Abstract
In the mid-twentieth century, specific characteristics of informal labor markets facilitated the development of lesbian desire among African American women with those attractions. We analyze archival materials on Black lesbians in Detroit, Michigan, to theorize underground economies as liminal spaces that served three key functions. First, off-the-books jobs provided income-generating opportunities to reduce financial precarity. Second, workspaces in urban leisure industries attracted Black sexual minorities as both laborers and consumers, offering the potential for self-discovery and a sense of belonging. During this period, the temporal nature that defined work in underground labor markets was consistent with the transitional state of lesbian sexuality as an identity around which to cohere alongside race. The liminality inherent in Black women’s self-definitions was supported by the temporal attributes of physical spaces where their work took place. Together, those experiences laid the groundwork for a nascent sexual community that could center African American culture.
Introduction
This study investigates how the structure and functioning of informal labor markets shaped early experiences of lesbian desire for Black, sexual minority women living in Detroit during the 1950s and 1960s. 1 Claudia Goldin’s (1990) economic history of American women shows that before the passage of anti-discrimination laws in the early 1970s, there were scarce formal job opportunities for Black women outside of the confines of domestic work, and entire employment sectors were legally permitted to discriminate against African Americans, confining them to low-wage and manual service jobs. These structural limitations forced many Black women to buttress any temporary work in the formal labor market with alternative income-generating activities (Jones 2009; Sugrue 1996). We identify financial as well as social benefits in informal economies and examine how they worked together to influence the development of a lesbian sexuality in the mid-twentieth century.
Historically, scholars have charted the development of sexual community through the lives of gay men who spent free time meeting strangers in urban sex markets (Chauncey 1994; Laumann et al. 2004); gainfully employed or wealthy men who used their human capital to create semiprivate spaces where they could pursue erotic desires (Centner and Neto 2021); and men who were active in the ballroom scene, or who frequented highly publicized interracial dances and grand social gatherings (Bailey 2014; Drexel 1997). Women historians and others have offered important analyses of white lesbians finding one another in working-class bars (Faderman 1991; Kennedy and Davis 1993; Thorpe 1997), or building community in vacation towns (Newton 1993), middle-class homes (Gilmartin 1996; Woolner 2023), and other social spaces before the Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation movements took root. Still other scholars have studied the historical organization of various forms of sex work and the role of non-heterosexual women in these laboring activities (Brooks 2010; Kennedy and Davis 1993; Woolner 2023). Recent work in sexuality and urban studies centers the ways contemporary nightlife structures the boundaries of LGBTQ identities and belonging (e.g., Brown-Saracino 2015; Ghaziani 2014). Many of these studies presuppose that actors have the means to establish and participate in physical sites organized around queer expression. But historically, differential access to resources has impacted the ability of racialized sexual minorities to create public sites of belonging around lesbian interests, particularly given societal group boundaries around race (Moore 2011; Smith-Cruz 2024).
Drawing from oral histories and archival materials of working-class Black lesbians coming of age during the mid-twentieth century, we examine efforts of women exploring same-sex desire through the forging of networks in alternative workspaces, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from areas in the South to northern cities like Detroit. Industrialization sorted migrants in gendered ways, so the ability of women to achieve economic independence required improvisation. The nighttime leisure economy emerged as a key component of urbanization, offering particular benefits to sexual minority women. In addition to serving as an income source, informal workspaces appealed to others who were interested in erotic same-sex attractions. Black women straddled the boundaries of multiple and intersecting social groups, and we frame their experiences through the concept of liminality, defined as an ambiguous or malleable state of being experienced during transitions from one stage or identity to another (Turner 1967/1987).
Liminality is a construct that can be used to understand how individuals navigate transformative points in their lives that are uncertain, fluid, and intermediary. We theorize Black sexual minority women in the mid-twentieth century as embodying a stage of liminality influenced by the intersections of their race, gender, and sexual desires. They were beginning to think of themselves as having more than just a passing same-sex attraction or interest in lesbian behaviors but had not yet formed an identity based in sexuality. This liminal sense of self flourished in underground and commercial leisure markets (i.e., after-hours spots, gambling halls, sex houses, places where alcohol was illegally sold) that operated as workspaces as well as sites for pleasure. We find these spaces occupied a liminality in their own right, because of their transitory nature and because the risky activities that took place in them threatened their longevity.
Employment outside of the regulated, formal work force allowed those with lesbian attractions to negotiate the connections between work, pleasure, and sexuality while building self-autonomy in multiple arenas of their lives. These laboring women weaved in and out of formal and informal economies, and in and out of sexual minority spaces, blurring the lines of those categories. As societal norms and political formations shifted and developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Black lesbians navigated those changes by finding sustenance and creating new definitions for themselves.
Background
Wage Labor as a Path to Sexual Autonomy
While same-gender attractions have existed and been acted upon throughout time, the transition away from the household family-based economy and the detachment of wages and labor from the family unit to the individual, are what really allowed gay men to build an identity and then community around same-sex attraction (D’Emilio 1983a:103). By the 1920s and 1930s, individuals began to have greater ability to separate from the interdependent family unit and use their wages through the “free labor system” to construct a personal life that could fulfill their desires. Capitalism brought White men ownership of their labor and the freedom to sell their labor power for wages. Urban centers contained gay bars and patterns of living that could be sustained by the “early gay lives” of people who D’Emilio says were “civil servants and business executives, department store clerks and college professors, factory operatives, ministers, lawyers, cooks, domestics, hoboes, and the idle rich” (p. 105). Some White gay men and an even smaller number of White lesbians were able to use this economic independence to form “a web” of friends and intimate relationships, and initiate a transition toward cohering around homosexual desires as a type of personal identity (D’Emilio 1983a:105).
However, this timeline does not fit the work experiences of African American laborers, 75% of whom lived in the South and were subjected to Jim Crow laws that limited their education and employment opportunities (Jones 1985). Most African Americans lacked access to the “free labor system,” defined as critical to the development of a gay identity. Notwithstanding the tantalizing social lives of artists, entertainers, and activists in the New Negro Movement driven by the Harlem Renaissance (Mabel Hampton Special Collection, 1976-1989; Davis 1998; Woolner 2023), before the latter part of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into Northern cities between 1940 through 1970, the majority of Black women had been tied to sharecropping systems that offered no wages for the work they performed. Others worked in domestic and personal service occupations, with their meager wages serving as a lifeline for the entire family unit (Jones 2009). In the early part of the twentieth century, the free labor economy that allowed White queer people to explore their sexuality as an identity around which to cohere was not available to African Americans as a path for independence.
The particular exploitation of Black labor for the gains of larger society is evidence of what Cedric Robinson (1983/2020) identifies as racial capitalism. The “racial character” of capitalism created differentiation in the labor experiences of racial groups. We expand this thinking by considering other forms of social differentiation within racial capitalism that supported its structure, particularly the timing and conditions under which sexual minorities across different racial and ethnic groups could engage with the capitalist system in ways that would support their economic independence. Black queer people had particular vulnerabilities that facilitated their exploitation as workers. For example, in Margot Canaday’s (2023) study of the work careers of sexual minorities in the mid-twentieth century, she finds that White gay men and some lesbians would turn to temporary work in service and leisure industries when they were fired from formal labor market jobs after suspicions of homosexuality. After experiencing homophobia, they were able to dip out of the formal economy until securing new work in a different city or locale (p. 77). Their Whiteness granted them the ability to continue to pursue occupations in the fields in which they were trained. Being “outed,” even through arrest, did not prevent reemployment in similar lines of work.
On the other hand, Black workers during this period, including those with same-sex desire, were hampered by racial oppression in formal labor markets and had difficulty securing and maintaining employment in fields in which they had expertise. They were relegated to low-paying, temporary jobs and relied on this type of work more consistently to make ends meet (Sugrue 1996). Ferguson (2004) and Khan and Vidal-Ortiz (2025) analyze the experiences of queer people of color in their critiques of whether and how capitalist advances facilitated the ability of individuals to incorporate sexuality into their identity status.
Moreover, racial capitalism and the mutually constitutive statuses of race, gender, and sexuality made it especially difficult for Black women with same-sex attraction to separate from their families of origin and find like-minded women in the scarce public spaces open to African Americans with lesbian attraction. As urban leisure industries began to recognize homosexual men (and occasionally women) as a group interested in particular social amusements, bars wanting to attract gay clientele restricted African Americans from participating in them (Faderman 1991; Thorpe 1996). As a result, during the early part of the twentieth century, Black women with same-sex attraction remained interdependent with their families for decades longer than the experiences of White gay men.
Although their numbers represented a small proportion of the total population, Black women increasingly lived and worked full-time in cities between 1920 and 1940 (White 2005). The growing community of female workers took advantage of the expanding urban populations by establishing themselves as “buyers, sellers, and consumers of illicit and licit products and services” (Harris 2016:34). They accomplished this by laboring simultaneously in multiple occupations and in informal economies (Blair 2010). They became agents of burgeoning leisure economies during the Prohibition Era, a role that persisted into the 1930s Depression and the postwar period. As the features of urban nightlife developed and modernized, women who were open to working outside of the bounds of middle-class respectability sought out jobs in these industries. Sexual minorities in particular were interested and began to congregate in what Canaday refers to as “queer occupations” in service industries (p. 70).
It was in these contexts that Black sexual minority women began to search for one another. Workspaces in informal and nighttime economies enabled more expansive presentations of self, attracting individuals with same-sex desire and gender-nonconforming individuals (Canaday 2023; Woolner 2023). By the mid-twentieth century, these jobs were available in above-board enterprises as well as underground markets. Although they were mostly centered around heterosexual engagements, sexual minority women found work in these spaces (Faderman 1991; Harley 2002).
Kennedy and Davis’ (1993) study of a working-class lesbian community in Buffalo during the early and mid-twentieth century primarily studied the lives of White women but also integrated interviews with six Black sexual minority women, exploring the relationships they cultivated with other African Americans as well as with some White lesbians in a variety of social spaces. That work and other studies have revealed the importance of house parties and other events in semiprivate and private spaces that helped build connections among Black women with same-sex desire before Stonewall, and before social movements helped incorporate lesbian attraction and behavior into a group identity centered on race (Fair 2021; Sawyer 1965; Thorpe 1996). In the current study, we analyze the importance of employment in formal labor markets and the underground economy as conduits that support Black women’s sexual transformation. We identify the midcentury period as a unique moment when African American sexual minority women could gain a footing in work settings, despite structural barriers and racial oppression, to move forward in their search for an autonomous way of life.
Economic and Social Benefits of Informal Labor Markets
With restricted opportunities for long-term employment and advancement in formal workplaces, income from informal jobs remained crucial for Black lesbian women’s ability to sustain themselves well into the 1970s (Harley 2002; Harris 2016). Informal economies comprise widespread networks of covert, income-producing ventures and economic transactions that fall outside of the formal labor market and are not taxed. They exist alongside formal economies within local contexts, and are characterized by cash-based, unregulated, and irregular entrepreneurial pursuits (Gaughan and Ferman 1987; Hoyman 1987; Venkatesh 2009). They may contain both licit and illicit components. Canaday (2023) identifies such low-wage, temporary jobs as comprising the “queer work world,” which included self-employment as well as “peripheral employment” in settings that were more lenient in accepting some forms of “gender transgression” (p. 70). While social scientists have been most interested in the economic benefits of informal labor markets, we argue that there are compelling non-economic motivations for engagement as consumers and producers of night culture.
Faderman, writing about lesbian subcultures of the 1950s and 1960s, said there were no “lesbian ghettos” where women could be assured of finding one another and be fully accepted, so working-class and young women would frequent bars and other spaces, sometimes those of “ill repute,” in the hopes of making contact with other lesbians (1991:161). Previous generations of African Americans sought out social pleasures in spaces where underground work took place to “escape from the world of assembly lines, relief lines, and color lines, and to leave momentarily the individual and collective battles against racism, sexism, and material deprivation” (Kelley 1994:47). Woolner found something similar for Black lesbians engaging in the Prohibition era nightlife as workers as well as consumers. Despite the police surveillance in 1920s vice districts, the liminal spaces of both private and public worlds were “crucial sites in the formation of Black queer sexual subjectivities” (2023:75). The foundational organization of rent parties, buffet flats, and speakeasies in previous generations were early conduits for the later engagement of Black migrating women and those already living in the North who were there to socialize them into urban nightlife.
The significance of the urban context for the development of sexuality as an identity category cannot be overstated. After World War II, discharged soldiers remained in cities with large military bases, and their relocation away from their original hometowns facilitated the formation of “gay ghettos.” As they began to congregate, seeing one another helped them begin to carve out a new self-concept based in homosexual desire, while new institutions in the city catering to their interests facilitated the support of a group identity organized around sexual orientation (Bérubé 1990; D’Emilio 1983b). However, redlining and other discriminatory policies guiding the development and expansion of metropolitan centers forced African Americans leaving the armed forces to return to racially segregated neighborhoods and nightlife institutions (Freeman 2019), though they did relocate by the tens of thousands from the South to northern cities. While they might also have formed a self-concept connected to their same-sex desires, they were already bound by a group membership based in race. Moreover, policing practices attempted to maintain the purity of White communities by pushing red-light districts into racially segregated areas of cities, making African American neighborhoods coterminous with areas for vice by the start of the 1940s (Heap 2010; Mumford 1997). Such racialized geographies and spatial arrangements increased the likelihood that Black queer women would encounter red-light districts, where they subsequently labored, entertained themselves, and were in contact with a wide range of people who were participating in activities that facilitated expressions of homosexual desire. By the mid-twentieth century, peripheral employment remained especially enticing for African American lesbians (Harley 2002; Kennedy and Davis 1993). Work in gin joints, brothels, dance halls, and other after-hours entertainment venues offered occasions to engage socially or romantically with other women during breaks or after shifts concluded.
When taken together, all of these factors—the necessity of multiple wage sources to make ends meet, the culture of vice districts with their vibrant nighttime activities that needed to be staffed, the importance of social pleasure to escape racism and sexism, and the frequenting of spaces of “ill repute” in order to possibly come into contact with other lesbians—were relevant for the experiences of Black women interested in building relationships with those interested in same-sex desire. Black women relied heavily on commercialized leisure spaces developed in Black urban districts at the start of the twentieth century to generate income (Mabel Hampton Oral History Collection 1976-1989; Woolner 2023). While there were risks to relying on under-the-table and illicit work to be self-supporting, the characteristics of locales where off-the-books labor occurred offered important opportunities to develop networks that could be used to connect outside work environments and to nurture the construction of an alternative sense of self.
“Betwixt and Between”: Liminality and Intersectional Identities
Social anthropologist Victor Turner used the phrase “betwixt and between” to describe the theoretical framework of liminality as the ambiguous or unstructured phase that individuals encounter in the process of transitioning from one social status to another (1967/1987:14). As a concept, liminality represents a temporary and transformative condition in individuals as well as in societies, as one moves into or adopts a new stage of life (Szakolczai 2009). The conditions that produce a liminal state involve settings in which established norms dissolve and new structures have not yet fully formed, creating an “in-between” state (p. 151). Scholars have theorized liminal change as African American migrants relocated and experienced a psychic transformation from Southern farmworkers to Northern urbanites (Griffin 1995). Sociologists have written about liminality as a way to understand the uncertain position of immigrants on a path to legal citizenship, with Cecelia Menjivar (2006) analyzing the gray area between the legal categories of documented and undocumented status, and Powell, Quadlin, and Pizmony-Levy (2015) describing the uncertain legal position of same-sex couples before Oberfell v. Hodge codified such marriages into federal law (Powell et al. 2015). Perhaps more similar to our use of liminality is the work of Mary Pattillo (2007), who identifies the ambiguities that Black middle-class gentrifiers face as they navigate relationships with neighborhood financial and community development institutions, as well as less-resourced residents of their communities. The liminal space they occupy appears as border crossings as they connect to, participate in, and assess networks across multiple socially bounded groups.
We employ liminality as a framework for understanding the complexities of navigating changing sexual identities for individuals who already have firmly bounded self-understandings in race. In the 1950s and 1960s, Black women who acted on their lesbian interests and desires by forming social relationships with sexual minorities they encountered began to straddle multiple worlds as they navigated the in-between spaces created by the expectations of different bounded groups with which they had some connection. This experience of liminality within the individual may be scaffolded by structural spaces that are also liminal in their purposes.
We conceptualize a liminality of racialized lesbians in the mid-twentieth century that exists because of their intersectional position as racialized women (Crenshaw 1989) and as individuals who engage in sexualities that are stigmatized (Jones 2025). The approach to intersectionality that we engage is an “intracategorical” or group-centered approach (Collins 2015; McCall 2005:1774), which analyzes the experiences of individuals who lie at the intersection of a single dimension of multiple categories—in our case, sexuality, race, and gender—as varying within-group and reflecting multiple dimensions of other categories (i.e., employment status, finer distinctions of socioeconomic status, gender presentation). The liminality lies in the tenuous state that the intersection of race, gender, and lesbian sexuality demands of the historical period in which these Black sexual minority women lived. Liminality, therefore, exists in the ways they are seen by larger society, by the racial communities that are already established, and in the transformative ways they come to understand themselves.
We explore the uses of formal and informal workspaces among Black queer women in this period to disclose the multiple functions of informal economies as not only offering financial resources but also offering a geographic or liminal space for which individuals can begin to shape their sexual identities, as Woolner (2023) began to identify in the social networks that “Black lady lovers” shaped with one another during the 1920s. Black women’s participation in informal economies enables them to navigate liminal interpersonal spaces and chart an independent course in life.
Data and Methods
There are many complexities in the pursuit of archival research on LGBTQ populations (Stone and Cantrell 2015), and this is especially the case for the study of racialized sexual minorities. Sociological data on the experiences of Black queer women are sparse in general, and a focus on the mid-twentieth century limits that further. Archival collections on African Americans and on LGBTQ populations contain few subject files at the intersection of race and sexual orientation. We worked within these limitations to produce a rendering of life for one group of Black queer women who described finding their way.
The analyses are drawn from a collection of oral histories with 20 working-class, African American women who came of age in a racially divided Detroit in the mid-twentieth century. The life interviews were conducted by historian Rochella “Roey” Thorpe between 1992 and 1995, as part of her unfinished dissertation research on lesbian life in Detroit from 1947 to 1975. The interviews were accessed by the first author as publicly available archival material in the Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The Thorpe Collection included 137 tape recordings and transcripts for 22 of the 46 interviews with African American and White women. We transcribed the 68 individual audio files for the remaining 24 interviews, ensuring we had transcripts for the complete set of 46 interviews. In this paper, we focus exclusively on the Black women. In accordance with other publications that analyze these data, we use these women’s real names except for “Sandy,” who requested a pseudonym (Thorpe 1996, 1997). If we provide only first names, it is because the respondent explicitly chose to withhold their last name at the time of the interview.
Thorpe used snowball sampling to find these respondents and conducted hours-long oral histories. The women were asked a series of questions covering topics such as family and educational background; childhood and adult self-understandings of sexuality, gender identity, and expression; involvement in lesbian social networks; formal and informal labor market experiences; and participation in social movements during the 1960s and 1970s.
While archived oral histories are subject to recall bias inherent to many forms of interviewing, we addressed these concerns in two ways. First, we corroborated the retrospective accounts in these archived oral histories with other research on the lives of Black, sexual minority women during this period (i.e., Harley 2002; Kennedy and Davis 1993), as well as a variety of interviews and research materials in other archival collections including “The Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project Boots of Leather/Slippers of Gold Collection—1998-01” by Madeline Davis, Liz Kennedy, and Avra Michelson at the Lesbian Herstory Archives; archival materials on African American LGBTQ elders in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Mignon Moore Archive of Black Lesbians and Gay Men, a private collection (Moore and Diaz 2025).
We also mitigated recall bias in the oral histories by systematically coding all the interviews. The analytic coding of these interviews was completed to organize the data for a book project on the development of community among Black sexual minority women. As such, we drew from a codebook of nearly 800 codes written in Microsoft Word tables by the first author covering many themes, including migration, employment history, family, experiences in sexual communities and social movements (broken down by decade), sexual identity, and experiences in the nightlife, in religious settings, and in racially segregated neighborhoods.
The second author transferred the interview transcriptions and 800 codes from Microsoft Word into Excel, then entered the codes directly into ATLAS.ti, a qualitative data analysis program. She then manually coded half of the interviews using ATLAS.ti, while a research assistant coded the second half of the interviews using the same software. For this article, we initiated a secondary, targeted round of coding to address our specific research question and to analyze mentions of formal and informal wage labor engagements, geographic locations, and connections to other sexual minorities. Given our focus on the relationship between labor and sexual identity, we used the coded interviews to produce a data table listing respondents’ names, birth years, highest level of formal education completed, and all the jobs they held (see Table 1). The women whose interviews we analyzed were born between 1899 and 1952, and on average, they were 52 years old at the time of the interview. They were born in Detroit or migrated as young children of African Americans who had relocated to the North from small towns in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, among other states. Their parents held working-class or agricultural jobs as sharecroppers, and most parents had less than a high school education. The table shows that the respondents’ employment histories were wide-ranging, spanning more than 60 categories. Among the jobs they identified in the formal economy, the most common were in factory work, sales, and janitorial work. Only two women reported consistent employment as domestic workers, which was surprising given that domestic work was a common form of available labor for Black women between 1940 and 1965. We speculate that this might be related to their status as sexual minorities, and that perhaps sexual minority women actively avoided this type of labor for extended periods of time.
Respondents’ Demographic Information and Jobs Held.
Note. This table captures the full range of jobs respondents reported ever having during their lifetimes. In accordance with the original wishes of the interviewees and the naming convention Roey Thorpe set in her publication (1996), this chart lists the names the respondents offered to the interviewer, and most requested to omit their last names. Only one person requested that a pseudonym be assigned, and she was given the name Sandy.
In alignment with our definition of formal and informal labor, we categorized work as informal or off-the-books when it was “cash-based, unregulated, and irregular,” regardless of whether it was licit (Gaughan and Ferman 1987). Our table helped establish the basis for analytic data memos that made clear how the segregated facilities of downtown Detroit and workplaces facilitated African American women’s ability to produce autonomous selves. We then returned to the guiding literatures and used them to sharpen our reasoning for our theoretical frameworks.
Detroit, 1950 to 1975
Detroit is an illuminating site for the study of working-class lesbians in the mid-twentieth century because of the enduring influence of migrating African Americans on the city’s structure and functioning, including its labor market patterns and its expanding entertainment and leisure culture. These features of urban life were particularly relevant to women pursuing economic independence and seeking a new life of autonomy. By the late 1950s, migrating Black Americans had contributed to the dramatic racial recomposition of the working class. Labor market shifts during the early stages of deindustrialization and the relocation of manufacturing jobs from the city to developing suburbs increased competition for jobs. Hiring discrimination, suppressed wages, and low job mobility were indicators of Black workers becoming increasingly excluded from the formal labor market (Sugrue 1996).
The nature of informal work became more varied as African Americans sought alternatives to legitimate wage employment. This was particularly the case for women, who were on the lowest rung of the job hierarchy (Branch 2011). The commercialization of leisure in industrializing cities had developed rapidly since the first part of the twentieth century, and for generations Detroit was known for its strong entertainment economy and expanding nighttime leisure to accommodate its growing population (Wolcott 2001:93–94). Its informal economy was dominated by temporary jobs in licit and illicit leisure work, including neighborhood-based gambling known as the “Numbers Game,” sports betting, nightclubs and music venues, restaurants, and bars—all of which required support staff to operate (George 2024). Legitimate businesses were also part of the informal economy—restaurants and retail stores in African American neighborhoods could have separate spaces where Numbers games, rackets, and illegal betting might take place at certain times of the day (Adcock and Nelson 1970). The larger, more fanciful venues catered to key players in business, politics, entertainment, organized crime, and the professional gambling elite who needed discrete places to socialize and conduct their affairs.
African American women were integral to the functioning of these establishments, particularly those in predominantly Black areas of the city. An employer might hire someone as a cashier at a diner, and the person might also collect betting slips and calculate payouts to wagers in a back room. One news story on an FBI raid in 1970 of a Detroit gambling ring notes that more than half of the 58 people arrested were women (Adcock and Nelson 1970). Moreover, women earned money by offering their own services to customers who frequented elite venues, including escort and sexual services (Davis 2019). Black women were also consumers in the leisure economy, particularly frequenting smaller, more modest bars and local establishments that catered to working-class people and nightlife workers looking for a place to socialize after their shifts ended. Engagement in leisure came with risks and costs, especially for women who engaged in sex work and other illegal activities. However, Detroit’s informal economies, like those in similar urban areas, were spaces imbued with Black culture through their patrons, entertainment, music, and services (George 2024). Businesses operated outside the traditional confines of respectability and offered largely unsupervised mixing among individuals from different backgrounds. People could socialize together and actively explore a fuller range of sexual expression without being censured.
Findings
In the mid-twentieth century, informal work was critical to Black working-class women’s survival, and in Detroit, they found it in the expanding commercial leisure industry. Their engagements in underground labor markets served three key functions. First, urban leisure economies relied heavily on women as workers and appealed to Black women, who needed infusions of cash to offset the instability of formal-sector employment. Licit and illicit leisure work offered alternative paths toward self-sufficiency in ways that reduced women’s interdependence with kin and facilitated their sexual autonomy. Second, commercial leisure and illicit work settings were impermanent and unregulated spaces where multiple activities took place simultaneously at odd hours of the day and night. They were often at risk of being shut down or relocated, so they had an ephemeral character that fostered exploratory and burgeoning behaviors and identities among patrons and workers alike.
Finally, off-the-books workspaces attracted people who were comfortable operating outside of the typical boundaries of respectability. Individuals with same-sex desires could pursue those interests and develop networks with others who also wanted to explore. In Detroit, leisure places were largely racially segregated, and repeated encounters with other Black sexual minorities offered African American lesbians a sense of belonging that began to satisfy the complexity of their structural positions. Altogether, these three functions of informal economies helped establish the framework for nascent Black lesbian communities that were cemented in later decades.
Economic Independence and Self-Actualization Through Formal and Informal Work
As women who were interested in pursuing sexual relationships with other women, most in our sample did not marry men or stay in heterosexual marriages for long, which increased the importance of being self-supporting. A common thread in their oral histories was that as young women, they were not strongly engaged with familial support networks and often felt overwhelmed by their economic precarity. They had little choice but to maintain multiple jobs concurrently to make ends meet. The work appointments they found were often temporary, and when one ended, they could find similar work in low-paying service jobs throughout the city. The experiences of Veronica Crump highlight how Black women responded in creative ways, continually seeking forms of employment that would allow them to approximate financial stability while beginning to explore their sexual desires for other women.
Veronica was born in 1951 and migrated to Detroit from Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, before graduating from high school. 2 She did some janitorial work at advertising and market firms while also picking up shifts as a bartender and waitress at several bars with Black gay clientele. These included Club Exclusive, a commercial establishment on the “Detroit side” of Eight Mile Road where she also lived, and Club Casbah, a nightclub known for hosting female impersonators (Hooper 1996). For 15 years, Veronica lived off and on with her two children and her lover, who was also a Black woman. At times, their two sources of income were insufficient, and when that happened, she picked up extra bartending shifts at a local bowling alley.
For Veronica and others like her, it was necessary to secure multiple sources of income because her pay was insufficient and her hold on formal sector jobs was tenuous. However, Veronica’s case also highlights non-economic factors that motivated her to seek waged labor in the nightlife industry. At some of her places of employment, she was involuntarily outed as “homosexual.” Veronica referred to these as “straight jobs,” indicating that these were spaces where heterosexuality was compulsory and specific work duties were highly gendered. When coworkers confronted her about her suspected lesbian sexuality, she would tell them, “If this is gonna cause a problem for you and your establishment, I can quit.” Rather than continue cycling in and out of these spaces, Veronica became enmeshed in the nighttime leisure economy. In Detroit, this industry had a long history of being welcoming to sexual minorities and gender nonconforming people. The businesses in which under-the-table work occurred were concentrated in African American neighborhoods, and many served predominantly Black clientele. Veronica found work at a nightclub with a history of African American sexual minority patrons and was able to take on job responsibilities outside the narrow scope of what was typically allowed of women during this time. These wage labor opportunities were licit, but Veronica sought work outside of “straight jobs” settings that aligned her public laborer self and her semiprivate lesbian identity.
Other respondents, like Alice, similarly described the importance of what Canaday calls the “queer work world” in making ends meet. Alice was born in Indiana in 1923 and moved to Michigan as a young child.
3
In her interview, she recalls deliberately building a diverse skill set to temper bouts of unemployment and ensure she had more than one way to sustain herself. The daughter of a waitress and a factory worker, Alice graduated from high school in 1941 and earned a trade school certificate. However, despite the booming wartime job market, Alice “couldn’t get hired” by the local General Motors (GM) plant. She took a job as a soda jerk, where she served White, former schoolmates who were hired at GM without any training certificates. Frustrated with what she saw as unfair employment practices at GM, which had a well-documented history of refusing to employ African American women (Crenshaw 1989), in 1944, she moved to New York City, where she worked at the Armor Corporation, a defense contracting company. With foresight into the precarity of formal economies for Black women, Alice says:
After a while, I quit because I had sense enough to realize that this job was gonna be limited as long as the war was going on. I was thinking ahead. As soon as the war was over, everybody was gonna lose their job, defense jobs. I wanted to prepare myself so that I would be able to do something else when the war was over.
To ensure that she received additional, albeit irregular, income, Alice began working weekends as a photographer’s assistant. “I was so glad I did,” she said, “because I was making more money doing photography than I was in the defense plant.” In 1945, she was employed by Morgan and Marvin Smith Studios to take “while you wait” photos of carousing servicemen and other patrons outside nightclubs, and eventually she secured her own photo concession stand. The Smith brothers were African American twins who became famous for their news portraits and commercial variety photographs of legendary entertainers, politicians, and others, including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. DuBois. From 1940 through 1968, Morgan and Marvin Smith Studios occupied two floors of 243 West 125th Street, adjacent to the Apollo Theater. 4
After the war ended, Alice lost her job at the Armor Corporation and spent the next 6 years supplementing her income from photography by working at a local chain store and training as a barber. She was hired to work in a Harlem shop owned by “Mr. Jordan,” who liked her work in barbering school. She worked and then managed the shop for several years before returning to Michigan in 1953. She was finally hired by GM, but continued her entrepreneurial work to supplement her income. Like Veronica, Alice experienced racial and gendered workplace discrimination. She had earned two trade school certificates and specialized machine-shop training, but was placed on the janitorial staff and never allowed to advance within the company.
The experience of picking up new trades or pursuing new employment sectors when the opportunity arose was not uncommon among the Black lesbians whose stories we found in the archives. In 1943, Billie Hill dropped out of high school to attend trade school, where she earned a certificate in riveting, a skilled metals fabrication trade. 5 A personal connection helped her secure a position at the Ford Mercury plant, but the job was for lower wage work as an inspector on the assembly line instead of a position as a foreman. Billie says, “I refused to take an inspector’s job. I said I was trained the same as the men, that I was not going to take an inspector’s job.” Ford placed her on the line instead as a troubleshooter, giving her hope that she would soon be promoted to foreman, but time after time she trained new White male employees who would then be promoted over her to foreman. The contractual protections of a unionized workplace, even at the height of the United Auto Workers’ collective bargaining and political power (Freeman 2019), stopped short of protecting Black women employees from unfair labor practices.
After the war, Billie worked at a different assembly job and also picked up night shifts as a taxi driver. She continued to maintain multiple jobs concurrently while she was also actively “in the life” 6 working as a bouncer at the Palais, a nightclub that was a popular meeting place for lesbians (Retzloff 2014). At the Palais, White butch and Black stud lesbians were employed as bartenders and bouncers because their masculine gender presentation was thought to help maintain a safe space for lesbians (Thorpe 1997). As a taxi driver, assembly worker, and bouncer at the Palais, Billie felt free to present as more masculine. Her jobs as a taxi driver and a bouncer were especially liberating because she did not have to report to heterosexual employers, and had some autonomy over her work hours. Billie even held fourth and fifth concurrent jobs on her resume—she worked as a night clerk and handyman in the trailer park where she lived with Marion, her on-and-off girlfriend of 8 years.
The women’s experiences were consistent with other research on employment discrimination in postwar Detroit. The automotive industry offered African Americans work opportunities while also perpetuating uneven and discriminatory hiring practices (Sugrue 1996). The economic benefits of combining formal and informal work opportunities were critical to supporting the self-autonomy Black lesbians sought. The women’s stories also reveal important non-economic benefits related to women’s participation in underground economies. These spaces offered job responsibilities beyond the narrow scope typically allowed to women at the time and were less hostile to expressions of nonfeminine gender presentation when specific jobs called for them. This ability to explore lesbian sexuality with little fear of retribution was empowering. Their presence also made them visible to other women interested in meeting and forming relationships with Black lesbians.
Leisure and Sexual Economies as Sites for Lesbian Social Relationships
The spaces where off-the-books and temporary leisure work took place in 1950s and 1960s Detroit shared some common traits. Restaurants, cocktail lounges, taverns, cabarets, and other establishments that welcomed African American patrons and workers were located in Black entertainment districts. There were often licit and illicit activities taking place in these spaces, which attracted people for a variety of purposes. They offered opportunities for unmonitored and uncensored socializing among diverse people and were places where women found both personal pleasures and professional gains.
In the archival material we analyze, some working-class lesbians worked at locations known for sexual commerce because businesses in these spaces were willing to hire Black women for other types of licit work, and because those locations permitted more open expressions of a variety of sexualities. As Black lesbians worked in these spaces or visited them as consumers, they began to connect with other women with same-sex desires, developing friendships and romantic interests, and exploring a fuller range of sexuality.
J.P. described how making her livelihood in proximity to the informal economy led to her first lesbian relationship. 7 J.P. was born in Detroit in 1947 after her parents migrated from North Carolina in search of better job opportunities. Though at the time of the interview she was employed as a city clerk, she shared that what she mainly did was “play cards for a living.” While J.P.’s interview did not offer many details about her years as a professional gambler, her classification as self-employed for most of her life suggests that her winnings in Detroit’s active illegal betting scene offered some measure of subsistence. Midcentury African American women in northern cities were active in gambling circuits as number runners, clerks, and messengers, and used this work as one of several paths to economic independence (Harley 2002). J.P.’s long-standing presence in the gambling world connected her with other women in the life, helping her find romantic partners. She recollects that in 1976, she “met this lady at a card game and we just hit it off just like that . . . the next week she moved in with me. And it just went on from there.”
Work in the leisure industry offered opportunities to develop a variety of types of relationships with sexual minority women. For example, Lynne was born in Detroit in 1939 to a father who had migrated from Florida to work in the Ford factories and a mother who had migrated from Georgia.
8
Lynne says she really began participating in the gay life in 1967 at the age of 28, when she started working and living downtown in the red-light district. “After being downtown,” she says, “I found that there were other women like me that had those feelings for females.” She began to supplement her daytime factory job by working off the books as a burlesque dancer at a club called Empress. With deepening ties to urban nightlife and various newfound romantic relationships, Lynne began to feel like she was truly in the life and enjoyed being surrounded by “women, women, women.” Lynne’s job at the nightclub allowed her to meet her first lesbian lover:
Well, the way it happened, I had met her from work. She wasn’t working where I was working. But where the club was, it was a bar next door to it and a lot of the women would come in for drinks before they go out on the street. One night we had left the club and she [was] standing out in the front with this fellow . . . We said hello and went in the bar, and as the weeks went on I would run into her. So it was almost like at this particular time at night she would make it her business to be standing out there when we had our break.
The corner where the two women would meet was a known spot for club workers and sex workers to mingle while taking breaks from their burlesque work or looking for potential customers. She followed the behavior of others by actively engaging in the entertainment scene to make ends meet, seek out community, and encounter other women for sexual liaisons and relationships. In occupying bars, cabarets, and the like, these Black lesbians tended to frequent the same public spaces as women who sold sex for money. Their proximity to nightclubs and similar environments facilitated a porous exchange of ideas and connections between the two groups, making lesbians more likely to trade sex for money and sex workers more likely to have sexual affairs with other women. The unfixed nature of informal economic activity also increased the likelihood of sexual minority networks developing in one space, such as bars, overlapping with networks in other spaces, like burlesque backrooms.
Among lesbians who were making ends meet in commercial leisure venues, gender presentation played a role in shaping the type of work Black women engaged in. A subset of respondents described themselves as studs who were more masculine or gender nonconforming in their clothing choices. These women were more likely to be approached by sex workers looking for someone to serve as their manager. Lynne dressed in gender-nonconforming ways when not performing burlesque, and while working at the Empress in 1967, she noticed that her fellow dancers “would go off and turn tricks.” She describes the differences between sex workers who worked for themselves, those who worked for male managers whom they referred to as pimps, and women who worked for female studs who managed them. A character in the informal economies of Detroit was the male hustler, who wore “flashy clothes and money clips” (Wolcott 2001:93). When asked when she first started meeting “pimps,” Lynne shared that she was often confused for one because her style of dress was masculine and she was constantly surrounded by women:
Well, ‘cause at one time they thought I was one, but that really wasn’t my bag at all because I was around a lot of women, I was in the entertainment business and you know, if you dance, you around a whole lot of women. And they would like to go to the different clubs and stuff with me. So everybody always assumed that they were all mine.
Female managers of sex workers were less common than male managers, but all mentions of the term “pimps” in the archival materials we uncovered were related to lesbian women who dressed in gender nonconforming ways and who spent time in nighttime leisure spaces with groups of women who dressed in very feminine ways.
While Lynne turned down offers to manage sex workers, other stud lesbians did capitalize on this economic opportunity. Their proximity to women who were involved in sex work increased the chances of lesbians coming into regular contact with heterosexual as well as non-heterosexual sex workers. In these permeable social spaces, sex workers themselves were also more likely to solicit other women for sexual flings or business liaisons that involved sexual relationships as well as management of their work. Stud lesbians who were active in nightlife report being approached by other lesbians to manage them. They often served as conduits between networks of sexual minority women who were less visible in public spaces. Sandy was a stud who straddled the formal and informal economies, in effect blurring the two.
9
She was born in Detroit in 1945 to a White mother who migrated from Quebec, Canada, and an African American father from Detroit. Sandy did not graduate from high school and, at age 17, began working as a dancer and choreographer for the renowned dancer and dance instructor Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson. Eventually, some of her lesbian friends encouraged her to utilize her stud identity to oversee other women’s sex work for extra income. When she first started managing sex workers, she worked as a barmaid, but soon after, she began to add to her income by performing burlesque dance. “That’s how I met a majority of the girls that worked for me,” Sandy shares, “through the burlesque.” She recollects the time, saying
It was a lot of women that were out chasing after me. And I got to talking to this lesbian, and she told me “You’d make a good pimp.” I was working in a bar. I was a barmaid. And that sounded good to me . . . Next thing I knew, I had 28 girls working for me.
Sandy was connected to informal networks that spread the word about the type of work she was involved in, and that helped keep her busy as a self-proclaimed pimp. She provided opportunities for these women to meet others and have sexual encounters. She also found formal-sector employment for some of the women she managed, in positions such as waitress and receptionist.
Although Sandy developed a medical condition and had to stop dancing for income at the age of 21, she returned occasionally for small burlesque gigs at the nightclub and remained closely tied to that world. She shifted between formal and informal work as a bartender, go-go dancer, and manager of sex workers. Each of these jobs placed her in proximity to individuals involved in sexual commerce, as well as other informal work less connected to erotic labor. Women like Sandy, who were engaged in nighttime leisure work between formal and informal economies, provided opportunities for themselves and for other lesbians in their social worlds. It also helped deepen the social networks that were already coalescing at gatherings in people’s homes, such as events in Detroit hosted by Ruth Ellis (Fair 2021; Welbon 1999), and other house parties taking place in locales across the country (Cornwell 1983/2025; Kennedy and Davis 1993; Thorpe 1996).
A Sense of Belonging in Liminal Underground Economies and Sexual Marketplaces
Lesbians who operated as managers of erotic labor or as enterprising party hosts played a critical role as “local brokers” (Laumann et al. 2004) in Detroit’s sexual marketplace. Veronica, introduced earlier, worked as a bartender at multiple jobs and hosted after-hours house parties in her apartment. Queer women and men attended these parties, and Veronica would charge anywhere from one to three dollars for entry, with food and alcohol available for purchase. Veronica describes the proceeds as “a pretty nice profit because it was not really a lot of places for us to go,” noting the monetary benefits of hosting these events and highlighting the private communal space her parties offered queer Black people. These events not only brokered sexual relationships and friendships but also put Veronica into contact with women who would eventually seek shelter with her if they became unemployed or needed a short-term place to live. Veronica’s after-hours parties were key to her approximating financial stability as she maintained employment as a bartender in Detroit’s nightlife industry.
We found that although locations where illicit work in the underground economy took place were primarily intended as spaces for income-generating activity, these activities also conferred social benefits, offering a sense of belonging at the intersections of race and sexuality, and the ability to meet new people. Marie 10 was born in Venice, Mississippi, in 1927, and migrated with her mother to Detroit when she was 10 years old. In the late 1940s, she began “hanging out with the gay peoples,” who introduced her to Black lesbians who offered sex for money. She says, “I was hanging around with the girls that was ‘doing things,’ and they would show me how I could make some money, you know, by just having sex. Well, I was real fast that way, so why not get some money for it?” The women provided her with her first exposure to what would become a steady source of income. Over time, she worked to maintain the impression that she was employed in a formal wage-earning job to her parents and siblings; at the same time, she developed long-lasting friendships and relationships with sexual minority women in spaces where she was pursuing sex work.
In 1967, when Marie was about 40 years old, she was still occasionally having sex for money, but she was “mostly running a house.” When asked if she was a “madam,” Marie answered:
Madam, something like that at that time. You see, I sold drinks. No drugs. I sold drinks, and after bars were closed some of the girls from the bar would come by the house, and now if I wanted to, if the price was right, I would take it. But I didn’t have to then . . . I built a lot of my trade up on selling the drinks because I lived in an area [where] at that time there were these trucks that deliver cattle, big trailer trucks, and I would pass out my number to the men going to these packing houses. The truck drivers would come and buy drinks, and then I would play music. And a lot of times, if they asked for a girl, I’d know where to get one for them.
The features of her arrangement are similar to the buffet flats created and managed by female entrepreneurs during Prohibition, offering lodging, rooms for sex work, gambling, illegal sale of liquor, and various forms of entertainment (Robertson 2009). Madams who managed these unique social institutions were respected by other leisure workers and employed women who may have been excluded from jobs in the formal labor market. Marie strategically transformed her home into a “little after-hours place” where she was “the lady of the house” and served as a connector between heterosexual men looking for sex and women, some of whom were lesbians, providing these services. She would make a profit from selling alcohol, and while she facilitated the connection between the men and the sex workers, she says she did not recover a percentage of the women’s earnings. Instead, for a 10-dollar fee paid to Marie, the women could rent out the rooms where sexual labor took place. Marie would also occasionally engage in sex work herself “if the price was right.” In so doing, she created an informal institutional structure that offered sex workers a reasonably priced space to do their work in safety and with greater control over their labor. When she was not organizing sex work, Marie’s private home also became a space for gay women to socialize and explore their same-sex desires.
While the original motivation for work in informal economies is usually the ability to supplement work in the formal labor market and buttress bouts of unemployment with a variety of income-generating activities, we find that the women in the archival data have revealed important noneconomic benefits of the underground economy that are tied to the liminal or uncertain state of their sexual minority status, as well as the liminal status of the physical spaces where licit and illicit work took place. For working-class Black lesbians in the mid-twentieth century, employment and involvement in nighttime leisure spaces offered several rewards: They provided a work environment that allowed for stud gender presentation; they offered a physical location to explore and develop a lesbian sexuality beyond casual sexual relations with women or fanciful sexual entertainment activities; and they facilitated opportunities to locate and develop networks with other Black women who wanted to act on their same-sex desires. They used these relationships to gain knowledge about other parties in private homes, as well as other workspaces where sexual minorities could be hired for work. They gained chances to build camaraderie with other women while engaging in sex work and other types of labor that lesbians might perform. The networks that emerged from these engagements were not yet concretized into purposeful communities but were beginning to cohere. The informal economy provided the space for such relationships and identities to initiate and grow.
Discussion
In the mid-twentieth century, Black women could not just “become” lesbians or take on a lesbian sexuality as an identity status, without considering the mutually constitutive roles of race and gender categories for possibilities of employment, housing, and a myriad of legal rights and protections. They held the tensions of the postwar/preliberation era as they swung between formal and informal economies, heterosexual and homosexual worlds, rigid and fluid gender structures, and the systemic exploitation of racial capitalism, all of which governed their behaviors. Our work is congruent with more humanistic frameworks (e.g., Ferguson 2004), offering data and analyses that highlight the importance of how sexual identity operates within the structural inequalities elucidated by theories of racial capitalism. The case study we explore invites other research on this issue.
Defining characteristics of informal labor markets in large urban cities facilitated the development of lesbian desire for African American women who held those attractions. Those contexts operated differently for them compared to what studies have found for White, sexual minority men. Black women with same-sex desire sought to find one another, and learned that the commercial leisure spaces where they were hired for short-term work opportunities were places that attracted other sexual minority women. They were less regulartory of behavior, offering a private and psychic space for liminal selves to undertake the work of transformation.
For Black, sexual minority women, the pursuit of self-actualization and autonomy was an important byproduct and motivating factor for engagement in informal labor markets. The non-economic properties of these settings provided a fertile environment for sexual identities to emerge and take shape, and new social relationships to develop. In addition, as migration processes expanded, the need for urban recreation, nighttime labor, and amusements supported women in their state of sexual liminality. This finding has implications for how sociologists understand the connections between race, gender, work, and pleasure, not only for sexual minority women but for other groups entangled in informal labor markets. Our work reveals the intimate connections between Black sexualities and practices of freedom, with such efforts persisting even as they experienced significant challenges (i.e., Jones 2025).
Working-class Black lesbians also found one another in segments of the leisure economy where sex work was organized. In Detroit, as well as other cities during this time, the boundaries between sex as work and sex as pleasure could be unclear since indoor spaces where this labor occurred usually offered a variety of services to customers. But lesbians have long been involved in the sex industry as workers, managers, and clients (Murray 1995). Nestle (1987) has described the relationship between lesbians and prostitutes as an “historical sisterhood,” noting that these overlapping groups share an outlaw status and a history of state control. The types of strong support networks that developed among women active in various roles across the sex industry are similar to what others have found in earlier periods of history. We argue that when these relationships are scaffolded by same-sex desire and the ability to connect with others who share that interest, the work settings they occupy become sites for identity-building around sexual orientation.
The underground economy has been a host for temporary work structures, with limited supervision and monitoring of behaviors that might fall outside of traditional bounds of respectability. Many jobs are organized around the illegal sale of alcohol or stolen goods, gambling, sex work, and other forms of vice. The risky settings encourage employers to hire individuals who lack certain legal protections and are therefore expendable as workers (Canaday 2023). Law enforcement can shut down, dismantle, relocate, or otherwise remove businesses where such activities occur, so people tend not to work in any given venue for extended periods. Therefore, while we use the concept of liminality to describe the experiences of sexual exploration that Black women engaged in throughout the mid-twentieth century, we also argue that economies in which under-the-table activities took place were themselves liminal spaces, much as Woolner (2023) called attention to decades earlier during the Prohibition Era. As locations where temporary transactions, bartering, and various types of exchanges occur, often under the guise of legitimate business ventures, those settings also held liminal properties. The fact that these spaces were located in African American neighborhoods and organized around Black social life gave sexual minorities a way to understand their sexuality as a part of a Black racial identity.
Identifying the underground economy as a liminal space that facilitates the development of self-understandings encourages researchers, and sociologists in particular, to expand their thinking about how liminality might function in other settings. The ambiguity of the “in-between” state is relevant not just for sexual identity, but also for other statuses as well. For example, Menjivar (2023) identifies liminality in the gray areas of the law that become tools to obstruct the immigration process, depending on the characteristics of those seeking to immigrate. There is more to be learned about the sociological properties of this ambiguous, ephemeral state of transformation and the characteristics of spaces that facilitate liminal change. Our work pushes this conceptual framework in new directions through its suggestion of how the temporal or in-between state of being that defines liminality exists within the individual in one’s experience of self-discovery around sexual identity, with that experience being fueled by the characteristics of nightlife and leisure jobs that are fleeting and transient, and that draw sexual minorities and other marginalized groups to labor. It invites further theorizing in sociology on the connection between liminality, located in the individual, and its capacity to be nurtured by temporal and geographic spaces.
In the pre-Stonewall era, working-class Black women cultivated places of belonging that were not always fixed. But once found, they could be rediscovered and enjoyed beyond a single friendship network. Our findings capture some of these experiences of social relationships that predate the development of a community and a politics around sexual orientation, alongside racial identity for African American women. These ideas emerge more fully through organizing in the 1970s, which revealed opportunities to see same-sex desire and behavior outside of a framework of shame, and within larger sets of political understandings for women and for African Americans through such groups at the Combahee River Collective (Taylor 2017) and Salsa Soul Sisters United for Societal Change (Smith-Cruz 2024). Nevertheless, the mid-twentieth century offers an important stage in this progression. Understanding nascent community-building from this vantage point can help elucidate other transitional processes in the formation of group membership. The case of sexual minority women in this time period, and what we learn about the ways members of marginalized groups locate one another and build relationships, invites sociologists to consider similar patterns of activity in different contexts among individuals or groups undergoing other types of change.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by grants to the first author from the National Institutes of Health (grant #P30-AG02-1684), the Russell Sage Foundation, the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies, and a Barnard College Presidential Award. The second author was funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (grant #DGE-1644869). We thank Japonica Brown-Saracino, Lynn Chancer, LaShawn Harris, Trevon Logan, Barbara Risman, four anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their careful comments and suggestions.
Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.