Adapted with the author's permission from a feature on www.truthdig.com, September 24, 2015:  The adaptation contains reproductions of some of the documents discovered by the author and citations to others.[1]

It was April 12, 1888.

When the police burst through the door of the two-story residence in northwest Washington, D.C., just half a mile from the White House, they discovered numbers of black men dancing together, “almost in a nude condition,” The Washington Post reported.[2] Another paper reports the men were wearing silk and satin dresses.[3]

Then all the dancing suddenly stopped. The men looked on in shock for a brief moment before scurrying to make their getaway.

Many struggled to strip off their garments, their ribbons and their “wigs of long, wavy hair.”[4] Others raced immediately to the back doors or leapt out of second-floor windows and onto the roofs of neighboring buildings.

A large man named William Dorsey Swann—the queen of the ball—was “arrayed in a gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin.”[5] But unlike the others, he ran frantically toward the officers in a vain attempt to keep them from entering.

The raid caused such a commotion that roughly 400 people arose from their beds, gathered outside to watch and even followed the police and suspects back to the station that night.

In total, 13 men—all black—were arrested and “charged with being suspicious characters.” They were ordered to pay a bond or serve 30 days in jail, and their names were published in the local papers the next day for all the city to read.

The papers' lists of arrestees vary slightly, but they all included: William Dorsey [Swann], John Smith, Jacob Byard, Charles Myers, Samuel Jackson, James Waters, James Howard (aka Laura Howard[?]), James Taylor and Benjamin Moore. The following names were listed in at least one but not all three of the papers: Jacob Lewis, Samuel Lewis, Lewis Jackson and Albert Lee.

(Story continued below.)

1887
Just a year before, in January 1887, another such dance was also raided.[6] This one had featured both white and black invitees—some sporting fancy frocks. Despite the chilly weather, some wore nothing at all. Several of the same people had been arrested, including Swann.

The evidence hints that the men may have intentionally changed the locations of their parties in order to evade law enforcement. Detectives, however, were keeping an eye on Swann and the others, perhaps with the help of one or more informants within the group.

Though some in the group were white, Swann and his friends were mostly black men who worked as laborers for wealthy white families or for the federal government. Despite the ever-present threat of being raided by the police, publicly shamed in the newspapers, fired from their jobs, disowned by their families and sent to prison, they repeatedly gathered in secret in one another’s homes to hold drag dances.

In the 1880s, however, homosexuality—then known as sexual inversion, erotopathia and “the old Scythian malady” and by other bizarre-sounding names—was often spoken of in the same breath as bestiality. Even among highly educated people, it was nearly unanimously looked upon as both a moral abomination and a serious mental disorder.

Here is a sample of the racist, sexist medical texts published in the late-nineteenth century U.S. It’s from an article by Dr. Irving C. Rosse, “Sexual Hypochondriasis and Perversion of the Genesic Instinct,” published in a Saint Louis, Missouri medical journal in 1892: 

"Among other genital idiosyncrasies of negroes coming to the knowledge of the Washington police, is the old Scythian malady spoken of by Hippocrates and Herodotus, and observed by contemporary travelers in the Caucasus. A band of negro men, with all the androgynous characteristics of the malady, was some time since raided by the police. The same race a few years ago had one or more gangs that practiced a kind of phallic worship. An informant, who has made a study of skatological rites among lower races described to me how a big buck, with turgescent penis, decorated with gaily colored ribbons, stood and allowed his comrades to caress and even osculate the member. Performances of the same nature are known to the rites of vadouism. In New Orleans a few years ago a vadoux society was suddenly surprised by the police during these ceremonies. Two of the naked persons taking part in the orgy were white women. The incident lead to a famous trial which resulted in acquittal."[7]

The Author
Channing Joseph is a journalist based in San Francisco. He is currently one of Truthdig’s editors as well as an MTV News correspondent covering social justice issues. His stories have also been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, People, CNN and BET as well as around the world in outlets like The Globe and Mail of Toronto and The New Zealand Herald. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Columbia Journalism School.