George Chauncey > Quotes

“Most gay men did not speak out against anti-gay policing so openly, but to take this as evidence that they had internalized anti-gay attitudes is to ignore the strength of the forces arrayed against them, to misinterpret silence as acquiescence, and to construe resistance in the narrowest of terms - as the organization of formal political groups and petitions.”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century.”
― George Chauncey

“By holding an annual drag ball on Thanksgiving, gay men both built on the day's tradition of masquerade and expanded the inversion it implied. On a day that celebrated the family, they assembled to celebrate their membership in a gay family.”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“Henry Gerber, writing in 1932 under the pseudonym Parisex, responded to an article in The Modern Thinker that condemned homosexuality. "Is not the psychiatrist again putting the cart before the horse in saying that homosexuality is a symptom of the neurotic style of life?" he insisted. "Would it not sound more natural to say that the homosexual is made neurotic because his style of life is beset by thousands of dangers?”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“God made them, wrote one man who said his son was homosexual. They did not choose their status. ... It is not a medical matter. ... You know there are quite as many people among them as among your so called 'normal.' ... Let your campagin remove the penal laws which make these 'diseased' people a prey for mackmailers. Give them recognition and let them live their lives.'”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“Many gay men resisted the medical judgment that they were mentally ill and needed treatment, despite the fact that medical discourse was one of the most powerful anti-gay forces in American culture (and one to which some recent social theories have attributed almost limitless cultural power).”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York

“As striking as the existence of a male beauty contest is the humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone with which Variety reported it. It gently ridicules the contestants, but it ridicules even more the "Coney Island dowagers" serving on the jury who hadn't a clue about what the sophisticated reporter saw transpiring, and seems to take glee in the exasperation of the chief judge, who did know what was going on.”
― George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

“[...] Claiming certain historical figures was important to gay men not only because it validated their own homosexuality, but because it linked them to others. One of the ways groups of people constitute themselves as an ethnic, religious or national community is by constructing a history that provides its members with a shared tradition and collective ancestors. This was a central purpose of the projece of gay historical reclamation as well. By constructing historical traditions of their own, gay men defined themselves as a distinct community. By imagining they had collective roots in the past, they asserted a collective identity in the present.”
― George Chauncey