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Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.
496 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1994
About the author
George Chauncey
14 books33 followersGeorge Chauncey is professor of American history at the University of Chicago and the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the distinguished Turner and Curti Awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award.
He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the 1993 trial of Colorado’s Amendment Two, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s Romer v. Evans decision that antigay rights referenda were unconstitutional, and he was the principal author of the Historians’ Amicus Brief, which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives and works in Chicago.
He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the 1993 trial of Colorado’s Amendment Two, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s Romer v. Evans decision that antigay rights referenda were unconstitutional, and he was the principal author of the Historians’ Amicus Brief, which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives and works in Chicago.
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November 20, 2020
There’s a pervasive misconception that all gay people were closeted and self-hating prior to Stonewall (1969). This couldn’t be further from the truth. In the early 1920s one doctor interviewed a group of working-class gender non-conforming people at a NYC jail who claimed that they were “proud to be degenerates and did not care to be cured!” (6). Historian Dr. George Chauncey’s work reveals a flourishing gay world in New York City in the late 19th century /early 20th century that “has been almost entirely forgotten in popular memory” (1).
By the 1890s, gender non-conforming people had made the Bowery a center of queer life, and “by the 1920s they had created three distinct gay neighborhood enclaves in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square, each with a different class and ethnic character, gay cultural style, and public reputation” (3). Effeminate gay people –called fairies -- hosted elaborate underground drag balls with thousands of attendees, hosted performance nights, put on theatrical productions, operated their own venues, and so much more. From 1870 on we have evidence that fairies were a fixture in working-class neighborhoods in US: “painted queens” would often wear “women’s clothes” and makeup in public during the day! No closets here, darling. In the 1920s and 1930s fairies used the term “gay life” to refer to the flamboyance of their dress and speech and underground world in NYC (17). The reason this history has been ignored for so long is because the gay life of the early twentieth “was a working-class world, centered in African-American and Irish and Italian immigrant neighborhoods” run by people we would now call “transfeminine” (10).
The starkest difference between now and then is that men were able to “engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves as gay” (65). Effeminate fairies would routinely have sex with masculine men (who also slept with cis women). These masculine men weren’t considered abnormal for their sexual practices, so long as they “abided by masculine gender conventions” (13). In this way, homophobia wasn’t targeted on the basis of sexual practice, but rather gender expression. It was only in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that the “division of men into ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals,’ based on the sex of their sexual partners replace[d] the division of men into ‘fairies’ and ‘normal men’ (13).
Fairies would often work as sex workers at the piers where masculine sailors “responde[d] to the solicitations of ‘fags’ as no different in kind from their response to those of female prostitutes” (67). In fact, the term “trade” originally referred to the client of a fairy sex worker (69). Other terms for masculine men who slept with fairies were “husbands” and “wolves” who referred to their fairy partners as “punks.” (88). Trade would offer refer to fairies as “cocksuckers” as they were especially known for this service that many cisgender women refused to provide (75). These sexual and romantic relationships between wolves and punks were not rare, they were actually very common among seamen and transient male workers who passed through American cities (88). Nor were these relationships secret – mainstream newspapers would often publish cartoons about them!
How would the story of LGBTQ history change if we began with gender non-conforming people, immigrants, and communities of color for whom the ‘closet’ was not an accurate framework? There’s increasing recognition that it was trans and gender non-conforming people who led the resistance at Stonewall, but this doesn’t go deep enough. Since the beginning of queer life in the US gender non-conforming people who have been holding down the resistance.
By the 1890s, gender non-conforming people had made the Bowery a center of queer life, and “by the 1920s they had created three distinct gay neighborhood enclaves in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square, each with a different class and ethnic character, gay cultural style, and public reputation” (3). Effeminate gay people –called fairies -- hosted elaborate underground drag balls with thousands of attendees, hosted performance nights, put on theatrical productions, operated their own venues, and so much more. From 1870 on we have evidence that fairies were a fixture in working-class neighborhoods in US: “painted queens” would often wear “women’s clothes” and makeup in public during the day! No closets here, darling. In the 1920s and 1930s fairies used the term “gay life” to refer to the flamboyance of their dress and speech and underground world in NYC (17). The reason this history has been ignored for so long is because the gay life of the early twentieth “was a working-class world, centered in African-American and Irish and Italian immigrant neighborhoods” run by people we would now call “transfeminine” (10).
The starkest difference between now and then is that men were able to “engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves as gay” (65). Effeminate fairies would routinely have sex with masculine men (who also slept with cis women). These masculine men weren’t considered abnormal for their sexual practices, so long as they “abided by masculine gender conventions” (13). In this way, homophobia wasn’t targeted on the basis of sexual practice, but rather gender expression. It was only in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that the “division of men into ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals,’ based on the sex of their sexual partners replace[d] the division of men into ‘fairies’ and ‘normal men’ (13).
Fairies would often work as sex workers at the piers where masculine sailors “responde[d] to the solicitations of ‘fags’ as no different in kind from their response to those of female prostitutes” (67). In fact, the term “trade” originally referred to the client of a fairy sex worker (69). Other terms for masculine men who slept with fairies were “husbands” and “wolves” who referred to their fairy partners as “punks.” (88). Trade would offer refer to fairies as “cocksuckers” as they were especially known for this service that many cisgender women refused to provide (75). These sexual and romantic relationships between wolves and punks were not rare, they were actually very common among seamen and transient male workers who passed through American cities (88). Nor were these relationships secret – mainstream newspapers would often publish cartoons about them!
How would the story of LGBTQ history change if we began with gender non-conforming people, immigrants, and communities of color for whom the ‘closet’ was not an accurate framework? There’s increasing recognition that it was trans and gender non-conforming people who led the resistance at Stonewall, but this doesn’t go deep enough. Since the beginning of queer life in the US gender non-conforming people who have been holding down the resistance.
July 14, 2010
Heterosexuality had not become a precondition of gender normativity in early-twentieth-century working-class culture. Men had to be many things in order to achieve the status of "normal" men, but being "heterosexual" was not one of them.
If many working men thought they demonstrated their sexual virility by taking the "man's part" in sexual encounters with either women or men, normal middle-class men increasingly believed that their virility depended on their exclusive sexual interest in women.
I have my hands (or head) full with Mrs. Dalloway and Tsvetaeva's intense autobiographical collages, but this is too good to put down. Chauncey has just finished discussing the many rituals by which the sailors, dockworkers, hoboes/seasonal laborers and homosocial immigrants of early 1900s New York affirmed manliness and male status (you're physically strong; you do hard and dangerous work; you dominate sexual partners, be they female prostitutes or the painted rent boys lounging in every saloon; you drink a lot, and buy drinks for your pals); he's about to launch his argument that our ironclad hetero-homosexual binarism evolved as the only way for the deskbound, domesticated middle class men to define manliness. In the absence of physical labor, in the scarcity of dangerous tests of strength, heterosexuality is invented. (I'm tempted to sigh, Gore Vidal-ishly, ah, the deformations wrought by embourgeoisement on immemorial sexual fluidity! But the sexual fluidity of working class men was built on intense sexism and restrictive gender roles, and the post-industrial economy probably represents an historic advance for women.) I scrutinize GQ and Esquire because I'm fascinated by the spectacle of American men struggling to elaborate, or simply believe in, a white-collar masculinity. It's not working. Maybe in cultures with aristocratic traditions of non-laboring men, but not here. All we've got is: "well, I know I'm not gay!"
Such were my impressions 130 pages in. Chauncey deepens his portrait of middle class angst. He points out that the number of salaried, nonpropertied men grew eight-fold from 1870 to 1910. The emergence of the salaryman unsettled the conceptions of male status and occupational spheres of the American middle class, which had always striven for the illusory independence of the entrepreneur and scorned wage-earning beyond a certain stage of youth (life-long wage-earning, Abraham Lincoln had said before an audience at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859, could be attributed to “a dependent nature which prefers it”). Instead of the prosperous farmer or small capitalist, in business for himself, the paradigmatic bourgeois was, by 1900, a desk-bound office worker performing fragmented and sedentary work in the middling bureaus of vast corporations, in the Lamb-Gogol-Kafka milieu of “superfluous men” who make nothing, do nothing, while dependent on other men—inscrutable bosses—for wages and approval, and surrounded by female secretaries who, while certainly subordinate, perform only slightly differentiated, similarly abstracted tasks. Middle class men began to worry over the dangers of “overcivilization.” The idea of war as a contest of racial virilities reappears, with a squeaky Rooseveltan accent, at this time—as do cults of prizefighters and strongmen, the purposeful wilderness tramping of puerile paramilitaries, and the collegiate enshrinement of “moral equivalents” of war like football. Also arising in this time of threatened gender order, Chauncey argues, is the enshrinement of heterosexuality as “a precondition of gender normativity.”
Homosexuals occupied a visible niche in the street life of immigrant neighborhoods, in the waterfront saloon milieu of the “bachelor subculture,” in the Storyvilles of the Sporting Life—
—and were policed, surveilled and suppressed alongside the other forms of rough masculine amusement—prostitution, drinking, gambling, burlesque shows—ingredient to that world. At its broadest Gay New York is the story of the turf struggle, commencing in the Progressive Era, between working class and bourgeois understandings of acceptable sociability and use of urban space, between middle class reformers and a host of evils they saw in urban life. Privately funded societies for the suppression of vice, committees of moral guardians, sent undercover agents into dens of iniquity, first to sniff out female prostitution, later to document male “degeneracy.” In time they compiled a secret archive—diagrams of bath houses, maps of cruising grounds, even records of conversations between gay men and the agents—that Chauncey calls the richest source of study for historians of early twentieth century gay life. Such is the ironic fate of a persecutorial dossier meant to spur enforcement from laissez-faire city cops (local police precincts could and often were paid off to ignore bath houses, or even, in some cases, to provide door security for drag balls). Out of all the testimony Chauncey braids into this vivid book, the street corner chats recorded by agents are most striking—you get to meet people in history, “a few faces cast up sharply from the waves,” as Pater would say:
After WWI the reformers got one of their wishes, Prohibition—the suppression of the saloon and its attendant evils. But like the YMCA hotels, gay trysting colonies originally built as Christian berths for sojourning innocents, Prohibition’s effect was the nightmarish opposite of the one intended. Upper- and middle-class New Yorkers resorted to gangster-run basement speakeasies, immigrant restaurants and working-class rent parties to get their drink on. Prohibition dissolved barriers between bourgeois and proletarian amusement, between “respectability and criminality, public and private, commercial space and home life.” The mainstreaming of working-class sociability meant the heightened visibility of gay men, long familiar figures on the streets and vaudeville stages of rougher neighborhoods (and on the park benches and rooftops where working-class couples, straight and gay, sought a little darkened privacy away from their crowded family tenements); and with the waning of the Harlem craze, the “Negro vogue” for elaborate plantation- and jungle-themed floor shows, nightspots began pushing a new transgressive novelty, the “pansy show.” These ran the gamut from vaudeville-ish buffoonery—“the gay equivalent of blackface,” Chauncey calls it—to the assertive fabulousness of Jean Malin. A Lithuanian immigrant who had become, by his late teens, a famous drag performer (as “Imogene Wilson”), Malin, now dressed as in men’s clothes, helmed an immensely popular act in several Times Square clubs in the early 1930s. Malin didn’t sing or dance, he simply “strolled about the club, interacting with the patrons and using his camp wit to entertain them (and presumably scandalizing them with his overtly gay comments).” Such interaction implied the hooting and catcalls of some straight male club goers, and Malin was famous for his arch verbal beheadings of hecklers. His resistance was physical, as well. He was a 200lb six-footer who could kick some ass. Once, after winning a drag contest, Malin wandered into a late-night cafeteria, still resplendently gowned and high on solidarity:
Prohibition spread rather than eradicated saloon culture, mingled rather than separated gay and straight, bourgeois and prole; the post-repeal New York State Liquor Authority was more effective in regulating social life, and led the charge in excluding homosexuality from the mainstream entertainment world in which it had become so visible during the 1920s. During the next four decades, the SLA revoked the liquor licenses of hundreds of establishments that served or tolerated gatherings of men plainclothes investigators thought gay. Liquor licenses were revoked and bars shut down because men were overheard discussing opera, or because a bartender was observed serving a man wearing tight pants. The threat of revocation and ruin deputized bar owners and restaurateurs in an anti-gay movement, and spooked those who would cultivate a gay clientele. The only entity that could afford to pay off police and absorb the costs of frequent closure and relocation was the Mafia, which got into the gay bar business in a big way after WWII. The Stonewall was a Mafia-owned club—but Stonewall seems far distant in Chauncey’s history, indeed he will get to it only near the close of his projected second volume. My outline of this first volume is muddled and skimpy, and can’t possibly suggest the vast human comedy Chauncey has unearthed—Harlem’s popular and highly developed drag circuit, or the bold pickup subculture worshipfully devoted to policemen, or the deeply discreet gay middle class worlds; the subway washrooms, the social world of the baths, the hundreds of heartbreaking arrests, jailings, beatings and bashings, the hilarious correspondence of Parker Tyler—
If many working men thought they demonstrated their sexual virility by taking the "man's part" in sexual encounters with either women or men, normal middle-class men increasingly believed that their virility depended on their exclusive sexual interest in women.
I have my hands (or head) full with Mrs. Dalloway and Tsvetaeva's intense autobiographical collages, but this is too good to put down. Chauncey has just finished discussing the many rituals by which the sailors, dockworkers, hoboes/seasonal laborers and homosocial immigrants of early 1900s New York affirmed manliness and male status (you're physically strong; you do hard and dangerous work; you dominate sexual partners, be they female prostitutes or the painted rent boys lounging in every saloon; you drink a lot, and buy drinks for your pals); he's about to launch his argument that our ironclad hetero-homosexual binarism evolved as the only way for the deskbound, domesticated middle class men to define manliness. In the absence of physical labor, in the scarcity of dangerous tests of strength, heterosexuality is invented. (I'm tempted to sigh, Gore Vidal-ishly, ah, the deformations wrought by embourgeoisement on immemorial sexual fluidity! But the sexual fluidity of working class men was built on intense sexism and restrictive gender roles, and the post-industrial economy probably represents an historic advance for women.) I scrutinize GQ and Esquire because I'm fascinated by the spectacle of American men struggling to elaborate, or simply believe in, a white-collar masculinity. It's not working. Maybe in cultures with aristocratic traditions of non-laboring men, but not here. All we've got is: "well, I know I'm not gay!"
Such were my impressions 130 pages in. Chauncey deepens his portrait of middle class angst. He points out that the number of salaried, nonpropertied men grew eight-fold from 1870 to 1910. The emergence of the salaryman unsettled the conceptions of male status and occupational spheres of the American middle class, which had always striven for the illusory independence of the entrepreneur and scorned wage-earning beyond a certain stage of youth (life-long wage-earning, Abraham Lincoln had said before an audience at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859, could be attributed to “a dependent nature which prefers it”). Instead of the prosperous farmer or small capitalist, in business for himself, the paradigmatic bourgeois was, by 1900, a desk-bound office worker performing fragmented and sedentary work in the middling bureaus of vast corporations, in the Lamb-Gogol-Kafka milieu of “superfluous men” who make nothing, do nothing, while dependent on other men—inscrutable bosses—for wages and approval, and surrounded by female secretaries who, while certainly subordinate, perform only slightly differentiated, similarly abstracted tasks. Middle class men began to worry over the dangers of “overcivilization.” The idea of war as a contest of racial virilities reappears, with a squeaky Rooseveltan accent, at this time—as do cults of prizefighters and strongmen, the purposeful wilderness tramping of puerile paramilitaries, and the collegiate enshrinement of “moral equivalents” of war like football. Also arising in this time of threatened gender order, Chauncey argues, is the enshrinement of heterosexuality as “a precondition of gender normativity.”
Homosexuals occupied a visible niche in the street life of immigrant neighborhoods, in the waterfront saloon milieu of the “bachelor subculture,” in the Storyvilles of the Sporting Life—
While a few words used by gay men were made-up terms that had no meaning in standard English or slang, most gave standard terms a second, gay meaning. Many were derived from the slang of female prostitutes. Gay itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men; trade and trick referred to prostitutes’ customers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cruising referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before it referred to a gay man’s
—and were policed, surveilled and suppressed alongside the other forms of rough masculine amusement—prostitution, drinking, gambling, burlesque shows—ingredient to that world. At its broadest Gay New York is the story of the turf struggle, commencing in the Progressive Era, between working class and bourgeois understandings of acceptable sociability and use of urban space, between middle class reformers and a host of evils they saw in urban life. Privately funded societies for the suppression of vice, committees of moral guardians, sent undercover agents into dens of iniquity, first to sniff out female prostitution, later to document male “degeneracy.” In time they compiled a secret archive—diagrams of bath houses, maps of cruising grounds, even records of conversations between gay men and the agents—that Chauncey calls the richest source of study for historians of early twentieth century gay life. Such is the ironic fate of a persecutorial dossier meant to spur enforcement from laissez-faire city cops (local police precincts could and often were paid off to ignore bath houses, or even, in some cases, to provide door security for drag balls). Out of all the testimony Chauncey braids into this vivid book, the street corner chats recorded by agents are most striking—you get to meet people in history, “a few faces cast up sharply from the waves,” as Pater would say:
The streets and corners were crowded with the sailors all of whom were on a sharp lookout for girls. It seemed to me that the sailors were sex mad. A number of these sailors were with other man walking arm in arm and on one dark street I saw a sailor and a man kissing each other. It looked like an exhibition of male perversion showing itself in the absence of girls or the difficulty of finding them. Some of the sailors told me that they might be able to get a girl if they went “up-town” but it was too far up and they were too drunk to go way up there. [“Conditions about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, June 6, 1917,” box 25, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]
The story of one black gay man who lived in the basement of a rooming house on West Fiftieth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in 1919 suggests the latitude—and limitations—of rooming house life. The tenant felt free to invite whom he met on the street into his room. One summer evening, for instance, he invited an undercover investigator he had met while sitting on the basement stairs. But, as he later explained to his guest, while three “young fellows” had been visiting him in his room on a regular basis, he had finally decided to stop seeing the youths because they made too much noise, and he did not want to landlady to “get wise.” Not only might be lose his room, he feared, but also his job as the house’s chambermaid. [Chauney’s prose, with quotations from “Report on colored fairy, 63 W. 50th St., Aug. 2, 1919,” box 34, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]
After WWI the reformers got one of their wishes, Prohibition—the suppression of the saloon and its attendant evils. But like the YMCA hotels, gay trysting colonies originally built as Christian berths for sojourning innocents, Prohibition’s effect was the nightmarish opposite of the one intended. Upper- and middle-class New Yorkers resorted to gangster-run basement speakeasies, immigrant restaurants and working-class rent parties to get their drink on. Prohibition dissolved barriers between bourgeois and proletarian amusement, between “respectability and criminality, public and private, commercial space and home life.” The mainstreaming of working-class sociability meant the heightened visibility of gay men, long familiar figures on the streets and vaudeville stages of rougher neighborhoods (and on the park benches and rooftops where working-class couples, straight and gay, sought a little darkened privacy away from their crowded family tenements); and with the waning of the Harlem craze, the “Negro vogue” for elaborate plantation- and jungle-themed floor shows, nightspots began pushing a new transgressive novelty, the “pansy show.” These ran the gamut from vaudeville-ish buffoonery—“the gay equivalent of blackface,” Chauncey calls it—to the assertive fabulousness of Jean Malin. A Lithuanian immigrant who had become, by his late teens, a famous drag performer (as “Imogene Wilson”), Malin, now dressed as in men’s clothes, helmed an immensely popular act in several Times Square clubs in the early 1930s. Malin didn’t sing or dance, he simply “strolled about the club, interacting with the patrons and using his camp wit to entertain them (and presumably scandalizing them with his overtly gay comments).” Such interaction implied the hooting and catcalls of some straight male club goers, and Malin was famous for his arch verbal beheadings of hecklers. His resistance was physical, as well. He was a 200lb six-footer who could kick some ass. Once, after winning a drag contest, Malin wandered into a late-night cafeteria, still resplendently gowned and high on solidarity:
”When a party of four rough looking birds tossed a pitcher of hot water at him as he danced by,” the columnist reported, “he pitched into them. After beating three of them into insensibility, the fight went into the street, with two taxi drivers coming to the assistance of the surviving member of the original foursome.” The story portrayed Malin as claiming his right to move openly through the city as a drag queen. Still, it ended on a suitably camp note. When the fight was over, Malin was said to have had tears in his eyes. Yes, he’d won the fight, he told another man, “but look at the disgraceful state my gown is in!”
Prohibition spread rather than eradicated saloon culture, mingled rather than separated gay and straight, bourgeois and prole; the post-repeal New York State Liquor Authority was more effective in regulating social life, and led the charge in excluding homosexuality from the mainstream entertainment world in which it had become so visible during the 1920s. During the next four decades, the SLA revoked the liquor licenses of hundreds of establishments that served or tolerated gatherings of men plainclothes investigators thought gay. Liquor licenses were revoked and bars shut down because men were overheard discussing opera, or because a bartender was observed serving a man wearing tight pants. The threat of revocation and ruin deputized bar owners and restaurateurs in an anti-gay movement, and spooked those who would cultivate a gay clientele. The only entity that could afford to pay off police and absorb the costs of frequent closure and relocation was the Mafia, which got into the gay bar business in a big way after WWII. The Stonewall was a Mafia-owned club—but Stonewall seems far distant in Chauncey’s history, indeed he will get to it only near the close of his projected second volume. My outline of this first volume is muddled and skimpy, and can’t possibly suggest the vast human comedy Chauncey has unearthed—Harlem’s popular and highly developed drag circuit, or the bold pickup subculture worshipfully devoted to policemen, or the deeply discreet gay middle class worlds; the subway washrooms, the social world of the baths, the hundreds of heartbreaking arrests, jailings, beatings and bashings, the hilarious correspondence of Parker Tyler—
Jules, being drunk, camped with them [a bunch of “straight” men:] too, and they tried to date him—even after feeling his muscle: he could have laid them all low: really it’s as wide as this paper.
May 12, 2021
Many people in North America believe that gay rights and queer history began in 1969 with the Stonewall riot. The premise of this book is that there is a long rich history in New York, and that queer people (who might now be called gay and lesbian) participated in the cultural life of the city, and were highly visible. One of the more famous drag balls, held annually for 70 years, attracted several thousand spectators and participants—male and female, straight and gay. Seventy years! (The last year was 1938).
This is a fascinating book for those who love history (otherwise, may be considered a bit dry). The evolution of the word "gay" itself is worth the price of admission (at one point, it was a secret code word, like a dog whistle, audible only to those in the know). The term "coming out" is also traced to the society practice of debutantes coming out into society.
The penny really dropped for me with the author's statement that the invention of the term "homosexual" also meant the invention of "heterosexuality". Before these categories became defined, there were "fairies" and "normal men" (Chauncey's language, reflecting contemporary usages) and there were all sorts of interaction between these two groups.
Even a lengthy review could not begin to convey the wealth of information in this book. The perspective is even more valuable.
Also, learn about the pansy craze! And how Prohibition helped gay clubs flourish. Greenwich Village! Harlem! Times Square!
This is a fascinating book for those who love history (otherwise, may be considered a bit dry). The evolution of the word "gay" itself is worth the price of admission (at one point, it was a secret code word, like a dog whistle, audible only to those in the know). The term "coming out" is also traced to the society practice of debutantes coming out into society.
The penny really dropped for me with the author's statement that the invention of the term "homosexual" also meant the invention of "heterosexuality". Before these categories became defined, there were "fairies" and "normal men" (Chauncey's language, reflecting contemporary usages) and there were all sorts of interaction between these two groups.
Even a lengthy review could not begin to convey the wealth of information in this book. The perspective is even more valuable.
Also, learn about the pansy craze! And how Prohibition helped gay clubs flourish. Greenwich Village! Harlem! Times Square!
December 6, 2018
“Identities are always relational, produced by the ways people affiliate themselves with or differentiate themselves from others -- and are marked as different by others.” [p273]
I broke some personal reading rules with this book. I don’t write in my books (except my cookbooks), but if you flip through my copy of Gay New York, you’ll find notes in the margins and a handful of underlines. It’s big enough, even as a paperback, that I couldn’t reasonably maneuver it and a notebook around my cat, but even if that had been an option I’m not sure I would have bothered.
Chauncey steamrolls over the idea that gay men before Stonewall lived lives that were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Armed with a mountain of research drawn from court dockets, arrest records, vice society records, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, tabloids, and interviews, he unearths a colorful history smoothed-over by post-WWII cultural retaliation, making it clear that New York City was home to a complex and sophisticated gay world in the first half of the 20th century.
The past is a funhouse mirror, filled with things at once familiar and strange. Chauncey opens by cautioning the reader against assuming modern sexual identities can simply be transposed into the past, and spends the first four chapters laying groundwork for male (homo)sexual practices of the early 20th century. From there, he moves on to the development and politics of the gay community in New York City. From drag balls to house parties, saloons to bathhouses, Chauncey’s history explores the ups and downs of gay life across class boundaries, including the careful double-life kept by many middle-class gay men.
There’s too much content to easily summarize, but the drag balls were a particularly interesting highlight. Performatively transgressive, these well-attended and well-publicized events reinforced the existing social order; two men might dance together if one was dressed as a woman, or two women if one was dressed as a man. Long common in places like Harlem and Greenwich village, they even spilled into Times Square in the 1920s, marking an era of contextual pseudo-tolerance that peaked with the Prohibition Era’s ‘pansy acts’ in public cabarets.
Chauncey closes with the repeal of the Volstead Act, which ushered in a new era of state-regulation and surveillance. Vaguely-worded alcohol laws provided necessary pretense to shut down establishments found to serve ‘disorderly’ (oft read: gay) patrons, regardless of behavior or gender expression. By the mid-1930s most drag balls had been ended, and in the decades following WWII the cultural shift became a riptide, drowning out the memory of New York’s once-colorful gay street life. The most ‘obvious’ expressions of sexual or gender nonconformity were driven out of the public eye; most surviving gay bars through the 1960s were run by the Mafia. (A quick search indicates that the Stonewall Inn was one of these.) Gay culture did not end (far from it) but its visible expressions were effectively driven from public spaces.
Confronted with such a plethora of information, I found myself stopping often to reassess my historical framework. In the process of excavating the history of New York City’s gay world, Chauncey brings to the reader’s attention the great complexity of evolving social, cultural, and sexual norms of the city throughout the first half of the 20th century. The push-pull tension between different classes, races, and subcultures is vibrantly alive in his analysis.
Ironically enough, but perhaps not surprisingly, the best records for his research were kept by anti-vice societies such as the Committee of Fourteen, who would send undercover ‘agents’ to spy on locations and persons suspected of immoral activity (including one poor soul whose job it was to stand behind a bathroom grate and observe the occupants).
Chauncey is careful never to claim gay life was easy, or even ‘open’ in the same sense as today, but he categorically rejects the concept of the ‘isolated, invisible, and self-hating’ gay man, and then provides a mountain of evidence to support his objection. The world of Gay New York is one of infinite intersectional complexity, deepening, rather than reducing my understanding of the forces that drive urban sociological tensions, both in the past and today.
This is not popular nonfiction. Chauncey’s argument is built on the informational equivalent of bedrock, or perhaps a nuclear bunker, which has the dual-effect of rendering it both difficult to counter (good), and tiring to read (not so good). It’s fine taken in small doses, but readers should be aware that exhaustive research makes for exhausting reading.
There’s so much I want to say about this book, but I know I can’t do it justice, so instead I’ll end with this: while I have to knock off a star for readability, this was hands-down one of the most thorough and broadly insightful works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
---
ETA: An updated version of this book was published on 04/09/2019. There don't appear to be any major changes or additions, but Chauncey does include a preface that explains the shortcomings of his original publication. This preface includes both notes on the political environment in which he was writing and restrospective application of the then-nascent field of transgender studies to his research.
I broke some personal reading rules with this book. I don’t write in my books (except my cookbooks), but if you flip through my copy of Gay New York, you’ll find notes in the margins and a handful of underlines. It’s big enough, even as a paperback, that I couldn’t reasonably maneuver it and a notebook around my cat, but even if that had been an option I’m not sure I would have bothered.
Chauncey steamrolls over the idea that gay men before Stonewall lived lives that were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Armed with a mountain of research drawn from court dockets, arrest records, vice society records, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, tabloids, and interviews, he unearths a colorful history smoothed-over by post-WWII cultural retaliation, making it clear that New York City was home to a complex and sophisticated gay world in the first half of the 20th century.
The past is a funhouse mirror, filled with things at once familiar and strange. Chauncey opens by cautioning the reader against assuming modern sexual identities can simply be transposed into the past, and spends the first four chapters laying groundwork for male (homo)sexual practices of the early 20th century. From there, he moves on to the development and politics of the gay community in New York City. From drag balls to house parties, saloons to bathhouses, Chauncey’s history explores the ups and downs of gay life across class boundaries, including the careful double-life kept by many middle-class gay men.
There’s too much content to easily summarize, but the drag balls were a particularly interesting highlight. Performatively transgressive, these well-attended and well-publicized events reinforced the existing social order; two men might dance together if one was dressed as a woman, or two women if one was dressed as a man. Long common in places like Harlem and Greenwich village, they even spilled into Times Square in the 1920s, marking an era of contextual pseudo-tolerance that peaked with the Prohibition Era’s ‘pansy acts’ in public cabarets.
Chauncey closes with the repeal of the Volstead Act, which ushered in a new era of state-regulation and surveillance. Vaguely-worded alcohol laws provided necessary pretense to shut down establishments found to serve ‘disorderly’ (oft read: gay) patrons, regardless of behavior or gender expression. By the mid-1930s most drag balls had been ended, and in the decades following WWII the cultural shift became a riptide, drowning out the memory of New York’s once-colorful gay street life. The most ‘obvious’ expressions of sexual or gender nonconformity were driven out of the public eye; most surviving gay bars through the 1960s were run by the Mafia. (A quick search indicates that the Stonewall Inn was one of these.) Gay culture did not end (far from it) but its visible expressions were effectively driven from public spaces.
Confronted with such a plethora of information, I found myself stopping often to reassess my historical framework. In the process of excavating the history of New York City’s gay world, Chauncey brings to the reader’s attention the great complexity of evolving social, cultural, and sexual norms of the city throughout the first half of the 20th century. The push-pull tension between different classes, races, and subcultures is vibrantly alive in his analysis.
Ironically enough, but perhaps not surprisingly, the best records for his research were kept by anti-vice societies such as the Committee of Fourteen, who would send undercover ‘agents’ to spy on locations and persons suspected of immoral activity (including one poor soul whose job it was to stand behind a bathroom grate and observe the occupants).
Chauncey is careful never to claim gay life was easy, or even ‘open’ in the same sense as today, but he categorically rejects the concept of the ‘isolated, invisible, and self-hating’ gay man, and then provides a mountain of evidence to support his objection. The world of Gay New York is one of infinite intersectional complexity, deepening, rather than reducing my understanding of the forces that drive urban sociological tensions, both in the past and today.
This is not popular nonfiction. Chauncey’s argument is built on the informational equivalent of bedrock, or perhaps a nuclear bunker, which has the dual-effect of rendering it both difficult to counter (good), and tiring to read (not so good). It’s fine taken in small doses, but readers should be aware that exhaustive research makes for exhausting reading.
There’s so much I want to say about this book, but I know I can’t do it justice, so instead I’ll end with this: while I have to knock off a star for readability, this was hands-down one of the most thorough and broadly insightful works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
---
ETA: An updated version of this book was published on 04/09/2019. There don't appear to be any major changes or additions, but Chauncey does include a preface that explains the shortcomings of his original publication. This preface includes both notes on the political environment in which he was writing and restrospective application of the then-nascent field of transgender studies to his research.
January 19, 2010
This is a big, big book and haven't nearly read it all. It's full of fascinating details that you can just read bits and pieces and be chatting about them for life, like I am. Sometimes you don't have to finish a book for it to change things for you. The vision of New York as it was in 1890-1940 changed forever how I see the struggle for gay rights.
I used to view it as springing suddenly into existence in the 60s on the larger tide of the Civil Rights movement. Stonewall marked a key turning point to more open activism, and then the AIDS crisis in the eighties pushed the movement further and further until we were so out and proud and here and queer that Pride no longer needed to be political and became just one more big circuit party.
But I digress - basically before 1960 EVERYONE had been closeted since ancient Greece, right? So not right.
This book opened my eyes to the fact that gay people had lived quite openly in New York, among other places, before 1960, and their presence was known and enjoyed by the wider world, if not in the same way as it is today, at least in a way that would have shocked people in the 1950s. I mean, tourists went to New York to attend drag balls that would put Hamburger Mary's Bingo Night to shame. So instead of 1940-1960 being just an extension of an eternity of secrecy, it was actually a period of backlash and reinvigorated homophobia.
This is why, when people tell me not to worry, history is on my side, gay marriage will eventually be legal because we just keep getting more and more progressive all the time, I snap at them. Because you just don't know when the tide will turn, and without settled law to protect you, we could end up in paddywagons and concentration camps again, just like before.
Try to remember that during the circuit party we call Pride.
I used to view it as springing suddenly into existence in the 60s on the larger tide of the Civil Rights movement. Stonewall marked a key turning point to more open activism, and then the AIDS crisis in the eighties pushed the movement further and further until we were so out and proud and here and queer that Pride no longer needed to be political and became just one more big circuit party.
But I digress - basically before 1960 EVERYONE had been closeted since ancient Greece, right? So not right.
This book opened my eyes to the fact that gay people had lived quite openly in New York, among other places, before 1960, and their presence was known and enjoyed by the wider world, if not in the same way as it is today, at least in a way that would have shocked people in the 1950s. I mean, tourists went to New York to attend drag balls that would put Hamburger Mary's Bingo Night to shame. So instead of 1940-1960 being just an extension of an eternity of secrecy, it was actually a period of backlash and reinvigorated homophobia.
This is why, when people tell me not to worry, history is on my side, gay marriage will eventually be legal because we just keep getting more and more progressive all the time, I snap at them. Because you just don't know when the tide will turn, and without settled law to protect you, we could end up in paddywagons and concentration camps again, just like before.
Try to remember that during the circuit party we call Pride.
February 4, 2026
i've started to notice a kind of historian's disease wherein having laboriously found a lot of specific details they now feel compelled to share all of them, and it is evident here; this is particularly striking in the second part, when we have endless recitals of what THIS bar was called and its intersection and the occupations of all 30 men arrested on THIS random night. all these things eventually do not contribute to our understanding of history or the portrait it makes so much as, perhaps, they felt sad to let go of, to allow time to consume again after they had been pried out of it.
i did learn a lot and was very glad to learn it, and i think much of the analysis, particularly in the first third when he focuses on fairies and gay men across class lines, is truly terrific. a built-in problem with projects of this scope is that when, inevitably, you reach the boundary of the scope, you bounce off it like a wall, and here they feel sometimes arbitrary.
there's a lot of points where instead of detail i would have preferred more context; i think it would have been useful to explore in more detail how black cultures in harlem shaped the development of gay cultures, especially w/r/t the harlem night scene and then black and "pansy" nightclub entertainers being in vogue with straight white audiences in similar ways in quick succession. there's a sudden aside at the end about how a string of child sex crimes led to heightened homophobia in the 30s-- what? where? what? why didn't we learn more about this earlier? honestly, in general, i think the author was reluctant to dwell on homophobia because he was arguing against a false understanding of historic homophobia, but i think it could have been incorporated more thoroughly, particularly on a culture/identity level rather than a legal/safety strategy level.
i also wish we'd dwelled longer on how youth informs culture and power and how everything affected gay youth specifically-- he briefly elucidates wolf/lamb as cultural categories but could have unfolded the gay histories of mentorship / harm within distinct layers of power relation, particularly in the contexts of homophobia and poverty-- particularly because the isolation and interdependence of gay youth have shaped gay cultures so deeply.
also i know (i know!) it makes sense for him to remain focused on gay men, but there are times when it does feel like women's history was much more relevant than he allows it-- no mention of the women's house of detention as one of the things making the village gay was crazy, as was his winking note that after being deported for gay obscenity, eve of eve's hangout went on to promptly open a new gay bar in paris, with no mention of the fact that after that she was murdered at auschwitz. just like, weird! and yet, i know, no book can be about everything! and yet!
the author is very clear about the areas needing further research; i also appreciated his new forward considering for the first time trans history as part of this history, and i would have loved further consideration in that light continuing to unfold his analysis that our modern divisions of sexuality and gender are indeed modern, of our specific times, born from this history. maybe this is simply Work That Remains to be Done.
i did learn a lot and was very glad to learn it, and i think much of the analysis, particularly in the first third when he focuses on fairies and gay men across class lines, is truly terrific. a built-in problem with projects of this scope is that when, inevitably, you reach the boundary of the scope, you bounce off it like a wall, and here they feel sometimes arbitrary.
there's a lot of points where instead of detail i would have preferred more context; i think it would have been useful to explore in more detail how black cultures in harlem shaped the development of gay cultures, especially w/r/t the harlem night scene and then black and "pansy" nightclub entertainers being in vogue with straight white audiences in similar ways in quick succession. there's a sudden aside at the end about how a string of child sex crimes led to heightened homophobia in the 30s-- what? where? what? why didn't we learn more about this earlier? honestly, in general, i think the author was reluctant to dwell on homophobia because he was arguing against a false understanding of historic homophobia, but i think it could have been incorporated more thoroughly, particularly on a culture/identity level rather than a legal/safety strategy level.
i also wish we'd dwelled longer on how youth informs culture and power and how everything affected gay youth specifically-- he briefly elucidates wolf/lamb as cultural categories but could have unfolded the gay histories of mentorship / harm within distinct layers of power relation, particularly in the contexts of homophobia and poverty-- particularly because the isolation and interdependence of gay youth have shaped gay cultures so deeply.
also i know (i know!) it makes sense for him to remain focused on gay men, but there are times when it does feel like women's history was much more relevant than he allows it-- no mention of the women's house of detention as one of the things making the village gay was crazy, as was his winking note that after being deported for gay obscenity, eve of eve's hangout went on to promptly open a new gay bar in paris, with no mention of the fact that after that she was murdered at auschwitz. just like, weird! and yet, i know, no book can be about everything! and yet!
the author is very clear about the areas needing further research; i also appreciated his new forward considering for the first time trans history as part of this history, and i would have loved further consideration in that light continuing to unfold his analysis that our modern divisions of sexuality and gender are indeed modern, of our specific times, born from this history. maybe this is simply Work That Remains to be Done.
November 29, 2012
Chauncey's history (1994) of the gay world of New York in the early twentieth century is encyclopedic. He did important original research, unlikely to ever be surpassed, mostly through oral interviews. He goes further in synthesizing the data into a convincing theory of the evolution of queer identity from "fairies" whose sexuality is based on behavior, into "gay" and "straight" desire representing the now ubiquitous homosexual/heterosexual divide. The book easily earns a full 5 stars for this work.
The writing, however, is pedantic, as might be expected from a scholarly work. His less-than-gripping text often seems about to veer into welcome, engaged emotional territory, but then pulls back. Although this is not a negative for an academic work, some readers will find it to be a slow read. Intellectual interest will need to suffice for the missing narrative drive to get to the end.
It is possible to make such a history more engaging. I greatly recommend Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity as an example. It covers nearly the same time period as Chauncey's, and it's interesting to compare Berlin's evolving gay culture with New York's.
Fans of Gay New York will be pleased to know that after more than twenty years the sequel seems finally to be scheduled for publication in 2016. This book is mentioned several times in the earlier work as covering the period up to Stonewall and beyond, but so far it has not appeared.
The writing, however, is pedantic, as might be expected from a scholarly work. His less-than-gripping text often seems about to veer into welcome, engaged emotional territory, but then pulls back. Although this is not a negative for an academic work, some readers will find it to be a slow read. Intellectual interest will need to suffice for the missing narrative drive to get to the end.
It is possible to make such a history more engaging. I greatly recommend Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity as an example. It covers nearly the same time period as Chauncey's, and it's interesting to compare Berlin's evolving gay culture with New York's.
Fans of Gay New York will be pleased to know that after more than twenty years the sequel seems finally to be scheduled for publication in 2016. This book is mentioned several times in the earlier work as covering the period up to Stonewall and beyond, but so far it has not appeared.
July 9, 2023
Really informative and a huge chuck of history that I honestly knew only a tiny bit about before. I listened to a library hold, but I think this is going on my wish list of queer history things I want to own one day, bc there is so much I would go back and double check, want to remember. The narrator did a fantastic job. I sometimes struggle with non fiction audiobooks, esp long and more historical, researched based, basically thesis paper style ones, but the narrator did a fantastic job keeping me engaged. Def rec if you want more abt queer history. ESPECIALLY pre-stonewall. We were very queer and apparently obviously so in many places here.
Great listen.
ETA: I own it now💜
Great listen.
ETA: I own it now💜
August 28, 2020
a perfect social history on queerness in NY from the turn of the century to the 1930s. highly recc
April 12, 2024
Literally imagine the whole city thinking you were gay to the point that it is front page news when you marry a woman, rip Jean Marin you were a legend
March 18, 2020
and you can want who you want! boys and boys and girls and girls! welcome to new york!
i regret nothing
so this review is just going to be random quotes, things i found interesting, and some commentary
content/trigger warnings; queerphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, anti-gay violence, misogyny, anti-sex work, uncensored use of anti-gay slurs/derogatory terms, uncensored use of racist slurs, racism, descriptions of queerphobia from police/doctors/legal professionals, ableist language,
coming out/the closet
— “coming out” like a lot of campy gay terminology was a play on the language of women’s culture; referring to debutante balls where girls are introduced, or come out, to society.
— in the 1920s, coming out referred to initiation into the gay world or the process by which someone came to recognize his sexual interest in other men. by the 1950s, it referred exclusively to a gay man’s first sexual experience with another man. by the 1970s, it more commonly referred to announcing one’s sexuality to straight loved ones. “the critical audience to which one came out had shifted from the gay world to the straight world”
— “gay people in the prewar years did not speak of coming out of what we call the ‘gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called ‘homosexual society’ or the ‘gay world,’ a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as ‘closet’ implies.”
— “the closet” wasn’t used by gay people before the 1960s. it doesn’t appear in records of the gay movement or in media, diaries, or letters of gay people before then. we should pay attention to the different terms people used to describe themselves and their social worlds; gay men described living a double life, putting on/taking off a mask, wearing their hair up/letting their hair down; moving between different personas and lives depending on the type of people they were around.
terminology
— “few words used by gay men were made-up terms that had no meaning in standard english or slang, most gave standard terms a second, gay meaning. many were derived from the slang of female prostitutes. gay itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men; trade and trick referred to prostitutes' customers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cruising referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before it referred to a gay man’s. other terms, such as coming out, burlesqued the rituals of society women.”
— men who hated the term fairy and the social category it signified embraced gay as an alternative label, but didn’t initiate its usage in gay culture. gay originally referred to things pleasurable, then by the seventeenth century came to refer more specifically to a life of “immoral pleasure and dissipation,” by the nineteenth century; sex work, gay also referred to something brightly colored or someone showily dressed; thus its adoption by fairies and the association with camp.
— “in the very different sexual culture that predominated at the turn of the century, [’fairies, trade, wolves, and punks’] understood themselves—and were regarded by others—as fundamentally different kinds of people. to classify their behavior and identities using the simple polarities of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ would be to misunderstand the complexity of their sexual system, the realities of their lived experiences”
queer
— the queer folk of the gay subculture defined themselves by their difference from the dominant culture.
— “by the 1910s and 1920s, men who identified themselves as different from other men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest rather than their womanlike gender status called themselves queer.”
— “‘queer wasn’t derogatory, it just meant you were different’ a man active in new york's gay world in the 1920s recalled. while some men regretted the supposed aberration in their character that queer denoted, others regarded their difference positively and took pleasure in being different from the norm. ‘who wanted to be normal and boring?’ many queers considered ‘faggot’ and ‘fairy’ to be more derogatory terms.”
— “while less visible than the fairies in the streets of new york, queer men constituted the majority of gay-identified men in new york in the early decades of the century.” one man who moved from germany to new york in 1927 remembered fairy and queer being the most common terms used for and by gay new yokers
— queer men’s efforts to forge an identity and cultural stance that distinguishes them from fairies and “normal” men alike marked the growing differentiation and isolation of sexuality from gender in middle-class american culture. fairies’ desire for men was thought to be because of their gender persona, as desire for men was considered an inherently feminine desire, queers maintained that their desire for men revealed only their sexuality, a distinct domain independent of gender.
— part of the appeal of queer for many men was the embodiment of privacy, self-restraint, and lack of self-disclosure.
— men who identified as fairies intended their style to mark him as gay, whereas men who identified as queer intended their style to deflect such suspicions. queer men were more likely to seek out men like themselves than fairies were.
— many middle-class queer men blamed anti-gay hostility on fairies for failing to abide by straight conventions of decorum in their dress and style, thus antagonizing “normal” people. which is interesting because the appeal of queer to most people is the rejection of assimilation and respectability politics; the point is to embrace your difference from the “norm,” not try to censor yourself to fit into the “norm.”
— “by the late 1940s, younger gay men were chastising older men who still used queer, which the younger men now regarded as demeaning. as will finch noted in his diary in 1951, ‘the term gay is taking [queer’s] place. i loathe the word, and stick to queer, but am constantly being reproved, especially in so denominating myself.’”
— “some men, especially older ones, continued to prefer queer to gay, in part because of gay’s initial association with the ‘fairies.’ younger men found it easier to forget the origins of gay in the campy banter of the very queens whom they wished to reject.” so gay men and queer men both rejected the fairy but gay men also rejected queer because they found it easier to forget gay’s origin with the specific type of queer men they were rejecting association with (fairies) than to ignore the growing negative connotations of queer with outsiders.....😒
— self-identified queer men were so good at developing codes that only fellow queer men within the subculture were intelligible to that doctors at the turn of the century were baffled by their ability to identify each other and talked about it like it was a sixth sense......early 1900s “gaydar” rise
— in the late 1800s and early 1900s, terms for gay men from anti-gay folks including law enforcement and doctors were “degenerate,” “pervert,” “sexual pervert,” and “invert.” not queer like some people claim was The derogatory term in the 1890s. (this is specific to new york, so it could be the common term in some places at that time, but to just label it as The Slur, period, is not accurate)
gender/woman stuff
— “many women activists remained devoted to women and unmarried to men” legends
— some interesting stuff about how the conversation about sexuality was centered on gender and gender roles as opposed to attraction, bisexual didn’t refer to someone attracted to men and women but rather someone who was both a man and woman, and distinguishing “cultural gender” from “anatomical sex” and regarding people as the gender they projected or were perceived as over their sex.
— effeminate gay men were “tolerated because they were regarded as women,” which meant they were “subjected to the same contempt, violence, and sexual exploitation regularly directed against women” so “participating in the collective sexualization and objectification of women was one of the rituals by which they established themselves as men” like...fuck women, amiright?
— gotta acknowledge how the homophobia described throughout the book is so completely tied up in misogyny/hatred for female sex work
— misogynistic queerphobes dismissed any woman who wanted to be treated equal to men as hairy, unattractive, man-like lesbian predators....how weak
— so what i’ve gathered is that heterosexuality basically became a concept and identity because straight men were so threatened by the existence of gay men and also women standing up for themselves...they’ve always been the weakest link
— “moral reformers” and police were so determined to control female sex workers that they threatened hotels into banning women, only to be like “wait what” when those hotels started to become hotspots for gay men lmao
random
— the stonewall rebellion was “widely and inaccurately regarded as the beginning of the lgbt movement,” as opposed to the “catalyst for a new wave of radical militancy in gay politics.” “historians have showed that a political movement preceded stonewall by two decades and had its origins in a gay subculture that expanded during the war.” please everyone stop saying stonewall was the beginning of the movement
— “we should never presume the absence of something before we have looked for it” PREACH!!!! queer people need to stop assuming there is no “proof” of various queer people existing in the community/before a certain time when they haven’t even bothered to check. that shit is in line with non-queer folks denying queer history to keep us in the shadows.
— many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded the other or that they were gay or bi, because they didn't understand or organize their sexual practices on a gay-straight axis.
— “it would be difficult to argue that they were really homosexuals . . . but neither could they plausibly be regarded as heterosexuals . . . nor were they bisexuals . . . they were, rather, men who were . . . interested in sexual activity defined not by the gender of their partner” [stares in modern day pansexual] 👀👀👀👀👀👀
— it was accepted and normal for men to kiss and share beds with their male friends, and just, you know, show their love and be free with their affection. until such expression of love became suspected to contain an “unwholesome” gay element.....early 1900s “no homo” anyone?
— ymca stood for “why i’m so gay” among gay men.....amazing
— “i have no contact with heterosexual people” legend status
— there’s a concerning dismissal about gay predators tbh. the author talks about gay men trying to molest men in their sleep and having sexual relationships with minors, but maintains any negative reaction to those gay men were simply due to them being gay.
— “gay men turned many restaurants into places where they could gather with gay friends, gossip, ridicule the dominant culture that ridiculed them, and construct an alternative culture” so making fun of heteros has always been gay culture
— “greenwich village’s reputation as a gay mecca eclipsed harlem's only because it was a white, middle-class world”
— the author says straight actors mimicking and ridiculing gay men by putting on shows where they do drag or stereotypical things is the “gay equivalent to blackface” i
— detailing queerbaiting and lack of (good) representation in the early 1900s....and we’re still dealing with that shit over a century later.....cool cool cool cool
i regret nothing
so this review is just going to be random quotes, things i found interesting, and some commentary
content/trigger warnings; queerphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, anti-gay violence, misogyny, anti-sex work, uncensored use of anti-gay slurs/derogatory terms, uncensored use of racist slurs, racism, descriptions of queerphobia from police/doctors/legal professionals, ableist language,
coming out/the closet
— “coming out” like a lot of campy gay terminology was a play on the language of women’s culture; referring to debutante balls where girls are introduced, or come out, to society.
— in the 1920s, coming out referred to initiation into the gay world or the process by which someone came to recognize his sexual interest in other men. by the 1950s, it referred exclusively to a gay man’s first sexual experience with another man. by the 1970s, it more commonly referred to announcing one’s sexuality to straight loved ones. “the critical audience to which one came out had shifted from the gay world to the straight world”
— “gay people in the prewar years did not speak of coming out of what we call the ‘gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called ‘homosexual society’ or the ‘gay world,’ a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as ‘closet’ implies.”
— “the closet” wasn’t used by gay people before the 1960s. it doesn’t appear in records of the gay movement or in media, diaries, or letters of gay people before then. we should pay attention to the different terms people used to describe themselves and their social worlds; gay men described living a double life, putting on/taking off a mask, wearing their hair up/letting their hair down; moving between different personas and lives depending on the type of people they were around.
terminology
— “few words used by gay men were made-up terms that had no meaning in standard english or slang, most gave standard terms a second, gay meaning. many were derived from the slang of female prostitutes. gay itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men; trade and trick referred to prostitutes' customers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cruising referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before it referred to a gay man’s. other terms, such as coming out, burlesqued the rituals of society women.”
— men who hated the term fairy and the social category it signified embraced gay as an alternative label, but didn’t initiate its usage in gay culture. gay originally referred to things pleasurable, then by the seventeenth century came to refer more specifically to a life of “immoral pleasure and dissipation,” by the nineteenth century; sex work, gay also referred to something brightly colored or someone showily dressed; thus its adoption by fairies and the association with camp.
— “in the very different sexual culture that predominated at the turn of the century, [’fairies, trade, wolves, and punks’] understood themselves—and were regarded by others—as fundamentally different kinds of people. to classify their behavior and identities using the simple polarities of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ would be to misunderstand the complexity of their sexual system, the realities of their lived experiences”
queer
— the queer folk of the gay subculture defined themselves by their difference from the dominant culture.
— “by the 1910s and 1920s, men who identified themselves as different from other men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest rather than their womanlike gender status called themselves queer.”
— “‘queer wasn’t derogatory, it just meant you were different’ a man active in new york's gay world in the 1920s recalled. while some men regretted the supposed aberration in their character that queer denoted, others regarded their difference positively and took pleasure in being different from the norm. ‘who wanted to be normal and boring?’ many queers considered ‘faggot’ and ‘fairy’ to be more derogatory terms.”
— “while less visible than the fairies in the streets of new york, queer men constituted the majority of gay-identified men in new york in the early decades of the century.” one man who moved from germany to new york in 1927 remembered fairy and queer being the most common terms used for and by gay new yokers
— queer men’s efforts to forge an identity and cultural stance that distinguishes them from fairies and “normal” men alike marked the growing differentiation and isolation of sexuality from gender in middle-class american culture. fairies’ desire for men was thought to be because of their gender persona, as desire for men was considered an inherently feminine desire, queers maintained that their desire for men revealed only their sexuality, a distinct domain independent of gender.
— part of the appeal of queer for many men was the embodiment of privacy, self-restraint, and lack of self-disclosure.
— men who identified as fairies intended their style to mark him as gay, whereas men who identified as queer intended their style to deflect such suspicions. queer men were more likely to seek out men like themselves than fairies were.
— many middle-class queer men blamed anti-gay hostility on fairies for failing to abide by straight conventions of decorum in their dress and style, thus antagonizing “normal” people. which is interesting because the appeal of queer to most people is the rejection of assimilation and respectability politics; the point is to embrace your difference from the “norm,” not try to censor yourself to fit into the “norm.”
— “by the late 1940s, younger gay men were chastising older men who still used queer, which the younger men now regarded as demeaning. as will finch noted in his diary in 1951, ‘the term gay is taking [queer’s] place. i loathe the word, and stick to queer, but am constantly being reproved, especially in so denominating myself.’”
— “some men, especially older ones, continued to prefer queer to gay, in part because of gay’s initial association with the ‘fairies.’ younger men found it easier to forget the origins of gay in the campy banter of the very queens whom they wished to reject.” so gay men and queer men both rejected the fairy but gay men also rejected queer because they found it easier to forget gay’s origin with the specific type of queer men they were rejecting association with (fairies) than to ignore the growing negative connotations of queer with outsiders.....😒
— self-identified queer men were so good at developing codes that only fellow queer men within the subculture were intelligible to that doctors at the turn of the century were baffled by their ability to identify each other and talked about it like it was a sixth sense......early 1900s “gaydar” rise
— in the late 1800s and early 1900s, terms for gay men from anti-gay folks including law enforcement and doctors were “degenerate,” “pervert,” “sexual pervert,” and “invert.” not queer like some people claim was The derogatory term in the 1890s. (this is specific to new york, so it could be the common term in some places at that time, but to just label it as The Slur, period, is not accurate)
gender/woman stuff
— “many women activists remained devoted to women and unmarried to men” legends
— some interesting stuff about how the conversation about sexuality was centered on gender and gender roles as opposed to attraction, bisexual didn’t refer to someone attracted to men and women but rather someone who was both a man and woman, and distinguishing “cultural gender” from “anatomical sex” and regarding people as the gender they projected or were perceived as over their sex.
— effeminate gay men were “tolerated because they were regarded as women,” which meant they were “subjected to the same contempt, violence, and sexual exploitation regularly directed against women” so “participating in the collective sexualization and objectification of women was one of the rituals by which they established themselves as men” like...fuck women, amiright?
— gotta acknowledge how the homophobia described throughout the book is so completely tied up in misogyny/hatred for female sex work
— misogynistic queerphobes dismissed any woman who wanted to be treated equal to men as hairy, unattractive, man-like lesbian predators....how weak
— so what i’ve gathered is that heterosexuality basically became a concept and identity because straight men were so threatened by the existence of gay men and also women standing up for themselves...they’ve always been the weakest link
— “moral reformers” and police were so determined to control female sex workers that they threatened hotels into banning women, only to be like “wait what” when those hotels started to become hotspots for gay men lmao
random
— the stonewall rebellion was “widely and inaccurately regarded as the beginning of the lgbt movement,” as opposed to the “catalyst for a new wave of radical militancy in gay politics.” “historians have showed that a political movement preceded stonewall by two decades and had its origins in a gay subculture that expanded during the war.” please everyone stop saying stonewall was the beginning of the movement
— “we should never presume the absence of something before we have looked for it” PREACH!!!! queer people need to stop assuming there is no “proof” of various queer people existing in the community/before a certain time when they haven’t even bothered to check. that shit is in line with non-queer folks denying queer history to keep us in the shadows.
— many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded the other or that they were gay or bi, because they didn't understand or organize their sexual practices on a gay-straight axis.
— “it would be difficult to argue that they were really homosexuals . . . but neither could they plausibly be regarded as heterosexuals . . . nor were they bisexuals . . . they were, rather, men who were . . . interested in sexual activity defined not by the gender of their partner” [stares in modern day pansexual] 👀👀👀👀👀👀
— it was accepted and normal for men to kiss and share beds with their male friends, and just, you know, show their love and be free with their affection. until such expression of love became suspected to contain an “unwholesome” gay element.....early 1900s “no homo” anyone?
— ymca stood for “why i’m so gay” among gay men.....amazing
— “i have no contact with heterosexual people” legend status
— there’s a concerning dismissal about gay predators tbh. the author talks about gay men trying to molest men in their sleep and having sexual relationships with minors, but maintains any negative reaction to those gay men were simply due to them being gay.
— “gay men turned many restaurants into places where they could gather with gay friends, gossip, ridicule the dominant culture that ridiculed them, and construct an alternative culture” so making fun of heteros has always been gay culture
— “greenwich village’s reputation as a gay mecca eclipsed harlem's only because it was a white, middle-class world”
— the author says straight actors mimicking and ridiculing gay men by putting on shows where they do drag or stereotypical things is the “gay equivalent to blackface” i
— detailing queerbaiting and lack of (good) representation in the early 1900s....and we’re still dealing with that shit over a century later.....cool cool cool cool
February 12, 2015
This is one of the more remarkable history books I've read in a while. It is important both in a scholarly sense and to Americans' understanding of their own culture and history. Anyone with a brain knows that there were homosexuals in the past, but for Chauncey to dig up that history with such richness, depth, and clarity is a true achievement.
The basic argument is that a vibrant male gay community formed from the 1890's to the 1920's and began to go into the closet only in the 1930's and 40's as part of a conservative backlash. This doesn't necessarily mean that everyone was out and tolerated, but gays carved out communities and locations for themselves, mostly in working class neighborhoods, and integrated themselves into more mainstream communities. They were not isolated from and invisible to the broader culture. They did not internalize the negative stereotypes that their society assigned to homosexuals.
One of the most interesting concepts in the book is that many people thought of gay males, especially the more effeminate "fairies" (as opposed to masculine-performing "queers") as inverted males who either were part woman or wanted to be women. They were often labelled the third sex and excluded from normative definitions of heterosexuality or masculinity. Hands down the most mind-expanding point in the book deals with the binary approach to heterosexuality and homosexuality. Obviously there is a fundamentally biological basis to one's attraction to either sex. However, the way a society defines gay and straight, or homosexual and heterosexual, changed drastically in the 20th century. In general, orientation/sexuality as they existed back then were defined more by performance of masculinity or femininity rather than the object of sexual desire. Therefore, many men could consider themselves and largely be considered masculine and straight even if they had sex with other males as long as they played the "male roles" in those sex acts. There were limits to this toleration, though, and sex with men was often tolerated as a weakness or outlet for release rather than embraced wholeheartedly by straight, masculine men. However, if they started to act feminine or queer, that would throw their sexuality and masculinity into question and lead to serious social consequences. Over the course of the 20th century, a strict, middle class definition of sexuality on the basis of the object of desire rather than the performance evolved, which is how we understand things today. As this new regime took over, ostensibly straight men had far less sex with openly gay men. This is one of the strongest arguments for social constructionism (of gender, desire, and identity) I've ever encountered.
I found it highly amusing that Mugwumpy, progressive reformers would build all sorts of public works (baths, YMCAs, housing, parks) and then get angry when gay men socialized and had sex there. In fact, many Progressive attempts to regulate "bad behavior," from drinking to female prostitution, just backfired and reinforced more homosexual behavior. For example, the crackdown on female prostitution in the early 20's just drove more men to male prostitutes because nominally straight men at the time saw "fairies" as closer to female than male, so having sex with them was just a utilitarian release and not a sign of their homosexuality. A huge part of this book was about gays appropriating straight culture for their own purposes. Another example was that gays borrowed the term "coming out" from upper class debutante balls. Chauncey points out that coming out mainly meant coming into the gay community, rather than the contemporary notion of coming out to the world.
Although it is a bit long, I would definitely assign parts of this book to undergraduate or advanced high school students. It is important for people to realize that homosexuals have a history, and that there story is different but not separate from American history as a whole. It is also important to realize that they simply existed. In a sense, this book is saddening because it shows all the trials, persecution, and mockery homosexuals went through in this period. It helps us understand the patterns of sexual behavior that proved so deadly during the AIDS epidemic. However, this book is also uplifting and empowering. It shows how homosexuals often demanded recognition and respect, how they maneuvered their ways through an often hostile society, how they formed their own communities, and most importantly, how they defined themselves and made their own history. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone looking for a new take on urban, American, gender, or gay history.
The basic argument is that a vibrant male gay community formed from the 1890's to the 1920's and began to go into the closet only in the 1930's and 40's as part of a conservative backlash. This doesn't necessarily mean that everyone was out and tolerated, but gays carved out communities and locations for themselves, mostly in working class neighborhoods, and integrated themselves into more mainstream communities. They were not isolated from and invisible to the broader culture. They did not internalize the negative stereotypes that their society assigned to homosexuals.
One of the most interesting concepts in the book is that many people thought of gay males, especially the more effeminate "fairies" (as opposed to masculine-performing "queers") as inverted males who either were part woman or wanted to be women. They were often labelled the third sex and excluded from normative definitions of heterosexuality or masculinity. Hands down the most mind-expanding point in the book deals with the binary approach to heterosexuality and homosexuality. Obviously there is a fundamentally biological basis to one's attraction to either sex. However, the way a society defines gay and straight, or homosexual and heterosexual, changed drastically in the 20th century. In general, orientation/sexuality as they existed back then were defined more by performance of masculinity or femininity rather than the object of sexual desire. Therefore, many men could consider themselves and largely be considered masculine and straight even if they had sex with other males as long as they played the "male roles" in those sex acts. There were limits to this toleration, though, and sex with men was often tolerated as a weakness or outlet for release rather than embraced wholeheartedly by straight, masculine men. However, if they started to act feminine or queer, that would throw their sexuality and masculinity into question and lead to serious social consequences. Over the course of the 20th century, a strict, middle class definition of sexuality on the basis of the object of desire rather than the performance evolved, which is how we understand things today. As this new regime took over, ostensibly straight men had far less sex with openly gay men. This is one of the strongest arguments for social constructionism (of gender, desire, and identity) I've ever encountered.
I found it highly amusing that Mugwumpy, progressive reformers would build all sorts of public works (baths, YMCAs, housing, parks) and then get angry when gay men socialized and had sex there. In fact, many Progressive attempts to regulate "bad behavior," from drinking to female prostitution, just backfired and reinforced more homosexual behavior. For example, the crackdown on female prostitution in the early 20's just drove more men to male prostitutes because nominally straight men at the time saw "fairies" as closer to female than male, so having sex with them was just a utilitarian release and not a sign of their homosexuality. A huge part of this book was about gays appropriating straight culture for their own purposes. Another example was that gays borrowed the term "coming out" from upper class debutante balls. Chauncey points out that coming out mainly meant coming into the gay community, rather than the contemporary notion of coming out to the world.
Although it is a bit long, I would definitely assign parts of this book to undergraduate or advanced high school students. It is important for people to realize that homosexuals have a history, and that there story is different but not separate from American history as a whole. It is also important to realize that they simply existed. In a sense, this book is saddening because it shows all the trials, persecution, and mockery homosexuals went through in this period. It helps us understand the patterns of sexual behavior that proved so deadly during the AIDS epidemic. However, this book is also uplifting and empowering. It shows how homosexuals often demanded recognition and respect, how they maneuvered their ways through an often hostile society, how they formed their own communities, and most importantly, how they defined themselves and made their own history. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone looking for a new take on urban, American, gender, or gay history.
July 3, 2017
this book is an encyclopedic, hugely informative, and very accessible — the fact that it took me two years to find the time to finish it is a reflection of how busy the last two years have been for me, not of the quality of the book. aside from being a fascinating and engaging read, it’s also a hugely valuable resource just as a reference, for the breadth of sources Chauncey uses, literary, legal, historical, academic, and otherwise.
also, like, I hate New York City as much as the next Bostonian, but this book should be, like, baseline required reading if you’re a gay guy in the US.
also, like, I hate New York City as much as the next Bostonian, but this book should be, like, baseline required reading if you’re a gay guy in the US.
October 19, 2026
Chauncey dismantles the idea that gay male life before Stonewall was all shame, suicidal self-hatred, and dirty and dangerous cruising spots. His gay New York City had YMCA hookups, Harlem drag balls and speakeasies—plus a system of glances and signals, like green suits or red ties—that let men find each other in plain sight.
These men (and it's only biological men here, not lesbians or trans) had an element of freedom because this was an era before “gay” and “bisexual” were settled ideas. You could have sex with men, but not be "gay" in this world, for example, as long as you weren't considered effeminate. It also records plenty of sidewalk heroics, where an “invert” stood up for his rights. The stakes were high: jail time, and your name and address printed in the newspaper. One man got 20 years for sodomy. A man could be arrested for wearing a dress.
The book repeats itself at times, and I wish it had been more firmly edited. Trans people are also mostly absent, which shows its 1994 publication date. I didn’t love “normal” as the word for straight men either, though Chauncey is using the term the men he studied used. Still, it’s an amazing book. If you love New York history, or want one of the first histories of gay life (the author was told his career would be smashed if he wrote it), read it.
These men (and it's only biological men here, not lesbians or trans) had an element of freedom because this was an era before “gay” and “bisexual” were settled ideas. You could have sex with men, but not be "gay" in this world, for example, as long as you weren't considered effeminate. It also records plenty of sidewalk heroics, where an “invert” stood up for his rights. The stakes were high: jail time, and your name and address printed in the newspaper. One man got 20 years for sodomy. A man could be arrested for wearing a dress.
The book repeats itself at times, and I wish it had been more firmly edited. Trans people are also mostly absent, which shows its 1994 publication date. I didn’t love “normal” as the word for straight men either, though Chauncey is using the term the men he studied used. Still, it’s an amazing book. If you love New York history, or want one of the first histories of gay life (the author was told his career would be smashed if he wrote it), read it.
December 2, 2025
Chauncey's study of the New York gay community in the early 20th century is a remarkable revision of decades of consensus on gay history. He renders the gay community on their own terms, never shying away from its challenges, while thoroughly disproving the myth that men were, until recent times, in a collective 'closet'.
It's incredible how alive he makes the city feel. A combination of oral histories and police and reform society records is deployed to bring us into saloons, boarding houses, parks, baths, and street corners. A gay world was hiding in plain sight.
It's incredible how alive he makes the city feel. A combination of oral histories and police and reform society records is deployed to bring us into saloons, boarding houses, parks, baths, and street corners. A gay world was hiding in plain sight.
March 21, 2015
A life-changing book for gay people who think they have no history. Although it focuses almost exclusively on gay men (with good reason, and Chauncey acknowledges that reason,) and only looks at New York City, Chauncey masterfully strips apart dominant narratives about the history of sexuality and explores the nuances of masculinity at the turn of the century. My primary complaint is that communities of color are not as present as they could have been; although Chauncey devotes some space to Black men and women in the section about Harlem, that constitutes half a chapter, with no real acknowledgement as to the gap he's left behind.
Regardless, this book is life-changing and definitely necessary for those interested in the history of sexuality in general, and of gay male history in particular. The notes alone may also be worth a serious look for those less interested in gay men--the sources he draws from also cover urban history, some Black history, the history of sex work, women's history, and lesbian history.
Regardless, this book is life-changing and definitely necessary for those interested in the history of sexuality in general, and of gay male history in particular. The notes alone may also be worth a serious look for those less interested in gay men--the sources he draws from also cover urban history, some Black history, the history of sex work, women's history, and lesbian history.
February 7, 2022
In Gay New York, Chauncey seeks to shift the historiographical field’s focus away from the post-Second World War era and disrupt the notion of progress prominent within gay historiography. Chauncey seeks to disprove three myths that shape early twentieth-century ideas about gay life; the myth of isolation, the myth of invisibility, and the myth of internalization. Indeed, these three myths help to shape the concept of the closet, in which gay men lived unconnected from others in a self-hating manner that forced them into heteronormativity. Chauncey, however, demonstrates that the closet, alongside the notion of “coming out,” looked vastly different before the second half of the century. Rather than coming out of the closet as we understand it today, coming out into the closet was a critical aspect for gay men hoping to express themselves and find community (p. 7). Through his analysis of communities in some of New York’s most densely populated gay neighbours, the Bowery, Harlem, Times Square, and Greenwich Village, Chauncey aptly demonstrates how gay life was visible, integrated with mainstream “normal” society, and not one marked by the now dominant heterosexual-homosexual binary. Chauncey traces the topography of the gay community in New York but also highlights the making of the “normal” world in relation to the gay world and how the hetero-homosexual regime became the prominent model under which sexuality was, and is, understood.
January 10, 2020
Vollgepackt mit Informationen und phantastisch recherchiert. Es hat ein paar Längen zwischendurch und es ist definitiv nichts zum "weglesen", aber es hat mir wahnsinnig viele spannende, Informationen geliefert und erschafft ein sehr lebhaftes Porträt einer vergangenen Epoche.
August 19, 2020
This was a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Especially at first, I found it somewhat repetitive — Chauncey is constantly re-iterating the premise of a given chapter, or of previous chapters, or possibly making points with very subtly different implications, and it gets a bit annoying. This is also, I think, primarily aimed at being a popular academic history, rather than simply a popular book — I believe Chauncey was looking to make a case for what Gay life was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to make a case that it was different than many would think.
I found many interesting ideas in this book, a few tid-bits:
The idea that in the early 20th century / late 19th century, people's sexual identities did not conform as neatly to our "homosexual" / "heterosexual" / "bisexual" categorization scheme — having a sexual relationship (even an ongoing one) did not necessarily endanger your status as a "normal" man, so long as it was done in a specific way
The introduction and then abolition of Prohibition both had profound effect on the visibility of gays in society; the introduction of liquor licenses made it much easier for moral purity societies to criminalize being openly gay, leading to more and more people being closeted.
Tolerance of homosexual behavior varied across class lines, with lower / working classes being surprisingly tolerant and the large impetus for anti-gay activity coming from middle class attitudes.
I am more dubious about many of the other things Chauncey says, and I am curious to learn how and if any of them have been borne out in further research in the 26 years since its initial publication (though I am very worried to wade into this area of research because I fear it is rife with postmodernism). For example, Chauncey suggests that many aspects of how gays presented themselves in society and acted amongst themselves had to do with societal attitudes towards manliness, rather than societal attitudes towards homosexuality; if this is the case, I would expect this to manifest markedly differently among lesbians of the era — which is unfortunately outside of the scope of the book. There are several things like this in the book which seem like they could be better supported.
I also found it a little hard to follow how things were changing over time. At times it seemed that the book was organized by theme (jumping back and forth in time) and other times it seemed more chronological (possibly this is because some of the "themes" like moral purity societies only developed later in the narrative). That made it harder to get a sense of how life for gay men in New York changed over time.
Overall, though, I quite enjoyed this book. I do quite like books about specific subcultures, and while "gay culture" is a fairly broad and fragmented subculture, this still scratches that itch for me.
3.5 of 5 stars
I found many interesting ideas in this book, a few tid-bits:
The idea that in the early 20th century / late 19th century, people's sexual identities did not conform as neatly to our "homosexual" / "heterosexual" / "bisexual" categorization scheme — having a sexual relationship (even an ongoing one) did not necessarily endanger your status as a "normal" man, so long as it was done in a specific way
The introduction and then abolition of Prohibition both had profound effect on the visibility of gays in society; the introduction of liquor licenses made it much easier for moral purity societies to criminalize being openly gay, leading to more and more people being closeted.
Tolerance of homosexual behavior varied across class lines, with lower / working classes being surprisingly tolerant and the large impetus for anti-gay activity coming from middle class attitudes.
I am more dubious about many of the other things Chauncey says, and I am curious to learn how and if any of them have been borne out in further research in the 26 years since its initial publication (though I am very worried to wade into this area of research because I fear it is rife with postmodernism). For example, Chauncey suggests that many aspects of how gays presented themselves in society and acted amongst themselves had to do with societal attitudes towards manliness, rather than societal attitudes towards homosexuality; if this is the case, I would expect this to manifest markedly differently among lesbians of the era — which is unfortunately outside of the scope of the book. There are several things like this in the book which seem like they could be better supported.
I also found it a little hard to follow how things were changing over time. At times it seemed that the book was organized by theme (jumping back and forth in time) and other times it seemed more chronological (possibly this is because some of the "themes" like moral purity societies only developed later in the narrative). That made it harder to get a sense of how life for gay men in New York changed over time.
Overall, though, I quite enjoyed this book. I do quite like books about specific subcultures, and while "gay culture" is a fairly broad and fragmented subculture, this still scratches that itch for me.
3.5 of 5 stars
August 26, 2021
3.5 rounded up to 4.
This was a fascinating read full of history, and really interesting information.
The statement by the author that the invention of the term ' homosexual' also meant the invention of the term 'heterosexual' really gave me pause and made a lot of sense.
The look into the way the word 'gay' evolved was fascinating. Also the exploration of other terms that become common to us now and how they evolved was really investing.
This book explores the notion that many believed that gays were living in hiding before stonewall. But as discussed in this book you realize that queer life was visible and there was a rich history in New York for queer life.
Incredibly dense and packed full of facts and historical information.
The book is written in a very academic style and can get a bit dry. The other thing that didn't help was the author was fairly repetitive and that made it a bit of a slog to get through. Some tighter editing would have helped a lot.
All in all this was a great informative read. I'm glad I read it even if it took me months!!!!! Lol.
This was a fascinating read full of history, and really interesting information.
The statement by the author that the invention of the term ' homosexual' also meant the invention of the term 'heterosexual' really gave me pause and made a lot of sense.
The look into the way the word 'gay' evolved was fascinating. Also the exploration of other terms that become common to us now and how they evolved was really investing.
This book explores the notion that many believed that gays were living in hiding before stonewall. But as discussed in this book you realize that queer life was visible and there was a rich history in New York for queer life.
Incredibly dense and packed full of facts and historical information.
The book is written in a very academic style and can get a bit dry. The other thing that didn't help was the author was fairly repetitive and that made it a bit of a slog to get through. Some tighter editing would have helped a lot.
All in all this was a great informative read. I'm glad I read it even if it took me months!!!!! Lol.
November 19, 2015
A dense book about a seldom covered topic, gay/fairy/trade/homosexual/what-have-you men, before the gay rights movement. Chauncey's work is well-written, and a tad long. The length of the book is warranted, and the level of detail provided is impressive---but it's still long. Luckily skipping a chapter that does not particularly interest you will not detract from your reading experience. This is because he is sure to rephrase and refer back (sometimes to previous chapters or mentioned locations or contexts) to other connected bits of information throughout.
Some of the most interesting information comes in Part 1 (in my opinion) because of our different understanding of the homo-hetero binary. The lines used to be much different, perhaps blurrier. The terminology is equally interesting. I had to stop and laugh when I discovered that "69," a term that I remember every boy in junior high giggling about, was invented as a coded double entantre used by homosexuals.
Some of the most interesting information comes in Part 1 (in my opinion) because of our different understanding of the homo-hetero binary. The lines used to be much different, perhaps blurrier. The terminology is equally interesting. I had to stop and laugh when I discovered that "69," a term that I remember every boy in junior high giggling about, was invented as a coded double entantre used by homosexuals.
February 18, 2017
This well researched, well written, entertaining and well illustrated work does everything its title suggests, helping further establish the link between gays in the 19th century and those today. Of greatest interest is its discussions of how our modern notions of same-sex sexuality emerged from those of the past, and to whom exactly those notions applied.
Together with Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, Gay New York provides readers a much completer panorama of gay history than up to now we've had. I strongly recommend this book.
Together with Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, Gay New York provides readers a much completer panorama of gay history than up to now we've had. I strongly recommend this book.
October 2, 2017
This book made me hungry for more information. I understand why the author decided to focus on New York and men's experiences, but I really wanted to know about other locations, such as in the west, and about women's experiences. I feel like bisexuality could've been brought up a little bit more as well, but I understand the parameters that Chauncey had to work with in order to write a full narrative about a specific group of people's experiences. It was awesome, but perhaps because I study women, I wanted to hear about their experiences a bit more.
October 4, 2021
Finalllllly finished this one... oh man it was a tough slog! But happy to have done so, as it is a fascinating albeit dry social history of turn of the century gay life in New York. I mean who even knew there was such a thing... because we are talking about the turn of the last century not the most recent!
Learned quite a lot really... Stonewall is NOT the beginning of gay history.
Overly academic and often quite repetitive, nevertheless a valuable contribution to gay history.
Learned quite a lot really... Stonewall is NOT the beginning of gay history.
Overly academic and often quite repetitive, nevertheless a valuable contribution to gay history.
April 3, 2026
I’ve finally finished this book and I really wish I could’ve gotten it done before March ended but such is life. It’s pretty incredible and comprehensive from cover to cover, but what I really enjoyed was intense amount of research that went into charting the urban contours of the gay social world. What’s even more interesting is the most precise accounts of homosexual relations in bars, bathhouses, public restrooms, parks, and brothels were plainclothes from the Committee of 14, which is ridiculously ironic. These interactions are contextualized by the Prohibition era and World War 1 that make lucid how gay men were in a constant state of negotiation between themselves in public vs. private. The only parts that I glazed over were the New York specific parts of the cities and reading about certain policies where I felt like if I lived in and had a spatial relationship New York I would have a much better time reading. I would love to visit the places mentioned. He has another book about the making of a gay New York in the postwar years but I can’t find it anywhere.
February 11, 2024
An eye-opening study of the lives of gay men in New York in the decades before the second world war. I was fascinated by the glimpses of lives usually unseen and unexamined, by the street life and the nightlife, by all the ways an oppressed minority resists and finds space within which they can be and, maybe, even flourish, by the sheer joy of human resilience and creativity. And then, of course, saddened and horrified by the clampdown that squeezed those spaces that gay men had managed to find and create, forcing people back into the shadows, back into isolation, punishing them relentlessly for their very existence. History doesn't go in a straight line. Freedoms that seem firmly grounded today can be taken away tomorrow if we aren't vigilant--as sexual, gender, and racialized minorities (and their allies) are finding out now.
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August 16, 2011I was intrigued by this essay since recently some of my preconceptions are starting to fall down and I wanted a book that helped me to rebuild my basis. If I think to a hypothetic “modern” past (more or less pre II World War) I had the idea the gay culture was more or less “underground”, or better, completely hidden. My idea was that, if you were gay (and yes, I know at the time the word gay had a different meaning, but bear with me), you were also probably fated to be unhappily married, or completely alone; some exception were allowed to the very wealthy men that sheltered themselves in some isolated paradise, far from the society eyes and judgement. Then I started to read about John Gray (March 2, 1866 – June 14, 1934), the man who apparently inspired Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and who, more or less, lived happily together with his lover Marc-André Raffalovich (September 11, 1864 – February 14, 1934): when John Gray, a catholic priest, went to Edinburgh Marc-André Raffalovich settled nearby; he then helped finance St Peter's Church in Morningside where Gray would serve as priest for the rest of his life. And is it a coincidence that John died barely 4 months after Marc-André?
Or about Edward Carpenter (August 29, 1844 – June 28, 1929), the man who most used the term “intermediate sex”, referring to those men who were not exactly men, not exactly women, men who were attracted by other men, but usually stronger and masculine men. Edward Carpenter was a strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, and had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, so much that they said Forster took inspiration from Carpenter for Maurice and D.H. Lawrence for Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Edward Carpenter had a long-lasting relationship with George Merrill (1866–1928), a working class man also from Sheffield. Again, when Merrill suddenly died in January 1928, Carpenter was devastated and 13 months after, he himself died, on Friday 28 June 1929.
And what about F.O. Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 - April 1, 1950), the noted Harward literary historian and critic, who wrote to his lover, the painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945), “we are complex – both of us – in that we are neither wholly man, woman, or child”. In another letter he noted, “just as there are energetic active women and sensitive delicate men, so also there are… men, like us, who appear to be masculine but have a female sex element”. Both Yale graduate and members of the Skull & Bones, Matthiessen was 20 years younger than Cheney, but they died at only 5 years of distance.
And then there is the story of Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 - February 22, 1987) and his lover Monroe Wheeler (February 13, 1899 - August 14, 1988); despite apparently having an open relationship, and an on-off ménages a trois with fashion photographer and male nude artist George Platt Lynes (April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955), they lived together until old age, hosting one of the most important intellectual saloon in their Greenwich Village apartment. Again, when Wescott dies in 1987, Monroe followed soon after 1 year and half later (on a sad note, it seems that to Monroe Wheeler was prohibited to live in the country house he had always shared with Glenway; truth be told, the house was not of Glenway, but of his brother who had married a wealthy heiress who apparently maintained for all her life both her husband than Glenway and Monroe).
But other than tidbits about these men, you will read also about the Harlem’s drag balls with the quintessentia of Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent, but also with, among the attendants, Broadway gay celebrities like Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan and Tallulah Bankhead (it’s a coincidence that most of these names are almost forgotten? I loved black and white movies by Clifton Webb, but those other names were completely new to me). It was the chance for me to google about Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead, and rediscover these fascinating women.
On a closing note, even if today there seems to be more “freedom”, popular culture still likes to erase the memory, like in the case of Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1913 - September 27, 2002) whose lover Indra Tamang is still today identified as “the butler”; upon her death, Charles Henri Ford’s sister, actress Ruth Ford (July 7, 1911 - August 12, 2009), according to the newspapers left 2 multimillionaire apartments in New York City plus an art collection (n.d.r. Charles Henri Ford was the partner of painter Pavel Tchelitchew, until his death in 1957) to her “butler”… who is no one else than Indra Tamang that already in the ’70 and ’80 was well known as to be Charles Henri Ford devoted partner. It’s so hard to imagine that she was not leaving an unthinkable generous legacy to a simple partner, but was probably honouring the memory of her late brother?
Gay New York is maybe a little more academic than my review is letting you believe, and that is a worth for the essay I suppose. But to me, romantic reader, it allowed to have a more solid basis to read about the above men and women, and their sometime hidden lives. It’s a pity they are hidden, since apparently, these men and women were not afraid, at their time, to openly live their love.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026214/?...
Or about Edward Carpenter (August 29, 1844 – June 28, 1929), the man who most used the term “intermediate sex”, referring to those men who were not exactly men, not exactly women, men who were attracted by other men, but usually stronger and masculine men. Edward Carpenter was a strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, and had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, so much that they said Forster took inspiration from Carpenter for Maurice and D.H. Lawrence for Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Edward Carpenter had a long-lasting relationship with George Merrill (1866–1928), a working class man also from Sheffield. Again, when Merrill suddenly died in January 1928, Carpenter was devastated and 13 months after, he himself died, on Friday 28 June 1929.
And what about F.O. Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 - April 1, 1950), the noted Harward literary historian and critic, who wrote to his lover, the painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945), “we are complex – both of us – in that we are neither wholly man, woman, or child”. In another letter he noted, “just as there are energetic active women and sensitive delicate men, so also there are… men, like us, who appear to be masculine but have a female sex element”. Both Yale graduate and members of the Skull & Bones, Matthiessen was 20 years younger than Cheney, but they died at only 5 years of distance.
And then there is the story of Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 - February 22, 1987) and his lover Monroe Wheeler (February 13, 1899 - August 14, 1988); despite apparently having an open relationship, and an on-off ménages a trois with fashion photographer and male nude artist George Platt Lynes (April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955), they lived together until old age, hosting one of the most important intellectual saloon in their Greenwich Village apartment. Again, when Wescott dies in 1987, Monroe followed soon after 1 year and half later (on a sad note, it seems that to Monroe Wheeler was prohibited to live in the country house he had always shared with Glenway; truth be told, the house was not of Glenway, but of his brother who had married a wealthy heiress who apparently maintained for all her life both her husband than Glenway and Monroe).
But other than tidbits about these men, you will read also about the Harlem’s drag balls with the quintessentia of Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent, but also with, among the attendants, Broadway gay celebrities like Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan and Tallulah Bankhead (it’s a coincidence that most of these names are almost forgotten? I loved black and white movies by Clifton Webb, but those other names were completely new to me). It was the chance for me to google about Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead, and rediscover these fascinating women.
On a closing note, even if today there seems to be more “freedom”, popular culture still likes to erase the memory, like in the case of Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1913 - September 27, 2002) whose lover Indra Tamang is still today identified as “the butler”; upon her death, Charles Henri Ford’s sister, actress Ruth Ford (July 7, 1911 - August 12, 2009), according to the newspapers left 2 multimillionaire apartments in New York City plus an art collection (n.d.r. Charles Henri Ford was the partner of painter Pavel Tchelitchew, until his death in 1957) to her “butler”… who is no one else than Indra Tamang that already in the ’70 and ’80 was well known as to be Charles Henri Ford devoted partner. It’s so hard to imagine that she was not leaving an unthinkable generous legacy to a simple partner, but was probably honouring the memory of her late brother?
Gay New York is maybe a little more academic than my review is letting you believe, and that is a worth for the essay I suppose. But to me, romantic reader, it allowed to have a more solid basis to read about the above men and women, and their sometime hidden lives. It’s a pity they are hidden, since apparently, these men and women were not afraid, at their time, to openly live their love.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026214/?...
April 22, 2014
One of those "everything you know is wrong" accounts that will rewrite what you think you know about the early 20th century. While gay people hardly had a walk in the park in the 1910s and 1920s, one would imagine, based on the political and social frameworks of the pre-Stonewall decades, that this would have been the worst time of all to be a member of "the third sex," as they were often called (along with "inverts," suggesting that they weren't so much men interested in men as secret women trapped in a man's body, hence their desire for men). Through a thorough researching of police records, first-hand testimony, newspaper reportage, and other primary sources, Chauncey makes the convincing case that this was a rare time in our country's history where gay people were building their own society and culture amidst the dominant society and culture with a bit less difficulty than would come in later years. Citing a variety of reasons (class being a big one...working-class straights and gays felt they had less to lose by fraternizing with one another than their middle-class equivalents), Chauncy re-draws the '10s and '20s as a time of intermingling, experimentation, and even public performance in the form of hugely attended drag balls and "sissy parades" that attracted tourists of all kinds.
Chauncey covers the mores of the time, the places where gays and lesbians met (not just bars, but also cafeterias, automats, in parks, public restrooms, and the newly popularized bathhouses), but also the shifting attitudes both within and outside the gay and lesbian cultures, the influence of Prohibition (the mass criminalization of any form of night life made a lot of straight people more inclined to look in on all sorts of vices they might not have otherwise been interested in, such as drag balls), the changing attitudes of incoming immigrants, and the cultures surrounding Greenwich Village and Harlem, two of the most vibrant gay cultures in New York. Though it was hardly a walk in the park (still plenty of arrests, fines, months in the work farm for the crime of being "aberrant" in public), Chauncey argues convincingly that many unlikely influences made this a mini-golden age of inclusiveness and intermingling of gay and straight worlds. It's exhaustive, even exhausting, the depth of information Chauncey provides. Although there's only 360 "live" pages (followed by hundreds of pages of endnotes and indices), the larger format and dense type made it feel more like a 500 page read in both scope and challenge. It's written for a mostly academic audience, but it reads pretty clearly if you're not in that world.
Whether you're interested in gay history or the hidden history of marginalized cultures in general, there's a lot to like here. It's about the stories, the events, and the coping strategies as much as the stats. Very highly recommended.
Chauncey covers the mores of the time, the places where gays and lesbians met (not just bars, but also cafeterias, automats, in parks, public restrooms, and the newly popularized bathhouses), but also the shifting attitudes both within and outside the gay and lesbian cultures, the influence of Prohibition (the mass criminalization of any form of night life made a lot of straight people more inclined to look in on all sorts of vices they might not have otherwise been interested in, such as drag balls), the changing attitudes of incoming immigrants, and the cultures surrounding Greenwich Village and Harlem, two of the most vibrant gay cultures in New York. Though it was hardly a walk in the park (still plenty of arrests, fines, months in the work farm for the crime of being "aberrant" in public), Chauncey argues convincingly that many unlikely influences made this a mini-golden age of inclusiveness and intermingling of gay and straight worlds. It's exhaustive, even exhausting, the depth of information Chauncey provides. Although there's only 360 "live" pages (followed by hundreds of pages of endnotes and indices), the larger format and dense type made it feel more like a 500 page read in both scope and challenge. It's written for a mostly academic audience, but it reads pretty clearly if you're not in that world.
Whether you're interested in gay history or the hidden history of marginalized cultures in general, there's a lot to like here. It's about the stories, the events, and the coping strategies as much as the stats. Very highly recommended.
January 17, 2022
Super interesting. Definitely recommend if you are interested in queer life pre-WW2. As the title implies, focuses on the male queer world with occasional discussion on the female queer world.
June 12, 2013
Holy shit this book is brilliant. I had been putting off reading if for ages because I've read a fair bit of queer history and it often falls for predictable ahistorical projections and appropriations. This is nothing like that. Quite the opposite of books which tromp the old "everything gets better path", this book makes the reader feel that being a man who had sex with men in the 1920s might well have been the most exciting life ever.
Every chapter would have been revelatory to justify a book of it's own. Chauncey has dug up all sorts of great stories: pick-ups in rough saloons of the 1890s, drag balls in Harlem in the 1930s with over 5,000 people, boarding houses, nightclub acts, bath houses of the 1920s, what Italian immigrants thought of doing it with fairies, cafeterias full of camp performances and on and on and on.
What's most exciting though is that Chauncey doesn't just pluck these people out of the past and project modern gay identities onto them. He doesn't believe they lived in the closet, he shows instead how these men lived as part of the various cultures in New York at the time as well as apart from these cultures in the gay worlds they sometimes made. He is at pains to discover how they made meaning of their lives and sex lives through the ideas of the time.
One of the central figures in Gay New York is the "fairy," as gender was the primary way that difference was understood at this time. Chauncey shows how crucial this visible effeminate type was for those who embraced it, for those who fucked fairies, those who wished fairies would stop embarassing more normal "queers" and for the emerging class of men who defined themselves in opposition to it, as the concept of the heterosexual appeared.
The book is also a great portrait of New York, a city expanding massively in an era where cities had not long existed in America. Chauncey shows how bigger forces, like immigration, prohibition or middle-class attempts to constrain street cultures influenced how different gay worlds developed. He is constantly attentive to gender norms and class cultures, as well as race and immigrant politics. In short, this is a genius work.
Every chapter would have been revelatory to justify a book of it's own. Chauncey has dug up all sorts of great stories: pick-ups in rough saloons of the 1890s, drag balls in Harlem in the 1930s with over 5,000 people, boarding houses, nightclub acts, bath houses of the 1920s, what Italian immigrants thought of doing it with fairies, cafeterias full of camp performances and on and on and on.
What's most exciting though is that Chauncey doesn't just pluck these people out of the past and project modern gay identities onto them. He doesn't believe they lived in the closet, he shows instead how these men lived as part of the various cultures in New York at the time as well as apart from these cultures in the gay worlds they sometimes made. He is at pains to discover how they made meaning of their lives and sex lives through the ideas of the time.
One of the central figures in Gay New York is the "fairy," as gender was the primary way that difference was understood at this time. Chauncey shows how crucial this visible effeminate type was for those who embraced it, for those who fucked fairies, those who wished fairies would stop embarassing more normal "queers" and for the emerging class of men who defined themselves in opposition to it, as the concept of the heterosexual appeared.
The book is also a great portrait of New York, a city expanding massively in an era where cities had not long existed in America. Chauncey shows how bigger forces, like immigration, prohibition or middle-class attempts to constrain street cultures influenced how different gay worlds developed. He is constantly attentive to gender norms and class cultures, as well as race and immigrant politics. In short, this is a genius work.
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