“Every time we lose a black trans woman we are losing history that we cannot get back”

— Bryanna Jenkins

Mya Hall was riding with her friend Brittney when they made a wrong turn & their Ford Escape moved towards the NSA operated gates of Fort Meade; after Mya failed to heed instructions to turn back from the NSA gates and rammed into a police vehicle NSA police opened fire.

The night before, they were both picked up in Baltimore by an unidentified older man & taken to an Elkridge motel. Early the next morning the two women rode off in his SUV headed south, away from Baltimore. Both women were sex workers. Mya was 27 & had been working the street for more than 6 years while Brittany was a newcomer to the Baltimore scene, at the time only 20 years old.

The shooting occurred around 9 a.m Monday March 30th, 2015 at the western gates of Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County. Mya died at the scene as the car she was driving sped towards a parked police vehicle. Brittney was badly injured, sustaining multiple gunshot wounds to the chest before being rushed to Maryland Shock Trauma. One officer is also reportedly injured, in press footage, he is talking comfortably from a gurney to first responders with his arm in a sling.

Fort Meade is the largest workplace in Maryland with 51,000 uniformed personnel, civilian employees and contractors. The army installation was then recently under fire for collecting the cell data of millions of Americans, revealed in a leak from Edward Snowden. The compound is notoriously secretive; established in 1952, its existence wasn’t acknowledged officially until a Senate investigation in 1975. The pair were not the first to make a wrong turn and end up at the gates of the compound but other similar incidents have ended in fines & court dates, not deadly violence. This incident was noteworthy enough to reach then-President Barack Obama, visiting Boston, according to a White House spokesperson.

Much like the death of Freddie Grey 13 days later, police & reporters used defamation in order to justify the violence done to Mya & Brittney. They were misgendered in most media reporting, their identities explained away as a possible terrorist disguise. Both were labeled intruders, despite never making it past the gates. Mya’s mugshot from a criminal history of robbery and prostitution was the most frequent context given to her recently deceased body.

The Baltimore Uprising, which began on April 12, 2015, gave voice to those struggling to cope with Freddie Gray’s death & the larger implications for Black life in Baltimore. However, this revolution largely failed to include Black transgender women. Thus it was the fatigue stemming from erasure, constant violence, & harassment, that would bring trans leaders, like Bryanna Jenkins, to create the Baltimore Transgender Alliance.

There was a huge activism boom in Baltimore in the months following the uprising of 2015. This potential energy led to The Baltimore Trans Uprising in July. A radical takeover of pride in June at the front of the parade to protest the erasure of TWOC & their issues, & The Trans March Of Remembrance/Resilience (TMOR) in November — a yearly protest headed by the Baltimore Transgender Alliance meant to honor those lost to trans related violence & the strength of our sisters who are still alive.

These events would catalyze the organizers of a trans liberation movement previously absent from Baltimore. Until then, trans representation meant working under larger LGBT goals without the trust or power to execute truly trans-led visions. Stepping out from under the LGBT umbrella meant truly meaningful trans work could then occur.

Much like the Baltimore Gay Alliance, formed 40 years earlier, The Baltimore Transgender Alliance was explicitly political from its beginnings. The Baltimore Gay Alliance does not exist today but the BTA is a continuation of that activist & organizing history.

And whatever happened to Brittney? The young & resilient survivor of police violence never saw the 25 thousand dollar settlement from that day, pocketed by her birth family. She continued to engage in survival sex work & street hustling. The trauma from that incident would continue to haunt her but she received a lot of help from our community both through soliciting individual donations & through the Baltimore Transgender Alliance (and other community organizations like YES center) who helped her out of more than one sticky situation. The BTA laid her to rest in April 2019 after she died from an overdose. Her vigil was attended by hundreds of people who knew her & helped her keep herself alive.

Brittney & Mya will always be remembered by the legacy of trans activism they inspired.

Contemporary trans resilience was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Royal testified that the cab had picked him up at Pressman & Madison nearby & that he had instructed the driver to take him to the park for fresh air. When the magistrate asked the Royal to respond to the fact that the police had caught him in such a compromising situation, he remarked, flippantly, “Well, this is the first time I’ve been caught this year.” This indicates that sex workers like Princeton were accustomed to regular interaction with the police.

When a fine was announced for both parties, Royal turned to three effeminate male spectators in the courtroom & said: “Sisters of the clan, I need money.” The four were able to pool the $25 necessary to avoid jail time, something that the cab driver was unable to do. Notably, a black homosexual community of sex workers operated so effectively that it superseded racial and class differences that might have otherwise caused Princeton Royal to be imprisoned and the white taxi driver to be released. This case proves street-based &/or full-service queer sex workers have been able to reduce harm through community for nearly a century.

A headline that reads “The Art Museum Drive Incident” details the wrongful arrest of another gay person outside a public park in 1981. The letter is written by the arrestee's attorney, & follows that the unnamed gay person went walking on the street by Wyman Park, Art Museum Drive after trying to go to the community center & discovering it was closed for the night. The individual was propositioned for sex by an undercover police officer who arrested him, despite his refusal. Because the sting was unsuccessful, the individual was charged with “Violation of Park Rule 50, park curfew”

These charges were successfully cleared in court because he was just outside of the park, but it was clear that this arrest was targeted not at park curfew violators but gay sex workers who used the park for cruising. The dismissal of this case on such arbitrary bounds elaborates that criminalization can occur for any reason. Indeed, at least 62 people were arrested that hot summer weekend for similar incidental charges.

This was a part of a targeted “clean-up” effort emboldened by a city ordinance that prevented loitering in all public places. Passed in the city council in 1979, Ordinance 1195 contained deliberate vague wording that police used to expand their power & control over the streets.

Baltimore City Police used this new city ordinance to mass arrest street-based sex workers, many of whom were black & transgender. The MDACLU challenged this new law as it unconstitutionally infringed on the right to assembly. These loitering cases were less about blocking walkways & more about who has access to public space. During the ACLU’s defense, which focused heavily on the discriminatory intent of police officers, two defendants were found guilty & two were acquitted; essentially resulting in an inconclusive ruling. However, reported incidents decrease in the months following the defeat.

The following year, 1982, the Baltimore Gay Alliance publically replied to a letter from Democratic candidate Kurt Shmoke, who was then running for State’s Attorney, urging him to consider decriminalizing sex work. In his letter, he stated concern over the solicitation of male sex workers in the Patterson Park/Eastern Avenue area who he referred to as “young boys”. The BGA was quick to call out that his perspective reflected a mentality that sex workers are victims & that gay people are pedophiles. At the time it was radical to have such a political candidate taking part in any conversation with LGBT community & the BGA doubled down on their activist roots by challenging their new supporter. This letter shows that the decriminalization of sex work has been a goal of gay activists for more than 38 years.

Historical Treatment of Gay Sex Workers was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Louise Parker Kelly, author of LGBT Baltimore & co-founder of the Gay Paper, shares a story with WYPR about the discrimination she saw on the board of the GLCCB; fed up, she addresses one of the white board members who asked her to get a token from the black community: “‘John, why don’t you go look in your living room & if you don’t have anybody there than what does that say because I don’t want to keep doing this. We need to create relationships’ — & to the credit of many of the men who worked at the community center they did that — But I think the black gay community in Baltimore was faced with a double whammy & the people who stepped forward were some of the strongest & most impressive people I have ever met” Indeed, people like Louis Huges, Carlton Smith, Monica Yorkman, Paulette Young & Louise Parker Kelly herself maintain their place as elders of the Baltimore LGBT community with incredible strength.

Allegations of racism within Baltimore’s gay community are not uncommon; for example, Black and White Men Together, a gay men’s organization in Baltimore, sued the Torch & the Porthole, two gay bars operating in the mid 80’s, for discrimination. The bars stood accused of carding African-American patrons with multiple forms of identification when white patrons would go unbothered. Black and White Men Together won their suit & established a legal precedent for discrimination in Baltimore.

Many early lesbians first identified with feminism, finding their roots in the women’s liberation movement of the ’70s. The gay liberation movement at the time was largely male & encouraged the separatism of lesbians from gay men who felt they had juxtaposed political goals. The GCCB had just begun settling into their new building on Chase street when the Lesbian Community Center closed in 1983. Thus many lesbians put forth tremendous effort to make this new center more accommodating to women. Foremost of which was the formation of a popular new GCCB program, Womonspace, which maintained a separate space for lesbians at the center. Subsequently, in 1985 the GCCB added the word “Lesbian” to the GLCCB’s name to create the most commonly used abbreviation of the organization.

The first president of the GLCCB was a black woman named Paulette Young; a founding member of the Baltimore Gay Alliance in 1975. As well the organizations most recent executive director, Mimi Demisew, is a black woman

There has been consistent tension from within the LGBT acronym; as is evidenced by the write-ins included, trans people have often been used to distance the struggles of gay men & women. Frequently, these conflicts manifest the difference between radical & assimilationist goals.

Sometimes this opposition is named with the acronym “TERF” & other times it is named inadequately as “microaggressions”. TERF stands for Trans exclusionary radical feminist & describes a biologically founded feminist ideal where woman (inadequately) describes the body.

During 2018’s Pride, a small group of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists situated themselves between the mayor & police. Protest leader, J**** B***, was utilizing her privilege as she briefly stood as the head of the law & /policy component of the mayor’s LGBT task force. One of the first things that she attempted in this role was to try to reverse years of trans-affirming policy changes won in the wake of the Consent decree process. Her official recommendation was to have people searched/separated by sex & not gender identity or preference. This did not represent the interests of the task force & her email was accordingly disregarded. Trans leaders knew that this would cause immense harm to arrested trans individuals & she was removed from the commission shortly thereafter.

Assimilationist politics make themselves apparent through upward appeals of ‘fairness’ to oppressive groups, often at the expense of their original message. This can be evidenced through their constant cooperation with police as well as B***s appearance on Fox News with other known misogynists the following month.

We have seen similar violently anti-trans behaviors from gay men. The Eagle, a gay bar located on N Charles near Baltimore Safe Haven, tried to get a nearby 24-hour gas station closed in 2017 because it served a largely black & trans clientele. The Baltimore Eagle attended local community meetings & sought the signatures of 10 area businesses; their plight was also unsuccessful but represents the distance they would go to separate what happens in their building from the outdoor sex workers of the stroll. When it seemed like they were making progress on this issue, after having hired TPOC management, they fired all of the ‘new hires’ (read: TPOC) with little notice or reason.

Intracommunity Conflict was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mt Vernon was home to the Gay Community Center of Baltimore for 34 years & is where Baltimore held its first pride celebration in 1975. The history is there to legitimize it.

However many of Mt. Vernon residents today are upper-middle class white gay men, others having long been priced out of the neighborhood. Many of the older gay institutions are closing or moving for similar reasons. The GLCCB moved from its home on West Chase st after 34 years in 2014. This northward move to the Old Goucher neighborhood was an attempt to keep up with shifting community dynamics & was reflected with a change in leadership direction. Black leadership within the GLCCB also brought Baltimore Pride, the GLCCB’s biggest fundraising event, north with them to Station North. Former GLCCB executive director, Jabari Lyles shares insight in an interview with the Baltimore Sun after the move: “Old Goucher is just a more suitable neighborhood for the makeup of our community. We recognize that many of our community are low-income folks, they’re people of color, they’re black folks. Old Goucher made a lot more sense to celebrate something like Baltimore Pride.”

Recent changes in the leadership, location & demographics of the GLCCB show that community centers must follow community if they want to keep from becoming museums. Community centers have the difficult task of getting people under the same roof, so it makes sense that the roof of the GLCCB should be in the 21218, the area with the highest amount of LGBT residents, according to recent Baltimore city population data.

“The Lesbian Community in Baltimore — A Short History” offers the tale of the Ida Brayman house on Homestead st in Waverly, where women of the liberation movement radicalized through living together in a collective house named after a woman labor organizer. They describe gradually finding lesbianism through their opposition to patriarchy & capitalism.

In the 1970s & early 80s, the mostly white women/lesbians that comprised the second-wave feminist movement lived in the mixed-income, mixed-race neighborhoods that comprised the 21218: Waverly, Abell & North Charles Village. It was out of this women’s liberation movement that came lesbian identity, notably distinct from the largely male-focused gay liberation movement of the time. This new lesbian identity found a home in the socialist organized free people's medical clinic as well as with the Women’s Liberation Center in Abell. The Lesbian Community center, which existed inside both of these community institutions hosted a switchboard, social groups, & published “Women: A Journal of Liberation.” which distributed 20,000 copies at its height until it closed in 1983. Indeed, there is much overlap in social movements & the community institutions they helped build. The 21218 boasted many neighborhood features like the people’s free medical clinic, Wyman park dell & the Waverly farmers market — all brought about by socialist neighborhood organizing in the 1970s & early ’80s. As well the 31st St bookstore was one of the earliest & most longstanding organizing spaces for gay women operating from 1973 to 1979.

Baltimore black gay pride takes place in the area west of Mt Vernon closer to Lexington Market, in Seton Hill. Pride failed to prioritize black gay issues so this celebration was born out of necessary separatism in 1991. The festivities take place in September as to not eclipse pride & notably reaches outside of white-dominated neighborhoods where many other gay events occur. The event was put together in part by Black & White Men Together — a gay organization specifically dedicated to bridging racial dialogues.

Seton Hill is the current home of the Metropolitan Community Church a longstanding LGBT affirming place of worship. Unfortunately, other LGBT spots in Seton Hill have closed since; Tikki’s bar & lounge, a popular black-owned night spot & sponsor of Black gay pride, closed sometime in the ’90s. Still, similar situations persist. Club Bunns, one of the few remaining Black LGBT nightclubs in the city closed recently, due in part to legal bullying from the gentrifying forces of the University of Maryland.

Place: Where is Baltimore's gayborhood? was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Named after the Baltimore Gay Paper which was a primary source for my research
• Context for my LGBT activism in Maryland
• An addition to the historical canon & collective knowledge
• A collection of stories, perspective & inquiry into Baltimores gay past

This is the hardest part of my research, contextualizing scraps of our recorded history. In the archives at the University of Baltimore (where I just graduated!) I’d look at photos of my black trans foremothers, scanning the background for clues as to who they were.

I knew that there have been spaces where we didn’t feel like the outlier & I wanted to find those spaces through research & speak to them. Speak to their importance, but also to the problems inherent with maintaining a ‘community’. It is this maintenance, the idea that our community must be changed or controlled, which leads to many of the sources in this account to come from (over)policing.

The glue that binds us together has always been sticky. So I offer new stories made of wet glue. Stories from as early as 1930 & as recent as 2015. Mainly from the Baltimore Gay Paper but also from alternative sources like the Afro-American, my former organization, the Baltimore Transgender Alliance, as well as my own personal social media archives.

This project is 2 years in the making & I won’t claim objective truth. In fact, I’ll demonstrate the failures of doing so: at the end, I’ve included one of the first drafts of the Baltimore Queer Paper. I include this first draft to show that each of these histories is subjective & as a primer, providing context for stories to come.

I used the special collections archive housed at my university to tell the story of the then-named GLCCB, Baltimore’s long-standing LGBT community center. But critically this first draft lacks the depth & perspective, telling an ultimately sanitized story in the hopes of being understood outside of the community. Our history should not have a single narrator, instead I argue that this is my subjective contribution.

I am writing this to the dykes who live in my neighborhood, to the trans women who nurtured me when I first came onto the scene, to the queer families taking up space & time in Baltimore.

John Waters had just released his instant-classic Pink Flamingos in 1972 & community here in Baltimore city was starting to form a concrete identity. Gay men had a couple clubs & bars scattered around the city like Leon’s & Club Baths and lesbians had Diana Press & the 31st street bookstore to the north — these were the very first public meeting spaces for LGBT community here in Baltimore, but needs soon exceeded capacity.

The Baltimore Gay Alliance was founded in 1975, the first political activist group for gay people in the city. The group went from holding meetings in members’ homes to getting a small rented office. Community was growing. For many brave gay people in Baltimore, it wasn’t enough to just have private spaces, these people wanted community & this community wanted a voice. That same year, Baltimore city held its first pride celebration around the Washington Monument in Mt. Vernon.

The Gay Community Center of Baltimore split off from the Baltimore Gay Alliance in 1977 — the new GCCB would serve as a support services organization, & the BGA would continue with their political organization & activism. This way, the GCCB could seek 501(c)3 nonprofit status & attend to community needs without getting in the way of BGA. The Gay Community Center of Baltimore would later become the GLCCB & is known today as the Pride Center of Maryland.

The GCCBs first offices were a small basement suite of rooms in the 2100 block of Maryland Avenue: home to counseling services, a meeting space & a men’s sexual health clinic. Separately, the metropolitan community church (MCC) was housed in St John’s church, providing an integrated safe space for al LGBT people to worship & even hosting the STD clinic for a few years while the GCCB was between locations.

A couple blocks north of St. John’s, active member of BGA, Gail Vivino ran the GCCB switchboard & newsletter in her basement at the corner of Calvert and 28th St. The switchboard in Gail Vivino’s basement provided support for LGBT youth who were coming out and connected resources, allies, & community members. Gail Vivino also worked on the GCCB newsletter, which eventually grew into The Baltimore Gay Paper, a key player that linked information from the community center to the community themselves.

The GCCB grew from this loose conglomerate of multiple entities working together in the 70’s. Each of these programs served a specific need for the growing community here in Baltimore. Dedicated individuals worked to galvanize this new community.

A good portion of the fundraising that allowed the GCCB to buy its first home at 241 West Chase Street in 1980 was done by one Harvey Schwartz. — However, the lengthy process of renovating a former pinball warehouse into a new community center was fueled by the materials, labor & cash donated by community members themselves.

This decade saw the birth of Baltimore’s gay community & the establishment of this new center saw it thrive. The building at 241 West Chase provided one roof for all of these disparate organizations to be under.

With the 80’s came the AIDS crisis, and that men’s sexual health clinic in the basement of the GCCB suddenly had a lot more work to do; the program operated under the GCCB from 1978 until 1989 when it became an independent healthcare provider. They would go on to move elsewhere in the Mt Vernon area but would retain a piece of their history; drawing their new name from the location of the GLCCB building, at the corner of Chase & Brexton streets.

Civil rights lawyer Kurt Decker worked with HERO & had this to say in an interview with WYPR: “AIDS was very transformative — devastating — and yet, almost in an ironic way an organizing tool, you couldn’t avoid coming out when you & your friends then developed HIV. All of the stigma & potential discrimination that would come from that really forced a lot of us to become more public & more organized”

Activists in Baltimore had been fighting bitterly for the revision of the city’s civil rights clause — which had already prevented discrimination on the basis of race, sex & religion. The Baltimore Gay Alliance (the group that the GCCB sprang from) was responsible for the first two attempts at city hall in 1980 & 1984 but were defeated due to heavy lobbying from religious groups & the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

For the third attempt, activists were now organizing a sophisticated lobbying effort under a broad coalition called the Baltimore Justice Campaign. Organizers rallied together Black Muslims, Orthodox Jews, & Evangelicals to counter the conservative Catholic opposition. Protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would go on to pass in 1988 & it was essential with the ever-growing stigma & discrimination gay people in Baltimore were facing, whether they had HIV or not. The success of the Baltimore Justice Campaign would go on to inspire Equality Maryland, which today with Freestate legal project, leads legal & political protection for LGBT people here in Maryland under their new name Freestate Justice.

The Baltimore Queer Paper is was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fourteen years before Stonewall, a raid by the Baltimore police on the Pepper Hill Club netted 162 gay men. Six police wagons had to make 24 trips to shuttle all the arrested men from the club to the nearby police station. This story comes from the archives of the Baltimore Sun reporting on the arrest & subsequent mass trial.

The Pepper Hill Club was located at 200 North Gay Street, only a block from the main police station, two blocks from City Hall, and on the fringes of “The Block,” Baltimore’s sex & entertainment district containing many strip bars and peep shows.

Male patrons were seen hugging and kissing each other, along with other unnamed acts of “indecency.” Two weeks prior to the arrests, police told the club’s owners to take down the lower half of a female mannequin hanging from the ceiling. Club co-owner Victor Lance described it irreverently as “a gag most people got a kick out of.” ”At least we put panties on ours,” he said. Arresting officer and head of the vice squad Hyman Goldstein also claimed that he warned the owners not to “allow homosexuals to congregate there,” but Lance denied this.

Around 11 p.m. on October 1, 1955, police arrived on the Pepper Hill Club’s premises and were met with what Goldstein referred to as a “living wall” of disorderly patrons. This description was apt in that it described the lack of control police had over the mass of patrons as well as police’s inability to distinguish homosexuals in the crowd. One officer heard one man say to another, “Do you still love me?” and the long arresting process began. The living wall was apprehended.

The following Sunday, of the 162 people arrested, 139 showed up for court, and 5 were convicted of disorderly conduct. Interestingly, the court ruled mostly in favor of the arrestees. The unprecedented scale of the arrest — headlines called it “the largest night-club raid ever made in Baltimore” — and the privilege of the Pepper Hill Club’s white clientele made this a noteworthy case. Judge James K. Cullen did not condone what was alleged to have gone on at the club but, he said, the manner in which the police acted “negatived the disorderly house charges”. In short, the courts ruled that, while homosexuality was still immoral in their eyes, there was not sufficient evidence to prove any one person's guilt — this also protected the defendants and didn’t out them.

NOTE I theorize the Pepper Hill Club was a refuge away from the Lavender Scare. In the 1950s McCarthyism orchestrated a witch hunt & mass firing of gay government workers, as well as increased policing for the D.C. gay community. Hyman Goldstein provided context for this influx “We have received word that Washington police are conducting a drive on homosexuals; apparently some of them are coming to Baltimore for their entertainment.”

“The majority of these people seem to regard this whole incident as a big joke,” Goldstein continued. Unlike at Stonewall, only one person was charged with assaulting policemen or resisting arrest: Mrs. Dorothy U. Killman. Perhaps this is because of the abrupt nature of the arrests, whereas the Stonewall riots were instead driven by overpolicing fatigue. Maybe the out-of-towners were unwilling to fight for a bar that wasn’t in their local D.C. community. Or maybe the mass arrest provided just enough of a smokescreen to get away with some wisecracks. We may never know why the patrons of the Pepper Hill Club responded with humor instead of retaliation; The Pepper Hill Club was torn down in the mid-60s to clear the ground for the Jones Falls Expressway.

Baltimore before Stonewall: The Pepper Hill Club Raid was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Men of Neuter Gender Frolic in Stunning Women’s Gowns,” the headline reads. Yes, Great Depression-era drag balls were a remarkable reality here in Baltimore. We have the Baltimore Afro-American, the longest running Black newspaper, to thank for their broad-minded coverage of the event. Indeed it is rare to see such coverage that treats subjects described as “neuter-gender,” “queer,” “third-sex,” and “pansies” with agency — even today.

The best-documented ball of early Baltimore history occurred in 1931, described by the Afro as the eighth annual celebration of its kind. Drawing crowds from Philadelphia and D.C., the balls were a rare integrated social scene during the Great Depression.

Much like balls of today, this lighthearted performance was about the queens conforming to beauty standards of their cis woman contemporaries, which they did with great success. One reporter described a queen as “bustless as a modern day flapper,” noting that gender nonconformity in fashion allowed for the queens to meet conventionally accepted women’s beauty standards. The same writer verified that on many of the evening's queens passed for “bona fide daughters of Eve.” Many reporters spend paragraphs describing the elegant gowns of silk and velvet, trying to give their reader such detail as to put them in the audience. This is to say that the ‘pansy balls’ were not just a spectacle because of the gender nonconformity, but also because of the seemingly impossible high-class nature of the performance during a period of severe economic turmoil. “Depression Chief Guest at Pansy Ball,” cries another headline.

It is difficult to parse the biased and sensationalist reporting into an exact understanding of the identities and demographics of ball attendees. One account said there was an enforced rule where “no women were allowed” (only “female impersonators”), while another described a pack of “masculine women” gathered near the north side of the proceedings. What’s clear is that, when the balls began allowing media coverage in 1931, press was relegated to spectator seating in the balcony because of previous biased coverage.

Club members heavily gatekept this space, and many accounts note almost as many “normal” people clamoring to get into the club as there were participants and spectators inside. Additionally, many would-be queens were blackballed for not being “perfect ladies.” Club members described undesirable behaviors as making oneself “too conspicuous in public places” and fighting over “gentlemen friends.” These outsiders were referred to as “rough and rowdies.” All this is to say that club members had a great deal of power and control over the setting of these high class, lowbrow events. They cared about the image they presented and demanded the respect of pansies and non-pansies alike.

The outside lives of the queens were the subject of frequent speculation — how they acquired their dresses, where they worked to be able to afford them, their sexualities outside of the balls — but few real answers were available. Some bought their lingerie, while others made, modified, or stole their garments. One queen is recorded as having worked as a nurse for a young boy with a wealthy family. Another is noted as having worked in a rich doctor’s office. One ballgoer was stopped on their way in by someone presumed to be their wife, berated, and told to come home. Reporters also made careful note that attendees frequently left in pairs — a veiled way of communicating that the events were frequently used for cruising.

Subverting gender conventions had to be done through events like these or by way of profession in the first half of the century. Gender roles could be based around profession as much as assigned sex. Most frequently accounts of “feminine men” outside of the ball setting noted their occupation as outdoor sex workers in public parks. This perspective is validated by accounts that use “professional female impersonator” the way we might use “transgender sex worker” today. This is to say that most lived a double life through the balls but some, through their work, did not. In addition to balls, street queens are described as looking forward to Halloween as an opportunity to dress as themselves in public without fear of (police) harassment.

Indeed, many discursive differences are apparent between these accounts, nearly a century old, and today’s terminology. “Coming out” was described as celebrating “new debutantes into homosexual society,” not the more conventional understanding we have today of explaining one’s gender or sexuality to a public. This mirrors an inward-facing gay identity prevalent during the time. “Homosexual” was a term used at the time to define anyone who defied typical gender or sexuality norms. “Transsexual,” with its pathologized connotations, had no bearing when pansies and street queens had neither the means nor access to hormone replacement therapy or gender reassignment surgery.

Pansies bloom in 1930s Baltimore City was originally published in Baltimore Queer Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.