1886 – World Queerstory

MaRainey

It’s been a really great month for queer music — we’ve got a new album from country’s first openly gay singer Steve Grand; a new album from British synthpop band Years & Years, led by the openly gay Olly Alexander; and Panic! at the Disco’s lead singer Brendon Urie came out as pansexual. With all this new news, I — of course — wanted to check out some old queer music history. It’s no surprise that led me to the incomparable Mother of Blues herself: Ma Rainey.

Born Gertrude Pridgett on April 26, 1886 in Georgia or possibly in September of 1882 in Alabama (depending on if you believe Gertrude or the U.S. census — researchers seem generally not to believe her). She was the second of five kids (the other four were pretty definitely born in Alabama — and her parents lived in Alabama. I’m just saying.) At 12 or 14 years old, Gertrude performed at a talent show in Columbus, Georgia and then began performing in black minstrel shows. According to Gertrude, she first heard blues music in 1902. The story goes that she heard a performer singing a blues song at another minstrel show — Gertrude was entranced, committed the song to memory that day, and immediately began using it as an encore to her own performances. Of course, she also claimed to have invented the name of the blues genre (she didn’t) so she’s not always the most reliable source of information. Just sayin’.

Two years later she married William “Pa” Rainey — a traveling comedian and vaudeville performer. Some time shortly after that, she and her husband formed a company called the Alabama Fun Makers Company. The troupe was short-lived, and in 1906 they both joined Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit’s Foot Company where they both performed and became quite popular.

In 1912, the Rabbit’s Foot Company was taken over by F.S. Wolcott. The Raineys stuck with the company for two more years before joining Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza — which billed the duo as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues”. The name stuck, and the two were soon using it on their own without being part of a troupe of performers. Soon after that, Gertrude was getting bookings all on her own — using the name Madam Gertrude Rainey, or “Ma”.

When Ma took the stage, she was a sight to behold — adorned in a diamond tiara, a necklace made out of $20 pieces, rings on each finger, wearing a golden gown with gold-capped teeth. She carried a gun and an ostrich plume. Audiences were enthralled. In fact, even though she was in the deep south, her shows were peacefully integrated between black people and white people. She was sometimes hired by wealthy white people to play private parties, but after every single one of these she would go out dancing and socializing at the local black café.

The Raineys spent winter in New Orleans, where they met a large number of blues performers — including Louis Armstrong, Pops Foster, and another queer blues singer Bessie Smith. (A story later came about that Ma had kidnapped Bessie, forced her to join the Rabbit’s Foot Company, and made her sing the blues but even Bessie’s family denied the story.) In 1916, Ma separated from her husband, ending both their working and romantic relationships.

Her star continued to rise, and in 1923 Paramount Records asked her to record songs for them. With Paramount, over the next several years, she released more than 100 singles and sold so many of them that she has been credited with saving the company single-handedly. The recordings were very popular — but, you know how some performers are better live than if you’re just listening to them? Ma Rainey was universally considered one of those — and audiences became even more eager to see her, and even more excited at her shows.

Ma was not as open about her sexuality as some of the women of early blues — Gladys Bentley for instance — however, she wasn’t in the closet either. In 1925, neighbors called the police when one of her parties became too raucous. The officers arrived just as things were beginning to get shall we say intimate with the all-female group. Ma Rainey was arrested for “running an indecent party” but was bailed out by Bessie Smith the next day. This may have been one reason Rainey’s guitarist Sam Chatmon thought the two were romantically linked.

This incident may have been part of the inspiration for “Prove It On Me Blues”, which Rainey recorded in 1928. The lyrics are a fairly explicitly about lesbianism and of breaking gender norms. As far as I can tell, this was the first recorded piece of music to celebrate a queer sexuality.

“Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.
It’s true I wear a collar and tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while.”

ma-rainey-prove-it-on-me

Paramount ran an ad for the song — a drawing of Ma Rainey in a three-piece suit (albeit, with a skirt and heels) and a fedora, talking to a group of women with a policeman watching from across the street. The ad said “What’s all this? Scandal? … Don’t fail to get this record from your dealer!”

1928 was Ma Rainey’s last year as a recording artist. Popular music styles were changing, so her contract with Paramount ended. She toured a little bit longer, before settling down back in Columbus, Georgia. It was about this time (1932) that Sterling A. Brown wrote a poem about her called “Ma Rainey”, describing how powerful her performances were. In her later years, she opened a handful of movie theaters — the Lyric, the Airdome, and the Liberty Theatre. On December 22, 1939, she had a heart attack and died but her legacy continues to this day.

Six months after Ma’s death, Memphis Minnie wrote a tribute song called “Ma Rainey”. It was the first such song, but it would not be the last. In 1965, Bob Dylan paired Ma Rainey with Beethoven in his song “Tombstone Blues”. In 1982, August Wilson published a play about her called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In 1983, Ma Rainey was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame. In 1994, the U.S. Post Office released a commemorative stamp in her honor. Ten years later, her song “See See Rider Blues” (recorded in 1924 — you can hear it below) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was also added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. In 2015, a film about Bessie Smith was released (Bessie) in which Mo’Nique played Ma Rainey, and one year later the First Annual Ma Rainey International Blues Festival was held in Columbus, Georgia. Last year (2017), in the same city, the Rainey-McCullers School of the Arts opened — named after Ma Rainey and Carson McCullers.

In 1952, Langston Hughes released a poem called “Shadow of the Blues”, in which one character proclaims of Ma Rainey: “To tell the truth, if I stop and listen, I can still hear her!” I think we still hear a bit of Ma every time an artist releases a song about queerness — and if that’s the case, I hope we never stop hearing her.

250px-Karl_Maria_Kertbeny_(ca_1865) One thing that makes talking about LGBTQ+ history difficult is that most of this history happened before we had the current understanding of human sexuality and gender identity — and also before we had the words we have now to describe it. So, today, let’s talk about the writer who created the term “homosexual”: Karl-Maria Kertbeny (born Karl-Maria Benkert.)

Karl-Maria was born in Vienna on February 28, 1824, but his family moved to Budapest when he was a child. He grew up to become a journalist, memoirist, translator, and human rights campaigner.

Karl-Maria was also closeted homosexual (except, of course, that word didn’t exist yet). In his youth, he befriended a young man who was also a closeted homosexual (they were actually just friends from what I can tell). This friend would go on to be extorted and blackmailed because of his affections, and would ultimately commit suicide. This event had a massive impact on Karl-Maria, who wrote later in his life that it gave him an “instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice.”

Karl-Maria went on to join the army and — in 1847 — he changed his last name to Kertbeny. (Why, I honestly couldn’t say. Why he left his first name unchanged is also a complete mystery. Neither of these questions, however, leaves me quite as confused as his mustache. What is that and why?) By 1868, he had settled in Berlin.

Although in his public writings, Karl-Maria claimed to be “normally sexed”, his personal diary was filled with an illustrious collection of veiled homosexual encounters. In these diaries, he also describes tremendous fear following the arrest of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs was a correspondence of Karl-Maria, but is much more notable for essentially pioneering the modern LGBT+ rights movement.

Karl-Maria began writing extensively on the topic of homosexuality — claiming it was for “anthropological interest”. (I guess “anthropological interest” was the mid-19th century version of “no homo”.) On May 8, 1868, in a private letter, Karl-Maria first coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual”, although the words were yet to be used in public.

In 1869, Karl-Maria published the first of two pamphlets arguing against the Prussian sodomy law (known as Paragraph 143). In these pamphlets, he argued that consensual sexual acts were private and should not be subject to criminal law and — drawing on his own experiences — argued that the law itself was what had allowed his friend to be blackmailed, which led to his friend’s suicide.

He also argued, in these pamphlets, that homosexuality was actually an inborn trait, not something men chose out of their own wickedness (which was the common belief of the time. He was, along with Ulrichs and Heinrich Hössli, one of the first people to take this point of view.) It was over the course of these writings that the word “homosexual” was first used, as part of a system of defining sexual “types” without using derogatory language like “sodomite”. He also introduced the term “heterosexualism” for the attraction between men and women, “monosexualism” for masturbators, and a few other words that are still not widely used — but even if we ignored most of the words he came up with, he did set us up to have a comprehensive, descriptive way of talking about sexuality without degrading people who don’t fit into the “norm”.

After these pamphlets, Karl-Maria’s career faded. In 1880, he did contribute a chapter to Gustav Jäger’s “Discovery of Soul”. His chapter was taken out by the publisher, but his sexual terminology was still used throughout the book. Karl-Maria died on January 23, 1882 — two years later in Budapest, before any of his ideas would really take root.

In 1886, a German sexual researcher named Richard von Krafft-Ebing borrowed the terminology from “Discovery of Soul” for his own work “Psychopathia Sexualis”. This work became so influential that it caused Karl-Maria’s terminology to become the standard, accepted words that we still use today.

In 2001, Karl-Maria Kertbeny’s gravesite was located by a sociologist. The Hungarian LGBT+ community set about having a new tombstone put in place, and since 2002 it has been a tradition at Hungarian LGBT festivals to place a wreath on his grave.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)