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.
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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:
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.