It's a gay, gay, gay New York

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Hey guys, since Bertie spent a lot of time in New York and since slash is a glorious thing, I am tossing in an unreserved recommendation for the book Gay New York by George Chauncey to anyone interested in what the gay scene would've been like in the 1920s and 1930s (which is, happily, the era the book spends the most time on).

Here's a link to it on Amazon: Gay New York by Chauncey.

It's about 470 pages long, so you really get your money worth. (Price is between $8 and $16 depending on if you go for new or used.)

Before reading it, I had a vague idea that anyone who was gay before Stonewall had to live in secrecy and fear. I was wrong. Totally wrong. I was floored to find an era where gay men would carry around things like this:




Not that it would've been a good idea for a man in the 1920s to walk into his job at a bank or an office and announce, "HEY, I sleep with MEN!", mind you. But as the book details, there was a very active, very visible gay scene that did not receive much negative attention from the police (who were more concerned with prostitution). It was mainly centered around the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and Harlem (the areas where single men tended to gather).



^ A police report on a drag ball . . . the scan is a little hard to read, but the text says:

"February 24, 1928, Manhattan Casino, 8th Ave and 155th St. - About 12:30 AM we visited this place and found approximately 5,000 people, colored and white, men attired in women's clothes, and vice versa. The affair, we were informed, was a "Fag [fairy]/Masquerade Ball." This is an annual affair where the white and colored fairies assemble together with their friends, this being attended also by certain respectable element who go here to see the sight." (I.e., straight people.) "While here, remaining about three-quarters of an hour, a certain amount of intoxication was observed. On three occasions it was seen where both men and women were intoxicated to the extent of being unable to walk unaided, and were taken from the hall by their friends. There was also a large number of uniformed patrolmen both outside, and in the hall proper as well as plainclothesmen. Noticing that to remain here would be unproductive, we shortly departed. Prior to leaving B and 5 questioned some casuals in the place as to where women could be met, but could learn nothing."

(My first reaction to that last line was, "Dude, are you at a drag ball, on duty, trying to pick up girls??" But then I figured out it was a couple of plainclothesmen trying to catch prostitutes.)

Some newspaper cartoons from the time, playing off the popular idea of the gay man as a "sexual invert" (i.e., a woman "on the inside.")




^ The text says "But this is exclusively a women's hotel!" "Well?"



"SWISH!" I love it.



A slightly larger image of the Pansies of America certificate, which I love forever and a day.



Can you imagine Jeeves' face if Bertie tried to leave the apartment looking like one of these fabulous drag queens? I think his head would explode. Sleeping with men, sure. Dressing in a manner that REVEALS ONE'S BELLY?? ASSUREDLY NOT.


I guarantee that your mind will be RIFE with plot bunnies after reading this book, not to mention it is fascinating from a historical perspective in its own right. The way ideas of masculinity have changed since then (when an average joe could sleep with a fairy (an effeminate man) and not be considered gay because fairies were kind of like girls, right? so it was like sleeping with a woman, really.), the surprisingly huge and visible drag balls and other society events, the way privacy was forced into public spaces (because so many gay men lived in community housing like boarding houses), and the one gay man who kept a diary about how he would befriend and then sleep with policemen on a regular basis.

On the Wodehousian side of things, I could see Jeeves being quite shaken if Bertie started making friends with anyone remotely campy . . . If Jeeves shies back from Bingo Little's dreadful horseshoe tie, I can't imagine what he would think if Bertie decided to compete in a drag ball. (Bertie does enjoy fancy dress, after all.)

Or would he perhaps view this as just another challenge and insist that Bertie be attired ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY so he will WIN that ruddy contest?

Feel free to fire away any questions at me, although I don't know anything more than anyone else who read the book. :)

Edit: Just added some quotes from the book.


This is an account from the book from a medical student from North Carolina who went on a "slumming tour" to see the "depravities" of the big city:

[H]e visited several gardens on the Bowery where "male perverts, dressed in elaborate female evening costumes, 'sat for company' and received a commission on all drinks served . . . Such men dressed in male attire at the Slide [the most infamous saloon], but still sat for company as did their transvestite counterparts elsewhere. Nesbitt [the student] asked one of the men, known as "Princess Toto" to join his table; to his surprise, he found the fellow "unusually intelligent" and sophisticated.

Princess Toto, he quickly decided, was the "social queen of this group" and had "pretty clear cut ideas about his own mental state and that of his fellows." Nature had made him this way, Toto assured the young medical student, and there were many men such as he. He indicated pride at the openness of "my kind" at places like the Slide, calling them "superior" to the "perverts in artistic, professional, and other circles who practice perversion surreptitiously." "Believe me," the student remembered him commenting, "there are plenty of them and they are good customers of ours." (p. 40)

Part of the acceptance of visible gay culture seems to have been part of a backlash against Prohibition:

Hundreds of slummers had attended the Greenwich Village balls during the 1910s to catch a glimpse of "Homosexualists," but the popularity and social cachet of the drags grew tremendously during Prohibition. "During the height of the New Negro era" [jazz, etc] "and the tourist invasion of Harlem [in the 1920s and early 1930s]," Langston Hughes recalled a decade later, "it was fashionable for the intelligentsia and the social leaders of both Harlem and the downtown area to occupy boxes at this ball and look down from above at the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor."

The Vanderbilts, the Astors, and other pillars of respectability were often there, along with Broadway celebrities popular in the gay world, such as Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan, and Tallulah Bankhead. By most accounts, thousands of spectators gathered to watch the biggest balls in the late 1920s and early 1930s. "FAG BALLS EXPOSED" screamed a headline in Broadway Brevities in 1932. "6,000 CROWD HUGE HALL AS QUEER MEN AND WOMEN DANCE." By the early 1930s, they were even being staged in Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel in midtown.

Comments

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

The book has been mentioned before in the community and was, in fact, part of the inspiration for "Jeeves and the Midnight Raid," though no one has posted scans from the book before. Thanks so much for these -- they are priceless!

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

The Pansies of America certificate reminds me a lot of the picture of Bingo Little that wotwotleigh kindly posted (http://indeedsir.livejournal.com/1015407.html#cutid1):



Something about the hands and shoulders!

[erynn999.livejournal.com]

I am indeed, exceedingly amused.

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

Mwahaha! I can totally see it.

[gini-baggins.livejournal.com]

LOL

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

Yes! I adored this book. Anyone who hasn't read it, g get a copy NOW!

[epakelpo.livejournal.com]

This is new info for me, I'm definitely interested! Thanks for the rec :)

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

Ooh, how fascinating! I will definitely see if I can find a copy. And I can absolutely see Jeeves making sure that Drag!Bertie was at the very height of fashion -- I was intrigued by his knowledge of women's fashion in "The Aunt and the Sluggard" ("Wads of stuff about the dresses. I didn't know Jeeves was such an authority."), also hinted at in Jeeves in the Offing, where he is asked to judge a bathing suit contest.

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

Also in "The Ties that Bind", when he goes into detail about Mrs McCorkadale's outfit at the debate. :D

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot about that line, but yes! Hmmm . . . "Jeeves and the Queer Affair of the Yule Ball."

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a fascinating book! I'll have to see if my library has it.

So, how much at risk were the "fairies" of being locked up? It sounds from your description like there was some general social acceptance for them. Was it the non-fairy gay men who were more in danger of arrest?

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

I will have to read the book again, but it sounded like the biggest risk was for men staying at boarding houses, if their landlord/landlady didn't approve and complained to the police. That's why sex in public bathhouses, the YMCA (seriously, there's a whole chapter on it), and public bathrooms became such a "thing" in the gay community.

There was definitely a level of risk--a lot of the men used pseudonyms in the gay community and were carefully "straight" at their jobs. The most "open" people were the ones who both lived and worked in Harlem or the other areas with a strong gay presence.

I'm running off to work now, but I'll get to the rest of your question when I get a chance. :)

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am back!

(General disclaimer, I know this varied a lot from city to city. NYC in particular had a reputation for being a wide-open town. "Anything gooooes!")

From what I can tell, middle-class straight people looked down on the queer community, yet at the same time accepted that it had a place in NYC. In fact, "slumming tours" were quite popular (sometimes complete with live sex shows in infamous saloons)!

So basically, it was fine for gay people to be "out there", but not okay for them to be the neighbor or co-worker of "respectable" people. So there was definitely an incentive for middle class gays to lead a double life, but for social and economic reasons more than fear of the police. Fortunately, in those days it wasn't that hard to lead that kind of a double life (just like it wasn't hard for Bertie to continually give false names when he was arrested for police-helmet-stealing to avoid seeing his name in the paper).

The areas where the gay community was most visible / flourishing was in the working class parts of town. This was also where the "full time fairies", so to speak, lived. Generally speaking, the attitude towards fairies seems to have been that because they were "women on the inside", it was only natural for them to be powdered, frilly, and to have sex with men. Not that there wasn't some working class jeering or discrimination towards gays, but it was on an individual basis, not like a concerted effort to get them out of the neighborhoods or anything. They were part of the landscape.

"Normal men" who had sex with men were sometimes seen as weirdos, sometimes as kind of a neutral thing by working class men as long as the manly!man was on top.

Not so relevant to NYC, but in lumber camps there was a very intricate wolf/lamb social construct where wolves (or jockers), who were "manly men", would hook up with lambs/punks (younger adolescents or young men). Basically, there were no women at all in lumber camps, so lambs/punks were socially constructed to be "the women" of the camps, doing all the cooking, cleaning, etc, as well as being in a romantic relationship with a wolf.

Since lumber camp work was seasonal, the lumbermen moved into cities in the "off season" (winter), living in "jungles" around the edge of the urban area and basically freaking the urbanites ouuuut. Wolves completely freaked out middle-class urban dwellers, much more than fairies did. Also, fairies did not mix with the lumbermen much.

So where do the sodomy laws fit into all this? Well, from what I've seen they were not enforced much in the 1910s - 1930s in NYC. Maybe there were too many visible gay people in Harlem and the Bowery to make it feasible to prosecute, or maybe the cops just didn't care. (Probably both.) I don't know about NYC, but I know in Portland (from Same-Sex Affairs, another GREAT book) that sodomy crimes were usually levied against immigrants or certain ethnic groups . . . it wasn't about sodomy per se, but about keeping down (or kicking out) immigrants and/or people of color.

[ironicbees.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the detailed info! Very interesting.

So basically, you could be an out gay person and not get arrested if you stuck to Harlem/working-class areas and didn't try to sully "respectable" places with your presence? Or if you were a sufficiently feminine man that you weren't threatening ideas of masculinity (i.e. it's okay for a girly man to take on a woman's role, but not a manly man)?

I'm glad the sodomy laws weren't enforced much. The penalty was much stronger in America than in the UK, wasn't it?

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

I think it varied by state; I know Washington state didn't adopt sodomy laws until the 1890s (but then they had craaazy long prison sentences for it--longer than for rape, for example).

It's hard to summarize the social attitudes because they were so complex and at times completely contradictory. My sense of is that, as you say, they were accepted as long as they kept "in their place" (the working class neighborhoods), where the middle class could gawk at them at horror at their leisure and reinforce their notion that "those people" (the working class) had simply appalling standards compared to Regular People.

However, here's an interesting quote from a gay man in the 1920s:

The secret of a woman's appeal to man is not so much her sex as her effeminancy . . . The attitude of the average man to the homosexual is determined by the degree of effeminacy in the homosexual. Your writer has observed that nine out of ten [men] take favorably to the homosexual. Of course, they seek the eternal feminine in the homosexual . . . [and] feminine homosexuals naturally have the greatest number of admirers.

Pretty much the exact opposite of how we think of homosexuality today. Also note that he categorizes three kinds of people: women, men, and homosexuals. This was the idea of gays as "the third sex" or "the intermediate sex." They were also sometimes described as "bisexual", playing off the "woman's spirit in a man's body" idea. (The word homosexual was actually not used much at all at this time.)

I'm going to add some quotes from the book to the main post when I have time.

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just found/added a quote about the well-to-do like the Vanderbilts watching drag balls and some even being thrown in Madison Square Garden, which I would've thought was out of "the gay zone", so I don't even know anymore.

Mind you, I think the upper class would have been more accepting of that kind of thing than the middle class. Middle class guy, could get fired for being "a pervert", but what can you do to someone like Vanderbilt? But then, of course, there was poor old Oscar Wilde. Was the social climate that much different in the US versus the UK? The transcript of his trial makes the judge/prosecutor sound genuinely shocked . . . so I don't know. Possibly in the US the idea of "the self-made man" and "captains of industry" (earning their way by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, etc etc etc) offered more leeway for the rich to do whatever they wanted? Or was it that the UK lacked the Prohibition, which made Americans feel cynical about moral reformists?

I think the fact that NYC was such a melting pot and HAD to have some kind of tolerance (however reluctant) of "differences", because of the various immigrants settled there played a big part. The Portland newspapers were absolutely shocked to think that someone UPPER CLASS like Wilde could be having sex with men (which was something "those dirty, deviant immigrants" did), whereas I can picture the New Yorkers going "lol *shrug*!". (Then in 1912 Portland had its own upper class scandal, where it turned out scads of its city leaders were gayin' it up at the YMCA. Good ol' YMCA! They shouldn't have had rules forbidding men to wear swimsuits in their pools if they didn't want to attract so many gay guys.)

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

They shouldn't have had rules forbidding men to wear swimsuits in their pools if they didn't want to attract so many gay guys.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You mean the dudes actually had to swim naked?! That's hilarious!

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

I KNOW, RIGHT??

Yes, that really was one of their rules. Only nude swimming. (I just checked Wikipedia and apparently this didn't change until the 1960s, whoa!)

They also typically had single rooms for rent for unmarried men. It was like it was made for gay men.

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Of course, this also begs the question . . . what exactly are the rules for the Drones Club swimming pool? :D

[wotwotleigh.livejournal.com]

Yes! XD (I mean, we know that fully clothed gentlemen sometimes ended up in it, but that probably wasn't standard procedure.)

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

I want to find a copy of this book.

[lapin-petite.livejournal.com]

I immediately recall awesome Jeeves and the Midnight Raid:D and thanks to your article it seems even more real.
And fanfic inspired by this idea would be lovely:D I can imagine Jeeves reaction be will like this:

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

Perfection. XD

[gini-baggins.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec! I'm really interested in this book :D

[lawnnun.livejournal.com]

Jeeves would wade through the blood of millions to ensure that Bertie was the prettiest pony. You know he would. And they'd have fierce arguments about hemlines and the right shade of blue to set off his eyes. To say nothing of makeup.

[ladymoondancer.livejournal.com]

It would also open up a whole new set of hilariously horrible choices in clothes. I mean, if Bertie is out buying striped spats and purple socks out of the limited selection of men's clothes, the mind boggles what he'd go for in women's attire.

"I say, Jeeves, look at this rather snazzy . . . well, I'm not sure what it is, but it's corking, isn't it?"

" . . . . those are meant to go UNDER the rest of the clothes, sir."