(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.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 06:12 am (UTC)(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.