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essinink 's review for:
“Identities are always relational, produced by the ways people affiliate themselves with or differentiate themselves from others -- and are marked as different by others.” [p273]
I broke some personal reading rules with this book. I don’t write in my books (except my cookbooks), but if you flip through my copy of Gay New York, you’ll find notes in the margins and a handful of underlines. It’s big enough, even as a paperback, that I couldn’t reasonably maneuver it and a notebook around my cat, but even if that had been an option I’m not sure I would have bothered.
Chauncey steamrolls over the idea that gay men before Stonewall lived lives that were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Armed with a mountain of research drawn from court dockets, arrest records, vice society records, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, tabloids, and interviews, he unearths a colorful history smoothed-over by post-WWII cultural retaliation, making it clear that New York City was home to a complex and sophisticated gay world in the first half of the 20th century.
The past is a funhouse mirror, filled with things at once familiar and strange. Chauncey opens by cautioning the reader against assuming modern sexual identities can simply be transposed into the past, and spends the first four chapters laying groundwork for male (homo)sexual practices of the early 20th century. From there, he moves on to the development and politics of the gay community in New York City. From drag balls to house parties, saloons to bathhouses, Chauncey’s history explores the ups and downs of gay life across class boundaries, including the careful double-life kept by many middle-class gay men.
There’s too much content to easily summarize, but the drag balls were a particularly interesting highlight. Performatively transgressive, these well-attended and well-publicized events reinforced the existing social order; two men might dance together if one was dressed as a woman, or two women if one was dressed as a man. Long common in places like Harlem and Greenwich village, they even spilled into Times Square in the 1920s, marking an era of contextual pseudo-tolerance that peaked with the Prohibition Era’s ‘pansy acts’ in public cabarets.
Chauncey closes with the repeal of the Volstead Act, which ushered in a new era of state-regulation and surveillance. Vaguely-worded alcohol laws provided necessary pretense to shut down establishments found to serve ‘disorderly’ (oft read: gay) patrons, regardless of behavior or gender expression. By the mid-1930s most drag balls had been ended, and in the decades following WWII the cultural shift became a riptide, drowning out the memory of New York’s once-colorful gay street life. The most ‘obvious’ expressions of sexual or gender nonconformity were driven out of the public eye; most surviving gay bars through the 1960s were run by the Mafia. (A quick search indicates that the Stonewall Inn was one of these.) Gay culture did not end (far from it) but its visible expressions were effectively driven from public spaces.
Confronted with such a plethora of information, I found myself stopping often to reassess my historical framework. In the process of excavating the history of New York City’s gay world, Chauncey brings to the reader’s attention the great complexity of evolving social, cultural, and sexual norms of the city throughout the first half of the 20th century. The push-pull tension between different classes, races, and subcultures is vibrantly alive in his analysis.
Ironically enough, but perhaps not surprisingly, the best records for his research were kept by anti-vice societies such as the Committee of Fourteen, who would send undercover ‘agents’ to spy on locations and persons suspected of immoral activity (including one poor soul whose job it was to stand behind a bathroom grate and observe the occupants).
Chauncey is careful never to claim gay life was easy, or even ‘open’ in the same sense as today, but he categorically rejects the concept of the ‘isolated, invisible, and self-hating’ gay man, and then provides a mountain of evidence to support his objection. The world of Gay New York is one of infinite intersectional complexity, deepening, rather than reducing my understanding of the forces that drive urban sociological tensions, both in the past and today.
This is not popular nonfiction. Chauncey’s argument is built on the informational equivalent of bedrock, or perhaps a nuclear bunker, which has the dual-effect of rendering it both difficult to counter (good), and tiring to read (not so good). It’s fine taken in small doses, but readers should be aware that exhaustive research makes for exhausting reading.
There’s so much I want to say about this book, but I know I can’t do it justice, so instead I’ll end with this: while I have to knock off a star for readability, this was hands-down one of the most thorough and broadly insightful works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
---
ETA: An updated version of this book was published on 04/09/2019. There don't appear to be any major changes or additions, but Chauncey does include a preface that explains the shortcomings of his original publication. This preface includes both notes on the political environment in which he was writing and restrospective application of the then-nascent field of transgender studies to his research.
I broke some personal reading rules with this book. I don’t write in my books (except my cookbooks), but if you flip through my copy of Gay New York, you’ll find notes in the margins and a handful of underlines. It’s big enough, even as a paperback, that I couldn’t reasonably maneuver it and a notebook around my cat, but even if that had been an option I’m not sure I would have bothered.
Chauncey steamrolls over the idea that gay men before Stonewall lived lives that were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Armed with a mountain of research drawn from court dockets, arrest records, vice society records, journals, scrapbooks, newspapers, tabloids, and interviews, he unearths a colorful history smoothed-over by post-WWII cultural retaliation, making it clear that New York City was home to a complex and sophisticated gay world in the first half of the 20th century.
The past is a funhouse mirror, filled with things at once familiar and strange. Chauncey opens by cautioning the reader against assuming modern sexual identities can simply be transposed into the past, and spends the first four chapters laying groundwork for male (homo)sexual practices of the early 20th century. From there, he moves on to the development and politics of the gay community in New York City. From drag balls to house parties, saloons to bathhouses, Chauncey’s history explores the ups and downs of gay life across class boundaries, including the careful double-life kept by many middle-class gay men.
There’s too much content to easily summarize, but the drag balls were a particularly interesting highlight. Performatively transgressive, these well-attended and well-publicized events reinforced the existing social order; two men might dance together if one was dressed as a woman, or two women if one was dressed as a man. Long common in places like Harlem and Greenwich village, they even spilled into Times Square in the 1920s, marking an era of contextual pseudo-tolerance that peaked with the Prohibition Era’s ‘pansy acts’ in public cabarets.
Chauncey closes with the repeal of the Volstead Act, which ushered in a new era of state-regulation and surveillance. Vaguely-worded alcohol laws provided necessary pretense to shut down establishments found to serve ‘disorderly’ (oft read: gay) patrons, regardless of behavior or gender expression. By the mid-1930s most drag balls had been ended, and in the decades following WWII the cultural shift became a riptide, drowning out the memory of New York’s once-colorful gay street life. The most ‘obvious’ expressions of sexual or gender nonconformity were driven out of the public eye; most surviving gay bars through the 1960s were run by the Mafia. (A quick search indicates that the Stonewall Inn was one of these.) Gay culture did not end (far from it) but its visible expressions were effectively driven from public spaces.
Confronted with such a plethora of information, I found myself stopping often to reassess my historical framework. In the process of excavating the history of New York City’s gay world, Chauncey brings to the reader’s attention the great complexity of evolving social, cultural, and sexual norms of the city throughout the first half of the 20th century. The push-pull tension between different classes, races, and subcultures is vibrantly alive in his analysis.
Ironically enough, but perhaps not surprisingly, the best records for his research were kept by anti-vice societies such as the Committee of Fourteen, who would send undercover ‘agents’ to spy on locations and persons suspected of immoral activity (including one poor soul whose job it was to stand behind a bathroom grate and observe the occupants).
Chauncey is careful never to claim gay life was easy, or even ‘open’ in the same sense as today, but he categorically rejects the concept of the ‘isolated, invisible, and self-hating’ gay man, and then provides a mountain of evidence to support his objection. The world of Gay New York is one of infinite intersectional complexity, deepening, rather than reducing my understanding of the forces that drive urban sociological tensions, both in the past and today.
This is not popular nonfiction. Chauncey’s argument is built on the informational equivalent of bedrock, or perhaps a nuclear bunker, which has the dual-effect of rendering it both difficult to counter (good), and tiring to read (not so good). It’s fine taken in small doses, but readers should be aware that exhaustive research makes for exhausting reading.
There’s so much I want to say about this book, but I know I can’t do it justice, so instead I’ll end with this: while I have to knock off a star for readability, this was hands-down one of the most thorough and broadly insightful works of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
---
ETA: An updated version of this book was published on 04/09/2019. There don't appear to be any major changes or additions, but Chauncey does include a preface that explains the shortcomings of his original publication. This preface includes both notes on the political environment in which he was writing and restrospective application of the then-nascent field of transgender studies to his research.