Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact. I'm Alice. I'm Hamish. I'm Irene. We're a queer history

podcast released on the first and 15th of every month. Each episode, one of us will talk about

a person, a place, or a topic from queer history from around the world and throughout time.

This week, it's Bisexual Awareness Week, and so we're going to be talking about

bisexual activist, spy and performer Josephine Baker.

Before we begin, we have several content warnings for this episode.

There's going to be a lot of discussion of periodical racism, including mentions of lynchings and race riots. There are mentions

of child abuse, including sexual abuse, marriage between an adult and a minor, mentions of

domestic abuse, a brief mention of drug use, period typical homophobia, and some dubious

interracial adoption policies. Also, some of this

episode takes place during World War II. So if any of that sounds like something you don't want to

hear, feel free to skip this episode. We have plenty of other content that you might enjoy.

So Josephine Baker was born as Frida Josephine MacDonald on the 3rd of June 1906 in St. Louis.

St. Louis is in Missouri.

At the time she was born, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the USA, and it also had

a large black population, and so throughout her childhood there were a lot of race riots and lynchings,

and it was pretty awful all around.

Her mother was a 19-year-old, 19 at the time she was born, African-American laundry worker

whose name was Carrie MacDonald. And Carrie MacDonald was adopted by ex-slave. So her parents

were ex-slaves. And Josephine never knew her father was. So there's speculation that he might

have been a white employer of Carrie, that he might have been a white employer

of Carrie, or he may have been a black boyfriend of Carrie, we don't know.

...