It's from the book: Gay New York - Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890 - 1940 (I posted one other entry about it).
It is very interesting - I can't find the quote, but the book says the term queer came from gay men who did not like being lumped into the role of fairy. There are also a couple of cartoons of men with sailors. One has the fairy strolling arm in arm with a sailor and sticking his tongue out at a prostitute on a park bench. The other has a fairy (who looks like Bertie when he returned from the west in the fur coat and cowboy hat) dropping a hankerchief and a sailor retrieving it for him. Unfortunately, all depictions of sailors in this book look drunk.
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Date: 2010-10-23 08:22 pm (UTC)It is very interesting - I can't find the quote, but the book says the term queer came from gay men who did not like being lumped into the role of fairy. There are also a couple of cartoons of men with sailors. One has the fairy strolling arm in arm with a sailor and sticking his tongue out at a prostitute on a park bench. The other has a fairy (who looks like Bertie when he returned from the west in the fur coat and cowboy hat) dropping a hankerchief and a sailor retrieving it for him. Unfortunately, all depictions of sailors in this book look drunk.