Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“Numerous doctors reported their astonishment at discovering in their clinical interviews with ‘inverts’ that their subjects rejected the efforts of science, religion, popular opinion, and the law to condemn them as moral degenerates.”

This is one example of what Chauncey means when he argues that gay men were assertive in developing their own history. Rather than passively letting the dominant culture and medical professionals define their lives and identities, gay men asserted and developed their own views and identities.

“This book argues instead that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.”

Chauncey argues that not only did gay subcultures existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were in a way more open. This contradicts what is often termed a “Whiggish” view of gay history, which insists that social and cultural progress has always increased throughout history.

“This book argues that in important respects the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.”

Chauncey agrees with what many might describe as the social constructionist view of gay history. According to this perspective, modern identities like “gay” are not part of a strong continuity that runs throughout history and different cultures, but instead they are created through changing social, cultural, and medical perspectives.

“In this ideological context, the red-light district provided the middle class with a graphic representation of the difference between bourgeois reticence and working-class degeneracy.”

An important part of Chauncey’s arguments are the cultural differences that existed between the working and middle classes. One of these was the view that working-class culture was more decadent than middle-class culture, which created more spaces for openly gay men in working-class neighborhoods.

“The determinative criterion in the identification of men as fairies was not the extent of their same-sex desire or activity (their ‘sexuality’), but rather the gender persona and status they assumed. It was only the men who assumed the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women who identified themselves—and were identified by others—as fairies.”

In Chauncey’s social constructionist view of the history of sexuality, he argues that during the 20th century, a shift occurred in how many gay men perceived themselves. Gay identities, previously based primarily on gender presentation, became based on choice in sexual partner.

“For many men […] adopting effeminate mannerisms represented a deliberate cultural strategy, as well as a way of making sense of their sense of sexual difference. It was a way to declare a gay identity publicly and to negotiate their relationship with other men.”

Although medical authorities tended to view all gay men as effeminate, it was not something imposed on gay men. Instead, gay men, especially those who identified as “fairies,” took on effeminate mannerisms deliberately.

“The most striking difference between the dominant sexual culture of the early twentieth century and that of our own era is the degree to which the earlier culture permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves—or to be regarded by others—as gay.”

The change in the social construction of gay identities affected not only gay but straight sexuality. In other words, starting in the more conservative 1940s and 1950s, it became less acceptable for men who identified as “straight” to have casual sex with gay men. “Looking the other way” was no longer as common.

“Men’s identities and reputations simply did not depend on a sexuality defined by the anatomical sex of their sexual partners.”

In the early 20th century, although attraction to other men defined gay men, Chauncey argues that they also defined themselves according to their gender identity. Thus, gay subculture identities related to social and psychological self-perception, including socially constructed aspects of identity (for example, gender roles), were an important part of how gay men defined themselves.

“Even their efforts, however, were profoundly shaped by the cultural presumption that sexual desire for men was inherently a feminine desire. That presumption made the identity they sought to construct a queer one indeed: unwilling to become virtual women, they sought to remain men who nonetheless loved other men.”

Society viewed gay men as being effeminate partly because of ideas circulated among the elites. However, gay men were active in this process too, forming identities based on these beliefs, like the “fairies,” or openly defying these images, like queer men.

“But the fairy also provoked a high degree of anxiety and scorn among middle-class men because he embodied the very things middle-class men most feared about their gender status. His effeminacy represented in extreme form the loss of manhood middle-class men most feared in themselves, and his style seemed to undermine their efforts to shore up their manly status.”

Chauncey often views historical change as driven by how groups react to social change. In this case, industrialization and the growth of cities stoked anxieties about masculinity, which in turn changed or reinforced societal perceptions of gay men as well as how they perceived and presented themselves.

“To some observers, sympathetic and hostile alike, the fairy became an emblem of modernity and of the collapse of traditional forms of social control.”

As noted elsewhere, significant socioeconomic changes led to anxieties about masculinity. These anxieties drove an increasingly derisive view of “fairies,” not just for straight men but also among some gay men.

“The war to make the world safe for democracy threatened to expose hundreds of thousands of American boys from farms and small towns to the evil influences of the big city. The manner in which the reformers construed this crisis was profoundly shaped by the discourse of urban degeneracy that had been central to their moral vision throughout the Progressive Era.”

Because cities provided far greater anonymity than rural towns, they helped enable gay subcultures to flourish. This proved a constant problem for moral reformers, especially during periods when more people were moving to the cities, such as during World War I.

“Most men did not make themselves so noticeable, but they nonetheless claimed space in a large number of restaurants on a regular basis, meeting friends, talking about whatever they wanted, and noticing—and sometimes trying to gain the notice of—the other gay men around them.”

A recurring point in Gay New York is that during the period it discusses, segregation between gay and heterosexual men did not occur. Instead, they often shared space in places like restaurants, at parties, and even during events like drag balls.

“Gay men dubbed all the restrooms […] ‘tearooms,’ which allowed them to discuss their adventures surreptitiously in mixed company, and may also have been an arch comment on the rooms’ significance as social centers. If ‘tearoom’ normally referred to a gracious cafe where respectable ladies could meet without risk of encountering inebriated males, it could ironically name the less elegant locale where so many gay men met.”

Gay subcultures often operated through innuendo or by subverting cultural institutions and understandings, such as the concept of “coming out.” “Tearooms” are another example of this cultural subversion.

“The efforts of the police to control gay men’s use of public space […] were part of a much broader effort by the state to (quite literally) police the boundaries between public and private space, and, in particular, to impose a bourgeois definition of such distinctions on working-class communities.”

Much of Chauncey’s analysis rests on the different moral views of the working and middle classes. In a sense, the story of gay male subcultures is also the story of middle-class authorities attempting to reform the working class.

“But the baths should not be regarded as simply the scene of furtive encounters between men who had disguised their identities, for they also served to introduce gay men to one another and foster their sense of allegiance to other gay men.”

The gay subcultures that Gay New York documents were not simply about men meeting to engage in anonymous sex. Even places where the ostensible purpose was to enable sexual encounters were important social hubs for the community.

“Part of the attraction of an amusement district such as Greenwich Village, like that of Harlem, was that it constituted a liminal space where visitors were encouraged to disregard some of the social injunctions that normally constrained their behavior, where they could observe and vicariously experience behavior that in other settings—particularly their own neighborhoods—they might consider objectionable enough to suppress.”

Gay neighborhoods or, to use Chauncey’s term, “gay enclaves,” were not only sites for gay men. They were also places where the broader culture interacted with gay subcultures to expand their experience or satisfy their curiosity.

“Although historians long assumed that change in attitudes concerning sexuality had begun in the middle class in the 1910s and 1920s, and only later percolated down to the more ‘rigid’ working class, recent work has suggested that much of the new ‘freedom in manners and morals’ among middle-class youths in the twenties was modeled on that of working-class youths, who were generally more direct about sexual matters than bourgeois reticence allowed.”

Another historical truism Chauncey challenges is that the working class was more conservative about sexuality than the middle class. The middle class viewed the working class as more promiscuous, and this was true: The working class was less restrained and more liberal than the middle class.

“Harlem’s social elite and intelligentsia made it clear that the open expression of one’s homosexuality precluded participation in respectable society.”

Simply because these gay enclaves existed does not mean that the gay residents of these areas were free from discrimination. Just as some bohemians and intellectuals of Greenwich Village disapproved of gay sexuality, many church and community leaders in Harlem opposed the gay community in their midst.

“[Gay men] developed extensive social networks on the basis of their sexual ties and shared experience of marginalization, just as immigrants elaborated social networks on the basis of their kinship and regional ties.”

Chauncey notes the parallels between the gay subculture and immigrant communities. Like immigrant communities, gay men financially supported each other and helped each other relocate to New York City.

“The growing popularity of the city’s drag balls revealed the heterosexual public’s growing fascination with gay culture.”

One way that the gay subcultures in the 1890-1939 era was more open than those of the late 20th century was that gay and straight communities were less segregated in public spaces and at public events. Drag balls, which had many heterosexual audience members, were one example.

“By the early thirties, a general revulsion had set in against the ‘excesses’ of Prohibition, and the celebration of sexual perversity on the stages of the premier cultural district of the American cultural capital seemed the most galling expression of such excess.”

A major change in attitudes toward gay subcultures occurred around the end of the Prohibition era and World War II. A reaction against the speakeasy culture of Prohibition was one of several factors.

“The new laws forbidding gay people to gather openly with heterosexuals in licensed restaurants and bars and banning even the representation of homosexuality bespoke a fear that gender arrangements were so fragile, even a glimpse of an alternative might endanger them.

Chauncey holds that what characterized gay subcultures after the end of Prohibition was not that they ceased to exist. Instead, it was a trend toward greater segregation and isolation of gay people from heterosexuals.