Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender

In late January 1950, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer R.E. Brown spotted Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee, three young Black femmes, exiting the restroom of a theater in the affluent Wilshire district. Brown, who was patrolling for women “purse-snatchers,” reported that the trio caught his eye because they were walking hurriedly. After Tisha, Rita and Mary Lee explained to Brown that they were employed as domestic workers in a home nearby, LAPD officers proceeded to arrest them for no apparent cause. After being arrested, Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee were taken tot he Wilshire division police station where a policewoman discovered that they were not what officers understood to be women. If we approach the photograph and news coverage of Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee through the terms of Black femme praxis, both news articles can be re-read to evince Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee’s relational sense of place. In many ways, the trio’s flight through print culture can be seen as a path of objectification: objects of policing and objects of recovery for LGBT history. However, under the purview of Black femme praxis, their flight can be read as a flocking, or what writer Adrienne Maree Brown defines as “intentional collective adaptation.”