There were corn-fed “pansies” from the Deep South breaking traditional folds mixing irrespective of race. There were the sophisticated “things” from Park Avenue and Broadway. There were the big black strapping “darlings” from the heart of Harlem. The Continent, Africa and even Asia had their due share of “ambassadors.” The ball was a melting pot, different, exotic and unorthodox, but acceptable.17
Gay historian George Chauncey presents a fascinating challenge to the assumption that all early gays were closeted, particularly those in big American cities like New York. Using police records, newspaper accounts, novels, letters, and diaries between 1890 and 1940, Chauncey counters “the myth of invisibility” and focuses on a thriving gay male scene in Harlem, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and Times Square neighborhoods in Gay New York.18 But only those men who assumed the sexual role and effeminate dress and mannerisms of women conceived of themselves as gay, or called themselves by the popular terms of the day: “fairy,” “pansy,” or “queer.” In that sense, gender identity was what determined sexual identity, including for those partaking in homosexual sex. As Chauncey argues, “The heterosexual-homosexual binarism that governs our thinking about sexuality today, and that, as we shall see, was already becoming hegemonic in middle-class sexual ideology, did not yet constitute the common sense of working-class sexual ideology.”19 In a sense, the campy femininity of those who identified as gay often acted to reconfirm the masculinity of “normal” men who had sex with them. Gay men wanting to attract suitors dressed and spoke in ways that were known to be gay, and hung out in parks, bathhouses, and pubs where they could attract others like themselves or working men and sailors on leave looking for sex.
Gays in working-class districts were accepted in some circles as part of city life, if not always respected or welcomed. They made easy targets for those looking to steal from or rough up someone whose outlaw status made it unlikely that they would go to the police, as hundreds of those suspected of being homosexual were arrested on charges of “indecency” every year. While it is difficult to speculate on how people attracted to those of the same sex perceived themselves in the era prior to the Second World War, evidence from diaries and novels seems to indicate that “‘Coming out’…was a lonely, difficult, and sometimes excruciatingly painful experience.”20 Even for those able to enjoy the urban gay subculture in their leisure time, coming out to families and coworkers most often meant risking social ostracism at least and the loss of a job in most cases. No wonder then that some of the liveliest gay American scenes were in places where men lived apart from the families and communities in which they were raised.
With the exception of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, most of the millions of immigrants arriving in New York from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere around the turn of the twentieth century did not come with their families. For example, 80 percent of Italians who came to the United States between 1880 and 1910 were men, most of them between fourteen and forty years old. By contrast, 42 percent of immigrant Jews were women and 25 percent were under fourteen years of age.21 The huge influx of single working men often settled in tenements and rooming houses, far from wives and family, if they had any. The New York Times Magazine referred to its hometown as the “City of the Single,” where during the first third of the twentieth century, 40 percent of the male population over fourteen was unmarried.22 The social, work, and home lives of working-class men were conducted in largely sex-segregated environments. Even most popular after-work entertainment in pubs was largely male, since aside from prostitutes women rarely frequented pubs in that era. The lack of available women, as well as the camaraderie of the workplace, the military, and the bars, led some of these men to experiment sexually with other men. During the gold rush of the late nineteenth century, a vast migration of miners and speculators streamed into San Francisco, already California’s biggest port city, creating huge concentrations of single migrant men passing through that city’s boarding houses. “In 1890, there was one saloon for every ninety-six residents, the highest proportion in the United States—double that of New York or Chicago,” explains one historian.23 In San Francisco as in New York, this large transient population was less likely to feel the constraints of social norms and rules.
Fear of public exposure and middle-class social convention drove thousands of professional men, often married with children, to have sex with working men in secret, on the “down low.” They went “slumming” on the Bowery, in Greenwich Village cafés, in San Francisco’s North Beach, and at the massive Harlem balls. Tragically, many of them blamed the more flamboyant gays and “mannish” lesbians for the hostility and fear mainstream society heaped on them. One gay man in the 1930s summed up the contempt of many “assimilated” middle-class gays this way: “As the cultured, distinguished, conservative Jew or Negro loathes and deplores his vulgar, socially unacceptable stereotype…so does their homosexual counterpart resent his caricature in the flaming faggot…. The general public [makes no distinction], and the one is penalized and ostracized for the grossness and excesses of the other.”24
The new openness of urban gay subcultures gave way to new theories of homosexual behavior. Doctors and sexologists advanced the notion that homosexuality was inherent in a person who had no power to change his or her nature. The widespread conception of gays as butch women and effeminate men ran so counter to the feminine and masculine ideals put forward in popular culture that ruling-class ideology embraced the unscientific conclusion that gays were suffering from a condition that set them apart from “normal” people. Gender-based biological explanations only served to confirm the inevitability of bourgeois gender norms and the nuclear family.
Many gays and lesbians themselves thought that their erotic urges and desires made them fundamentally different from heterosexual society. Writers such as Radclyffe Hall, who successfully fought the banning in the United States of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928 (it was, however, banned in Britain), popularized the medical definition of homosexuality as an inescapable, emotionally tormenting, natural deviance. The Well of Lonliness remains today one of the most widely read lesbian works of fiction, despite its anachronistic portrayal of sexual inversion. It was for years the only lesbian novel that demanded of the world, “Give us also the right to our existence!”25
The development of a visible and identifiable gay minority not only led to gay oppression but also to the possibility of organized resistance to it. Socialist Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx and a close friend of sexologist Havelock Ellis, wrote and spoke frequently to large crowds on women’s liberation and the rights of homosexuals. In Germany, Social Democratic Party (SPD) member Magnus Hirschfeld started the first gay organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, in 1897. Hirschfeld, with the support of the SPD, campaigned to repeal a law against men having consensual sex.26 During the failed German Revolution of 1918–1923, dozens of gay organizations and periodicals appeared calling for the liberation of homosexuals. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when all laws against gays were struck from the books, the German Communist Party argued, “The class-conscious proletariat…approaches the question of sex life and also the problem of homosexuality with a lack of prejudice.… [T]he proletariat…demands the same freedom from restrictions for those forms of sex life as for intercourse between the sexes.”27 The anarchist Emma Goldman went on a speaking tour throughout the United States in 1915 and defended homosexuality. Goldman commented to friends about the numbers of men and women who would approach her afterward to say that it was the first time they had ever heard about others like themselves.28
But for most gays and lesbians through the early twentieth century, life was filled with self-hatred and public condemnation. Few had the luxury of coming out for fear of losing jobs or the risk of becoming a social pariah. Pervasive legal and religious hostility and social restrictions sent many to seek a “cure” from doctors or to find a release from emotional strain and internalized self-loathing through alcohol and drugs. In a pattern that was to repeat itself later in the twentieth century, gay life in the United States was forced out of the public sphere