Jan 7, 2009
Making use of oral histories, diaries, police records, newspaper accounts, and other archival material, George Chauncey has written a compellingly readable, densely packed social history of pre-World War II urban gay life. His is an overwhelmingly revisionist account of the way several generations of gay men came to understand their identity, forge a community, and conduct their social lives. Whereas it has been generally assumed that prior to the birth of the gay rights movement (launched by the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots) gays lived in deeply closeted existence, isolated from each other and invisible to the rest of society, Chauncey demonstrates that long before mid-century a complex, amazingly visible, and continually changing gay male world had taken shape. Neighborhood enclaves developed in Greenwich Village, Times Square, and Harlem; gay saloons and bathhouses, cheap cafeterias and elegant restaurants flourished; widely publicized dances and elaborate drag balls were regularly held and even straight spectators flocked to them. Gay men carved out public and private space for themselves in parks and on beaches, in books and on stage. What Chauncey does is to chart the geography of this newly recovered gay world and recapture its culture and politics.
In addition to the colorful tours of Bowery bars (where perhaps surprisingly the most obvious gays were working-class men, largely African Americans and Irish and Italian immigrants) and uptown speakeasies (where rouged “fairies” mixed easily with straight patrons), Chauncey points out how remarkably integrated gay men were within the dominant straight culture. Despite a degree of persecution, gays were simply a part of the urban scene to many New Yorkers of the time. Only later, after the height of gay visibility and openly gay entertainers in the 1930’s, did anti-gay ordinances, enforcement of sodomy laws, censorship, and violence bring an end to many gay events and arenas. The criminalization of gay life, Chauncey argues, constructed the closet and forced gays into it.
At the same time, notions of sexual identity became more fiercely designated, gay and straight became more polarized and were seen exclusively in terms of sexual rather than social behavior. Prohibition and its repeal, the Depression, and a backlash against earlier “moral laxity”—all these helped to reshape notions of masculinity and carve new cleavages between gay and straight people. “In important ways,” Chauncey writes, “the hetero- homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.” This is only one such fresh and provocative insight that Chauncey’s pioneering ethnographic study presents. As a social analysis of rich but unexplored terrain, GAY NEW YORK is an invaluable and inspiring resource.
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