Gay New York

George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books (Harper Collins), 1994.

Contemporary accounts of the gay rights movement tend to begin with, or right around the Stonewall Riot of 1969. A common assumption of these narratives is that gay Americans had been living closeted lives continuously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to that point, when the example of the Civil Rights movement and the loosening of traditional social constraints in the Sixties finally allowed gays to assert themselves in the public sphere. Chauncey directly challenges that orthodoxy, recreating a history of a gay world prior to World War II which was more open, more publicly visible, and to a degree even more accepted than later generations of homosexual Americans would experience. This is both a history and a reclamation project.

There are a handful of themes underlying this broad account. In dealing with these concepts, Chauncey first explains that the terms we now use to discuss gay people and gay culture would not apply to this era. People in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not make the clear distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals. They did, on the other hand, make a distinction between "fairies" (or "pansies" in later decades of the time frame covered), who were men for whom "homosexuality" was determined not by sexual preference but by gender behavior; a man was a "fairy" if he behaved in an effeminate manner; his preference for having sexual relations with other men was secondary, or rather a "by-product", so to speak, of his feminine gendered behavior. Therefore, the men who had sex with them were not necessarily considered "gay" in the modern sense, as they played the role of the gendered male in the relationship. The "rough" trade referred to the "normal" men who sought "fairies" or were sought out by them.

"Queers" were another subset of gays; they were marked by a more subdued public persona, and a tendency to distinguish themselves from the fairies. While fairies tended to seek out the "rough" trade for sexual partners, queers very often sought out romantic and sexual relationships with other queers. And it is worth noting at this point--this book is a story about gay men, not homosexuals in general. Chauncey explains this choice for two reasons. First, standard gender roles for all people at the time strictly limited the autonomy and freedom of movement women had compared to men, so that the world that lesbians moved in was different, and more restricted, than the "Gay New York", which coexisted within the geographic space of "normal" New York, in which gay men negotiated their own lives. Secondly, as noted above the concept of "homosexuality" was not yet defined, so that there was not yet the perceived commonality of interests between gay men and lesbians which later generations would acknowledge.

In general, Chauncey argues that acceptance of gay men was more common in immigrant and working-class communities than in middle-class and Anglo-American culture. The general narrative of the book, in fact, builds from this beginning towards the Prohibition era when gay culture found a more welcoming home in "proper" society as one consequence of the Volstead Act driving nightlife "underground" (sometimes literally, as in the case of many speakeasies) so that middle- and upper-class patrons ended up rubbing shoulders with organized crime figures, for example, while patronizing clubs that commodified the "exotic" by offering a sanitized look at African-American or homosexual life in places like, respectively, the Cotton Club and the Pansy Club.

The backlash against this brief era of acceptance and even celebration of openly gay behavior and unapologetic gay men came to an end with the close of Prohibition and the beginning the Great Depression. The utilization of liquor licensing as a tool of state control drove gay bars underground and gay people themselves to hide their identities more than they had in previous decades. By the time the late 1960's rolled around, the invisibility of gay people and the demonization of homosexuality had come to seem both normal and permanent. The fact that previous generations had known a very different gay New York was largely forgotten outside of the gay community itself.