Gay New York Book

Heterosexuality had not become a precondition of gender normativity in early-twentieth-century working-class culture. Men had to be many things in order to achieve the status of "normal" men, but being "heterosexual" was not one of them.

If many working men thought they demonstrated their sexual virility by taking the "man's part" in sexual encounters with either women or men, normal middle-class men increasingly believed that their virility depended on their exclusive sexual interest in women.

I have my hands (or head) full with Mrs. Dalloway and Tsvetaeva's intense autobiographical collages, but this is too good to put down. Chauncey has just finished discussing the many rituals by which the sailors, dockworkers, hoboes/seasonal laborers and homosocial immigrants of early 1900s New York affirmed manliness and male status (you're physically strong; you do hard and dangerous work; you dominate sexual partners, be they female prostitutes or the painted rent boys lounging in every saloon; you drink a lot, and buy drinks for your pals); he's about to launch his argument that our ironclad hetero-homosexual binarism evolved as the only way for the deskbound, domesticated middle class men to define manliness. In the absence of physical labor, in the scarcity of dangerous tests of strength, heterosexuality is invented. (I'm tempted to sigh, Gore Vidal-ishly, ah, the deformations wrought by embourgeoisement on immemorial sexual fluidity! But the sexual fluidity of working class men was built on intense sexism and restrictive gender roles, and the post-industrial economy probably represents an historic advance for women.) I scrutinize GQ and Esquire because I'm fascinated by the spectacle of American men struggling to elaborate, or simply believe in, a white-collar masculinity. It's not working. Maybe in cultures with aristocratic traditions of non-laboring men, but not here. All we've got is: "well, I know I'm not gay!"


Such were my impressions 130 pages in. Chauncey deepens his portrait of middle class angst. He points out that the number of salaried, nonpropertied men grew eight-fold from 1870 to 1910. The emergence of the salaryman unsettled the conceptions of male status and occupational spheres of the American middle class, which had always striven for the illusory independence of the entrepreneur and scorned wage-earning beyond a certain stage of youth (life-long wage-earning, Abraham Lincoln had said before an audience at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859, could be attributed to “a dependant nature which prefers it”). Instead of the prosperous farmer or small capitalist, in business for himself, the paradigmatic bourgeois was, by 1900, a deskbound office worker performing fragmented and sedentary work in the middling bureaus of vast corporations, in the Lamb-Gogol-Kafka milieu of “superfluous men” who make nothing, do nothing, while dependant on other men—inscrutable bosses—for wages and approval, and surrounded by female secretaries who, while certainly subordinate, perform only slightly differentiated, similarly abstracted tasks. Middle class men began to worry over the dangers of “overcivilization.” The idea of war as a contest of racial virilities reappears, with a squeaky Rooseveltan accent, at this time—as do cults of prizefighters and strongmen, the purposeful wilderness tramping of puerile paramilitaries, and the collegiate enshrinement of “moral equivalents” of war like football. Also arising in this time of threatened gender order, Chauncey argues, is the enshrinement of heterosexuality as “a precondition of gender normativity.”


Homosexuals occupied a visible niche in the street life of immigrant neighborhoods, in the waterfront saloon milieu of the “bachelor subculture,” in the Storyvilles of the Sporting Life—

While a few words used by gay men were made-up terms that had no meaning in standard English or slang, most gave standard terms a second, gay meaning. Many were derived from the slang of female prostitutes. Gay itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men; trade and trick referred to prostitutes’ customers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cruising referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before it referred to a gay man’s

—and were policed, surveilled and suppressed alongside the other forms of rough masculine amusement—prostitution, drinking, gambling, burlesque shows—ingredient to that world. At its broadest Gay New York is the story of the turf struggle, commencing in the Progressive Era, between working class and bourgeois understandings of acceptable sociability and use of urban space, between middle class reformers and a host of evils they saw in urban life. Privately funded societies for the suppression of vice, committees of moral guardians, sent undercover agents into dens of iniquity, first to sniff out female prostitution, later to document male “degeneracy.” In time they compiled a secret archive—diagrams of bath houses, maps of cruising grounds, even records of conversations between gay men and the agents—that Chauncey calls the richest source of study for historians of early twentieth century gay life. Such is the ironic fate of a persecutorial dossier meant to spur enforcement from laissez-faire city cops (local police precincts could and often were paid off to ignore bath houses, or even, in some cases, to provide door security for drag balls). Out of all the testimony Chauncey braids into this vivid book, the street corner chats recorded by agents are most striking—you get to meet people in history, “a few faces cast up sharply from the waves,” as Pater would say:

The streets and corners were crowded with the sailors all of whom were on a sharp lookout for girls. It seemed to me that the sailors were sex mad. A number of these sailors were with other man walking arm in arm and on one dark street I saw a sailor and a man kissing each other. It looked like an exhibition of male perversion showing itself in the absence of girls or the difficulty of finding them. Some of the sailors told me that they might be able to get a girl if they went “up-town” but it was too far up and they were too drunk to go way up there. [“Conditions about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, June 6, 1917,” box 25, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]

The story of one black gay man who lived in the basement of a rooming house on West Fiftieth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in 1919 suggests the latitude—and limitations—of rooming house life. The tenant felt free to invite whom he met on the street into his room. One summer evening, for instance, he invited an undercover investigator he had met while sitting on the basement stairs. But, as he later explained to his guest, while three “young fellows” had been visiting him in his room on a regular basis, he had finally decided to stop seeing the youths because they made too much noise, and he did not want to landlady to “get wise.” Not only might be lose his room, he feared, but also his job as the house’s chambermaid. [Chauney’s prose, with quotations from “Report on colored fairy, 63 W. 50th St., Aug. 2, 1919,” box 34, Committee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]


After WWI the reformers got one of their wishes, Prohibition—the suppression of the saloon and its attendant evils. But like the YMCA hotels, gay trysting colonies originally built as Christian berths for sojourning innocents, Prohibition’s effect was the nightmarish opposite of the one intended. Upper- and middle-class New Yorkers resorted to gangster-run basement speakeasies, immigrant restaurants and working-class rent parties to get their drink on. Prohibition dissolved barriers between bourgeois and proletarian amusement, between “respectability and criminality, public and private, commercial space and home life.” The mainstreaming of working-class sociability meant the heightened visibility of gay men, long familiar figures on the streets and vaudeville stages of rougher neighborhoods (and on the park benches and rooftops where working-class couples, straight and gay, sought a little darkened privacy away from their crowded family tenements); and with the waning of the Harlem craze, the “Negro vogue” for elaborate plantation- and jungle-themed floor shows, nightspots began pushing a new transgressive novelty, the “pansy show.” These ran the gamut from vaudeville-ish buffoonery—“the gay equivalent of blackface,” Chauncey calls it—to the assertive fabulousness of Jean Malin. A Lithuanian immigrant who had become, by his late teens, a famous drag performer (as “Imogene Wilson”), Malin, now dressed as in men’s clothes, helmed an immensely popular act in several Times Square clubs in the early 1930s. Malin didn’t sing or dance, he simply “strolled about the club, interacting with the patrons and using his camp wit to entertain them (and presumably scandalizing them with his overtly gay comments).” Such interaction implied the hooting and catcalls of some straight male club goers, and Malin was famous for his arch verbal beheadings of hecklers. His resistance was physical, as well. He was a 200lb six-footer who could kick some ass. Once, after winning a drag contest, Malin wandered into a late-night cafeteria, still resplendently gowned and high on solidarity:

”When a party of four rough looking birds tossed a pitcher of hot water at him as he danced by,” the columnist reported, “he pitched into them. After beating three of them into insensibility, the fight went into the street, with two taxi drivers coming to the assistance of the surviving member of the original foursome.” The story portrayed Malin as claiming his right to move openly through the city as a drag queen. Still, it ended on a suitably camp note. When the fight was over, Malin was said to have had tears in his eyes. Yes, he’d won the fight, he told another man, “but look at the disgraceful state my gown is in!”


Prohibition spread rather than eradicated saloon culture, mingled rather than separated gay and straight, bourgeois and prole; the post-repeal New York State Liquor Authority was more effective in regulating social life, and led the charge in excluding homosexuality from the mainstream entertainment world in which it had become so visible during the 1920s. During the next four decades, the SLA revoked the liquor licenses of hundreds of establishments that served or tolerated gatherings of men plainclothes investigators thought gay. Liquor licenses were revoked and bars shut down because men were overheard discussing opera, or because a bartender was observed serving a man wearing tight pants. The threat of revocation and ruin deputized bar owners and restaurateurs in an anti-gay movement, and spooked those who would cultivate a gay clientele. The only entity that could afford to pay off police and absorb the costs of frequent closure and relocation was the Mafia, which got into the gay bar business in a big way after WWII. The Stonewall was a Mafia-owned club—but Stonewall seems far distant in Chauncey’s history, indeed he will get to it only near the close of his projected second volume. My outline of this first volume is muddled and skimpy, and can’t possibly suggest the vast human comedy Chauncey has unearthed—Harlem’s popular and highly developed drag circuit, or the bold pickup subculture worshipfully devoted to policemen, or the deeply discreet gay middle class worlds; the subway washrooms, the social world of the baths, the hundreds of heartbreaking arrests, jailings, beatings and bashings, the hilarious correspondence of Parker Tyler—

Jules, being drunk, camped with them [a bunch of “straight” men:] too, and they tried to date him—even after feeling his muscle: he could have laid them all low: really it’s as wide as this paper.