Mabel Hampton (1902–1989)
What a life this Black butch queer Harlemite elder led!
Her father took off before her birth and her mother died when Mabel was two months old. She lived in North Carolina with her grandmother until she died when Mabel was seven. She was put on a train to New York and lived in Harlem with her aunt and a minister uncle, who raped her.
Soon, the eight-year-old ran away and walked the Harlem streets. A woman gave her a nickel and she rode the train to Jersey City. A woman who thought she could find Mabel’s family took her in. Mabel provided sketchy information, and so lived with this Black family until she was 17. (The family’s last name was White, so some sources misclaim that the family was white.) That’s when she started working as a dancer at Coney Island and learned about “the life” from a woman in the revue.
Now in Harlem, Mabel began dance work. But in 1920 she was arrested outside of a party. Why? Because an unescorted woman leaving a bar or party could be charged with prostitution.
She went before New York’s first female judge, Jean Norris, who was infamous for being harsh on Black women and sex workers. Mabel was sentenced to three years and sent to Bedford Hills prison, where she met many lesbians.
Released early for good behavior, she was told to stay out of New York City. She didn’t, and had to serve the rest of her sentence. Upon release, she performed in Harlem (Garden of Joy, Lafayette Theatre) but her heart wasn’t in it, due to the racism and misogyny she encountered. She then began cleaning white women’s houses.
Meanwhile, Mabel was hanging with Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, and Jackie “Moms” Mabley, who threw wild parties. Nothing matched A’Lelia Walker’s “salons” though, where a butler ushered her into the ballroom, where large pillows lined the walls and short tables bore fruits and wines. Naked women came by offering things to eat, and men laid with women, women with women, men with men.
Prohibition’s end stopped the wild times and the Depression cut deeply. For Black working-class women without WWII jobs, there was only domestic work. In fact, the ‘40s were called the decade of the Bronx Slave Market, when Black women stood on Brooklyn and Bronx street corners while white women drove by on the lookout for cheap labor (two decades later Mabel began working as a janitor at Jacobi Hospital).
But no story of Mabel could possibly be complete without accounts of her wife, Lillian Foster. Mabel recalls when they met in “Not Just Passing Through,” a 1994 documentary:
I was going downtown, and she … was standing on the corner. So I said, ‘Oh that’s a cute little woman.’ I see the streetcar coming, and it was full. She says, ‘You wanna get on there?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’
She says, ‘well come on.’ So, she jumped up, pushing … people out the way, and me, I jumped up there, and I looked her over.
She says, ‘You live by yourself?’
I says, ‘Yeah.’
So she says, ‘You married?’
I said, ‘No, I’m not ... I don’t like men that well. Why should I marry?’
That’s that. So she came to the house for dinner. Had a couple of my friends there, they’d all been married for quite a [while]. I was single, they said, ‘Mable, you don’t do nothing but run around with women, why don’t you settle down?’
I said, ‘Well maybe I will.’
Documentary Interviewer ‘How long before you ... ?’ ‘Oh, didn’t take too long, just about two weeks. I didn’t want to rush it. Yes, for 46 years, she stayed all night. And she stayed with me until 1978, when she passed away.’
Lillian recalled in 1976, “Forty-four years ago I met Mabel. We was a wonderful pair. I’ll never forget it … I met her in 1932, September 22. And we haven’t been separated since in our whole life.”
They referred to each other as “husband and wife.” They proudly marched together in the first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979.
They lived at 639 East 169th Street, Bronx from 1943 until Lillian’s death in 1978. Mabel stayed on until1988. There’s a marker for “The Mabel Hampton and Lillian Foster Residence.”
In Mabel’s 1984 address to New York’s Pride, she affirmed, “I, Mabel Hampton, have been a Lesbian all my life, for 82 years, and I am proud of myself and my people. I would like for all my people to be free in this country and all over the world, my gay people and my black people.”
In 1985, she was Grand Marshal of the New York Pride March.
To hear Mabel Hampton at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and see photos, visit herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/items/ browse?collection=29.
In her new book, “Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South,” LaShonda Mims explores the history of queer women in Atlanta and Charlotte following World War II. Uniting Southern women’s history with urban history, the book serves as an imaginatively constructed archive of feminist newsletters, queer bar guides, oral histories, and political rhetoric to explore the complex history of lesbian life in the South.
In an interview with Georgia Voice, Mims dove into the complexities of this history, from racial archival inequities to the controversial importance of corporate support, and what readers can expect when they pick up “Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists.”
Quotes have been edited for clarity. Read the full interview online at thegavoice.com.
What can people expect when reading “Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists?” The book is divided into five chapters. The first one looks at opportunities: how do women find each other or build queer lives when there aren’t the structures to meet queer people? The first chapter looks at preStonewall, in and around World War II. The second one is connections, and that takes from the ’50s to the ’70s and looks at how women found each other in more public spaces. I call it the bar chapter … The third chapter is visibility, and that’s 1970s lesbian feminism. It looks at the political, visible activist efforts. These were the drastic dykes; literally, these women in Charlotte called themselves the drastic dykes, so I can’t take credit for that incredible name. They gave up male-identified jobs and they started a magazine for queer women writers called Sinister Wisdom — it’s still publishing today. Chapter four is Pride. That is the chapter inspired by my own travels to Pride in Atlanta and looking at the political struggles that both Charlotte and Atlanta had to maintain Pride. The fifth chapter is called institutions, and that looks at the power of corporations in each city to shape the [experience] for queer people.
I’ll start with asking about the necessity of establishing a lesbian history as its own separate entity from gay male history. Can you talk about the differences in these histories and the experiences of gay men and lesbian women during these times? Queer history started mostly focused on men, mostly focused on white men. We did get one or two books on lesbian organizing, but a lot of books would be written as queer or gay history, but the women would just be a chapter. As George Chauncy noted in “Gay New York”, lesbians lived their lives in completely separate ways and women [in general] lived their lives in completely separate ways with completely separate hurdles in what they could accomplish.
The networks women build — the conferences, bookstores, music festivals — are as much about being lesbians as they are about being women. That makes a very different history, and that means you take a very different path in how you research.
I did want to ask you about this corporate element you mentioned. I think that’s a hot button topic right now with the increasing corporate presence at Pride. Can you talk more about the role these corporations had in creating space for these lesbian women? It’s a complicated argument, and one I can expect to get some pushback on. It was just hard for me to ignore, especially in Charlotte, how much opportunity and possibility changed when Bank of America led the Southeast by offering partner benefits. Corporate support for Pride events and corporate benefits for lesbian and gay employees altered the climate for queer life in each city. That’s the point I’m making. I don’t want to give them any more credit than that.
We talked about the differences in gay men’s and lesbians’ experiences. I’d like to talk about the difference among the lesbians’ experiences along racial and class lines, especially in a city as Black as Atlanta. What I found pretty quickly was that white women who are queer are also white women in the South, and they tend to build their lives quite separately from Black and brown women. There are definitely stratifications along class. There is some privilege in being able to quit your job and become a lesbian separatist.
The privileges of the archives mean that white women’s stories have been saved and historicized in a way that Black, Brown, and Asian women’s haven’t. What I learned talking to Black women who are archiving and working to tell their queer stories is that they want to tell their stories. They don’t want white women telling their stories. That doesn’t mean I want to ignore what Black women were saying, but much of the sources I had [were told] through white women’s eyes. Just like much of what I learned about women came through gay men’s publications for a long time. I had to go through layers of privilege and just do what historians do, which is tell the story based on the evidence we have and then hope someone later tells a more complete story based on better evidence.
You can purchase Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists at Charis Books and More in person and online at charisbooksandmore.com.