During the years of the Harlem Renaissance, African-American homosexual men commonly identified one another as faggots, in reclama-tion of the shameful “bundle of sticks” that fifteenth-century English heretics were forced to carry about in public humiliation. Like
many other Harlem residents, the uninhibited Texas transplant Jimmie Daniels presented himself to the neighborhood’s habitués as unabashedly queer. As a young man, Daniels hosted and performed at New York’s popular Hot Cha speakeasy, where he helped to establish Harlem as a multiracial entertainment mecca, before launching his namesake Jimmie Daniels Nightclub in 1939. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Daniels joined hundreds of other adventurous men who masqueraded in makeup and handmade gowns to hobnob with women revelers dressed in tuxedos at Harlem’s annual Hamilton Lodge Ball on West 155th Street. Legions of spectators, including straight socialites and reporters from the Harlem newspapers, purchased balcony seats to cheer on the gaudy proceedings, which they cordially recognized as “the Faggots Balls.”

George Platt Lynes, Jimmie Daniels, photograph, ca. 1936. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Copyright the Estate of George Platt Lynes. Sources: Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,
and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies,
and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010.