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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

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Themes

The Formation and Evolution of Gay Subcultures

Content Warning: This section of the study guide contains descriptions of anti-gay bias. In addition, the source text contains sexually explicit descriptions and outdated and offensive language, which is replicated only in direct quotes.

Gay New York focuses on the development of gay subcultures. Chauncey’s throughline in the book is that gay subcultures have existed in New York City since at least 1890, and Chauncey suggests that future research might reveal that such subcultures were around even earlier, at least in other areas. The text argues that urban environments help enable gay subcultures since people are free from monitoring and controlling by their families and communities. Such subcultures evolve under various social, political, and economic pressures. For example, the “fairies” culture existed as a result of the cultural view that men sexually attracted to other men were naturally effeminate, World War I brought more gay men away from their rural and small town homes to cities, and Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies and the involvement of organized crime in New York nightlife, which benefited and helped protect openly gay people. These cultures may have been driven further out of public view by the decline of New York City’s speakeasy culture along with the end of Prohibition and growing anxiety over masculinity in the wake of the Great Depression. However, they continued to exist, even into the more culturally conservative 1940s and 1950s.

As Chauncey describes them, gay subcultures and their formation and continuation depended on spaces where men could meet. These spaces could be temporary, like private parties and drag balls such as the Hamilton Lodge Ball, or they could be well-known institutions and landmarks, like specific bathhouses, public parks, gay enclaves like Harlem and Greenwich Village, and specific saloons, bars, and speakeasies, among other sites. In addition, the activities of gay men, such as helping each other relocate to New York City and working to define themselves as “fairies,” queer, or gay using the ideas of or in defiance of the dominant culture, helped preserve and propagate gay subcultures.

Gay Men as Active in Their Own History

Largely because of his own background in social history, George Chauncey is consistent in how he answers the question of who makes or drives history. He believes that those who historically drive change are usually not political leaders or the elites responsible for medical and social opinions in the dominant culture, but instead the general public. Even in gay enclaves like Harlem and Greenwich Village, gay people had to and did assert themselves against the disapproval of local police, intellectuals, and community leaders. For instance, Chauncey writes that it was “gay [B]lack men” who “turned Harlem into a homosexual Mecca” (244). The text argues that the fact that the gay subculture took shape in working-class neighborhoods, not among the middle-class areas whose people were most familiar with popular medical writings about gay sexuality, supports the view of gay history as being shaped from below.

Certainly, events such as new alcohol regulations following the end of Prohibition and the resulting crackdown on gay bars affected the gay community. Nevertheless, throughout the period described in Gay New York (roughly 1890-1939), gay men were active in the sense that they did not surrender their right to romantic and sexual lives or to their own identities and sense of community. They built community in overt ways, such as turning restrooms into “tearooms,” using public parks as areas for sexual encounters, and helping other gay men relocate to New York City, and also in more subtle ways, such as refusing to accept the dominant culture’s negative views of gay sexuality and subverting cultural understandings through subverting terms like “fairy,” “tearoom,” and “coming out.”

The Double Lives of Gay Men

Discrimination and oppression from the dominant culture forced gay men to lead “double lives” in order to keep their jobs and social respectability. As Chauncey describes it, “Many men who identified themselves as queer lived double lives and participated in the gay world only irregularly, even if it was quite important to them when they did so” (24). The size of New York City gave the people who lived there the ability to move in places where they were unknown, granting them anonymity, unlike life in small towns and rural areas, and this enabled gay men and others to lead such double lives. However, Chauncey considers this only the “starting point.” For gay men, double lives also meant finding or building institutions, cultures, and social structures that allowed them to live full social lives as gay men and build social networks to foster community and support. In a sense, gay men didn’t live double lives as much as they built double social networks.

In addition, Chauncey emphasizes that these double social networks were not always strictly segregated from each other. For example, a gay man could be in the presence of coworkers who did not know that he was gay while chatting with a server who was gay: “Men could participate in—and more important, create—the gay world in almost any setting” (276). What is significant to Chauncey is whether these men could live such double lives in spaces that were public and visible. This is exactly what changed by the 1930s and 1940s. However, as Chauncey notes, the number of bars that exclusively catered to a gay clientele actually increased during this period of more intense oppression. In both the 1890-1939 period and the era from World War II to the Stonewall riot, gay men always had to develop double social networks. The change was in how complex and visible the two could be. In the later period, gay men continued to find spaces and relationships that allowed them to develop two networks, but before the 1930s, the two could operate more openly, more in parallel, whereas in the later period they increasingly had to segregate and render hidden their gay networks.