Honorg Gee Chncey, a Scholar of Gay History | Columbia Magaze

Contents:

• GAY NEW YORK: GENR, URBAN CULTURE, AND THE MAKG OF THE GAY MALE WORLD 1890-1940
• GEORGE CHAUNCEY'S GAY NEW YORK: A VIEW FROM 25 YEARS LATER
• GAY NEW YORK : GENR, URBAN CULTURE, AND THE MAKGS OF THE GAY MALE WORLD, 1890-1940
• HONORG GEE CHNCEY, A SCHOLAR OF GAY HISTORY
• GAY NEW YORK
• GAY NEW YORK
• GAY NEW YORK: 1930–1970

GAY NEW YORK: GENR, URBAN CULTURE, AND THE MAKG OF THE GAY MALE WORLD 1890-1940

By the 1890s, genr non-nformg people had ma the Bowery a center of queer life, and “by the 1920s they had created three distct gay neighborhood enclav Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Tim Square, each wh a different class and ethnic character, gay cultural style, and public reputatn” (3).

Lgbtq-history655 reviews964 followersApril 20, 2020Wrten rponse to the notn that the 'closet' always has existed for Amerin gay men and lbians, as well as the ncept that genr and sexualy always have been distct domas of personhood, Chncey's Gay New York argu that gay people were not isolated, visible, and self-hatg durg the first s of the twentieth century. Chncey brilliantly tails how a diverse range of genr/sexual inti -existed wh each other wh New York durg the perd, all the while trackg how "homosexual" and "heterosexual"—the two sexual inti that would overpower and erase the rt after the war—rose to promence whe middle-class society.

Chncey has jt fished discsg the many ruals by which the sailors, dockworkers, hobo/seasonal laborers and homosocial immigrants of early 1900s New York affirmed manls and male stat (you're physilly strong; you do hard and dangero work; you domate sexual partners, be they female prostut or the pated rent boys loungg every saloon; you drk a lot, and buy drks for your pals); he's about to lnch his argument that our ironclad hetero-homosexual barism evolved as the only way for the skbound, domtited middle class men to fe manls. ”Homosexuals occupied a visible niche the street life of immigrant neighborhoods, the wateront saloon i of the “bachelor subculture, ” the Storyvill of the Sportg Life—While a few words ed by gay men were ma-up terms that had no meang standard English or slang, most gave standard terms a send, gay meang. Gay self referred to female prostut before referred to gay men; tra and trick referred to prostut’ ctomers before they referred to gay men’s partners; and cisg referred to a streetwalker’s search for partners before referred to a gay man’s—and were policed, surveilled and supprsed alongsi the other forms of rough mascule amement—prostutn, drkg, gamblg, burlque shows—gredient to that world.

GEORGE CHAUNCEY'S GAY NEW YORK: A VIEW FROM 25 YEARS LATER

[“Condns about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, June 6, 1917, ” box 25, Commtee of Fourteen papers, New York Public Library:]The story of one black gay man who lived the basement of a roomg hoe on Wt Fiftieth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenu, 1919 suggts the latu—and limatns—of roomg hoe life.

” The mastreamg of workg-class sociabily meant the heightened visibily of gay men, long faiar figur on the streets and vville stag of rougher neighborhoods (and on the park bench and rooftops where workg-class upl, straight and gay, sought a ltle darkened privacy away om their crowd fay tenements); and wh the wang of the Harlem craze, the “Negro vogue” for elaborate plantatn- and jungle-themed floor shows, nightspots began phg a new transgrsive novelty, the “pansy show.

Prohibn spread rather than eradited saloon culture, mgled rather than separated gay and straight, bourgeois and prole; the post-repeal New York State Liquor Authory was more effective regulatg social life, and led the charge excludg homosexualy om the mastream entertament world which had bee so visible durg the 1920s. My outle of this first volume is muddled and skimpy, and n’t possibly suggt the vast human edy Chncey has unearthed—Harlem’s popular and highly veloped drag circu, or the bold pickup subculture worshipfully voted to policemen, or the eply discreet gay middle class worlds; the subway washrooms, the social world of the baths, the hundreds of heartbreakg arrts, jailgs, beatgs and bashgs, the hilar rrponnce of Parker Tyler—Jul, beg dnk, mped wh them [a bunch of “straight” men:] too, and they tried to date him—even after feelg his mcle: he uld have laid them all low: really ’s as wi as this paper. Armed wh a mounta of rearch drawn om urt dockets, arrt rerds, vice society rerds, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, tabloids, and terviews, he unearths a lorful history smoothed-over by post-WWII cultural retaliatn, makg clear that New York Cy was home to a plex and sophistited gay world the first half of the 20th past is a funhoe mirror, filled wh thgs at once faiar and strange.

GAY NEW YORK : GENR, URBAN CULTURE, AND THE MAKGS OF THE GAY MALE WORLD, 1890-1940

So stead of 1940-1960 beg jt an extensn of an eterny of secrecy, was actually a perd of backlash and revigorated is why, when people tell me not to worry, history is on my si, gay marriage will eventually be legal bee we jt keep gettg more and more progrsive all the time, I snap at them. I regret nothgso this review is jt gog to be random quot, thgs i found tertg, and some mentaryntent/trigger warngs; queerphobia, homophobia, lbophobia, anti-gay vlence, misogyny, anti-sex work, uncensored e of anti-gay slurs/rogatory terms, uncensored e of racist slurs, racism, scriptns of queerphobia om police/doctors/legal profsnals, ableist language, g out/the closet— “g out” like a lot of mpy gay termology was a play on the language of women’s culture; referrg to butante balls where girls are troduced, or e out, to society. “the cril dience to which one me out had shifted om the gay world to the straight world”— “gay people the prewar years did not speak of g out of what we ll the ‘gay closet’ but rather of g out to what they lled ‘homosexual society’ or the ‘gay world, ’ a world neher so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidn as ‘closet’ impli.

HONORG GEE CHNCEY, A SCHOLAR OF GAY HISTORY

We should pay attentn to the different terms people ed to scribe themselv and their social worlds; gay men scribed livg a double life, puttg on/takg off a mask, wearg their hair up/lettg their hair down; movg between different personas and liv pendg on the type of people they were around. Gay origally referred to thgs pleasurable, then by the seventeenth century me to refer more specifilly to a life of “immoral pleasure and dissipatn, ” by the neteenth century; sex work, gay also referred to somethg brightly lored or someone showily drsed; th s adoptn by fairi and the associatn wh mp.

To classify their behavr and inti g the simple polari of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ would be to misunrstand the plexy of their sexual system, the reali of their lived experienc”queer— the queer folk of the gay subculture fed themselv by their difference om the domant culture. ” one man who moved om germany to new york 1927 remembered fairy and queer beg the most mon terms ed for and by gay new yokers— queer men’s efforts to fe an inty and cultural stance that distguish them om fairi and “normal” men alike marked the growg differentiatn and isolatn of sexualy om genr middle-class amerin culture.

?— self-intified queer men were so good at velopg s that only fellow queer men wh the subculture were telligible to that doctors at the turn of the century were baffled by their abily to intify each other and talked about like was a sixth 1900s “gaydar” rise— the late 1800s and early 1900s, terms for gay men om anti-gay folks cludg law enforcement and doctors were “generate, ” “pervert, ” “sexual pervert, ” and “vert. — effemate gay men were “tolerated bee they were regard as women, ” which meant they were “subjected to the same ntempt, vlence, and sexual exploatn regularly directed agast women” so “participatg the llective sexualizatn and objectifitn of women was one of the ruals by which they tablished themselv as men” women, amiright?

GAY NEW YORK

— gotta acknowledge how the homophobia scribed throughout the book is so pletely tied up misogyny/hatred for female sex work— misogynistic queerphob dismissed any woman who wanted to be treated equal to men as hairy, unattractive, man-like lbian weak— so what i’ve gathered is that heterosexualy basilly beme a ncept and inty bee straight men were so threatened by the existence of gay men and also women standg up for ’ve always been the weakt lk— “moral reformers” and police were so termed to ntrol female sex workers that they threatened hotels to banng women, only to be like “wa what” when those hotels started to bee hotspots for gay men lmaorandom— the stonewall rebelln was “wily and accurately regard as the begng of the lgbt movement, ” as opposed to the “talyst for a new wave of radil ancy gay polics.

— “gay men turned many rtrants to plac where they uld gather wh gay iends, gossip, ridicule the domant culture that ridiculed them, and nstct an alternative culture” so makg fun of heteros has always been gay culture— “greenwich village’s reputatn as a gay mec eclipsed harlem's only bee was a whe, middle-class world”— the thor says straight actors mimickg and ridiculg gay men by puttg on shows where they do drag or stereotypil thgs is the “gay equivalent to blackface” i— tailg queerbag and lack of (good) reprentatn the early we’re still alg wh that sh over a century ol ol olgenre-nonfictn physilly-own queer-as--fuck-you Author 1 book144 followersFebary 12, 2015This is one of the more remarkable history books I've read a while. I remend this book wholeheartedly to anyone lookg for a new take on urban, Amerin, genr, or gay reviews50 followersJuly 3, 2017this book is an encyclopedic, hugely rmative, and very accsible — the fact that took me two years to fd the time to fish is a reflectn of how by the last two years have been for me, not of the qualy of the book.

Asi om beg a fascatg and engagg read, ’s also a hugely valuable rource jt as a reference, for the breadth of sourc Chncey , lerary, legal, historil, amic, and, like, I hate New York Cy as much as the next Bostonian, but this book should be, like, basele required readg if you’re a gay guy the US. Through his analysis of muni some of New York’s most nsely populated gay neighbours, the Bowery, Harlem, Tim Square, and Greenwich Village, Chncey aptly monstrat how gay life was visible, tegrated wh mastream “normal” society, and not one marked by the now domant heterosexual-homosexual bary. My ia was that, if you were gay (and y, I know at the time the word gay had a different meang, but bear wh me), you were also probably fated to be unhappily married, or pletely alone; some exceptn were allowed to the very wealthy men that sheltered themselv some isolated paradise, far om the society ey and judgement.

GAY NEW YORK

But other than tidbs about the men, you will read also about the Harlem’s drag balls wh the qutsentia of Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hugh and Richard Bce Nugent, but also wh, among the attendants, Broadway gay celebri like Beatrice Lillie, Clifton Webb, Jay Brennan and Tallulah Bankhead (’s a cince that most of the nam are almost fotten? The ia that the early 20th century / late 19th century, people's sexual inti did not nform as neatly to our "homosexual" / "heterosexual" / "bisexual" tegorizatn scheme — havg a sexual relatnship (even an ongog one) did not necsarily endanger your stat as a "normal" man, so long as was done a specific way. For example, Chncey suggts that many aspects of how gays prented themselv society and acted amongst themselv had to do wh societal attus towards manls, rather than societal attus towards homosexualy; if this is the se, I would expect this to manift markedly differently among lbians of the era — which is unfortunately outsi of the spe of the book.

While gay people hardly had a walk the part the 1910s and 1920s, one would image, based on the polil and social ameworks of the pre-Stonewall s, that this would have been the worst time of all to be a member of "the third sex, " as they were often lled (along wh "verts, " suggtg that they weren't so much men terted men as secret women trapped a man's body, hence their sire for men). Through a thorough rearchg of police rerds, first-hand ttimony, newspaper reportage, and other primary sourc, Chncey mak the nvcg se that this was a rare time our untry's history where gay people were buildg their own society and culture amidst the domant society and culture wh a b ls difficulty than would e later years. Workg-class straights and gays felt they had ls to lose by aternizg wh one another than their middle-class equivalents), Chncy re-draws the '10s and '20s as a time of termglg, experimentatn, and even public performance the form of hugely attend drag balls and "sissy paras" that attracted tourists of all kds.

Chncey vers the mor of the time, the plac where gays and lbians met (not jt bars, but also feterias, tomats, parks, public rtrooms, and the newly popularized bathho), but also the shiftg attus both wh and outsi the gay and lbian cultur, the fluence of Prohibn (the mass crimalizatn of any form of night life ma a lot of straight people more cled to look on all sorts of vic they might not have otherwise been terted , such as drag balls), the changg attus of g immigrants, and the cultur surroundg Greenwich Village and Harlem, two of the most vibrant gay cultur New York.

GAY NEW YORK: 1930–1970

Both homosexualy and polygamy were targeted and attacked by the feral ernment on the grounds that each practice “disturbed public orr, ” but the former was only prohibed public whereas the latter was eradited graduate school now for Amerin Studi, I read the entire book for my troductn to the Lerature of Amerin Studi class.

" Whereas most Amerin histori foc on the visibily of a Gay muny wh the begng of the Gay Rights movement rponse to the Stonewall Rts of 1969, Gee Chncey crafts together evince om police rerds, medil studi, and rtoon imag om popular magaz and newspapers to monstrate how visible and well tablished gay muni New York were even before the 1960s.

Wh s first few years of publitn, Gay New York also llected a number of notable priz, cludg the Los Angel Tim Book Prize for history, the Frerick Jackson Turner Award om the Organizatn of Amerin Historians (OAH), the Lambda Lerary Award for gay men's studi, and the Merle Curti Award om the OAH.