Finding Queer Asian America in the Margins
Notes From the Telegraph Club #6
This is the sixth installment in my series Notes From the Telegraph Club, which dives into the research I did to write my most recent novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. I do my best to avoid major spoilers, but I do mention some things that happen in the book in order to explore the historical context. I don’t believe that knowing some plot points will spoil this book, but if you’d like to avoid all potential spoilers, you may wish to read the book before reading these essays.
Long before I conceived of the idea for Last Night at the Telegraph Club, I bought historian Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide Open Town: A Queer History of San Francisco to 1965. I was researching a different novel (I still haven’t written it), and one sentence in particular jumped out at me: “San Francisco native Merle Woo remembers that lesbians of color often frequented Forbidden City in the 1950s.”
Forbidden City was a nightclub located just outside of Chinatown on Sutter Street near Union Square. Owned by Chinese American entertainer/entrepreneur Charlie Low, it was open from 1938 to 1970. At the height of its popularity in the 1940s, it featured an “all Chinese floor show” that ran three times a night, entertaining over 2,000 guests daily. The club certainly capitalized on Americans’ fascination with the exotic Orient, but the performers generally stuck to Western song-and-dance routines. Think Fred and Ginger, or The Lawrence Welk Show.
By the 1950s, the nightclub business had declined, and Low made deals with local tour companies to bring tourists into Chinatown for dinner and a show. That was when Merle Woo remembered those “lesbians of color” at the Forbidden City. What had they been like? Unfortunately, that single sentence on page 79 of Wide Open Town was the only time Merle Woo and her memories were mentioned.
But there was a footnote, which I followed to the back of the book. It read: “Merle Woo, interviewed by Nan Alamilla Boyd, tape recording, San Francisco, 15 May 1992, Wide Open Town History Project, GLBT Historical Society.”
So more of Merle’s memories had been recorded, but they were out of reach—for the moment.
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When I began the research for Last Night at the Telegraph Club in earnest, I knew that I needed to know more about those lesbians of color. More specifically, I needed to know what it was like to be a Chinese American lesbian in San Francisco in the 1950s, but they were nearly invisible in the historical record. The few times I came across references to Asian American lesbians, they were mentioned in passing or relegated to the footnotes.
It was enough to make one think that queer Asian Americans didn’t exist back then, but I knew that wasn’t true. What has happened is that our experiences have been erased or marginalized, deemed less important than the experiences of white LGBTQ people.
That meant that a lot of my research into the lives of queer Chinese American women in the 1950s felt like detective work. I tracked down every comment or footnote about a queer Chinese American person I could find, and I reached out to historians and academics to ask for leads. Here are some of the clues I assembled to inform the character of Lily Hu.
Dr. Margaret Chung
Although very few people know of her these days, Dr. Margaret Chung was a local San Francisco celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s. She was the first Chinese American woman doctor in the United States, and although she never came out, she was also likely queer. I’ve written about Dr. Chung separately, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but her close relationships with women didn’t pass unnoticed. In fact, all of San Francisco’s Chinatown seemed to believe that she was a lesbian, and an FBI investigation of her reportedly confirmed it.
It’s not clear how much the Chinese community in San Francisco accepted Dr. Chung, especially since she barely spoke Cantonese, but she did co-found the Chinese Hospital, and as a woman doctor she was uniquely positioned to treat Chinese women.
In Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Lily’s father works at the Chinese Hospital, so I imagined that he probably worked with her, or at least knew of her. His knowledge influences the way he thinks of homosexuality, especially when he finds out about his daughter.
Mary Lee
In an oral history given by Reba Hudson that was included in Wide Open Town, Hudson recounts a visit to a bar:
“We’d been somewhere dressy, and we were sitting in what was Mona’s Candlelight. I think Mona had had it briefly, but then a young Chinese woman named Mary Lee was the actual owner.”
Mona’s Candlelight was a club that may have been opened by Mona Sargent, a woman who ran several lesbian clubs in the North Beach district in the 1940s and 50s, including the famous Mona’s 440, where Gladys Bentley and male impersonators often performed. How had a Chinese woman come to own it?
Wide Open Town provides no explanation for this; that sentence is the only mention of Mary Lee. But it was intriguing for me to think about who Mary Lee might have been. She was notable enough for one of the lesbian community’s regulars, Reba Hudson, to mention her decades after she had visited her club. She must have been memorable, if only for being a Chinese woman in a lesbian bar.
Rose Bamberger
In 1955, Rose Bamberger was a young Filipina woman in a relationship with a white woman named Rosemary Sliepen. Rose really loved to dance, but dancing in lesbian bars was illegal at the time, so Rose came up with the idea to start a social club where lesbians could dance. Its first meeting took place on Sept. 21, 1955, and four couples were in attendance, including Rose. The women decided to call themselves the Daughters of Bilitis, and it eventually became an influential gay rights organization led by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who had been one of the original four couples.
It was the transition from a purely social club to an activist organization that caused Rose Bamberger to leave within six months of the club’s founding. In Wide Open Town, Del Martin recalled that “the Filipino woman whose idea was it, the club, she just wanted to have parties and dance.” Dancing wasn’t enough for the other members.
Perhaps because the DOB strayed so far from its founding roots, Rose Bamberger is seldom mentioned in news reports and histories of the group, which usually focus on Martin and Lyon. But I love knowing that the Daughters of Bilitis was co-founded by a Filipina lesbian who simply loved to dance. I wonder if she ever went to Forbidden City to watch the Chinese American dancers and their Fred and Ginger routines.
Crystal Jang
Because the historical record was so sparse when it came to Chinese American lesbians in this time period, I reached out to historian Amy Sueyoshi to ask for leads, and Sueyoshi put me in touch with Crystal Jang, a Chinese American lesbian who had grown up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 2017, I went to San Francisco to do some location research, and I met Jang in Chinatown, where she took me on a tour of her old neighborhood and told me about her life. Jang is about ten years younger than Lily, so her experiences wouldn’t map directly onto the fictional character, but much of what she told me influenced how I created Lily’s world.
In one memorable story, Jang told me that by the time she was 13 in 1959, she had heard the word “gay” but didn’t know what it meant. To solve this mystery, she went to the North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library, near Chinatown, and looked up the word. That’s where she discovered the Kinsey Report. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was first published in 1948, and its follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was published in 1953.
These reports were revolutionary in their time period, and they informed Jang that it was okay to be gay. Armed with this knowledge, she came out to her friends shortly afterward. Although they didn’t reject her, they were puzzled because the word “gay” was only associated with gay men back then.
One of those men was Tony Wing, who had been a dancer at the Forbidden City. In the late 1950s, he taught tap dancing at the YMCA, and although Jang never took his classes, she would go and watch him dance. He wasn’t out at the time, but he seemed gay to her. I imagine he would have been fascinating to her: one of those gay men in person.
So much of discovering who you are involves seeing who other people are and asking yourself, consciously or subconsciously, am I like them? In the 1950s, I imagined it was very difficult to do this. Any young queer person had to seek out their role models in unusual places, probably with no actual confirmation that the person was LGBTQ.
Merle Woo
During my visit to San Francisco, I made sure to visit the GLBT Historical Society archives so that I could listen to that footnoted tape recording of Merle Woo’s interview.
Woo, who was Chinese-Korean, was born in Chinatown in 1941. She recounted wanting to be a nurse or a nun when she was growing up, but after graduating high school in 1959, she got a job at Joseph Magnin, the department store on Union Square. Woo worked in sportswear on the second floor, but most Asian women were elevator girls back then. Several of the managers at Joseph Magnin were lesbians, and Woo noted that it wasn’t a big deal at the time.
After a brief time at Joseph Magnin, Woo auditioned to perform as a jazz singer at the Forbidden City and got the gig, even though she wasn’t old enough to drink the cocktails she was expected to sell to the men in the audience between shows.
“Every night was a party,” she recalled, and many of the people who worked there were lesbians. “There wasn’t a doubt about it,” she said, even though they never came out publicly.
Toy Yat Mar
One of the first references I bought when I was researching Telegraph Club was Forbidden City, USA: Chinatown Nightclubs 1936-1970 by Arthur Dong. The book, which accompanies a documentary of the same name that I highly recommend, contains a sumptuous collection of vintage photographs showing Chinese men and women onstage in sparkling costumes. Although some of the men who performed at the Forbidden City came out later in life—one even performed as a female impersonator—none of the women in the book are identified as lesbians.
And yet, on page 161, in a chapter devoted to singer Toy Yat Mar, who often performed as “the Chinese Sophie Tucker,” there’s a black-and-white photo from the 1940s that immediately struck me as queer. It depicts Toy Yat Mar dressed in a man’s suit with a bow tie, leaning against the surface of a bar with a cigarette in her hand. She’s wearing dark lipstick, and her appearance instantly evokes Marlene Dietrich. The caption reads cheekily: “I was a southpaw….I grew up unfettered by tradition.”
On page 59 in the right margin, a tiny black-and-white photo depicts “Forbidden City women in uniform: Mary Mammon (fourth from left), Dottie Sun, Jade Ling, and Toy Yat Mar with unidentified woman and men, at the Forbidden City (ca. 1945).” These Forbidden City women, all dressed in military uniforms, are seated at a table in the restaurant. Toy Yat Mar and the unidentified woman are seated together on the right side, and they’re holding hands in Toy Yat Mar’s lap just beneath the table.
One could argue that these women are just friends, but how many friends hold hands under the table? I wondered who had taken the photo, and whether it was a friend of Toy Yat Mar’s. Had the photographer surprised them and not given them a chance to let go of each other? Or had they been friends with the photographer, who could have known the truth?
Looking at this photo and linking it back to the photo of Toy Yat Mar in the suit was like finding proof—visual proof—that queer Asian women existed back then, and in some cases they were hiding in plain sight. They likely took care to keep their sexuality and same-sex relationships private, but they also existed in the world and interacted with their communities, sometimes quite openly.
They were doctors. They owned lesbian bars. They worked at department stores. They loved to go dancing. They read the Kinsey Report at the public library. They dressed in men’s suits and sang onstage, and they held their girlfriend’s hand in the club.
All of these women informed the character and world of Lily Hu, who would also likely declare that she was unfettered by tradition.
But I think it’s tradition, actually, that’s the problem. Tradition has all too often decided that we don’t belong in it, when in fact that’s not true. We do, and we always have.
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References
Disclosure: Some links go to Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. If you click through and make a purchase, I will earn a commission.
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-Open Town :a History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. University of California Press, 2003.
Dong, Arthur E., et al. Forbidden City U.S.A.: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970. DeepFocus Productions, 2014.
Gallo, Marcia M. Different Daughters: a History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. Seal Press, 2007.
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity. University of California Press, 2005.
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