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Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History
At the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it.
In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.
Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.
In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.
Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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April 16, 2024
This is an odd book, which may appeal to those who like close reading of literary texts. However, the book never really achieves the aim that it sets out in the subtitle.
Near the beginning of May West’s 1927 play The Drag: A Homosexual Comedy ([1927] 1997), Barbara Richmond, a wealthy white New Yorker, asks her brother, the eminent sexologist Dr. James Richmond, to tell her more about a strange Book that she spots in his library….
Doctor: what people don't know, my dear, don't trouble them
Barbara: in other words, it's a good thing 1/2 of the world doesn't know how the other half lives, eh?…
Over the course of three acts, West introduces spectators to working class trade, to middle-class inverts, to fairies, to perverts, to sissy-men, to husbands, to closeted homosexual masquerading as heterosexual, to a drag performance that brings them all together (and brings the play to a screeching halt), to raunchy gay slang, and extended closing remarks on the immorality homosex and the mysteries of modern homosexual identity in the United States. 1-2
This book contains that these are the strategies undertaken by the slumming writers considered in the following pages. Contrary to the generic expectations of slumming literature such as The Drag, Queering the Underworld argues that a handful of US writers and artists in the first half of the 20th century queered the popular genre; turned the slumming narrative against itself, used it to manipulate homosexual identifications and frustrated the compulsion to reveal underworld sexual knowledge. 3
Like so many discursive inventions of the nineteenth century, slumming literatures were often designed to comprehend and codify social contact across borders segregating social classes, including classes based on ethnicity, race, capital, gender deviance, and, in due time, sexual identity. The typical preface to a slumming literature has the narrator present the city and its sights as a lurid local sensation that both inspires curiosity and demands revelation. 5
So too, Riis’s mention of “untold depravities” alerts readers, were emergent identity categories of urban homosexual bodies realized, reproduced, reified, and contained. In the words of historian Judith Walkowitz, slumming literatures “encouraged an exploration in the dissemination of ‘sexual knowledge’” (1992, 125), and the recurrence of rhetoric such as “anomalous,” “degenerate,” “vice,” “queer,” “shadowy,” “depravities,” “hideous deformities,” and “wickedness” supports her claim. 10
Alongside West’s The Drag, the best instance of these continuities occurs in Ralph Werther’s 1918 modernist memoir Autobiography of an Androgyne, where a self- professed white middle-class invert from New York City—who also self- identifies as a working-class fairy—goes slumming in “the southern end of the Bowery” ([1918] 1975, 66), discovers Irish immigrants receptive to his sexual advances, and reprints “a letter to the family physician” telling his doctor that “I desire to know the mysteries of my peculiar life. It seems to me I have a right to know. . . . If the science of medicine knows anything about my peculiarity, I demand of you to know it” (52–53). 11
As he writes at the end of his 1922 follow-up, The Female- Impersonators, he is a textual participant in his Riddle of the Underworld, an unpublished (and perhaps unwritten) hodgepodge of sociological investigation, sexological case history, slumming literature, and sensational expose ́ (fig. 3). 12
By a reverse dis- course, I refer to Michel Foucault’s exemplary definition in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, An Introduction: “Homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” (1990a, 101). 15
Along- side the New Woman, there emerged a new type of boy—the delinquent adolescent. 68
If, as Bersani contends, “the category of homosexuality—even as it has been homophobically cultivated—includes within it an indeterminacy and a mobility inimical to the disciplinary designs facilitated by the assignment of stable identities” (1995, 5)…74
Robert E. Park, a founder of the Chicago school of sociology and a profound influence on Locke, termed these ethnic and sexualized zones “moral regions” in his seminal work The City ([1915] 1997): “Fifty years ago every village had one or two eccentric characters who were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very eccentricities, whether of genius or of defect, from genuinely inti- mate intercourse with their fellows. . . . In the city many of these divergent types now find a milieu [or ‘moral region’] in which, for good or for ill, their dispositions and talents parturiate and bear fruit” (26). 113
In so doing, they used Foucauldian reverse discourses to create what Chauncey (1994), White (1993), and other historians have described as the “gay world,” or what cultural critics in queer studies have termed counter publics (Chauncey 1994, 7). “The full panoply of tactics gay men devised for communicating, claiming space, and affirming themselves—the kind of resistant social practices...called the tactics of the weak—proved to be remarkably successful in the generations before a more formal gay political movement developed,” 122
I could say the same for his supposed homosexual identity. In 1925, he was arrested for soliciting homosex in a New York subway washroom. While legal discourse typed him as a homosexual pervert, Thurman re- fused to self-identity as gay and derided the tabloid quality of his arrest. As he told William Jourdan Rapp in a letter: “And you can also imagine with what relish a certain group of Negroes in Harlem received and relayed the news that I was a homo. No evidence is needed of course beyond the initial rumor. Such is life” ([1929] 2003d, 139). This complaint, I believe, should not be read as another instance of homosexual panic or gay self-loathing.A closer glance atThurman’s 1932 roman-a`-clef,Infants of the Spring reveals that the author affirmed queer—not necessarily homosexual—relations between men to advance what he called “slightly known territory” beyond the calculated stereotypes of a “City of Sur- prises” ([1932] 1992, 199). 129
what to make of the pornographic clipping books Van Vechten compiled after he turned away from fiction writing and to photography and collect- ing as his primary aesthetic mediums? Held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the scrapbooks total twenty-three in number. Until recently, the books were sealed at Van Vechten’s insis- tence. Now available to scholars and curious readers, an “Ex Libris Van Vechten” stamp marks each scrapbook, and each presumably contains a wealth of information about homosexual communities from the 1920s until Van Vechten’s death in 1964. A hodgepodge of photographs, scan- dal sheets, erotic postcards, soft porn drawings, sensational newspaper clippings, advertisements, invitations, drag ball announcements, boys en plein air, reproductions of Renaissance paintings, objets d’art, and obituaries, the scrapbooks appear to record the emergence—and the subsequent erasure—of a U.S. gay underworld in the first half of the twentieth century. If viewed chronologically, the books chart the rise of a gay sub- culture during the Roaring Twenties and its downfall during the paranoid crackdowns and police raids that marked the Cold War era. 144
One could focus on reference guides to underworld homosexual idiom such as Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (Goldin, O’Leary, and Lipsius 1950) and, later, Bruce Rodgers’s cheeky Gay Talk: A (Some- times) Outrageous Dictionary of Gay Slang (1972). One could concentrate on best-selling sexology tracts that argue for and against the classification of subterranean homosexual bodies such as Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) or Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach ([1951] 1960). 194
Near the beginning of May West’s 1927 play The Drag: A Homosexual Comedy ([1927] 1997), Barbara Richmond, a wealthy white New Yorker, asks her brother, the eminent sexologist Dr. James Richmond, to tell her more about a strange Book that she spots in his library….
Doctor: what people don't know, my dear, don't trouble them
Barbara: in other words, it's a good thing 1/2 of the world doesn't know how the other half lives, eh?…
Over the course of three acts, West introduces spectators to working class trade, to middle-class inverts, to fairies, to perverts, to sissy-men, to husbands, to closeted homosexual masquerading as heterosexual, to a drag performance that brings them all together (and brings the play to a screeching halt), to raunchy gay slang, and extended closing remarks on the immorality homosex and the mysteries of modern homosexual identity in the United States. 1-2
This book contains that these are the strategies undertaken by the slumming writers considered in the following pages. Contrary to the generic expectations of slumming literature such as The Drag, Queering the Underworld argues that a handful of US writers and artists in the first half of the 20th century queered the popular genre; turned the slumming narrative against itself, used it to manipulate homosexual identifications and frustrated the compulsion to reveal underworld sexual knowledge. 3
Like so many discursive inventions of the nineteenth century, slumming literatures were often designed to comprehend and codify social contact across borders segregating social classes, including classes based on ethnicity, race, capital, gender deviance, and, in due time, sexual identity. The typical preface to a slumming literature has the narrator present the city and its sights as a lurid local sensation that both inspires curiosity and demands revelation. 5
So too, Riis’s mention of “untold depravities” alerts readers, were emergent identity categories of urban homosexual bodies realized, reproduced, reified, and contained. In the words of historian Judith Walkowitz, slumming literatures “encouraged an exploration in the dissemination of ‘sexual knowledge’” (1992, 125), and the recurrence of rhetoric such as “anomalous,” “degenerate,” “vice,” “queer,” “shadowy,” “depravities,” “hideous deformities,” and “wickedness” supports her claim. 10
Alongside West’s The Drag, the best instance of these continuities occurs in Ralph Werther’s 1918 modernist memoir Autobiography of an Androgyne, where a self- professed white middle-class invert from New York City—who also self- identifies as a working-class fairy—goes slumming in “the southern end of the Bowery” ([1918] 1975, 66), discovers Irish immigrants receptive to his sexual advances, and reprints “a letter to the family physician” telling his doctor that “I desire to know the mysteries of my peculiar life. It seems to me I have a right to know. . . . If the science of medicine knows anything about my peculiarity, I demand of you to know it” (52–53). 11
As he writes at the end of his 1922 follow-up, The Female- Impersonators, he is a textual participant in his Riddle of the Underworld, an unpublished (and perhaps unwritten) hodgepodge of sociological investigation, sexological case history, slumming literature, and sensational expose ́ (fig. 3). 12
By a reverse dis- course, I refer to Michel Foucault’s exemplary definition in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, An Introduction: “Homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” (1990a, 101). 15
Along- side the New Woman, there emerged a new type of boy—the delinquent adolescent. 68
If, as Bersani contends, “the category of homosexuality—even as it has been homophobically cultivated—includes within it an indeterminacy and a mobility inimical to the disciplinary designs facilitated by the assignment of stable identities” (1995, 5)…74
Robert E. Park, a founder of the Chicago school of sociology and a profound influence on Locke, termed these ethnic and sexualized zones “moral regions” in his seminal work The City ([1915] 1997): “Fifty years ago every village had one or two eccentric characters who were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very eccentricities, whether of genius or of defect, from genuinely inti- mate intercourse with their fellows. . . . In the city many of these divergent types now find a milieu [or ‘moral region’] in which, for good or for ill, their dispositions and talents parturiate and bear fruit” (26). 113
In so doing, they used Foucauldian reverse discourses to create what Chauncey (1994), White (1993), and other historians have described as the “gay world,” or what cultural critics in queer studies have termed counter publics (Chauncey 1994, 7). “The full panoply of tactics gay men devised for communicating, claiming space, and affirming themselves—the kind of resistant social practices...called the tactics of the weak—proved to be remarkably successful in the generations before a more formal gay political movement developed,” 122
I could say the same for his supposed homosexual identity. In 1925, he was arrested for soliciting homosex in a New York subway washroom. While legal discourse typed him as a homosexual pervert, Thurman re- fused to self-identity as gay and derided the tabloid quality of his arrest. As he told William Jourdan Rapp in a letter: “And you can also imagine with what relish a certain group of Negroes in Harlem received and relayed the news that I was a homo. No evidence is needed of course beyond the initial rumor. Such is life” ([1929] 2003d, 139). This complaint, I believe, should not be read as another instance of homosexual panic or gay self-loathing.A closer glance atThurman’s 1932 roman-a`-clef,Infants of the Spring reveals that the author affirmed queer—not necessarily homosexual—relations between men to advance what he called “slightly known territory” beyond the calculated stereotypes of a “City of Sur- prises” ([1932] 1992, 199). 129
what to make of the pornographic clipping books Van Vechten compiled after he turned away from fiction writing and to photography and collect- ing as his primary aesthetic mediums? Held at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the scrapbooks total twenty-three in number. Until recently, the books were sealed at Van Vechten’s insis- tence. Now available to scholars and curious readers, an “Ex Libris Van Vechten” stamp marks each scrapbook, and each presumably contains a wealth of information about homosexual communities from the 1920s until Van Vechten’s death in 1964. A hodgepodge of photographs, scan- dal sheets, erotic postcards, soft porn drawings, sensational newspaper clippings, advertisements, invitations, drag ball announcements, boys en plein air, reproductions of Renaissance paintings, objets d’art, and obituaries, the scrapbooks appear to record the emergence—and the subsequent erasure—of a U.S. gay underworld in the first half of the twentieth century. If viewed chronologically, the books chart the rise of a gay sub- culture during the Roaring Twenties and its downfall during the paranoid crackdowns and police raids that marked the Cold War era. 144
One could focus on reference guides to underworld homosexual idiom such as Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (Goldin, O’Leary, and Lipsius 1950) and, later, Bruce Rodgers’s cheeky Gay Talk: A (Some- times) Outrageous Dictionary of Gay Slang (1972). One could concentrate on best-selling sexology tracts that argue for and against the classification of subterranean homosexual bodies such as Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) or Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach ([1951] 1960). 194
March 21, 2019
I picked this up not for its literary analysis, but because of the type of queer theory it snuggled up with. This isn't really a pure theory book, but it should be! I was somewhat familiar with the Harlem Renaissance writers and Djuna Barnes, so I could follow the arguments. However, I found the most sustenance in the introduction and conclusion. While the text doesn't necessarily take a stand on trauma-porn poetry or other self-produced slummings or even identity politics, I took away the implicit message that making our queer lives sympathetic, transparent, legible, and friendly the outsiders isn't the only way to produce queer narratives. This academicy treatment takes a radical stand against fascism from the left -- the "I see you" instagrammy push toward community, pride, mainstream civil rights, homonormativity, etc. that drives me nutso. Where is the version of this perspective as pure theory? Leave comparative lit and dive into rhetoric, my contrary, bizzare friend!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews