Cross-gender impersonation was all right, however, onstage. Male and female impersonation had long been part of theater, and it differed from what we today call drag. Impersonation was not queer-coded in its early days and was usually performed by heterosexuals. By the 1920s, however, mainstream male impersonation fell out of vogue, possibly due to changing ideas about sexuality that linked cross-gender performance with homosexuality. Male impersonation did not end, though; it continued and transformed in marginalized spaces. In 1920s and ’30s Harlem, African American singer Gladys Bentley performed in menswear, and at the time she didn’t hide her queer identity. When her Harlem career began to fizzle in the 1940s, Bentley went west, eventually landing at Mona’s, the lesbian nightclub in San Francisco. Mona’s featured other male impersonators who, like Bentley, dressed in tuxedos and often replaced standard lyrics in their songs with openly gay ones. Clubs featuring male impersonators continued to advertise in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications well into the 1950s, and heterosexual tourists went to the shows seeking exotic entertainment, just as they visited Chinatown for a taste of the Orient.
The early 1950s was a period of relative freedom for San Francisco gay bars, because the 1951 Stoumen v. Reilly decision legalized public assembly of homosexuals in California. Homosexual acts, however, remained illegal, and as the decade wore on, police crackdowns would start to focus on homosexual activity. In September 1954, police raided 12 Adler, a bar owned by butch lesbian Tommy Vasu. Several teenage girls were also arrested, and newspaper accounts played up a scandalous cocktail of drugs, homosexuality, and cross-dressing. In 1956, a new mayor launched an anti-vice campaign to put many gay bars out of business. It’s no coincidence that 1956 was also the year that the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded; this early gay rights organization aimed to provide a way for lesbians to socialize outside the bar scene.
The DOB and the lesbian bars described in Wide-Open Town seemed to be predominantly white. It has been difficult for me to find evidence of lesbians of color in this time period, although Kennedy’s and Davis’s research does include black women. Finding any history of queer Asian American women has been even more difficult, but tantalizing clues have surfaced in many sources. Wide-Open Town, of course, mentions Merle Woo, who was an Asian American activist in the 1970s and ’80s, and it also mentions the existence of Filipina lesbians. Incidentally, a Filipina lesbian named Rose was the originator of the idea for the DOB, though the DOB’s white cofounders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, have become far better known. Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, USA, a documentary and accompanying book about the Chinatown nightclub, includes gay Asian American performers, but they don’t speak about their experiences in detail. The Chinese lesbian that Lily’s father mentions was inspired by Margaret Chung, who was the first Chinese American woman doctor and was rumored to be a lesbian who had a relationship with singer Sophie Tucker. Chung never came out. Historian Amy Sueyoshi put me in touch with Crystal Jang, a Chinese American lesbian who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and went to Galileo High School in the late 1950s and ’60s. I also spoke with Kitty Tsui, a lesbian poet who was active in the 1970s and ’80s with Merle Woo. Tsui and Jang both told me that they were often the sole Asian American lesbian in the room.
Lily’s story is my attempt to draw some of this history out from the margins, to un-erase the stories of women like Crystal Jang and Merle Woo and Dr. Margaret Chung. Lily’s story is entirely fiction and is not based on theirs, but I imagine that she and these real women all had to deal with similar challenges: learning how to live as both Chinese American and lesbian, in spaces that often did not allow both to coexist.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
In addition to periodicals from the 1950s including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and Seventeen magazine, some of the most useful references I consulted include:
BOOKS AND ARTICLES
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America. New York: Viking, 2003.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity: 20th Anniversary Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Holt, Nathalia. Rise of the Rocket Girls. New York: Little, Brown, 2016.
Kao, George. Cathay by the Bay: Glimpses of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the Year 1950. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Lim, Shirley Jennifer. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930–1960. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Moy, Victoria. Fighting for the Dream: Voices of Chinese American Veterans From World War II to Afghanistan. Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 2014.
Nee, Victor G., and Brett de Bary. Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.
Ni, Ting. The Cultural Experiences of Chinese Students Who Studied in the United States During the 1930s–1940s. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.
Rodger, Gillian. Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Sueyoshi, Amy. “Breathing Fire: Remembering Asian Pacific American Activism in Queer History.” In LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2016.
Wong, Edmund S. Growing Up in San Francisco’s Chinatown: Boomer Memories From Noodle Rolls to Apple Pie. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018.
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Yeh, Chiou-Ling. Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Chen, Amy, and Ying Zhan. Chinatown Files. Filmakers Library, 2001.
DeLarverié, Stormé, and Michelle Parkerson, et al. Stormé: the Lady of the Jewel Box. Women Make Movies, 2000.
Dong, Arthur E. et al. Forbidden City, U.S.A. DeepFocus Productions, 2015.
Poirier, Paris. Last Call At Maud’s. Frameline, 1993.