Women of Color in Burlesque: The Not-So-Hidden-History
By Guest Contributor Sydney F. Lewis
I have been up all night looking at vintage Jet Magazines on Google Books. A friend and fellow Black burlesque performer, Chicava HoneyChild of Brown Girls Burlesque, introduced me to this impressive online archive of Black politics, society, and entertainment. Founded in 1951, by John H. Johnson, Jet magazine was initially billed as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine.” I like to think of it as Ebony magazine’s tawdry little sister. After about eight hours of being glued to the screen, flipping virtually through captivating documentation of Black strippers from the 1940s-1970s, I have come to the conclusion that, just as I suspected, the omission of Black Women and other Women of Color from the realm of burlesque picture and history books is just willed ignorance– ignorance, lazy scholarship, and yup I’ll say it, racist brands of white feminism.
Once I learned about the online archive of Jet magazines, it took me a few hours of leisurely and pleasurable research to compile a list of almost fifty names and locations and about thirty pictures of black burlesque performers, strippers, and “Shake Dancers.” Some women were big-time enough to work on the Minsky circuit, earn $1000+ a week, insure their bodies, tour the US and Europe, and work with (and date) prominent entertainers such as Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis Jr., and Little Richard. Women such as Rosalee Takeela, Rose Hardaway, Vida de Soir “The Red Hot Sex Queen,” Elizabeth “China Doll” Dickerson, and Jean Idelle were commonly pictured in the gossip columns of the national black magazine.
One woman, Rosa La Roso was in an extended legal battle with white burlesque performer Rose La Rosa after the white dancer sought a court injunction to prohibit Rosa la Roso from using such a similar name. Rose La Rosa is listed in various burlesque history books, while the Black performer, Rosa La Roso is never mentioned. This is particularly ironic given that Rosa La Roso commented about the white performer, “I’ve never even heard of that other Rose.” In the October 29, 1953 issue, Jet published an expose entitled “Why Girls become Shake Dancers” with content that, even in 2011, is fairly stripper-positive.
My pleasure perusing the Jet archive quickly turned to anger as I realized that I have been bamboozled into believing that my Black burlesque foremothers didn’t exist or were all little-known, no-name (read low talent) chorus girls. Due to racist and exclusionary scholarship, I’ve been tricked into believing that it was racism from long ago that kept these brown burlesque queens nameless and lost to history, that no one bothered to document their presence then so we can’t find documents now. And that’s a lie. Such performers were documented, extensively, by the black press, and that documentation isn’t impossible to find. If I can discover more than fifty performers of color in a leisurely few hours at my computer, then imagine what treasures of information could be found in black theater and performance archives, newspapers, or other black magazines. Black striptease artists had a voice is the 40s, 50s, and 60s and it is contemporary burlesque historians who repress their presence.
I personally own at least 10 books on burlesque, neo-burlesque, and striptease which I comb like a CSI agent for any evidence of women of color performers. Despite their claims that they are a “Pictorial History of Burlesque,” a compendium of “Legendary Stars of Stage,” or an “untold history” of striptease these books disturbingly omit countless black and brown performers.
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