Content warning for concentration camps, Holocaust, Nazis
“She held me in her arms as one holds a child–I was happy. I forgot all the worldly injuries and struggles–I felt gentle, tender caresses of a woman’s hand about me. I was happy…” – Eve Adams
Though she was frequently a target of both political and social persecution, Eve Adams showed a tenacity and fighting spirit at every turning point during her radical, audacious life. As a visibly queer Jewish woman, Adams was unafraid to challenge societal norms and live unabashedly as herself, choosing to pursue whatever felt deeply normal to her, even if everyone else surrounding her challenged those pursuits. Though her life came to an untimely and tragic end, Adams’ complex and multifaceted story has been unearthed in more recent years thanks to the efforts of several thorough historians, and she is now remembered as a pioneering figure in the LGBTQ+ community. As an advocate for sexual freedom, a subversive anarchist, a trailblazer in the establishment of queer spaces for women, and the author of one of the earliest lesbian ethnographies in the U.S., Adams' work highlights the intersectionality of LGBTQ+ rights, radical politics, and the fight against antisemitism and fascism, while her life story survives as a poignant reminder of the courage and resilience of those who fought for the right to live and love openly.
Eve Adams was born Chawa Złoczower in Mława, Poland in 1891. As the eldest of seven children, she displayed an autonomous nature early on, becoming a caretaker of sorts to her younger siblings as well as an assistant to her mother in running the household. While attending primary school in Mława and continuing her education in Płock, Chawa also demonstrated her intellectual brilliance, learning to speak seven languages in total. At the age of twenty, Chawa grew bored of life in Poland and on her own decided to emigrate to the United States, arriving by ship to New York through Ellis Island. Once in New York City, she began hanging out with bohemians around Greenwich Village and calling herself by her Anglicized name, “Eve”. She also chose “Adams” (sometimes spelled Addams) as her new last name which, according to historian George Chauncey, was “an androgynous pseudonym whose biblical origins her Protestant persecutors might well have found blasphemous.” During this period, Adams adopted a more masculine style, and cut a notable figure in the neighborhood, becoming known for her distinctive pantsuits and short haircut and earning the moniker "the queen of the third sex."
Considering the vibrant social and political landscape of her early years in Poland, which at the time was teeming with socialists, nationalists, liberals, and anarchists vying for influence, Adams likely arrived in New York with a head already teeming with radical ideas. She became involved in New York City’s anarchist movement, distributing publications, attending rallies and befriending numerous other notable movement leaders including Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman, and Henry Miller. She eventually became a traveling saleswoman of leftist periodicals like Goldman’s Mother Earth, and by 1919 was considered an “agitator” by the government and was under surveillance by the "Radical Division" of the FBI, run by J. Edgar Hoover.
In the winter of 1921, Adams moved to Chicago, where she continued to work several odd jobs, including offering Russian lessons and hawking copies of Der Groyser Kundes, a Yiddish-language humor publication. While there, she also opened and began comanaging a tearoom called the Grey Cottage with her partner, Swedish painter Ruth Norlander. The Grey Cottage served as a hub for the city’s artists, intellectuals and LGBTQ+ folk, but lasted less than a year as the pair parted ways when Adams decided to return to New York in 1923.
Upon her return, Adams signed a U.S. government declaration of intention to become a citizen, in which she proclaimed that she was neither an anarchist nor a polygamist and swore to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty”. By no means, however, did this declaration grant her citizenship in the States, a luxury for which Adams would continue to fight over the next several years. By the end of 1924, however, Eve found herself running another tearoom, this time located in the basement of a row house at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Written up by Robert Edwards in The Quill–a small but popular magazine that circulated in the Village–the venue was described as “Eve and Ann’s” which hosted “open evenings” with “Books, Batik, Art, etc.”
The tearoom would be more consistently written up and reviewed under various other names, including “Eve Adams’ Tearoom”, “Eve’s Tea Room” and most frequently, “Eve’s Hangout”. Regardless of its exact name, the small, dimly lit cellar quickly became a popular destination for the city’s bohemian contingents, drawing in artists, poets, activists, gay men and lesbians in particular. According to The Daily News, at Eve's “men kept to one room, the women in another” while Robert Edwards again in The Quill noted that Eve’s Hangout was a place “where ladies prefer each other. Not very healthy for she-adolescents, nor comfortable for he-men.” Indeed, Eve's Hangout especially served as a vital sanctuary for queer women, offering secure gatherings after hours where they could freely express themselves and share personal stories away from the threats of judgment or prejudice. One Variety article from 1926 even went so far as to promote that Eve’s Hangout displayed a famous sign at its door that read “Men are admitted, but not welcome”, though that fact has never been corroborated anywhere else. Nevertheless, as a gathering space where queer women could openly explore their radical politics and sexual identities, Eve's Hangout is considered today to be one of the earliest “lesbian bars” to ever exist in New York City.
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In 1925 Eve also wrote and published 150 copies "for private circulation only" of a book she brazenly entitled Lesbian Love. Composed as a collection of short narratives, the work, termed by Adams as a "scientific literary contribution," presents numerous women engaging in flirtation, romance, and love with each other, along with some experimenting with their gender expressions. According to Adams’ biographer Jonathan Ned Katz, Lesbian Love is “the earliest portrait of the lesbian community released in the United States by a lesbian author.”
The existence of both Lesbian Love and Eve’s Hangout at a time when both were seen as risque and illegal would ultimately lead to Adams’ downfall. In 1926, Eve was entrapped by an undercover police detective named Margaret Leonard and was arrested by the New York City Vice Squad while at the Hangout. Over the course of months, Leonard had tried three separate times to catch Eve “in the act” of lesbianism, and was ultimately able to accuse Adams of making overt sexual advances towards her, using a physical copy of Lesbian Love as cold hard evidence. Adams was then tried and convicted of disorderly conduct for attempted sex with a policewoman as well as of obscenity for Lesbian Love. According to Adams at the time: “I never realized that the book was indecent. If I did, I would have never written it…I merely wrote this group of short stories of people I observed in my travels out west and mostly in Greenwich Village. I merely intended to describe these characters with the aim to help them, to show them the truth of their lives.”
Adams was then sent to a women’s penitentiary and subsequently spent a year in prison, which naturally led to the closure of Eve’s Hangout. After a series of hearings, she was deported back to Poland, having never succeeded in becoming a U.S. citizen. In December of 1927, The New York Daily News smugly reported: “The morals of this 35-year-old woman, former Greenwich Village tea room proprietor, were not what this country demands from a would-be citizen, the immigration authorities decided after she spent a year in the workhouse.”
Adams struggled with being back in Poland, and often wrote to friends telling of the antisemitism she endured there and the challenges she faced trying to earn income. In 1930, she moved to Paris, where she made a living by selling “dirty” books written by the likes of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and D. H. Lawrence to American tourists. Then in 1933, she met and developed a deeply close relationship with Jewish singer Hella Olstein Soldner. Adam later described their meeting as “fate” and in letters to friends described Soldner as a “most beloved girl.” Though their relationship was never explicitly described as either romantic or erotic, the pair began living together and continued to do so even after Soldner got married to another man.
During their time together, Adams and Soldner often talked of plans to emigrate to Palestine to join Eve’s brother who lived there but that they lacked the financial means to do so. As conditions for Jewish peopleJews and LGBTQ+ folk worsened in Europe, both women instead moved together to Southern France, while Adams wrote numerous letters to friends in the States, pleading for help to obtain a permit to return to the country from which she had been unjustly banished. Ultimately, the war caught up to them and in 1943, Eve and Hella were arrested in Nice and were eventually deported by cattle car to Auschwitz. Neither woman made it out of the concentration camp.
Eve Adams and her extraordinary life remained seemingly forgotten to history until several events and individuals would help reinvigorate both her story and influence. In 1999, a college student in Albany, New York named Nina Alvarez discovered a green clothbound book in the lobby of her apartment building. After picking it up, Alvarez learned that she had come into ownership of what is now believed to be the only extant copy of Lesbian Love. Throughout the 2010s, playwright, actor and director Barbara Kahn authored and staged several plays in New York City telling of Eve Adams’ life, including The Spring and Fall of Eve Adams, Unreachable Eden and Island Girls. Then in 2021, historian Jonathan Ned Katz published the first ever extensive biography of Adams, entitled The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. After connecting with Alvarez, Katz was able to reprint the original text and illustrations of Lesbian Love in its entirety at the end of his biography, all but ensuring that the text and its daring author would never be lost again.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Chauncey, George. Gay New York. New York, Basic Books, 1994.
Downs, Jim. “Rediscovering Eve Adams, the Radical Lesbian Activist.” The New Yorker, 2021, June 26.
Gattuso, Reina. “The Founder of America’s Earliest Lesbian Bar Was Deported for Obscenity.” Atlas Obscura, 2019, September 3. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-was-first-gay-bar
Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 2021.
Palmer, Emily. “Overlooked No More: Eve Adams, Writer Who Gave Lesbians a Voice.”
The New York Times, 2021, July 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/obituaries/eve-adams-overlooked.html
Scelfo, Julie. The Women Who Made New York. Berkeley, Seal Press, 2016.
Shockley, Jay. “Eve’s Hangout”. NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2017, March. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/eve-addams-tearoom/
Whalen, Lottie. Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern. London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023.