ext_64537 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
ladymoondancer.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
indeedsir_backup2012-01-08 09:03 pm
ladymoondancer.livejournal.com) wrote in indeedsir_backup2012-01-08 09:03 pm
Entry tags:
It's a gay, gay, gay New York
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:
Part of the acceptance of visible gay culture seems to have been part of a backlash against Prohibition:
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
Whoa, whoa, whoa! You mean the dudes actually had to swim naked?! That's hilarious!
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject