known through the records of the movement. We can, for instance, only partially know Sepia Gloria Swanson, the black, male cross-dresser whose performances as a white woman diva lit up the Harlem underworld. Wilson's analysis of the unknowable as the unrecorded fully surfaces when he focuses on Wallace Thurman's collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp in the writing of the play Harlem (1929). Thurman, in an unpublished essay entitled "My Collaborator," laments the lack of a "movietone camera" that, during his writing sessions with Rapp, could have captured the "picture of Bill Rapp, excited over the possibilities or difficulties of a scene, leaping from his chair, pacing the floor, frantically gesturing the while he shouts Negro dialect with decided East Side overtone" (56). In the most engaging parts of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies, Wilson adopts the approach of an alternative type of movie camera that reconstructs the gestures, "leaping," and "pacing" that produced the written texts and the formally staged performances. The study sometimes fully gestures toward the anti-textual performance-studies approach, encapsulated in Diana Taylor's insistence that the archive cannot contain the "live" (Taylor 173). Wilson's analysis of Gladys Bentley adds a new twist to our understanding of the tension between the live and the archive. Years after her Harlem Renaissance performance of the butch swagger, Bentley, in 1958, performed heteronormativity in a "live," television...