With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Lisa E Davis worked for years in SUNY, CUNY. the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU. Her essays in North American, Latin American and European journals, and lectures in the US and abroad, explored diverse topics. Lately, her writing has appeared in anthologies and periodicals dedicated to LGBTQ culture. She has lived in Greenwich Village for many years and loves to write about it. Her historical novel Under the Mink (LA: Alyson, 2001), www.underthemink.com, about drag queens and kings who worked in Village mafia-owned nightclubs of the 1940s, grew out of her long-time friendship with many of them. 

 

It was thanks to one show biz personality from those bygone days that the author discovered the story of Angela Calomiris (also a Villager, who lived on Jane Street). In an oral history interview recorded by the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Buddy Kent, aka Bubbles Kent, Exotic Dancer, aka Malvina Schwartz of East New York, Brooklyn, identified Angie as someone who had denounced gay girls to the police and FBI.

 

Buddy, who knew all the players in this drama, remembered that Angie had turned in Yetta Cohn (long-time friend and companion of screen actress, Academy Award winner Judy Holliday--Born Yesterday, Bells Are Ringing, It Should Happen to You ) as a Communist sympathizer. Yetta lost her job with the NYPD, and did not work for eight years. In 1952, Judy Holliday was called before the McCarran Committee (SISS, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee) alongside other Hollywood personalities. The Red Scare swept all before it.

 

Buddy "Bubbles" Kent and the novel based on the history of that underground show business world are pictured below.