Some icons are revered for the body of work they leave behind, others for how they lived their life every day while they walked the Earth. African-American LGBTQ rights activist Mabel Hampton falls in the latter category, a woman whose willingness and inclination to unapologetically be herself and live a life true to who she was has inspired countless members of the LGBTQ community, particularly women of color, to do the same.
Born in 1902 in Winston-Salem North Carolina, Mabel Hampton’s childhood was unstable and rife with trauma. Both her mother and grandmother passed away when she was very young, and at age seven she relocated to Greenwich Village to live with family. Within her first year in New York she was raped by her uncle. Mabel ran away, never to return to her family. Later in life, Mabel told close friend and fellow activist Joan Nestle that despite her young age, something inside her knew what her uncle did was evil and deeply wrong, and she had to save herself.
“I didn’t think it was right,” Mabel said, in tapes preserved by the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Even though I didn’t understand it, I didn’t think it was right.”
This encounter, along with a youth spent fighting off advances the opposite sex, helped inform Mabel’s feelings towards men, feelings that lasted throughout her life.
“I never cared that much for them,” she says in the archived audio. “They’re alright in their field, but I never cared for them because there’s something about men and the way they are cruel where a woman is concerned.”
At the age of eight Mabel ran away to New Jersey, where she was taken in by a family that welcomed her into their lives with open arms. As she got deeper into her teenage years and needed to move on, Mabel was drawn to Harlem, where she worked as an entertainer right in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, dancing at legendary clubs like “The Garden of Joy” and singing with the Lafayette Theater Chorus.
Deborah Edel was Mabel’s dear friend, and is a founding member and coordinator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and she tells 1010 WINS that Harlem was the natural place for a woman like Mabel at the time.
"Anybody who was interested in as many different things in life as Mabel was, and also being a black woman in New York City," Edel said. "Harlem was the place where you went to live."
Harlem was where Mabel began to meet other lesbians like herself, and started to date women and frequent clubs and parties where she could truly commune with people who were like her. The fun was fated to end too soon, however. Mabel was busted fraudulently in a prostitution sting in 1920 at the age of seventeen. Mabel was partying with some friends, and Deborah Edel says when police showed up and found openly gay people gathering and enjoying themselves, they pushed whatever false charges they had to go break up the party.
“What they were doing was seen as outside of the law,” Edel says. “Because of that, and all the attempts to always clean up and force gay people out of their life situations and back into the closet, Mabel ended up at Bedford Hills.”
Mabel spent three years behind bars for the prostitution charge, and focused on domestic work upon her release. Mabel worked to survive, and though she preferred to wear men’s slacks and shirts as opposed to traditionally feminine garments, her personality and charm found her plenty of work in homes and local hospitals.
In 1932 Mabel met the woman she would spend the next 46 years of her life with, Lillian Foster. Mabel had dated many women in her life, but Lillian was different. She gave Mabel the family she’d never had. Their love was for life, and the home they shared in the South Bronx became the epicenter of Mabel’s evolution from a woman struggling to survive into a strident activist for the gay community.
“Her home was her sanctuary,” says Edel. “And her desk, where she kept all her papers and her books in her little study, was really very very important to her.”
It was the first space Mabel had ever truly been able to call her own.
“It was very important to her to have a place where she could feel safe and protected,” says Edel of the apartment on 169th Street. “A place where she and Lillian could come home at night and lead their lives the way they really wanted to.”
Out on the street, however, they pretended to be sisters, something that Joan Nestle calls “a survival tactic.” Inside, though, they had their own family and world that the outside couldn’t come in and ruin.
Mabel lived in a section of the Bronx that suffered from a lot of fires in the 1970s and 1980s, and Mabel was eventually forced out of the home.
Later in her life Mabel Hampton helped greatly in the creation of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, working to build up the collection and donating everything from her personal papers and mementos to her massive collection of lesbian pulp novels to the archives. Mabel got to know young LGBTQ women and women of color, and served as a friend and role model to the women.
“She really took on the opportunity to educate the young women about what life had been like before Stonewall, what life had been like in the thirties and forties,” Edel says. “I think people loved her because she was direct, and she was clear, and she was funny and she was warm, and she listened to them, and she was comfortable talking about her life.”
Mabel spent the rest of her life as an authority of the black and gay experience in the twentieth century, giving speeches and educating the public on the issues facing her community. She fought hard for marginalized people, and she was uncompromising in her demands for equality. In 1984 Mabel was asked to speak at the New York City Pride Parade.
“I, Mabel Hampton,” she told the crowd, “have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this country and all over the world, my gay people and my black people.”
The next year she served as Grand Marshall of the parade. That year she was also presented with a lifetime achievement award by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays.
Mabel passed away in 1989, but Deborah Edel says activists today can and should learn from Mabel’s story and her dedication to the advancement of her oppressed people.
“You have to think not just about yourself but the world around you in which you live…those are important messages to a world that is struggling right now.”