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

Chauncey starts by asserting that a “highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world” existed in New York City between 1890 and 1939. However, it has been “almost entirely forgotten” by both the general public and historians (1). Chauncey hopes to reverse historians’ oversight. Particularly, he wishes to combat the “myth of isolation” (2), the idea that anti-gay sentiment was so predominant in late-19th- and early-20th- century American society that gay subculture was impossible. While strict anti-gay laws existed, they were enforced “irregularly,” and the general public in New York City treated gay men with “indifference or curiosity” (2). Meanwhile, gay men established three “neighborhood enclaves” in Harlem, Times Square, and Greenwich Village.

Another myth Chauncey critiques is the “myth of invisibility” (3), which holds that any gay culture that existed at the time had to be completely hidden. He argues that gay men were visible in the same saloons, dance halls, parties, speakeasies, and theatrical shows as other people. “Fairies” were openly effeminate gay men and drag queens (4), while other gay men communicated and organized using an elaborate subculture built on coded language and speech and on styles of dress. The text also examines the “myth of internationalization” (4), which argues that social repression imposed self-hatred on gay men and that this restrained them. Chauncey points out that among New York’s gay men, positive expressions of their identity flourished, as did activism against anti-gay oppression via letters to newspapers, their own publications, and attempts to sway legal experts and doctors. Gay men were active in resisting anti-gay medical, legal, and religious views. Nonetheless, the myths reflect the historical view that before the Stonewall riots that sparked the gay rights movement, “gay people lived in a closet that kept them isolated, invisible, and vulnerable to anti-gay ideology” (6).

Chauncey argues that before the Stonewall riots, gay men, instead of being trapped in a closet, viewed their experience as more like “living a double life” (6). This was evident in how gay men spoke of “coming out,” a term they subverted that originally referred to debutantes, or the tradition of a woman’s “being formally introduced to […] the society of her cultural peers” (7). For gay men, “coming out” meant appearing at drag balls that were “patterned on the debutante and masquerade balls of the dominant culture” and thus joining the gay subculture (7).

This world was forgotten because of the increased persecution that started in the 1930s through laws suppressing drag balls, discouraging the depiction of LGBTQ identity in plays and films, and even against LGBTQ people working in or being served at restaurants. Such crackdowns succeeded in making gay culture less visible to the general public. As Chauncey puts it, “the state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it” (9). In contrast to historians who support the “Whiggish notion” that social progress always moves forward, 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 [20th] century than the first” (9). Such persecution and marginalization likewise discouraged academic historians from looking into LGBTQ history. Historians who did conduct this research based it on elite sources like The New York Times instead of African American publications and working-class culture. Another element that has overshadowed the pre-World War II gay culture of New York City is the growth of gay culture in the postwar years. The military mobilization of World War II moved men and, to a lesser extent, women from their “normative” home lives to environments where they were freer to explore gay sexuality. Chauncy adds that “this does not mean that the war generation was the first generation to leave the constraints of family life and watchful neighbors” (11). He notes that historians like Randolph Trumbach and Alan Bray investigated the “sodomitical subcultures” that existed in major European cities by the 18th century (12).

Additionally, Chauncey asserts that the pre-World War II gay male culture was not understood in terms of heterosexual and “homosexual.” Instead, the gay community included “fairies,” who defined themselves both effeminate and gay, while a man who had sex with them “was not considered abnormal […] so long as he abided by masculine gender conventions” (13). Although terms like “gay” and “fairy” were used loosely and their meanings changed over time, Chauncey argues that they still “represent a different conceptual mapping of male sexual practices” (14). This means that none of these terms directly matches up with how people now use terms like “gay.” Authorities then used both scientific terms like “invert” and popular slang like “queer” and “fairy” to describe gay men, while average people described gay men in terms that highlighted their alleged effeminacy, like “fairy” and “sissy.” Gay men referred to themselves as “queer,” which meant being sexually interested in other men whether or not they themselves were effeminate, although they also used terms like “faggot,” “queen,” and “fairy” to describe other gay men whom they saw as extremely effeminate. So-called queens and fairies themselves sought “trade,” implying sex with a traditionally very masculine man, often someone like a soldier or a sailor. “Gay” was in use at the time, but it referred to both a “sexual preference” and “the flamboyance in dress and speech associated with the fairies” (17). Usually, it was a coded word for gay men to identify each other. While “gay” became more popular, “queer” was seen as a pejorative as it gained use in anti-gay media campaigns, and younger gay men associated “queer” with the effeminate mannerisms that older generations had adopted. The word “gay” to mean “homosexual” spread into the mainstream media by the late 1960s.

All this led to a period of “cultural redefinition.” The new “gay” men defined themselves by their choice in male sexual partners, rather than by gender like the “fairies” of older generations, and tried to present themselves as traditionally masculine. Instead of pursuing “trade,” they wanted partners who also viewed themselves as gay. Heterosexual men became less willing to have sex with men, since doing so implied that they were not straight. In Chauncey’s words, the rise of the term “gay” represented “a reorganization of sexual categories” that involved a “transition from an early twentieth-century culture divided into ‘queers’ and ‘men’ on the basis of gender status to a late-twentieth-century culture divided into ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ on the basis of sexual object choice” (22). Chauncey describes Gay New York as a history of how gay men manage to create a culture despite oppression and also of “the boundaries that distinguished the men of that world from other men in a culture in which many more men engaged in homosexual practices than identified themselves as queer” (23).

By examining this, Chauncey is not just describing how the gay subculture defined itself, but also how the “normal world” set “boundaries.” In addition, Chauncey argues that concepts like “homosexual” versus “heterosexual” started as ideas among the general public before the elite embraced them. Specifically, he argues against the idea “that nineteenth-century medical discourse constructed the ‘homosexual’ as a personality type” and suggests instead that “homosexual” first appeared in popular culture (26). Also, the idea of the “fairy” persisted longer in working-class than in middle-class culture, while the images of the “fairy” and “homosexual” coexisted. Chauncey adds that writing a book about both lesbians and gay men would have been impossible without doing a disservice to one or the other, but Gay New York looks at the history of gender in ways still relevant to the history of the lesbian subculture. He chose New York City as the focus of his study because it “may well have been prototypical, for the urban conditions and cultural changes that allowed a gay world to take shape there” (28-29), though he notes that these changes and conditions may have unfolded in other major cities as well.