In 1925, Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish émigré who had spent the past four years travelling across the United States selling leftist radical literature, opened a tearoom in Greenwich Village. Eve’s Hangout, as it was sometimes known, was situated in the basement of 129 MacDougal Street. The small, sparingly lit cellar quickly became a destination among the city’s bohemian contingents—artists, poets, activists, gay men, and lesbians. According to the Daily News, it was rumored that “men kept to one room, the women in another.” The Quill, a downtown periodical, summed it up, mockingly, as a place “where ladies prefer each other.”
Adams was born Chawa Zloczewer in Mława, a town in Russian Poland, in 1891, and she came to America in 1912, at the age of twenty. Given the social and political ferment of the Poland of her youth—where socialists, nationalists, liberals, and anarchists actively campaigned for supporters—it’s likely that she already had radical ideas by the time she arrived. In New York, Adams wore pants suits; her dress was once described as “mannish.” Before founding Eve’s Hangout, she worked at a magazine, Mother Earth, run by the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman. The periodicals that Adams sold included the Liberator, a “Journal of Revolutionary Progress.” One ad she posted for her subscription service featured, simply, a drawing of her androgynous bob, accompanied by the words “You will know her by her hair.”
One evening in June, 1926, a woman named Margaret Leonard walked into Eve’s Hangout wearing a tweed suit and carrying a briefcase. Adams took to Leonard, and, the next day, they met at Adams’s apartment and rode a taxi to Times Square to see a play. Later, Leonard would report that, in the car, Adams kissed her “profusely,” slid her hand under Leonard’s coat, and touched Leonard’s breasts. At dinner, they waltzed. That night, Adams told Leonard that she wanted to give her a copy of the book she had published the previous year, called “Lesbian Love,” a collection of biographical snapshots of lesbians Adams had known. They returned to her apartment, where Adams gave Leonard a copy and autographed it.
A few days after their outing, Leonard returned to Eve’s Hangout and revealed herself to be an undercover policewoman. Together with four other officers, she arrested Adams for “disorderly conduct”—a broad charge that referred, in this case, to Adams’s alleged sexual advances—and for having written an “obscene” book. After trials for each charge, Adams was sentenced to a year and a half in jail. When she completed her sentence, immigration authorities began deportation proceedings against her. (Although she had begun applying for naturalization in 1923, Adams was not yet an American citizen.) During the hearings, she pleaded to be allowed to stay, but, in 1927, she was sent back to Poland. Her days there were hard. In a letter to a friend, she described her “everyday worry” being “for a piece of bread.” “I cannot steal and I am a stranger-Jew here,” she wrote. She sustained herself on a Ten Cent Classics edition of Tennyson’s poetry, and she eventually managed to move to Paris. Adams’s passport listed her profession as “writer—woman of letters,” but, to support herself, she sold novels to American tourists on the street. After the Nazis occupied France, she tirelessly worked to find a way out of the country, but in late 1943 she was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.
“Lesbian Love,” though long since largely forgotten, might be the first ethnography of lesbians in America. Structured as a series of vignettes, the book—which Adams described as a “scientific literary contribution”—captures scores of women who flirted, courted, or were in love with one another, and some who played with the presentations of their gender. In the opening chapter, “Glimpses,” Adams writes of “a little rendezvous tearoom, late after dinner hour, where six or seven girls had gathered. One lone man sat silent in a corner. Whispers and love sonatas could be heard among the group of girls—occasionally laughter.” The group included women called Ann, Sara (who seemed to be Ann’s lover), and “May, the proprietress, known as Jim.”
That we can read “Lesbian Love” now is thanks to the historian Jonathan Ned Katz, who began piecing together an account of Adams’s life after coming across a vague mention of her in a book review in 2016. At the time, Katz, the author of “Gay American History,” and arguably the most prolific archaeologist of America’s queer past, was surprised that he had never heard of this iconoclast. He was intrigued by Adams’s use of the word “lesbian” in her title—the first such instance in an American text, he now believes—so he decided to search for her. The result, “The Daring Times and Dangerous Life of Eve Adams,” which was published by Chicago Review Press in May, is an animated biography, but it is also a kind of rescue mission, as queer histories often must be.
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One of the obstacles that queer historians face is that the material in archives often does not describe queer people’s intimate arrangements explicitly—if not because there was no vocabulary for those arrangements, then because queer people have felt compelled to leave few traces, in the face of a culture that considered their romantic lives sinful, aberrant, and even criminal. In many cases, the most substantial pieces of evidence are the records that were created when queer people got in trouble—documents like police records and trial transcripts, which Katz drew on extensively. Adams landed on the radar of the Bureau of Investigation, the progenitor of the F.B.I., in 1919, when a new division was created specifically to gather information on labor organizers, dissenters, pacifists, and activists. From that point onward, she was under almost constant watch.
That “Lesbian Love” proved so difficult to find for so long was in part by design: Adams printed just a hundred and fifty copies, which were labelled “for private circulation only.” At one of her deportation hearings, she told the judge that she intended the book for a limited audience who were already interested in the topic—“artists and poets of Greenwich Village.” Limiting the book’s reach was a protective strategy but meant that it nearly vanished from the historical record. When Katz began his research, the only copy ever held by a library—the Sterling Library, at Yale—had long since disappeared. It wasn’t until he got in touch with a playwright named Barbara Kahn, who had written three plays about Adams that had short runs in the East Village in the early twenty-tens, that he learned the whereabouts of an extant copy. Kahn passed on the name of a woman named Nina Alvarez, who, incredibly, had discovered a copy in the lobby of her apartment building in Albany, in 1998. The text of this copy, which Alvarez shared with Katz, appears as the appendix to his book, along with some of the original illustrations, all but guaranteeing that it will never again be inaccessible to readers and researchers.
It seems appropriate that Katz would be the one to tell Adams’s story. Both were autodidacts: Katz, who is now eighty-three, does not have a college degree—he learned how to write history mostly from the intellectuals and activists he met in New York in the nineteen-seventies. Much of this education was obtained at the weekly dinners hosted by John D’Emilio—the renowned gay historian, then a graduate student at Columbia—where attendees gathered to eat spaghetti and to discuss Marx and Lenin. As a young Jewish woman raised in Poland, Adams was unlikely to have received an advanced education, but, in New York, she too was part of intellectual circles. She frequented parties held by a woman named Edith Adams, where she mingled with the likes of Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene O’Neill, and Sadakichi Hartmann. Ben Lewis Reitman, a political ally of Eve Adams’s, described the scene there as “a training school for female roughneck anarchists.”
But there is also a deeper affinity between the two, in the way they devoted their careers to capturing worlds that were at risk of disappearing. In Adams’s time, same-sex relationships existed almost entirely in the shadows, and many of the women involved in them wanted to keep it that way. (Gertrude Stein, her contemporary, kept her affairs quiet by confining them to the drawing rooms and parlors to which her wealth and social class granted her access.) In 1925, when Adams published “Lesbian Love,” the word “lesbian” was only just beginning to shed the associations it had as a term invoked by medical authorities to pathologize women who pursued same-sex relationships. It was not a label that many who were assigned it embraced. But Adams wanted to change that; she liked the word for the possibility it offered of making visible an identity and type of relationship that had had no universal name. And, although her vision of it may have been slightly narrower than ours, resembling what would come to be known as “butch,” her adoption of it as a positive term is nonetheless revolutionary.
Katz’s choice to use the word “gay” in the title of “Gay American History” was also a pointed one. Prior to the book’s publication, in 1976, queer lives were not considered legitimate subjects of historical inquiry. The Dewey decimal system classified homosexuality as a medical aberration or crime. Katz’s book compiled an abundance of records to show that gay Americans had existed for a long time, and that their communities constituted a culture of their own. Like Adams, he recognized that in documenting these communities, and naming their participants “gay,” he was providing them with a frame through which to understand themselves.
Some of Katz’s material came from a serendipitous source—a man named Eran Zahavy, a descendant of Adams’s brother, Yerachmiel Zahavy, who immigrated to Palestine prior to the Second World War. Before his death, Yerachmiel tasked his grandson with finding out the truth of what happened to his sister. Eran discovered that a researcher named Martha Lynn Reis had written her graduate thesis about Ben Lewis Reitman, Adams’s ally; through her, he learned of letters that Adams wrote to Reitman about a relationship she had with a younger woman, Hella Olstein Soldner, whom she met in Paris. When Eran found Soldner’s family, they gave him a file of Adams’s letters, as well as a handful of photographs.
One of these images, Adams’s last passport picture, appears on the cover of Katz’s book. Of the photo, Katz writes that she has “a familiar look—she could be one of my arty, brainy, political pals.” As Katz admits, the basis of his feelings of familiarity extended beyond the nature of their common work. Katz began his research in December, 2016, and found in Adams’s circumstances a warning about how policies fuelled by anti-immigrant sentiment might treat those who, despite identities that the state deemed undesirable, nonetheless wanted to leave accounts of themselves. When Adams was questioned about “Lesbian Love” at one of her deportation hearings, eight years before she would be transported to Auschwitz, she responded, “I never realized that the book was indecent. If I did, I would have never written it. . . . I merely wrote this group of short stories of people I observed in my travels out west and mostly in Greenwich Village. I merely intended to describe these characters with the aim to help them, to show them the truth of their lives.”
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