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A Scarlet Pansy
First published in 1932, A Scarlet Pansy is an extraordinarily vivid and richly textured depiction of American queer life in the early twentieth century, tracing the coming of age of androgynous Fay Etrange.
Born in small-town Pennsylvania and struggling with her difference, Fay eventually accepts her gender and sexual nonconformity and immerses herself in the fairy subculture of New York City.
A self-proclaimed "oncer" - never tricking with same man twice - she immerses herself in the nightclubs, theatres, and street life of the city, cavorting with kindred spirits including female impersonators, streetwalkers, and hustlers as well as other fairies and connoisseurs of rough trade.
While reveling in these exploits she becomes a successful banker and later attends medical school, where she receives training in obstetrics. There she also develops her life's ambition to find a cure for gonorrhea, a disease supposedly "fastened on mankind as a penalty for enjoying love."
A Scarlet Pansy stands apart from similar fiction of its time -- as well as the ensuing decades -- by celebrating rather than pathologizing its effeminate and sexually adventurous protagonist. In this edition, republished for the first time in its original unexpurgated form, Robert J. Corber examines the way in which it flew in the face of other literature of the time in its treatment of gender expression and same-sex desire. He places the novel squarely within its social and cultural context of a century ago while taking into account the book's checkered publication history as well as the question of the novel's unknown author.
Much more than cultural artifact, A Scarlet Pansy remains a uniquely delightful and penetrating work of literature, resonating as much with present-day culture as it is illuminating of our understanding of queer history, and challenging our notions of what makes a man a woman, and vice versa.
Born in small-town Pennsylvania and struggling with her difference, Fay eventually accepts her gender and sexual nonconformity and immerses herself in the fairy subculture of New York City.
A self-proclaimed "oncer" - never tricking with same man twice - she immerses herself in the nightclubs, theatres, and street life of the city, cavorting with kindred spirits including female impersonators, streetwalkers, and hustlers as well as other fairies and connoisseurs of rough trade.
While reveling in these exploits she becomes a successful banker and later attends medical school, where she receives training in obstetrics. There she also develops her life's ambition to find a cure for gonorrhea, a disease supposedly "fastened on mankind as a penalty for enjoying love."
A Scarlet Pansy stands apart from similar fiction of its time -- as well as the ensuing decades -- by celebrating rather than pathologizing its effeminate and sexually adventurous protagonist. In this edition, republished for the first time in its original unexpurgated form, Robert J. Corber examines the way in which it flew in the face of other literature of the time in its treatment of gender expression and same-sex desire. He places the novel squarely within its social and cultural context of a century ago while taking into account the book's checkered publication history as well as the question of the novel's unknown author.
Much more than cultural artifact, A Scarlet Pansy remains a uniquely delightful and penetrating work of literature, resonating as much with present-day culture as it is illuminating of our understanding of queer history, and challenging our notions of what makes a man a woman, and vice versa.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 2, 2016
Rating: 4 quizzical stars of five
I'll post a link to my review soon*. Fordham University Press and NetGalley get my thanks for making this still-necessary book available to me for review. It will be archived on 31 July, so get your requests in soon!
*It's soon!
New review! A SCARLET PANSY http://tinyurl.com/hw3ka8p
A funny tale about Funny fairies and dykes. I had a lark reading it!
I'll post a link to my review soon*. Fordham University Press and NetGalley get my thanks for making this still-necessary book available to me for review. It will be archived on 31 July, so get your requests in soon!
*It's soon!
New review! A SCARLET PANSY http://tinyurl.com/hw3ka8p
A funny tale about Funny fairies and dykes. I had a lark reading it!
October 15, 2024
This was like...fine
May 21, 2016
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I feel myself not being quite certain how to rate and review this book. While I adored the GLBT representation flourishing in this book I didn't particularly liked the writing style, which felt dated and too pure and idealistic.
This is the story of Fay, and while never being openly described but pointed out in vague terms, a transgender woman. She is always compared and written as a woman, and the way this book is unashamed of gay, lesbian and trans culture and sexuality is refreshing. The book take no moral highways with the abundance of lovers Fay has, nor the abundance of lovers her friends of various genders and background has. While sexual acts never are written out, it is hinted at all through the book, and the characters take about their love life openly.
Fay begins live in rural Pensylvania, and travels to the closet big city when reacheing adulthood, innocent and inexperienced. Her first experiences with men and love and sexuality she fashes with shame and self-loathing. She eventually moves to New York, gaining work in a bank, earning money that makes her free to study medicine to become a doctor; her dream job. In New Yorks she meets the friends that will make her find herself and come to accept her sexuality and love life.
I do really like the message, to be loved and love and not to be ashamed of who you are. The open way this is portrayed is refreshing. I got hold up by the writing style, thus taking it a while to get through the book.
The beginning of this book begins with an essay about this book and the subjects written about. It dwells on who the author is, the story about the book's publication and also gives spotlight to how gender and sexuality was viewed in the time period this book is placed in, the late 19th and early 20th century. The essay explains that in those days, humans didn't view gender as something fixed and twosome as we do today, and that it wasn't something peculiar that a man might want to sleep or love another man or a woman a woman.
A refreshing read, fore sure.
I feel myself not being quite certain how to rate and review this book. While I adored the GLBT representation flourishing in this book I didn't particularly liked the writing style, which felt dated and too pure and idealistic.
This is the story of Fay, and while never being openly described but pointed out in vague terms, a transgender woman. She is always compared and written as a woman, and the way this book is unashamed of gay, lesbian and trans culture and sexuality is refreshing. The book take no moral highways with the abundance of lovers Fay has, nor the abundance of lovers her friends of various genders and background has. While sexual acts never are written out, it is hinted at all through the book, and the characters take about their love life openly.
Fay begins live in rural Pensylvania, and travels to the closet big city when reacheing adulthood, innocent and inexperienced. Her first experiences with men and love and sexuality she fashes with shame and self-loathing. She eventually moves to New York, gaining work in a bank, earning money that makes her free to study medicine to become a doctor; her dream job. In New Yorks she meets the friends that will make her find herself and come to accept her sexuality and love life.
I do really like the message, to be loved and love and not to be ashamed of who you are. The open way this is portrayed is refreshing. I got hold up by the writing style, thus taking it a while to get through the book.
The beginning of this book begins with an essay about this book and the subjects written about. It dwells on who the author is, the story about the book's publication and also gives spotlight to how gender and sexuality was viewed in the time period this book is placed in, the late 19th and early 20th century. The essay explains that in those days, humans didn't view gender as something fixed and twosome as we do today, and that it wasn't something peculiar that a man might want to sleep or love another man or a woman a woman.
A refreshing read, fore sure.
April 30, 2016
Transgendered Fay Etrange leaves her rural Pennsylvania home to make a life for herself off the farm, traveling first to Baltimore and then to New York City, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An idealistic romantic, Fay is also searching for a love that is pure. A Scarlet Pansy is described in the introduction as “a queer reimagining of the Horatio Alger story,” which is an accurate description. Fay’s life is filled with hard work, good friends, abundant lovers, and ample rewards including financial independence. Much of Scully’s writing is so clear and straightforward that I kept thinking it was a biography. The more intimate parts of the story are told with euphemisms and the conversations are filled with witty repartee. A Scarlet Pansy is a quick, enjoyable, and charming read capturing a moment in time through the eyes of someone new to many of us. You just can’t help loving the girl.
April 1, 2022
What an astonishing novel! A 1932 gay novel, very queer, and quite modern. It seems quite an important book for how little it is known.\n\nThe main plot is an improbable rags to riches story of Fay Etrange as she works her way up from nothing to being a wealthy investor and doctor, culminating in her romantic and tragic death on the front of World War I. Honestly this plot is not very good but it's not the point of the book. The real story is a proud, unapologetic biography of a gay man living an absolutely queer life of high camp. The gender and sexual content is surprisingly relatable now, almost 90 years later.\n\nFirst, to get the pronouns out of the way. Fay is referred to throughout the book as "she". But it's also clear she is a man, a gay man. My take on it is not that she's transgender in the contemporary sense, she does not live as a woman. We'd say she's "genderqueer" instead. Or in the language of its time it was the camp world of gay men referring to each other as "her" and "Miss Thing" and "girl". Anyway none of the pronoun stuff is very complicated but I like the editor's notes about how unusual the book is in directly challenging gender roles in a way that was not only atypical at the time, but also out of step with 1990s gay liberation as America normalized gay men as men. Fay is feminine but a man. Also a fairy at a time when being a fairy was a role with a place in society, not just despised.\n\nFay also is sexually voracious. And quite successful at picking up "real he-men". Some trade, but mostly men of some refinement and interest. The first part of the book has her being sadly self-loathing and avoiding her sexuality. A tiresome trope of its era. But then the book goes in a really wonderful and liberating direction as she embraces her sexuality and joins the queer demimonde. Much of the book is a mix of her escapades with her various tricks mixed with outrageous parties and drag balls. And a rotating cast of queens, fairies, bulldykes, men and women living outside the bounds of accepted society and absolutely proud and hilarious about it.\n\nThis transgressive glittering society is the gay world I feel I inherited. Growing up in the 80s my exposure to gay life involved a lot of thrilling hints of camp, promiscuity, and defiance. We've moved past that now in America. Now the stereotypical gay man is a slightly burly, competent and quiet couple who has dogs or maybe a child and lives a life in harmony with the expectations of ordinary straight society. And while I am grateful for that normalization I also find the demimonde depicted in _A Scarlet Pansy_ appealing, a theatrical and brave society of queers living queer lives by their own rules. Some of that spirit today is captured in communities like the New York Ball Culture.\n\nIt's not all fun and parties though, particularly at the start of the book. I particularly touching bit of writing is Fay's relationship with her brother Bill. Who hates how faggy she is, criticizes her speech, and contributes greatly to Fay's self loathing. The author's portrayal of that felt very authentic to me. Happily Fay just decides Bill is boring and bad for her and moves on and doesn't see him again. It frees Fay to live the outrageous queer life that makes the book so fun.\n\nI found this book in the most wonderful way. Finding it on a list of homophile publications in Swasarnt Nerf's Gay Guides for 1949, an authentic recommendation from 70 years ago.\n\nI'm grateful to Robert Corber for producing this edition. The book went through a lot of edits and variations; a bowdlerized version in the 40s, an "updated" edition in the 90s to hew to modern political sensibilities (with Fay given the name "Randy" and masculine pronouns!) It's great to read the original version. And his preface is remarkably useful in contextualizing the novel. I particularly like his emphasis on how this book works outside expected gender norms, both in its time and now. It reads very queer and au courant in 2021.
March 3, 2022
This was a strange and kind of awesome read. It's a novel about the queer scene in New York in the 1910s, written at least in part for an insider audience - so, unlike, say, The Well of Loneliness, which is trying to represent the experience of being an invert to a straight readership and make a plea for equality and acceptance, A Scarlet Pansy is by Edwardian queers for Edwardian queers. This makes it BAFFLING for a post-Stonewall reader, born into a world where sexual orientation and gender identity are much more clearly distinguished than they are in either The Well or Pansy. And though I can follow some of the jokes ("Miss Kitty Fuchs!" "DOES she?"), I'm sure many or most of them go straight past me.
The thing that made it much more readable for me was thinking about Ancillary Justice, which similarly brought me up against my desire to just KNOW WHAT SEX PEOPLE ARE DAMMIT and similarly frustrated that desire and made me wonder why I cared and what difference it would make. Reading it as science-fiction was much more satisfying, and highlighted the ways in which all realist fiction takes place in a slightly different "world" from the one we live in (something Geoff Ryman writes about beautifully in Was).
The thing that made it much more readable for me was thinking about Ancillary Justice, which similarly brought me up against my desire to just KNOW WHAT SEX PEOPLE ARE DAMMIT and similarly frustrated that desire and made me wonder why I cared and what difference it would make. Reading it as science-fiction was much more satisfying, and highlighted the ways in which all realist fiction takes place in a slightly different "world" from the one we live in (something Geoff Ryman writes about beautifully in Was).
December 2, 2023
"A Scarlet Pansy," skillfully edited and introduced by Robert J. Corber, invites readers into the hidden corners of early 20th-century queer literature. Robert Scully's groundbreaking work, originally published in 1932, defies the societal norms of its time, providing a candid exploration of homosexuality in a conservative era. Corber's insightful introduction contextualizes the novel, offering a lens into the challenges and triumphs of a pioneering LGBTQ+ narrative.
Scully's prose, though a product of its era, resonates with a timeless authenticity. The characters, particularly the protagonist, navigate a world rife with prejudice and clandestine desires. The editor's careful touch preserves the historical nuances while making the text accessible to contemporary readers. "A Scarlet Pansy" stands as a testament to the resilience of marginalized voices and their enduring struggle for recognition.
Corber's editorial work not only restores an important piece of queer literature but also elevates it to its deserved place in literary discourse. This edition is a valuable addition to the canon, offering a poignant glimpse into the past while challenging readers to reflect on the ongoing journey toward acceptance and understanding.
Scully's prose, though a product of its era, resonates with a timeless authenticity. The characters, particularly the protagonist, navigate a world rife with prejudice and clandestine desires. The editor's careful touch preserves the historical nuances while making the text accessible to contemporary readers. "A Scarlet Pansy" stands as a testament to the resilience of marginalized voices and their enduring struggle for recognition.
Corber's editorial work not only restores an important piece of queer literature but also elevates it to its deserved place in literary discourse. This edition is a valuable addition to the canon, offering a poignant glimpse into the past while challenging readers to reflect on the ongoing journey toward acceptance and understanding.
February 8, 2019
A remarkable book written some times in the 20s that follows the life of a transgender woman named Fay Etrange.
At the time this was published, most novels focusing on queer or "fairy" life took pains in ultimately associating queer life with one of decadence, moral decay and ultimately loneliness and violence. A Scarlet Pansy rejects this trend, instead portraying Fay as an empowered woman who takes control of her career and enjoys her queer life and her androgynous features. Queer life here is not depicted as lonely, but rather racous, fun and socially liberating.
This positive portrayal of queer life, and the positive portrayal of its trans protagonist (who goes on to complete medical school and treats wounded soldiers during WW1) makes this a remarkable novel that celebrates and invites the reader into queer life of early twentieth century New York, rather than treating its characters as zoo animals and ultimately foisting stale Puritanical morals upon them either through their suicide, drug use or murder.
At the time this was published, most novels focusing on queer or "fairy" life took pains in ultimately associating queer life with one of decadence, moral decay and ultimately loneliness and violence. A Scarlet Pansy rejects this trend, instead portraying Fay as an empowered woman who takes control of her career and enjoys her queer life and her androgynous features. Queer life here is not depicted as lonely, but rather racous, fun and socially liberating.
This positive portrayal of queer life, and the positive portrayal of its trans protagonist (who goes on to complete medical school and treats wounded soldiers during WW1) makes this a remarkable novel that celebrates and invites the reader into queer life of early twentieth century New York, rather than treating its characters as zoo animals and ultimately foisting stale Puritanical morals upon them either through their suicide, drug use or murder.
January 16, 2023
An interesting look into queerness in a different era, but not my kind of novel.... I started skimming through the party scenes by the end and just looking at the dialog - there were lots of clothing descriptions by that point. As opposed to plot development, this story focuses more on character development, and Faye does develop significantly as a character throughout. The ending sort of came out of nowhere, with the slow plot suddenly racing toward a pre-determined ending, and seemed like a backtracking in her character development.
February 14, 2022
I have no idea how to rate this. It's not good in pretty much any objective way, unless the sex jokes my friends and I made in high school were high art. But it is fascinating, and certain scenes were a real time machine. The fact that a thing that got published in 1932 *is* full of the sorts of jokes my friends and I made in high school makes queer culture of ~100 years ago feel closer than I had considered before.
September 20, 2024
'A Scarlet Pansy' is a time capsule of queer life in the early 1900s. As we follow Fay through her journey of self-discovery, we're taken on a tour of queer life during the time period; from found family, nightclubs, and affairs. This novel is rich with history, narratives, and literary devices. I just wish we had more details and time, many plot points felt rushed or glossed over.
June 26, 2016
It's certainly hard to review, with 2016 eyes and mind, a book with this theme written in the 30s. We now know more, and better, and we now also have better terms, better words to express what these characters go through in this story. That said, one cannot deny the importance, the mind-blowing feeling of acceptance and of not being alone this novel must have represented to uncountable members of the queer community through the years.
It is not a particularly interesting plot--if you take aside the queer theme. It's more an account of all the conquers Fay goes gathering in her life. It may even make it seem life was easier that it was for someone like her. But it's refreshing to see how she and others around accept her as she is, as the perfect creation that has every right to live her life as she sees fit as long as she's not hurting anyone. A lesson we are, as a society, still struggling to make everyone accept, so many decades later. It's actually heartbreaking to see that we are still fighting for the bare minimum, not that far apart.
On the other hand, it's exhilarating to have yet another piece of proof that gender is and has always been an spectrum. That the gender binary is nothing but a societal (and of some cultures, not all) construction. It's not a trend, it's not been created now. People have always been like that, we are just, finally, starting to talk openly about it. About time, too.
All in all, a recommended reading. (Oh, the intro of my ARC had the word "transgendered" on it so I skipped it entirely, but I've read in another review that the final novel will have it corrected.)
I'd like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this novel in exchange of my honest review.
It is not a particularly interesting plot--if you take aside the queer theme. It's more an account of all the conquers Fay goes gathering in her life. It may even make it seem life was easier that it was for someone like her. But it's refreshing to see how she and others around accept her as she is, as the perfect creation that has every right to live her life as she sees fit as long as she's not hurting anyone. A lesson we are, as a society, still struggling to make everyone accept, so many decades later. It's actually heartbreaking to see that we are still fighting for the bare minimum, not that far apart.
On the other hand, it's exhilarating to have yet another piece of proof that gender is and has always been an spectrum. That the gender binary is nothing but a societal (and of some cultures, not all) construction. It's not a trend, it's not been created now. People have always been like that, we are just, finally, starting to talk openly about it. About time, too.
All in all, a recommended reading. (Oh, the intro of my ARC had the word "transgendered" on it so I skipped it entirely, but I've read in another review that the final novel will have it corrected.)
I'd like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this novel in exchange of my honest review.
May 23, 2016
This book is beyond boring. I don't know how I made it through 70%. No plot just wild escapades of a gender non conforming person in the early 20th century.
August 5, 2020
rereading for thesis
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