Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940

by Chad Heap

During Prohibition, “Harlem was the ‘in’ place to go for music and booze,” recalled the African American chanteuse Bricktop. “Every night the limousines pulled up to the corner,” and out spilled affluent whites, looking for a good time, great jazz, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable.
 
That is the indelible public image of slumming, but as Chad Heap reveals in this fascinating history, the reality is that slumming was far more widespread—and important—than such nostalgia-tinged recollections would lead us to believe. From its appearance as a “fashionable dissipation” centered on the immigrant and working-class districts of 1880s New York through its spread to Chicago and into the 1930s nightspots frequented by lesbians and gay men, Slumming charts the development of this popular pastime, demonstrating how its moralizing origins were soon outstripped by the artistic, racial, and sexual adventuring that typified Jazz-Age America. Vividly recreating the allure of storied neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Bronzeville, with their bohemian tearooms, rent parties, and “black and tan” cabarets, Heap plumbs the complicated mix of curiosity and desire that drew respectable white urbanites to venture into previously off-limits locales. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.
 
Packed with stories of late-night dance, drink, and sexual exploration—and shot through with a deep understanding of cities and the habits of urban life—Slumming revives an era that is long gone, but whose effects are still felt powerfully today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, School, Urban Studies, Gender Studies, Race

432 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Hillery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic and very good, in-depth research, but the writing style manages to drain any energy out of the content. The book needed some editing; it got very repetitive. That said, it highlights an important part of LGBTQ history and shows that in urban America there was definitely 'out' LGBTQ life well before Stonewall.

[Trent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-researched and fascinating, although the sometimes overly academic prose made it tough going. (I don't think I've ever read a book that used the word "reify" so much.)

[Jen Well-Steered · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently I read a review of this book 14 years ago, possibly in the New York Times, and downloaded it and it's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. No idea what made me want to read it.

It's interesting to read about how people were transgressive in the past, but also cringe. And of course it will be the same for people looking back on us in 50 years.

[Desiree Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all of you who read Karen Abbott's "Sin and the Second City" and pretty much had an experience that was pretty, well, anti-climatic, this book is the antidote.

Mind you, it's no walk on the North Side. This is all hardscrabble, South Side grit - there's no sugarcoating, it's pure facts and purient analyses of the slumming life in New York and Chicago from 1885 to 1940. It's an urban history examination of middle- and upper-class whites' forays into the slums through several vogues, from prostitution and opium dens and Bohemian thrillage to Negro exploitation and homosexual cabarets. Along the way, Heap, an academic at George Washington, explores how an understanding of various racial and sexual conditions were unintentionally and surreptitiously arrived at by the slummers. The verbatim and historical accounts of the sights, scenes and spectacles are interesting as hell, and honestly, the post-Victorian immigrants make Paris Hilton look like a virgin. If she even made it through the wilderness that was Harlem, Chinatown, Bronzeville, Times Square, Towertown and the Levee District.

At times, the hot jazz and cold gin screech to a standstill when Heap inadvertently makes repetitive conclusions and draws too many neat parallels between incidents and reflections. Rather than put us through similar motions, I felt that this could have been part of a more detailed conclusion. I mean, nobody wants to be halted mid-shimmy to do the family fox trot. Still, the research and thinking that have gone behind this book is exhaustive and fascinating to no end, and the only thing that could have brought those pre-, post- and during Prohibition years larger than life would have been more pictures. A man bent over in the bathroom of a masquerade ball on the South Side as others filled the bathroom, standing in line to take turns at him? Who would have thought, Chicago? But then again...

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an exercise of reading historical evidence "against the grain," Chad Heap builds upon George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 as he employs the activity of slumming as a lens of analysis. He explores how the complicated practice of "slumming" among New York City and Chicago's white middle and upper class, as well as well-intentioned sociologists and reformers, facilitated social transitions along the racial divide of white and black and the gender and sexuality binary of hetero and homosexual, as the privileged crossed geographical, social, and sexual boundaries into "the slums."

Arguing that there were successive slumming movements, Heap chronicles the explorations of the white middle class into four different groups and areas:

1) Working class immigrant neighborhoods and their often accompanying red light districts
2) "Bohemian thrillage" in Greenwich Village
3) "Negro vogue" in Harlem
4) The "pansy and lesbian craze"

Heap argues that these slumming experiences served to naturalize slummers' identity as significantly different than those who lived within the slums themselves, thus stabilizing the shifting boundaries of race and class-based respectability during a time of significant social and cultural upheaval.

[Kim Adamache · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the book, Slumming, the author locates leisure activities in New York City and Chicago. He emphasizes three groups of the middle and upper class who voyeuristically peer into and participate in the world of the so-called slums, the neighborhoods of the working class and their amusements. All three groups (reformers, intellectuals, and young, single men and women looking for a good time) were involved with observing ‘how the other half lives’ and is a form of Orientalism. Their amusement essentially was the working class, how they live and recreate. Whatever guise they came in, the implication was that of superiority over the object of their gaze.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting look at the vogue of slumming in the turn of the century America. I learned a lot about white middle class constructions of race and sexuality, things that still affect our understanding today. I highly recommend reading this with other books that address similiar race and sexuality issues, like Gay New York.

[George Neville-Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uses an interesting and engaging viewpoint to look at the racial and sexual history in the late 19th and early 20th century.