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For a long time Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 was on my to-read list. While I was in Florida I popped into the used bookstore within walking distance of Mom's - gotta love college towns - and there it was. It's out of print, so your best bet is Amazon or Powell's.
It grew out of a Ph.D. thesis, and it reads that way unfortunately, but I found the content absolutely fascinating. The popular mythology about and among GLBT people is that back then we were invisible to the world at large and isolated from each other. Gay New York explodes those myths using diaries, police records, the records of private moral-enforcement groups, and the gay & black press.
Commercial establishments that catered to us were always subject to eventual closure, but there was always something. Bars intended to be gay or just taken over by gays, bath houses, and drag balls that drew thousands. We even got exploited by mainstream theater toward the end of Prohibition as theater producers looked for new angles to compete with movies. It all reached a fever pitch around 1930 as Hollywood beckoned.
You know the idea, prevalent in other parts of the world, that you're not gay unless you're on the receiving end of things? That used to be prevalent at least among working-class people here until the middle of the 20th century. The idea that any man interested exclusively in men is a "homosexualist" started with 19th-century medical literature, and was a middle class notion until very recently.
We were visible in the form of flamboyant "fairies", but the ideas that we were born as we are and that we deserve the same rights of assembly, employment, etc. as everyone else were something hardly anyone was pushing. "Coming out" meant coming out to other gay people, not the world at large. The idea that we are people, dammit, is definitely post-Stonewall.
Sadly, lesbians were mostly out of scope for this book (although we did run some of the best hangouts in Greenwich Village in the 20's). The author points out that we were less mobile & less visible than men back then.
Why did it all end? Let's see: in the early 30's you had the perfect storm of a corrupt mayor in a tough reelection fight, a homophobic mainstream newspaper campaign, a famous shooting (Prohibition meant most gay bars were run by the Mafia - even the Stonewall was), and the need (?) to market the repeal of Prohibition with tough new liquor laws enforced by homophobic bureaucrats from outside New York City.
In other words, when we became visible for the first time, most New Yorkers did what they've always done: they lived with it. Some of them even enjoyed it. But Middle America, including the NY state capital, Albany, freaked right out and eventually got their revenge. They couldn't even stand mentions of us in mainstream media, much less our own.
Could it happen again? I like to think not - they play "YMCA" at major league baseball games - but I won't feel truly safe until homophobia gets treated the way racism does today, the way GLBT-ness used to be treated: like the memetic plague that it is. I wish I could buy all the homophobes plane tickets to Seattle and introduce them to David Serkin-Poole, cantor at Temple B'Nai Torah, or any of a zillion other decent queer people.
Then we can work on kink & poly. This is going to take a while, isn't it?
It grew out of a Ph.D. thesis, and it reads that way unfortunately, but I found the content absolutely fascinating. The popular mythology about and among GLBT people is that back then we were invisible to the world at large and isolated from each other. Gay New York explodes those myths using diaries, police records, the records of private moral-enforcement groups, and the gay & black press.
Commercial establishments that catered to us were always subject to eventual closure, but there was always something. Bars intended to be gay or just taken over by gays, bath houses, and drag balls that drew thousands. We even got exploited by mainstream theater toward the end of Prohibition as theater producers looked for new angles to compete with movies. It all reached a fever pitch around 1930 as Hollywood beckoned.
You know the idea, prevalent in other parts of the world, that you're not gay unless you're on the receiving end of things? That used to be prevalent at least among working-class people here until the middle of the 20th century. The idea that any man interested exclusively in men is a "homosexualist" started with 19th-century medical literature, and was a middle class notion until very recently.
We were visible in the form of flamboyant "fairies", but the ideas that we were born as we are and that we deserve the same rights of assembly, employment, etc. as everyone else were something hardly anyone was pushing. "Coming out" meant coming out to other gay people, not the world at large. The idea that we are people, dammit, is definitely post-Stonewall.
Sadly, lesbians were mostly out of scope for this book (although we did run some of the best hangouts in Greenwich Village in the 20's). The author points out that we were less mobile & less visible than men back then.
Why did it all end? Let's see: in the early 30's you had the perfect storm of a corrupt mayor in a tough reelection fight, a homophobic mainstream newspaper campaign, a famous shooting (Prohibition meant most gay bars were run by the Mafia - even the Stonewall was), and the need (?) to market the repeal of Prohibition with tough new liquor laws enforced by homophobic bureaucrats from outside New York City.
In other words, when we became visible for the first time, most New Yorkers did what they've always done: they lived with it. Some of them even enjoyed it. But Middle America, including the NY state capital, Albany, freaked right out and eventually got their revenge. They couldn't even stand mentions of us in mainstream media, much less our own.
Could it happen again? I like to think not - they play "YMCA" at major league baseball games - but I won't feel truly safe until homophobia gets treated the way racism does today, the way GLBT-ness used to be treated: like the memetic plague that it is. I wish I could buy all the homophobes plane tickets to Seattle and introduce them to David Serkin-Poole, cantor at Temple B'Nai Torah, or any of a zillion other decent queer people.
Then we can work on kink & poly. This is going to take a while, isn't it?
