Rest in Peace, Cei Bell

A bit of Philly gay history, remembered through the words of one who lived it

Cei Bell passed away early in the month of February, at age sixty-eight. She was a writer, an artist, an activist, a Black trans woman, a lifelong Philadelphian. I knew a bit about Cei because she was involved in 1970s Philadelphia gay, lesbian, and trans activism that I plan to write about in the final chapter of my dissertation. In my little (very gay, very Philly-centric) corner of social media, I did not see anybody posting about her passing, which made me realize that most people in my community don’t know about Cei. I think they should. This is a post to honor Cei’s life and work. May her memory be a blessing.

A young Cei Bell <3 There aren’t many photos of her available online.

Cei Bell grew up in Center City and West Oak Lane in a Black middle-class family. In 1970, at the age of 15, she was outed by a teacher at the Parkway Program High School, the “so-called progressive” school she attended.¹ In an essay titled “The Radicalqueens Trans-Formation,” published in the anthology Smash the Church, Smash the State, Bell speculates that she was probably the first out gay student in the Philadelphia public school system. She spent much of her time at school trying to avoid getting beat up. Her early life, as she describes it in this essay, was marked by violence at the hands of strangers and her older half-brother, and a struggle to understand her position in the world as somebody whose gender and sexuality were clearly different from the norm. She also recalls some truly wild 1970s “progressive” school memories - “I had my first joint in chemistry class, and the teacher lit it,” she recalls. “Another time, he seemed to be trying to start an orgy in an English class.”² In her telling, instability, sex, and sexual violence were everywhere.

“In the middle of this,” she writes, “I met some teenaged drag queens in Rittenhouse Square and found my way out of the closet.” The 1970s Philly that Bell describes is a far cry from the city today. “This was Center City before the skyscrapers were built,” she writes, “back when it was a lovely forgotten ruin.” Runaway queer kids hung out in Rittenhouse Square, at the Penn Center Skating Rink, at Dewey’s diner at 13th and Locust. “The kids came from almost every background you can imagine,” Bell writes. “They survived any way they could.”³

Entering this world of gay street kids allowed Bell to come into her trans identity, but it also exposed her to new violences. In her essay in Smash the Church, Smash the State, she writes of being forcibly strip-searched by an older pedophile when he falsely accused her of stealing $5, and later being raped. “I had to come out of the closet to hear someone call me n***** to my face,” she writes.⁴ But her connection with fellow young queens helped her see that these were not personal problems with violence, but rather political and structural ones. The queens had a word for these violent men: “neshineau.” They would use this word to alert one another to “start running when fagbashers were nearby.”⁵ The issue of anti-Black racism in gay spaces was one that she would continue to encounter and fight throughout her life.

Bell wound up joining the Gay Activists Alliance, or GAA, an organization that had started in New York as a splinter group formed by former members of the Gay Liberation Front. It was through GAA that Bell met Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a young Italian-American radical fairy from South Philly. Bell recalls first hanging out with Mecca at an apartment on Spruce Street that all the gay street kids passed through. Mecca “had long straightened hair and aviator glasses,” Bell recalls. “I thought he resembled Gloria Steinem.” Mecca and Bell began discussing butch and femme identities in the gay community, sex roles, and what it meant to be feminist. The two were off and running; they would be lifelong friends. That night they formed a caucus of GAA, later to be called the RadicalQueens. That name initially seemed “too far out,” so they started as the Queen’s Liberation Caucus.⁶ Adopting a radical feminist organizing model, the Caucus offered a consciousness-raising group for queens. “We brought up issues that GAA and the gay liberation movement didn’t,” Bell explains, “primarily, our right to express a nonconforming gender identity and to live without the threat of violence from men.”⁷ Mecca and Bell went on to publish their own magazine, titled The Radical Queen and host forums on drag, including instruction from older queens.

Bell and her friends were interested in radical gender experimentation. She recalls putting together a “radical drag” look for the GAA float for Philly’s 1973 Pride march, which included boots and a construction helmet worn with a dress. She also recalls a rather wild story about protesting a local Halloween contest where “the most beautiful transsexual would receive an all-expenses-paid sex change operation.” “Transsexuality wasn’t about beauty,” Bell wrote.⁸ She, along with the other Radical Queens, was interested in principles coming from both the gay liberation and radical feminist movements, and she was also keenly aware of racism in the movement; it goes unsaid in Bell’s essay, but surely the “most beautiful transsexual” would have been white.

Bell was a writer, and she published work in the Inquirer, The Philadelphia Tribune, The Philadelphia Gay News, Billy Penn, and elsewhere. As she wrote in an article for WHYY, “Being a black transsexual woman, getting articles published was very difficult. Most editors were straight white men who could not care less, and some were openly hostile. Many gay white male editors weren’t much better and thought that a black transsexual writer was incongruous.”⁹ In a 2016 essay commemorating the 30th anniversary of the anthology In the Life, edited by Black gay Philadelphia writer Joe Beam who died of AIDS, Bell wrote of her experiences with racism in the gay community, which Beam also wrote about. “In the ’70s I would see white people who I knew from Gay Activist Alliance and other organizations on the street and if I said hello they would walk past me as though we never met,” she wrote. “I was stunned when Joe told me that happened to him with people he knew from Giovanni’s Room.”¹⁰ In a 2013 article, in response to the repeated use of the N-word by a white Drag Race contestant, she satirically suggested that “uncouth and stupid white people should embrace and reclaim their stupidity” by adding two more letters to the LGBT acronym: BS, for Backwards and Stupid.¹¹ Lol.

Bell’s writing has a wandering quality that I appreciate; you never quite know where she is heading next on the page, or where she will end up. There’s a conversational quality to it, and a willingness to let the reader arrive at their own conclusions. One essay for WHYY, on her life as a writer, discusses her struggles to get published in the Inquirer in the 1990s. She proposed an article on Killtime, “an anarchist artist compound in a warehouse around 40th and Lancaster.”¹² She went to see the artists perform a “revolutionary nature/environmental play” called The Transformation (which is on YouTube here - I’m not gonna watch it, but if you do, tell me how it is lol). At the show, she unwittingly took acid and had to stumble home to trip for the next day. After she’d sobered up, she went in to the Inquirer office to meet with her editor, and had the pleasure there of bumping into an old hookup who had spurned her and seeing his alarmed face as he hid behind an open newspaper. “The day my article was scheduled to run, it was bumped for a convention of Elvis impersonators,” she wrote. “On the day it ran, I went to the Inquirer building at 2 a.m. The presses were still in the same complex in those days, and you could get the paper as soon as it was printed. I walked to Rittenhouse Square and sat on the wall in the middle of the night reading my article.”¹³ These are the last lines of her essay - we leave her perched in the park where she’d hung out decades earlier with gay street kids, reading her own words in print. Next time I’m in Rittenhouse Square, I’ll think of Cei. I wonder if I’ll feel her there.

An illustration by Cei of a holly tree in West Oak Lane

1. Source: Cei Bell, “The Radicalqueens Trans-Formation,” published in Smash the Church, Smash the State.

2. Bell, 119.

3. Bell, 120.

4. Bell, 120.

5. Bell, 121.

6. Bell, 121.

7. Bell, 121-122.

8. Bell, 123.

9. Cei Bell, “The Joy of Writing - And Being Published,” WHYY, 2017.

10. Cei Bell, “Joe Beam’s Memory and LGBT Racism,” WHYY, 2016.

11. Cei Bell, “The N-Word and the LGBTQI-BS Community,” The Philadelphia Tribune, 2013.

12. Cei Bell, “The Joy of Writing - And Being Published.”

13. Cei Bell, “The Joy of Writing - And Being Published.”