Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies. Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. xii + 260.

James F. Wilson's Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance is a fresh look at the performance culture in Harlem during the 1920s and '30s. In rich archival detail, Wilson argues that "race and gender in the [Harlem] theaters and nightclubs of the era were often highly ambiguous, ambivalent, and bewildering" (3), reflecting the ways male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, high and "low" culture mixed in Harlem Renaissance performance culture. As a result, Harlem emerges in the text as a "fragmented site of identification" where no "'authentic' African American identity" can be claimed (45).

Wilson argues that Harlem's semipublic party scene was an integral facet of what that neighborhood had to offer as an entertainment mecca. From A'Leilia Walker's infamously salacious salons to bawdy rent parties, the semipublic was a space of non-commercialized and inaugural performance. These spaces inspired headliners to try out new material as well as providing a space where less-established performers could steal the raw material for their next show. The semipublic space was a generative forum for Harlem's performance culture and essential to the "emergence of a lesbian and gay subculture" (28)....