Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

I read this book for a History of LGBTQ in America, and it was a very good book. The book is full of facts. Not theories. Not arguments. Not philosophies. Historical Facts. In short, it is a historical look at the first few decades of the 1900s in NYC, and how open the gay lifestyle became--and how popular it became to schmooze with. It also chronicles how much difficulty people had with the concept of people being gay or wearing the wrong clothes. There were actually laws against people wearing too many articles of clothes that were gender-inappropriate. Naturally, if you paid off the local cops your gay bar might get a faux raid, and a small fine for the owners. Or, for the wildly popular gay gala events, you could purchase a license from the police department to hold a "costume" ball--which meant now men could dress as women and women could dress as men. But this could lead to issues because the flatfoots would still try and enforce the "no inappropriate gay activities" by prohibiting people of the same gender form dancing together--even when they were not the same gender. One incident involved a man dressed as a woman dancing with an actual woman also dressed as a woman. A police officer at the gala informed them that the law still prohibited couples of the same sex from dancing together. They informed the officer that they were a man and a woman. The officer informed them that because the event was sanctioned by the police license, and the man (dressed as a woman) had purchased his ticket to attend, and came as woman, he was a woman for that evening, and thus could only dance with people dressed as men--even if they were real men, which was fine. Some of this stuff you just can't make up... Interestingly, gay bars got raided a lot, while the gay bath houses got raided once. The civic leagues were more focused on the gay bars because there was open "gayness" going on, and even though actual sodomy (a felony) was going on in the bathhouses, they were not as concerned with that because the bathhouses were discreet and you had to go on knowing what it was before you could see what was going on. In a gay bar, however, the homosexuality was open for anyone walking past to see--men wearing makeup and otherwise acting as sissies. There is a myth that gay culture is new in America. It is not. America has never been comfortable with the fact there are gay and transgender people, and tries to force them--via draconian laws--to go back and hide in the closet again. This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the problem that America has with just accepting that gays exist...

In "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 – 1940", George Chauncey argues “that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.” (pg. 9) Further, he argues “that in important respects the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.” (pg. 13) Through his work, Chauncey maps both the physical and social topography of gay culture in New York City. Finally, Chauncey argues “that the construction of male homosexual identities can be understood only in the context of the broader social organization and representation of gender, that relations among men were construed in gendered terms, and that the policing of gay men was part of a more general policing of the gender order.” (pg. 28) One of the most interesting parts of Chauncey’s analysis details the manner in which gay and heterosexual men interacted. Chauncey writes, “The earlier culture [pre-1950s] permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves – or to be regarded by others – as gay.” (pg. 65) Due to this, “many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other, or that their occasional recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, indicated an abnormal, ‘homosexual,’ or even ‘bisexual’ disposition, for they neither understood nor organized their sexual practices along a hetero-homosexual axis.” (pg. 65) Chauncey adds an element of class to his analysis, specifically when discussing the differences between those groups of gay men that self-identified as queer and those that identified as fairies. Chauncey writes, “The queers’ antagonism toward the fairies was in large part a class antagonism. Not all queers were middle class…just as not all fairies were of the working class. But if the fairy as a cultural ‘type’ was rooted in the working-class culture of the Bowery…the queer was rooted in the middle-class culture of the Village and the prosperous sections of Harlem and Times Square.” (pg. 106) His discussion of police power further demonstrates the complex relationships between the queer and normal worlds. Chauncey discusses the anti-vice societies’ and police focus on sexuality targeting primarily female prostitutes. Chauncey writes, “The campaigns to control assignation hotels illustrate the degree to which the anti-vice societies often neglected homosexuality because of their preoccupation with controlling female prostitution, as well as the ability of ‘normal’-looking gay men to manipulate observers’ presumption that they were straight to their own advantage.” (pg. 163) When the police did charge gay men, they usually did so with disorderly conduct charges. Chauncey writes, “The use of the disorderly conduct law against gay people was consistent with the intent of the law, which effectively criminalized a wide range of non-normative behavior in public spaces, as defined by the dominant culture, be it loitering, gambling, failure to hire oneself out to an employer, failure to remain sober, or behaving in a public space in any other manner perceived as threatening the social order.” (pg. 172) After the end of Prohibition, the State Liquor Authority controlled both those spaces where patrons could drink and what type of clientele they could host. According to Chauncey, “The genius of the licensing mechanism lay in the way it expanded the state’s ability to survey and regulate public sociability…By threatening proprietors with the revocation of their licenses if its agents discovered that customers were violating the regulations, it forced proprietors to uphold those regulations on behalf of the state.” (pg. 336) This public role of policing fed into later Cold War fears, in which “the specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America. The new image was invoked to justify a new wave of assaults on gay men in the postwar decade.” (pg. 360) This effectively ended the broader public realm open to gay New Yorkers while cementing the hetero-homosexual binary.

I think this book is what being a historian is all about. Chauncey's research, writing, and analysis is amazing. He has opened our eyes to an entire subculture of American society that had been ignored or largely forgotten. This is the kind of real-world history that's extremely important but would never be taught in school. Chauncey uses rarely explored archives to bring to life a thriving yet changing male gay subculture in NY during the early part of the 20th century. He discusses some of the most popular gay spots around the city, yet the perils people faced in visiting these locations. He goes into the ways in which gays would have to pay close attention to where they could and could not go with their friends, and the consequences of getting caught. It's eye-opening to say the least. Who knew that Harlem was such a popular spot for gay expression? Who knew that Prohibition actually boosted gay life, while repeal helped to stifle that part of society? Or that there was a "pansy craze" in the 1920s? Or that some male soldiers were OK with seeking sexual gratification from effeminate males if women weren't available? It's all fascinating, probably the most interesting history book I've ever read in that I had absolutely NO idea about any of it. And while Chauncey does not make his book a sermon against homophobia, the simple facts he uses show that our society treated gays like dangerous pariahs in most cases. Sadly, that homophobia would intensify before it started to subside, and I can't wait for Chauncey's next book, which will pick up where Gay New York ended.

At its core Chauncey’s argument is that the pre-war world was a more open and welcoming place for gay men than has conventionally been held. Tangentially, he argues that the concepts of gender and sexuality in this era were radically different from current concepts we’ve come to accept. In making his argument Chauncey refutes three “myths” about pre-movement gay life: internalization, which states “that gay men uncritically internalized the dominant culture’s view of them as sick, perverted, and immoral”; invisibility, which says “even if a gay world existed, it was kept invisible and thus remained difficult for isolated gay men to find.”; and isolation, that says “anti-gay hostility prevented the development of an extensive gay subculture and forced gay men to lead solitary lives” prior to the gay liberation movement. Chauncey quickly refutes these myths and then spends the majority of his book supporting those refutations. Finally, Chauncey chronicles the transition from a world divided on the basis of sexual persona to one divided based on sexual object-choice. Chauncey’s arguments are well supported by his research; his use of a truly impressive list of sources, including court records, informant testimony, and personal interviews, makes those arguments extremely convincing. Because the scope of the period and place in question is so potentially vast, Chauncey narrows it to focus almost exclusively on gay men. The book benefits from this emphasis, allowing Chauncey to truly dig in and concentrate on his subject. Chauncey’s strength, however, is also his weakness - at several points in the book the combination of his narrow subject and his plethora of sources cross the border from exhaustively researched to simply exhausting, occasionally tending on the long-winded side. Ultimately, however, Gay New York provides exceptional insight into a little-understood period in the history of New York and the gay world.

I was intrigued by this essay since recently some of my preconceptions are starting to fall down and I wanted a book that helped me to rebuild my basis. If I think to a hypothetic "modern" past (more or less pre II World War) I had the idea the gay culture was more or less "underground", or better, completely hidden. My idea was that, if you were gay (and yes, I know at the time the word gay had a different meaning, but bear with me), you were also probably fated to be unhappily married, or completely alone; some exception were allowed to the very wealthy men that sheltered themselves in some isolated paradise, far from the society eyes and judgement. Then I started to read about John Gray (March 2, 1866 - June 14, 1934), the man who apparently inspired Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and who, more or less, lived happily together with his lover Marc-André Raffalovich (September 11, 1864 - February 14, 1934): when John Gray, a catholic priest, went to Edinburgh Marc-André Raffalovich settled nearby; he then helped finance St Peter's Church in Morningside where Gray would serve as priest for the rest of his life. And is it a coincidence that John died barely 4 months after Marc-André? Or about Edward Carpenter (August 29, 1844 - June 28, 1929), the man who most used the term "intermediate sex", referring to those men who were not exactly men, not exactly women, men who were attracted by other men, but usually stronger and masculine men. Edward Carpenter was a strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, and had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, so much that they said Forster took inspiration from Carpenter for Maurice and D.H. Lawrence for Lady Chatterley's Lover: Edward Carpenter had a long-lasting relationship with George Merrill (1866-1928), a working class man also from Sheffield. Again, when Merrill suddenly died in January 1928, Carpenter was devastated and 13 months after, he himself died, on Friday 28 June 1929. And what about F.O. Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 - April 1, 1950), the noted Harward literary historian and critic, who wrote to his lover, the painter Russell Cheney (1881-1945), "we are complex - both of us - in that we are neither wholly man, woman, or child". In another letter he noted, "just as there are energetic active women and sensitive delicate men, so also there are... men, like us, who appear to be masculine but have a female sex element". Both Yale graduate and members of the Skull & Bones, Matthiessen was 20 years younger than Cheney, but they died at only 5 years of distance. And then there is the story of Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 - February 22, 1987) and his lover Monroe Wheeler (February 13, 1899 - August 14, 1988); despite apparently having an open relationship, and an on-off ménages a trois with fashion photographer and male nude artist George Platt Lynes (April 15, 1907 - December 6, 1955), they lived together until old age, hosting one of the most important intellectual saloon in their Greenwich Village apartment. Again, when Wescott dies in 1987, Monroe followed soon after 1 year and half later (on a sad note, it seems that to Monroe Wheeler was prohibited to live in the country house he had always shared with Glenway; truth be told, the house was not of Glenway, but of his brother who had married a wealthy heiress who apparently maintained for all her life both her husband than Glenway and Monroe). But other than tidbits about these men, you will read also about the Harlem's drag balls with the quintessentia of Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent, but also with, among the attendants, Broadway gay celebrities like Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan and Tallulah Bankhead (it's a coincidence that most of these names are almost forgotten? I loved black and white movies by Clifton Webb, but those other names were completely new to me). It was the chance for me to google about Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead, and rediscover these fascinating women. On a closing note, even if today there seems to be more "freedom", popular culture still likes to erase the memory, like in the case of Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1913 - September 27, 2002) whose lover Indra Tamang is still today identified as "the butler"; upon her death, Charles Henri Ford's sister, actress Ruth Ford (July 7, 1911 - August 12, 2009), according to the newspapers left 2 multimillionaire apartments in New York City plus an art collection (n.d.r. Charles Henri Ford was the partner of painter Pavel Tchelitchew, until his death in 1957) to her "butler"... who is no one else than Indra Tamang that already in the '70 and '80 was well known as to be Charles Henri Ford devoted partner. It's so hard to imagine that she was not leaving an unthinkable generous legacy to a simple partner, but was probably honouring the memory of her late brother? Gay New York is maybe a little more academic than my review is letting you believe, and that is a worth for the essay I suppose. But to me, romantic reader, it allowed to have a more solid basis to read about the above men and women, and their sometime hidden lives. It's a pity they are hidden, since apparently, these men and women were not afraid, at their time, to openly live their love.

This is now my absolute favorite book. I can’t rave about it enough, as anyone who has spoken to me this year has quickly discovered. Highly highly recommend for anyone interested in queer history and everyone else should read it too, out history is important and this book is truly fascinating, empowering, and so so important for understanding a big chunk of queer history usually left out or popular discourse. Queer people did not spring out of holes in the ground at Stonewall. We’ve always been here, and the traditions popularized with Stonewall extend back far beyond the cold war era. Read this book.

My history professor told me about this book and once I read the introduction I was immediately hooked to the pages. George Chauncey absolutely proves his point that New York City has a highly visible and well integrated subculture from the 1890s to when it was pushed underground in the 1930s. A general survey of history will not mention gay Americans until Stonewall and before I read this book I only knew about gay history since World War II. I would have never imaged that gays had a complex subculture. Although the author argues that New York City does not serve as an example for other areas in the United States, it makes me wonder were there other gay subculture in other cities, and was there even one before 1890s? One of the weaknesses of the book is that the author repeats himself all over the place. I also wished the last chapter about the subculture going underground was a little bit longer. Other than that if anybody is wondering how sexuality was perceive across lines of race and social class will be interested to find out that our modern notions of sexuality is a recent construction. And you will be interested to know that he is STILL working on the other book The Strange Career of the Closet (which is an echo of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow) which I read on Basic Books website that it is schedule for release in 2015.

This is an IMPORTANT book and a must-read if you want to be well-informed about the formation of gay culture in NYC. The key takeaway for me, a guy who knows a few things about this topic, is that there's been a lot of mythology about the past when it comes to sexuality overall. NYC was every bit as raunchy in 1902 as it is in 2022. There were baths, there were orgies, and yes, there was romance. Chauncey is an exhaustive researcher. He does an admirable job of detailing the infrastructures of both the gay community, as it was, and the systems that oppressed it. No stone is left unturned, and maybe that's where it stumbles. Have you ever talked to someone at a cocktail party who can't stop proving his or her point? He will explain something, like the baths, who was drawn to them, then why. After providing some detailed examples, he'll then summarize what was already said. In fact, the Epilogue is really a summary of the whole book. It's a tad bit too academic, even for scholars ,in my humble opinion, and takes the color out of the story. The guy reading it on Audible also uses a single voice for anyone other than the narrator that sounds like a mix of Andy Griffith and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Item was as expected and arrived quickly and in good condition. Great read and a seminal work, but this book is starting to get a bit dated. Combining this with other, more recent queer history books is recommended. Thanks!

The book arrived quickly and is very informative and interesting. I opted for a used copy and it is in very good condition.

I loved this book from the first page to the last :) It is incredibly well researched and even better reflected upon. It's so dense with information, but still such a delight to read!

Fantastic read. So well researched it’s incredible.

A must!