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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Social Context: Gay Rights and Attitudes Toward Gay People

When Gay New York was published in 1994, the issue of gay rights was still highly controversial and contested. Gay rights activists had been visible and active for decades by then, and during the 1960s and 1970s some states had abolished sodomy laws, which practically outlawed gay sexuality. However, sodomy laws persisted in much of the South. By 1990, only three states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) had any laws explicitly protecting gay and lesbian people from employment and housing discrimination, and the federal government provided no protections. Legal recognition of same-sex marriages had yet to be seriously proposed, much less enacted, in any state or at the national level. Although the US Democratic Party came to power in 1992 through the election of President Bill Clinton, he was arguably more conservative in his approach to both economic and social issues than previous Democratic presidents since the 1940s. To that end, in 1993, Clinton enacted a policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which allowed gay people to join the military as long as they were not openly gay.

Social attitudes toward gay people remained fraught. Although tolerance toward gay people and the appearance of gay characters in popular media rose during the 1970s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s evangelical Christianity, especially via the activist group the Moral Majority, began to exercise more political and cultural influence. Their pressure made the media more reluctant to depict explicitly gay characters in television and film. In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS severely impacted the gay community, increasing its presence in the news. Some reports inaccurately depicted HIV/AIDS as a disease that affected only gay men, thus increasing negative views toward the gay community and fueling discriminatory and outright hostile attitudes toward gay people, especially gay men. Along with rampant misinformation, the federal government’s slow and poor response to the outbreak of AIDS helped the virus exact a devastating death toll, especially in the gay community.

Ideological Context: Ways of Viewing History and LGBTQ History

As George Chauncey himself notes, some members of American academia opposed the study of LGBTQ history. Traditionally, most historians in the US focused on political, military, and diplomatic history. By the middle of the 20th century, dissatisfaction increased toward what was called “Great Man History,” meaning the view history should focus on the achievements of “great” people, specifically of men in power. During the World War II era, however, academic study of history in the US expanded to include a greater focus on social and cultural history, specifically involving the history of the working class, women, African Americans, Jewish people, and other typically disenfranchised or marginalized groups. This involved both a shift in historians’ focus and changes in the view of history itself. The intent was to show that not only “great” people but people “from below” changed history.

A softening of attitudes toward the LGBTQ community intersected with this trend of reevaluating what historians could and should cover. For example, in 1976 college professor Vern Burlough (who was heterosexual) wrote and published a book titled Sexual Variance in Society and History. However, the academic study of history did not arguably start to become a major subfield until the 1990s, when academic publications emerged, such as the University of Texas-Austin’s The Journal of the History of Sexuality and academic histories like Rictor Norton’s Mother Clapp’s Molly House in 1990. By the 1990s, historians of gay sexuality roughly fell into two camps. One was the essentialists, defined by historians like John Boswell and Rictor Norton, who argued that gay people saw themselves as having a shared identity across time and cultures. The other was the social constructionists, who (inspired by the work of the theorist Michel Foucault) argued that gay sexuality did not exist as an identity until sometime in the 19th or early 20th centuries. Gay New York was an influential work in the social constructionist camp. Since the publication of Gay New York, LGBTQ historians like Helmut Puff tend to more embrace the view that multiple perspectives on sexuality have coexisted throughout history, some resembling identities and communities like “homosexual” or “gay” and others that consider sexuality in terms of action rather than identity.