>> We talked about the Harlem Renaissance
as if it's self-evident.
And we use the term Renaissance to suggest,
of course, the idea of rebirth,
that all of a sudden Harlem became
an interesting place at this historical moment,
roughly the late 1920s and 1930s.
But I want to suggest that in fact,
the Harlem Renaissance misplaces the emphasis.
Because Harlem had always been interesting.
What was different about this historical period was that
White culture finally became
interested in what was going on in Harlem.
I want to argue that one of the reasons that
white culture became interested in what was going
on in Harlem was that a prohibition had created
a world in which if you
wanted to engage in aspects of vice,
drinking, and of course,
especially non-normative forms of sex.
You have to go up to Harlem. It was another country
and in a pattern not unfamiliar even today,
the police left these aspects alone,
of course, after being paid off.
In Harlem, White people for the very first time
came to experience African American culture.
In so doing, talked about it's
very different social codes.
Most notably for our purposes with regard to sexuality.
Because at this moment,
Harlem was very much
a different world with regard to same-sex desire.
Harlem, for example, had something called buffet flats.
Buffet flats were rented apartments in which in one room,
one would see a man and a woman in
another room would be a man and a man,
in another room would be a woman and a woman.
You could either watch or for an extra bit of money,
you could participate and what was striking about
the buffet flats is in fact the name, a buffet.
It suggests of course,
that what you are interested in,
what you partake of is merely an aspect of your taste.
It doesn't define who you are or
make you different than anybody else.
Harlem had a much more open same-sex culture
than anywhere else in America at the time.
As White first came
to Harlem and experience that culture,
they were enamored of it,
talked about it and wrote about it.
No figure more powerfully than Carl Van Vechten,
who was the great popularizer
of the Harlem Renaissance to White America.
But it wasn't only to White America
that these same-sex codes signified.
Importantly, one of
the leading blues artists of the period,
Ma Rainey took one career-limiting incident and made it,
in fact, something that made her quite celebrated.
[MUSIC] Ma Rainey was hosting in 1925,
basically a lesbian orgy.
The police were called because of the noise.
They rated the apartment.
All the girls escaped, but my rating,
who's a large woman, fell down
the fire escape and was arrested.
Everybody knew that Ma Rainey had
been arrested for hosting the lesbian orgy.
But nonetheless, there was nothing in
the social codes or the law of
the time that allowed her to be charged with that,
so she was charged doesn't
matter for running a body house.
Three years later, in 1928,
she releases a record called Prove It on Me Blues.
Here's the advertisement for Prove It on Me Blues.
It shows Ma Rainey, the large,
heavy set woman in the center looking seriously
at two svelte younger women while, cops look at her.
She's using the very incident that got him
into trouble to sell the record and
the lyrics of Prove It on Me Blues even more powerfully
attest to this moment that everybody then understood.
They say, I'll do it.
She sings, ain't nobody caught me.
You're all got to prove it on me.
Remember she was arrested in the fire escape.
She wasn't arrested red-handed.
[MUSIC] Then she goes on to say,
yes, it's true I wear a collar and a tie.
Yes, it's true, I don't like men.
She's constantly seeding the recognition
on the part of the listener,
but she's actually not interested in men,
that she is a lesbian.
But then she teases back,
but they say, I do it yeah,
ain't, nobody caught me.
You-all got to prove it on me.
It worked as a strategy and as a song
and this was the number one selling of 1928.