Undercover Girl The Lesbian Informant Who Helped the FBI Bring Down the Communist Party

At the height of the Red Scare, Angela Calomiris was a paid FBI informant inside the American Communist Party. As a Greenwich Village photographer, Calomiris spied on the New York Photo League, pioneers in documentary photography. While local Party officials may have had their sus-picions about her sexuality, her apparent dedication to the cause won them over.

When Calomiris testified for the prosecution at the 1949 Smith Act trial of the Party's National Board, her identity as an informant (but not as a lesbian) was revealed. Her testimony sent eleven party leaders to prison and decimated the ranks of the Communist Party in the US.

Undercover Girl is both a new chapter in Cold War history and an intimate look at the relationship between the FBI and one of its paid inform-ants. Ambitious and sometimes ruthless, Calomiris defied convention in her quest for celebrity.

Lisa E. Davis has lived in Greenwich Village for many years and loves to write about it. With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Davis taught for years at SUNY and CUNY, published numerous essays, and lectured widely on New World and European literary topics. Her novel Under the Mink, a film noir tale of gay and lesbian entertainers in mob-owned Village nightclubs of the 1940s, was re-issued in 2015 to considerable acclaim. Her LGBTQ-themed short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various domestic and foreign anthologies and periodicals.