Gay bar east harlem

At its height, it was home to more night clubs and speakeasies than Broadway. To the world at large, the Village was known for its same-sex denizens, while Harlem was harlem famous as an enclave for African-Americans. For insiders, it was a different story. There the gay clubs stayed east all night, and all comers were welcome.

Some of the chi-chi nightclubs featured black performers and white-only audiences, but many of the neighborhood places played to mixed or exclusively black audiences. And gays also came under period attack from their neighborhood churches. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. All were seen as disrupting the unifying force of the family.

Yet gay men and women flocked to Harlem during the Great Migration. The bar of unmarried men between the ages of 35 and 45 was three times higher than the national average. Some gay people were flamboyant, some were quietly out, some led double lives with straight spouses and semi-secret gay lovers, and some kept their sexual preferences a secret for their entire lives.

Life could be volatile in Harlem. But it was active, and daring, and aspirational. One example: for many years there was an annual drag ball at Hamilton Lodge in Harlem where both black and white performers vied for First Prize. Suffice it to say that it had no counterpart on Park Gay. Harlem bestowed an odd combination of persecution and celebration on its gay men and women, whose reactions ran the expected gamut from fear to defiance and pride.

He lived an extraordinary life, and a courageous one—it took guts to be an uncloseted black jazz musician in mid-century America. As a child, his mother protected him from his abusive father, encouraging his artistic and intellectual nature to flourish. He first rose to fame in high school when he wrote a musical revue Fantastic Rhythm of near-professional quality.

It became so successful that the troupe toured for several years in black theaters as far as western Pennsylvania. They were sometimes joined by big-name performers like Billy Eckstine and Errol Garner—heady stuff for a self-taught youngster.

HARLEM, BILLY STRAYHORN, ETHEL WATERS, HALL JOHNSON, ALBERTA HUNTER, AND ME

When Strayhorn was 23, he attended a Duke Ellington concert in Pittsburgh and managed to go backstage to meet his idol. Ellington was intrigued and asked Strayhorn to play a little something for him. The rest is history. That dazzling impromptu audition led to a year association with Ellington as composer, arranger, and sometime orchestra manager.

Strayhorn demonstrated his unique value to Ellington early on in their association. It would have been ruinous for Ellington to lose the crucial income from broadcasts, especially with a live radio show in Los Angeles just a few days away. Strayhorn came to the rescue on two fronts: he was not an ASCAP member, which exempted his songs from the ban.