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Singer, actress and civil rights activist Josephine Baker (1906 –1975) was among the most influential queer icons of the 20th century. The enigmatic, endlessly imaginative performer made an art form out of challenging the gender and racial status quo of her era. A rare example of an openly bisexual celebrity before the 21st century, Baker’s story demonstrates why queer liberation must be understood through the lens of intersectionality and systems of privilege.
Early Years
Freda Josephine McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a single working mother, Carrie McDonald, who supported her children as a laundress.[1] As an impoverished African American young woman, Baker’s early life was defined by the cruelties of racism pervasive in the American South during the Jim Crow era. Sources suggest that the 1917 East St. Louis race riots, which saw dozens of African Americans murdered and thousands more left homeless, was a critical moment for the 11-year old Baker that inspired her to take to vaudeville.[2] Baker’s natural gifts as a stage performer provided her a pathway out of crushing poverty. Her first major stage role came in the Black musical Shuffle Along, when she herself was still a teenager, in New York City.[3] From then on, there was no turning back for Baker on the road to international stardom.
Roaring 20s
She first arrived in Paris in 1925 at the height of the post-World War I “Roaring 20s”. France would ultimately become Baker’s joy and lifelong home, where she was beloved throughout her expatriate years. Her time in Paris began as the headliner for the show La Revue Nègre, but her performances in La Folie du Jour later at the Follies-Bergere Theater turned Baker into a household name. Baker’s exotic “danse sauvage” and fearless costumes – most infamously, her banana “skirt” – made her an instant sensation. Baker’s shows deliberately flaunted racist and sexist stereotypes, effectively turning the tables on the tropes familiar to her white, European and colonizer audience.[4]
Baker was acclaimed in Paris as “the Bronze Venus” and feted accordingly throughout the 1920s and 30s. Ernest Hemingway praised her as “the most sensational woman anyone saw” while Pablo Picasso lauded her “smile to end all smiles”.[5] By the 1930s, she was also a rising movie star and became the first African American woman in a lead film role.[6]
Throughout her rise to stardom, Baker embraced a fully open queer sexuality and unabashedly sex-positive lifestyle. She famously said of her sexuality, “I’m not immoral…I’m only natural.”[7] Baker would ultimately be married four times to men (her marriage to Jean Lion enabled her French citizenship), but she had numerous affairs with women throughout her life.
While a teenager in the US, Baker was reportedly involved with the blues singer, Clara Smith, another African American artist, and with fellow performer Maude Russell while on her earliest US tours.[8] But her affairs with women continued into her expatriate years despite her fame and intensified public scrutiny. Among these were likely the French author known as Collette, affairs with German women she met throughout her tour there in 1926, and possibly the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.[9]
In addition to four husbands (the last of whom was homosexual himself), Baker was connected to the architect Le Corbusier and the Crown Price Gustav Adolf of Sweden, who reportedly made an evening of decorating Baker’s naked body with priceless jewels during Baker’s visit to Stockholm.[10]
Spy and Activist
World War II briefly curtailed Baker’s career on stage, but she refused to slow down (or stand down) while Europe was engulfed in warfare. She courageously supported the French Resistance movement as a spy, and proved uniquely adept at moving throughout European high society without attracting attention. She eventually set up shop in North Africa, ferrying secret messages to the Allies, while also performing for racially integrated companies of French and American forces.[11] She was ultimately awarded the Croix de Guerre for services to liberate the country she had made her home.
Her visits to the US, particularly in the early 1950s, were set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. The deep, intransigent racism and enforced segregation that Baker saw whenever she returned to US shores shocked her after her years of celebrity in Europe.[12] Among many other instances, she found herself turned away from whites-only hotels in New York City, and in some cases verbally abused by her white co-stars.[13] These experiences led to Baker’s refusal to perform for segregated crowds, and ultimately influenced her participation in the 1963 March on Washington (where she was the only female speaker).[14] Her speech that day, delivered just before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took the podium, is available here.
Her commitment to equality for all peoples became a central, driving preoccupation for the remainder of her life. This pursuit was perhaps most evident in her “Rainbow Tribe”, a multi-ethnic group of a dozen adopted children that she raised together at her chateau in Dordogne, France. Baker saw her “global family” as a microcosm of a free, liberated and loving society which she believed humanity could achieve.
Legacy
But despite her public activism and family life, Baker continued to amaze audiences well into her 60s. Though she fell into financial challenges (even settling into the French Riviera in 1969 with the help of Princess Grace Kelly after losing her home), she remained an electric performer until her final show just days before her death in April 1975.[15] Thousands attended her Paris funeral, complete with a 21-gun salute; in 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron inducted her as the first Black woman in the Panthéon, France’s famous monument honoring national heroes.[16]
Though Josephine Baker has been immortalized as a performer, the power of her legacy extends far beyond the stage. A priority issue for the modern queer community is gaining a deeper understanding of intersectionality, particularly among issues of race, gender and sexuality. In many respects, Baker lived at the very center of these “intersections” as she fearlessly challenged prejudice in many forms throughout her illustrious life. Above all, she refused to be confined or limited by the norms of her era, racial, sexual or otherwise; Baker saw no other way to live authentically to herself. Baker’s story reads like that of a modern heroine, not that of a performer who made her Paris debut nearly a century ago. In this sense, she is truly timeless – an icon for generations far past her own, and a testament to the importance and influence of queer Black voices throughout history.
[1] Laura R. Jolley, “Josephine Baker”, Historical Society of Missouri, https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/josephine-baker.
[2] “Josephine Baker,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, https://nmaahc.si.edu/josephine-baker.
[3] Jolley, ibid.
[4] Agence France-Presse (AFP), “Josephine Baker: France’s adopted Black superstar immortalized”, France 24, November 22, 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-josephine-baker-france-s-adopted-black-superstar-immortalised.
[5] Ibid.
[6] National Museum of African American History and Culture, ibid.
[7] Hadley Hall Meares, “Paris When It Sizzles: The Loves and Lives of Josephine Baker”, Vanity Fair, September 20, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/josephine-baker-biography-paris.
[8] Sara Kettler, “How Josephine Baker Upended Sexual Stereotypes While Advocating For Civil Rights,” Biography.com, August 25, 2022, https://www.biography.com/news/josephine-baker-bisexual.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Meares, ibid.
[11] National Museum of African American History and Culture, ibid.
[12] Jolley, ibid.
[13] Meares, ibid.
[14] Jolley, ibid.
[15] Agence France-Presse (AFP), ibid.
[16] Kettler, ibid.