In 1854, just before the American Civil War, domestic worker Addie Brown met Rebecca Primus, the daughter of an important and well-known Connecticut family. The two women were born free, which meant that they never had to undergo the horrors of slavery, though slavery persisted throughout the South.
The two survived the war, and in 1865 Rebecca was asked to leave Connecticut and move south to help build a school for newly freed African Americans. By then, Addie and Rebecca had developed an intense and passionate relationship, so the move was extremely difficult.
Over the next few years, Addie and Rebecca wrote letters detailing their love and lust for one another. In one letter, Addie wrote, ‘O my Dear Dear Rebecca when you press me to your Dear bosom… happy I was, last night I gave any thing if I could only layed my poor aching head on your bosom. O Dear how soon will it be I can be able to do so…’
As time went on, Addie became frustrated. It had been a long time since she had seen Rebecca, and she was worried that Rebecca’s feelings may have changed. To find out, Addie played the oldest trick in the book and attempted to make Rebecca jealous by suggesting that one of her colleagues was into her: ‘The girls are very friendly towards me. I am eather in they room or they in mine, every night out ten and sometimes past. One of them wants to sleep with me. Perhaps I will give my consent some of these nights.’1
It worked. Rebecca wrote back alarmed and Addie swiftly backtracked: ‘If you think that is my bosom that captivated the girl that made her want to sleep with me, she got sadly disappointed injoying it, for I had my back towards all night and my night dress was butten up so she could not get to my bosom.’
The correspondence continued for sixteen years and only ended when Addie died at just twenty-eight years old. Their relationship is significant for several reasons. Not only is it rare that we have physical evidence of sex and love between two women during the American Civil War, but also, they were Black and came from very different backgrounds, Addie working-class and Rebecca well-educated. It’s also great to see a woman attempting to make another woman jealous, using the same tactics that many lesbians use today. Perhaps I will give my consent one of these nights? In other words, ‘I’m gonna shag someone else if you don’t reassure me of your feelings’.
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Civil wars were seemingly contagious, because in 1936, Spain’s right-wing nationalists went head-to-head with the left-wing democrats. The war ended in favour of the nationalists, but the left didn’t go down easily, just ask Lucía Sánchez Saornil. Well, you can’t because she’s dead, but you know what I mean.
Lucía was born in Madrid in 1895. Unlike many women at the time, Lucía was educated and attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. She was also a writer, and during the Spanish Civil War, she made sure to write about the women who were playing their part.
Although it may sound like she was a feminist, she did not identify as such. Lucía believed feminism was for upper-class snobs who wanted equality for wealthy women and not the working class. Instead, Lucía embraced militant anarchy, fought against fixed gender roles, and even helped create the Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an organisation that addressed sexism, women’s liberation and the social revolution. Oh, and she was also super gay.
In 1937, Lucía met América Barrosa. The two forged a lifelong relationship and were forced to flee once the nationalists took power.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany and immediately acted like a dick. Before Hitler, 1920s Berlin was heaving with homos. It wasn’t quite legal, but queers were tolerated as religion was rejected in favour of more progressive attitudes towards sex and gender. The homosexuals embraced this relaxed attitude and started calling their gay bars super gay names like Dorian Gray and The Magic Flute Dance Palace. The best thing of all? It wasn’t just queer men; queer women were also invited to the party. Finally!
One of these women was Lotte Hahm. Lotte owned Violetta, the most successful women-only club in Berlin. She was also deeply entrenched in the lesbian scene and wrote for the lesbian-themed magazine Die Freundin (The Girlfriend).
Not long after Hitler was elected, Violetta was closed, same-sex dancing was banned, and on 8 March 1933, the last issue of Die Freundin was published. Then, one day, while Lotte was out walking, a random man appeared from nowhere and asked her to watch his suitcase. Before she could say anything, the man had vanished, and the Gestapo were emptying the bag’s contents onto the ground. Lotte watched in horror as communist paraphernalia fell from the bag and scattered across the ground.
Lotte was arrested and sent to Moringen, a concentration camp for women. Once there she was beaten, whipped and thrown into ice-cold baths, an experience that left her half-paralysed. After a visit from Heinrich Himmler, the camp was closed, and Lotte was one of just a select few who were miraculously released back to Berlin. When she arrived, she resumed organising underground social events for lesbians and did so until her death in 1967.
But Lotte Hahm wasn’t the only luscious lesbian in town. Berlin was also home to the comedy queen Claire Waldoff. Claire was known for her fast-paced wit, double-entendres and extreme sass, which she showcased at her successful cabaret show. At the same time, Claire’s girlfriend, Olga ‘Olly’ von Roeder, ran a popular salon that she held in their home. The salon attracted entertainers from all over Berlin, including Marlene Dietrich; no surprises there then. Claire and Olly were very smitten, so smitten that Claire later said, ‘We both hit the jackpot with each other… Olly is a truly rare, honourable character, a wonderful person.’
They were #lesbiangoals.
The Nazis didn’t like Claire and Olly, or their band of merry lesbians, so they closed her show and told everyone that she had killed herself. She hadn’t. So, after providing the Nazis with her Aryan certificate (yep, that was a thing) Claire was once more allowed to perform. It didn’t last long, though, since Claire’s raunchy songs, and the Jews who composed them, continued to irritate the Nazis. She was banned yet again.
Unlike many, Claire and Olly were lucky enough to move to Bavaria and live a relatively peaceful life. They died within five years of one another (Claire in 1957 and Olly in 1963) and were buried on the same lot.
Berlin wasn’t the only place embracing sexual liberation before the war. Paris also enjoyed a little slap and tickle. Le Monocle, one of the hottest clubs in town, welcomed all sorts of identities and capitalised on breaking gender boundaries. It was also run by the glamorously groomed Lulu de Montparnasse, a beautiful butch with a slick haircut and a superbly tailored tuxedo. The club became so popular that women came from far and wide to experience the wonders inside.
It was named after a trend at the time where certain women wore a monocle to discreetly let others know that they were into puss. Soon enough, the monocle became part of the lesbian uniform, the Birkenstock of its day, and a must-have in a lesbian wardrobe. Le Monocle thrived throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but of course, after the Nazis occupied France, it was closed.
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Lesbians have always been great at creating spaces for themselves. Take Polish immigrant Eva Kotchever, who in 1925 opened lesbian tearoom Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village, New York.
Eve’s Hangout was everything you would expect from a Greenwich Village lesbian tearoom. There were regular poetry readings, dramatic musical presentations, intense group discussions, cat chat, sex chat and tea chat. Eva also included men, and had a sign on the door that said, ‘Men are admitted but not welcome’.
And people say lesbians aren’t funny?
The bar was successful, but because a successful lesbian is a threat to humanity, the police ransacked the joint. During the raid, the police found Eva’s collection of lesbian-centred sexual stories. Eva tried to pretend that they weren’t anything to do with lesbianism, but the book’s name, Lesbian Love, gave it away.
Eva was arrested and charged with obscenity and disorderly conduct. She was deported back to Poland but somehow managed to make her way to France, where she opened another lesbian tearoom that was equally successful. Not long after, the Nazis invaded France. They didn’t like Eva or her successful lesbian tearoom. She would be murdered along with thousands of other lesbians in Auschwitz.
In the early days of Nazi Germany, lesbianism was not against the law. The Nazis’ main concern was with race, so it didn’t really matter where a woman stuck her fingers, so long as she had a womb to reproduce white genes.
As the Second World War progressed, things changed, and lesbians were often arrested and sent to their deaths. For instance, Henny Schermann and Mary Punjer were murdered for drinking in an underground lesbian bar. The Nazis described Henny as a ‘compulsive lesbian’ and Mary as a ‘very active (sassy) lesbian’. The perfect blend, if you ask me. On the back of Henny’s prison photograph, it was said that both her sexual preference and her Jewishness led to her arrest.
Elli Smula and Margarete Rosenberg were arrested after their co-workers had grassed them up to the Gestapo. The Gestapo claimed that their sexual orientation had made them shit at their jobs, so they were sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp with the word ‘lesbian’ emblazoned on their documents.
Thankfully, some lesbians did escape, one being Annette Eick. Before the war, Annette delighted in the Berlin queer scene, and often drank in the Dorian Gray. It was here Annette met Marlene Dietrich, or a girl who looked like her anyway. The two got chatting, started flirting, and ended up in bed. The next day, the Nazis arrived, and the Dietrich lookalike disappeared.
Annette was Jewish, and a lesbian, so she needed to get out of Germany ASAP. She had heard that a nearby farm was offering permits for Jewish youths, so she made her way there in the hope that she could get one. Not long after, the farm was invaded and everybody was taken to a police prison. Luckily, Annette managed to escape, but her passport was still at the farm. Like a boss, she waited until dark, crept into the farm and recovered her passport among the debris.
On her way back home, she was stopped by a postman, who gave her a letter.
‘It’s a love letter,’ he said.
Annette tore open the letter and found an immigration permit for England. It was from the Marlene Dietrich lookalike. Although she managed to escape, she never saw her parents again, and lived the remainder of her life in England.
Never seeing your parents again was a common consequence at the time. In 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank, her family and several others went into hiding in a secret annex located in the rear end of a large building in the centre of Amsterdam. To pass the time and because she loved writing, Anne kept a day-to-day record in a diary that she had purchased just before the war. In the diary, she wrote about her relationships with her family, the other people who were sharing the annex, and her life before the war.
In 1944, the annex was raided, and the group were discovered and deported to Auschwitz. When they arrived, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was immediately separated from his wife, Edith, and his two daughters, Margot and Anne. Edith then remained at Auschwitz and starved to death, while Margot and Anne were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus.
Otto was rescued and liberated by Soviet troops in early 1945. Upon his release, he made his way back to Amsterdam and soon realised that out of all those taken from the annex, he was the only one who had survived. He also discovered that Anne’s diary had been salvaged by a resident of the house.
The diary was eventually published, although Anne’s potential queerness like her romantic feelings towards her friend Jacqueline van Maarsen were not originally included. In an entry from January 1944, finally published in 1986, Anne wrote about wanting to touch Jacque’s breasts and kiss her. Female nudes sent her into ecstasy: ‘Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend!’
Bet you don’t remember that from history class.
When asked about her relationship with Anne years later, Jacqueline said, ‘We had a close relationship and I liked being with her, but she laid a claim on me and I didn’t know how to handle that. I always had to prove to her that we were “best friends”. Her passionate declarations of friendship were too much for me sometimes. Then I met up with other friends and she was jealous and unhappy.’
Maybe Anne would have gone on to identify as lesbian. Maybe she wouldn’t have. But there was no denying Anne’s longing for her friend, how she missed her, and how she got excited when she thought about her. Her would-be sexual preferences are not relevant to her fame, not really. But I wish she could have known that, in different circumstances, her longing might one day be understood and even reciprocated.
The quashing of queer culture was not among the worst Nazi atrocities. While we will never know how this sub-culture would have evolved in their absence, we do know that 1920s Europe had been kind to people who did not comply with compulsory heterosexuality. Berlin had numerous bars welcoming gay, bisexual, lesbian and trans folk, as did Vienna. There was even an institute for sexual research, specialising in what we would now refer to as transgender studies, a subject that had been rarely investigated before. In Italy there were queer districts, in Paris there were queer bookshops, and even European films were beginning to portray sympathetic, even likeable queer characters. But faced with the far greater powers of Nazism and fascism, queer culture didn’t have a hope in hell of flourishing.