This (Gay) Old House
(Or: These are the LGBTQ+ people in your neighborhood.)
We had only lived in our new home a few weeks when a neighbor, whose house is just down the hill from ours, eagerly informed us that our house was gay. At least, that’s what I (happily) drew from the conversation.
She told us that she had attended a political fundraiser in our house back when a male couple owned it. The men collected art, she explained. It made sense: in lieu of utilitarian overhead lighting, the house came with small recessed lights angled toward the walls, the better to illuminate works of art. My new neighbor, a woman in her mid- to late-50s with blonde-grey curls and a wide smile, drew closer to me as she said, in a strangely aggressive whisper, “The art was VERY HOMOEROTIC.” And then she chuckled.
I smiled, too, because I knew that I had truly found my dream house. I had become the owner of a home not only surrounded by lovely gardens and flowering trees but filled with the ghosts of queer lust past. Please and thank you.
Replacing those impractically tiny wall-adjacent fixtures with all-purpose lighting was one of the first changes we made to the house after we assumed occupancy, but I otherwise wanted to embrace my home’s queer past. I live in a quaint 1920s suburb outside of Philadelphia, many of whose residents pride themselves on their progressive values. Yet this town remains overwhelmingly white and straight. Every expression of LGBTQ visibility—including new rainbow-painted crosswalks—feels significant. (One of those crosswalks was defaced with anti-gay language in the fall of 2023, but community members rallied to restore it.) Moving into a house whose history evoked neighbors’ slightly scandalized recollections of gay-themed art helped me feel more at home.
I was reminded of this story about my home when I read about two newly designated National Historic Landmarks: the Furies Collective and the Slowe-Burrill House, both in Washington, D.C. These designations resulted from a partnership between the National Parks Service (NPS), which oversees the National Historic Landmarks program, and the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
The Furies Collective was a lesbian separatist group that lived in a D.C. rowhouse (219 11th Street SE) from 1971 to 1973. Comprised of twelve women, the collective was committed to women’s total independence from men. They shared household duties, pooled their resources, and crafted a philosophy of lesbian feminism that resonated across the United States. Women’s bookstores carried their newspaper, The Furies, which helped their ideas circulate far beyond 11th Street. I’ll write more about the Furies in a future newsletter.
The other designation was the home of Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill, who lived together at 1256 Kearney Street, NE, in Washington, DC from 1922 to 1937. Slowe was Howard University’s first dean of women and the first Black member of the National Association of Deans of Women. She advocated against sexism within Howard and against racism within the broader realm of higher education. Burrill was also an educator. For Slowe as for the Furies, home ownership was not simply about building equity or finding a commodious residence. It meant the freedom to express her sexuality freely.
Slowe’s story is especially illustrative of the importance of housing in LGBTQ history. In 1922, Howard’s president J. Stanley Durkee appointed Slowe to the position of Dean of Women. (Slowe had graduated from Howard as class valedictorian in 1908. She was also a tennis star. She earned a Master’s degree in English from Columbia.) Slowe successfully negotiated for dean-worthy pay and a spot on the university’s Board of Deans. In 1926, a new president of Howard, Mordecai Johnson, almost immediately questioned Slowe’s professional status and influence. With Johnson’s encouragement, in 1933, the Board of Trustees cut funding for Slowe’s office and booted her from the Board of Deans. They disbanded the women’s program, firing the “women’s physician, dietician, and director of dormitories”—which amounted, as Slowe wrote in a letter to the Board, to “practically everything that I had built up over a period of eleven years.”
Housing became a main point of contention. Johnson ordered Slowe to move out of her private home, which she shared with Burrill, and live instead on campus to supervise women students, the better to “keep her eyes on the activities of the girls.” (The Dean of Men was not asked to live on campus.) Slowe reached out to alumni for support and took the story to the press. Letters to the Trustees poured in (all, seemingly, from white and Black women). One Black woman pointed out that the new requirement might diminish the reputation of Howard’s female students: “Certainly it would be most unfortunate publicly to stigmatize the women of our largest institution of higher education as unfit for the measure of self-government granted the men of that institution.” Slowe was especially galled that the requirement would transform her role from that of a professional dean to more of a “matron,” a position associated with dormitory supervision and chaperonage of young women. Whether Johnson was motivated by sexism, homophobia, some combination of the two, or other factors, his vendetta against Slowe struck at both her professional and personal dignity. Slowe successfully resisted Johnson’s demands that she live on campus, but the destruction of the women’s division continued, and she never received comparable pay to her male peers.
The home she and Burrill shared was more than just a residence, and their ownership of it had consequences far beyond its value to them personally. As a private home owned by two highly respected, educated Black women who interacted with generations of students and their families, the house on Kearney Street was a center of Black women’s sociability and networking. They hosted parties for female Howard students. Young women who attended Howard knew that the Dean and her partner lived together in a house that they owned, a model of Black attainment amid the grinding discrimination of Jim Crow.
As co-owners of the house, Slowe and Burrill were both visibly and discreetly queer. In the 1920s and 1930s, professional women who lived together could avoid scrutiny because many people assumed that they had formed a partnership more economic than intimate. An educated woman who wanted to pursue her profession almost always remained unmarried. While typically earning less than a man would doing the same job, she could live modestly if she took on a roommate. That logic allowed gay women to form households in plain view of their neighbors, without drawing unwanted attention to their domestic arrangements. Yet within a mostly female community of students, educators, and others, the nature of Slowe and Burrill’s relationship was likely well understood. According to an article in the Washington Post, “those in their circles interacted with Slowe and Burrill as if they were a couple.”
Slowe had an intimate understanding of the need for women’s autonomy. She insisted (without success) that Howard open more courses in economics, political science, and other “modern” subjects to its women students, to prepare them for the complexities of the contemporary world. She prized her independence and was rightfully proud of what she had accomplished as an educator and administrator. The idea that a man might tell her, an adult, where and with whom to live, highlighted a specific sort of sexism that insists on infantilizing women who challenge the very structures that suppress their self-determination.
One story suggests that Burrill temporarily moved out of the house on Kearney Street for a couple years after Slowe’s death, from kidney disease, in 1937, because she could not bear to be there without her lifelong companion. She handled the responsibilities of a widow, replying to condolence cards and settling Slowe’s other accounts.
These are the sorts of stories that too easily disappear from our neighborhoods. We tend to view the suburbs in particular as straight until proven otherwise. While I am skeptical that federal funding for LGBTQ public history initiatives will continue over the next four years, it’s wonderful that the NPS and OAH preserved some of those histories for us.
Please check out my book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (Norton, 2024) — on “best of” lists for the New Yorker, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews!
In addition to heritage sites officially designated by the NPS, you can explore the LGBTQ “History Pin” project to find other historically significant landmarks near you.
Other Sources:
Bell-Scott, Patricia. “To Keep My Self-Respect: Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe’s 1927 Memorandum on the Sexual Harassment of Black Women.” NWSA Journal 9, no. 2 (1997): 70–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316507.
Perkins, Linda M. “Lucy Diggs Slowe: Champion of the Self-Determination of African-American Women in Higher Education.” The Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1/4 (1996): 89–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717610.