Reply to 3 posts

Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago & London: Univ of Chicago Press, 1999)

CHAPTER FIVE

known them since they were undergraduates at Ohio State, before they had become a couple. Phyllis had written her master's thesis on the first lesbian homophile organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, and we knew she'd be game for this adventure. Our only concern was that Kelly (now the founder and continuing force behind the lesbian mothers' group Momazons) was at that time quite closeted, despite her relationship with Phyllis. We weren't sure how she'd feel about appearing in Athens as the embodiment oflesbianism and about dealing with a fearful family.

But go they did. The lawyer and a couple of family mem­ bers gathered at the house to make sure Phyllis and Kelly didn't cart off anything inappropriate. The high point of the day came when Kelly was sorting through McDonald's record collection, putting anything lesbian or gay in one pile and all the rest in another. When she came to a Frank Sinatra record, she inadvertently put it in the gay stack. One of the family members gasped in horror. "Oh no, not him!" he exclaimed. Kelly quickly moved it to the correct pile, though she was tempted to leave it where it was.

As it turned out, Marge McDonald's diaries proved a treasure, since they recorded her first forays into the lesbian community of Columbus in the 1950s. Her chronicle evokes the still-untold story of the spread oflesbian bars and lesbian communities all across the country in the decades after the Second World War. And the tale of her bequest to the Lesbian Herstory Archives reminds us how important such stories are and how much communities are still central in the gay and lesbian worlds of the present.

In this chapter I turn to the emergence in the first half of the twentieth century of what we can begin to call lesbian and gay communities. In big cities across the nation, men and women with same-sex desires knew where to gather,

<!.102»

Marge McDonald, ca. 1952. Marge McDonald Collection. .

© LHEF, Inc. Courtesy of the Lesb1ank Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New Yor .

CHAPTER FIVE

used certain terms to identify themselves, and developed codes of dress and behavior that marked them as partic­ ular kinds of people. But it was not just in the notorious locations that women and men were able to meet others with similar sexual desires. Communities sprang up in the most unlikely places. What is perhaps most remarkable is the variety of competing conceptions of who was "queer;' to say nothing of the toleration of same-sex sexuality in certain social contexts. In the building of what came to be named "lesbian" and "gay" communities we can see the origins of the modern world we live in. But it is just as important to notice the differences.

A Different World

The time has come to talk vocabulary. By the seventeenth century the word "gay" had come to connote illicit pleasure, and by the nineteenth century it specifically referred to pros­ titution. Like so many other words used to describe men with same-sex desires, "gay" moved from the sexual underworld in which such desires might be fulfilled to subcultures that fostered the building of identities based on same-sex love and desire. "Gay" was in use as a code word for same-sex sexuality in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century-perhaps earlier, as Walt Whitman's correspondence suggests-but it did not come into the vocabulary of a wider public until the 1950s. The terms most in use across different ethnic groups were "queer" and "fairy" and a host of words with more precise meanings. African Americans said "fag­ got;' "bulldagger;' "ladylover;' "stud;' or "in the life." 1 Words changed their exact meanings over time and in the mouths of different kinds of people. What is important is that we avoid thinking that all the terms used by people in the past are synonyms for what we today mean by "gay" and "lesbian:'

«104»

COMING TOGETHER

We must listen carefully and try to understand exactly what

people were saying. Identity as a "queer" emerged in the context of participat­

ing in a community of like-minded individuals. In cities all across the nation by the early twentieth century, a man with determination could find the place to meet the right people. In Newport, Rhode Island, the social center was the YMCA. The "gang;' as they called themselves, took steps to come together beyond seeking out sex. They lived or visited at the Y, ate dinner or threw parties there. According to Edward Stevenson, who published a study titled The Intersexes in 1908, "Certain smart clubs are well-known for their homo­ sexual atmospheres" in New York, Boston, Washington, Chi­ cago, New Orleans, and Saint Louis, sometimes passing for a "literary-club;' an "athletic society;' a "dramatic-society;' or a "chess-dub;' so no "outsider easily suspects what really

goes on:' 2

The Vice Commission of Chicago, formed to study fe­ male prostitution, reported in 1911 on the existence there of "groups" and "colonies" of men interested in same-sex sexual activity. These men cruised the streets, gathered in particular boardinghouses,worked in certain professions, and attended theater performances that appealed to their tastes. In the 1920s and 1930s, sociologists at the University of Chicago, indulging their passion for immersing themselves in and recording urban life, left us a rich record ofsame-sex commu­ nities. The faculty sent students flocking to dance halls and cabarets to observe the doings of working-class city people, and there they encountered men in search of men as well as men in search of women. A true/false test in a 1938 sociology course even posed the question: "In large cities, homosexual individuals tend to congregate rather than remain separate from each other:' Based on what the sociologists had observed in the streets of the city, the correct answer was "true."3

«105»

CHAPTER FIVE

The areas where identifiably "queer" men hung out be­ came the places where other men interested in meeting them knew they could go. In Chicago that area was the Near North Side, where single men and women lived in rooming houses and patronized restaurants, saloons, and theaters that catered to their tastes and their limited means. Boardinghouses and "black and tan" cabarets that attracted an interracial following also flourished on the South Side. Private parties, news of which spread through public gathering places, added to the number of spots where queer men could find one another. One man explained that he "came out ... when I began to go to parties." Even the workplaces, such as department stores and offices, which attracted more than their share ofgay male employees, could function as a gay social world. One man who had moved to Chicago knowing he would not be lonely there "looked around the office and said to the manager, 'Why all the fellows are sissy around here.' "4 What one of the sociolo­ gists called the "social world of the homosexuals, where they have their particular status, participate in common activities, where they can express themselves in their particular fashion;' was central to the creation of queer identities. 5

In New York by the end of the nineteenth century, the Bowery was home to a number of "resorts" or saloons that catered to a flamboyant "fairy" subculture. A center of com­ mercialized vice, the Bowery was an immigrant working-class neighborhood where the inhabitants rubbed shoulders, on the streets and in drinking establishments, with "boys [who] have powder on their faces like girls and talk to you like disorderly girls talk to men;' as a middle-class investigator reported in 1901. 6

By the 1920s two New York neighborhoods-Greenwich Village and Harlem-had come to be home to large and visible same-sex enclaves. Greenwich Village, at the turn ofthe century an Italian immigrant neighborhood, attracted "ho­

«106»

COMING TOGETHER

hemian" artists of all ethnic groups in the 1900s. What hostile observers called the "long-haired men" and "short-haired women" of the Village advocated social and sexual experi­ mentation, creating a favorable environment for those with same-sex desires. Unconventionality, including the realm of sexual behavior, became the trademark of the Village, and in the years after the First World War its reputation drew both curious sightseers and individuals looking for tolerance. Speakeasies and tearooms catering "to the 'temperamental' element" flourished; one of these, the Flower Pot, was a "gay and impromptu place where excitement reigned from nine in the evening until the wee hours of the morning.''7 What distinguished such locales from the earlier fairy resorts of the Bowery was that straight and gay people mingled in a

middle-class milieu. But the truly "mixed" social scene, in every sense of the

word, could be found in Harlem, Manhattan's major cross­ class black neighborhood. There African American men and women, denied entry to establishments in other parts of the city, built a vibrant nightlife that attracted straight and gay, black and white, women and men. As an observer described one nightclub, "Every night we find the place crowded with both races, the black and the white, both types of lovers, the homo and the heterosexual:'8 The dazzling talent of the artistic flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance spread word of gay and lesbian love through such diverse channels as the literature of Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, the drawings of Bruce Nugent, and the raunchy blues lyrics of Bessie Smith. Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem

described a Baltimore bar where

all around the den, luxuriating under the little colored lights, the dark dandies were loving up their pansies. Feet tickling feet under tables, tantalizing liquor-rich giggling, hands busy up above.

«107»

CHAPTER FIVE

"A Spot in the Village;' illustrating the reputation

of Greenwich Village in the interwar years. From

Broadway Brevities, June 6, 1932, reproduced in George Chauncey Jr., Gay New York.

"Honey gal! Honey gal! What other sweet boy is loving you

now? Don't you know your last night's daddy am waiting for you?"9

The blues publicized not only the existence of homosex­ uals but a language to describe them. Lucille Bogan's "B.D. Women Blues" sang of "bulldagger" women, and "Sissy Man Blues" gave voice to their male counterparts. Although such songs poked fun at "mannish-acting" women and "lisping, swishing, womanish-acting" men, they also served to identify and name individuals who built an identity around same-sex desire, and some of them even celebrated the gay lifestyle. IO The terms "bull dagger" -derived from "bulldyker;' referring to women "diked out" in male attire-and "sissy" called attention to the cross-gender aspects of queer life. And in fact many of the great women blues singers-Gladys Bentley,

«108»

COMING TOGETHER

Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Alberta Hunter­ were themselves lesbian or bisexual.

A variety of locations, including private and semipri­ vate parties, provided a safe place for lesbians and gay men to meet in Harlem. The "rent party;' which offered music, dancing, and the chance to buy bootleg alcohol in return for an admission fee, allowed the host to pay the rent and brought together people with similar sexual interests, not all of whom knew the host. Mabel Hampton, an African American woman who lived in Harlem in the 1920s in her teens, described such parties: "You buy your drinks and meet other women and dance and have fun . . . . And most of them was good-lookin' women too ... the bulldykers used to come and bring their women with them, you know. And you wasn't supposed to jive with them, you know .... They

«109»

CHAPTER FIVE

danced up a breeze."11 Those interested in same-sex sexual encounters also attended the lavish parties thrown by A'Lelia Walker, the millionaire daughter of Madame C. J. Walker, who had made her fortune marketing her hair-straightening process. "Buffet flats;' private apartments where rooms could be rented by the night and where after-hours entertainment sometimes featured live sex acts, also might cater to a gay clientele. More public were speakeasies and costume balls, which attracted a racially integrated crowd of both hetero­ sexuals and homosexuals. One African American investiga­ tor hired by the Committee of Fourteen, an antivice group, described the scene in a basement speakeasy in 1928. One woman "was dancing indecently with a man .... Several of the men were dancing among themselves. Two of the women were dancing with one another going through the motions of copulation .... I also observed two men who were dancing with one another kiss each other, and one sucked the other's tongue:' 12

The onset of the Great Depression brought an end to the Harlem Renaissance. Still, a gay and lesbian subculture remained, albeit one less open and less racially mixed. What is remarkable about Harlem in the 1920s is that same-sex desire and love served as a dividing line that sometimes put black and white individuals on the same side.

Women with same-sex desires had fewer options for public socializing, although by the 1920s communities be­ gan to form in the furnished-room districts of Chicago and "bulldaggers" found a place in Harlem. Bisexual African American blues singer Ma Rainey immortalized State Street, on the South Side of Chicago, in such verses as

Goin' down to spread the news

State Street women wearing brogan shoes

«110»

COMING TOGETHER

Mabel Hampton, 1918. © LHEF, Inc. Courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York.

There's one thing I don't understand

Some women walkin' State Street like a man.

"Box-Car Bertha;' a female hobo who left an autobiography for posterity, mentioned "tea shops and bootleg joints on the near-north side" of Chicago where such women might gather, and other commentators observed private parties and women living together in the bohemian parts ofthe furnished

«111»

CHAPTER FIVE

room district.13 As in the dance hall subculture, women with "women sweethearts;' some of whom worked as prostitutes, mixed easily in a world ofcommercialized and open sexuality. A sociology student saw twenty-five "queer gals;' many in drag, at the Bally Hoo Cafe in Chicago in 1933.14 By the late 1930s, Mona's in San Francisco had made the move from its bohemian beginnings to its new guise of a lesbian nightclub where lesbian waitresses sang show tunes and male impersonators camped it up. 15

In all these places, and in others like them in cities across the nation, men and women met one another and built communities. As in Newport, Rhode Island, some level of gender crossing played a central role in attracting the at­ tention of potential partners, even if the medical definitions of gender inversion did not. The Newport gang sometimes dressed in drag and adopted women's names, and even in public they might be identified as feminine. One of the naval investigators noted that "it was common knowledge that if a man was walking along the street in an effeminate man­ ner, with his lips rouged, his face powdered, and his eye­ brows pencilled;' he was a "fairy." From inside the commu­ nity, a member pointed to less flagrant signs: acting "sort of peculiar; walking around with his hands on his hips;' a "not masculine" manner, an "expression with the eyes and the gestures:' 16

In Chicago too, effeminacy made men with same-sex desires recognizable: "In this community there is a large number of men who are thoroughly gregarious in habit; who mostly affect the carriage, mannerisms, and speech of women ... ; who lean to the fantastic in dress and other modes of expression, and who have a definite cult with regard to sexual life . . . . They have a vocabulary and signs of recognition of their own."17 Chicago physician William Held described a saloon in which dean-shaven male "perverts"

«112 »

COMING TOGETHER

flirted, used female names, and chatted "in a pronounced girl­ like manner." 18

Some Newport gang members reported effeminate ten­ dencies from an early age, but it was the community they encountered that gave meaning to such feelings or personal styles. One man, identified by the gang not only as a "queer" but specifically as a "pogue;' reported beginning to use makeup and taking a female name "because the others did" these things.19 In Chicago, a second-generation Polish Amer­ ican who took part in the bohemian community learned about "queers" from novels and then heard from a friend that "fairies" hung out at the Michigan Avenue bridge. Curious, the young man hurried down to bridge, where he met a man who introduced him to his circle of friends. Seeing that they wore flashy clothes and cosmetics and acted in feminine ways, he learnep to imitate them as he moved into "queer life:'20

Fairies in the Bowery dressed in women's clothing only in secure Bowery resorts or for the well-publicized drag balls that flourished in cities like New York and Chicago. But they signaled their interest in other men by dressing "as fancy and flashy as a youth" could dare, wearing such items as white kid gloves, red neckties, suede shoes, pegged trousers, or­ especially bold-green suits. 21 Fairies not only wore makeup but plucked their eyebrows and lightened and waved their hair, and they "swished" when they walked.

Approaching the link between sexuality and gender from another side, one Chicago man described his attempt to alter his sexuality, to "try to be a man;' by lowering his voice, walking differently, and smoking cigars after ten years of effeminacy. 22 Another dropped the fairy role from his daytime life in order to hold down "a man's job;' although he took on some effeminate characteristics in the evening when he socialized with his queer friends. Although not all men who had sex with other men adopted effeminate characteristics,

«113»

CHAPTER FIVE

"Swish;' a cartoon illustrating the effeminacy of the fairy, from Broadway Brevities, June 6, 1932.

Reproduced in George Chauncey Jr., Gay New York.

"going about with the belles;' as one man put it, was what marked one, to himself and to others, as "queer."23

But the existence of a community of men who expressed their same-sex desire through effeminacy did not mean that this world was wholly separate from the larger community. In fact, men interested in sex with men mingled with men seeking women in the dance halls, bars, and other hang­ outs frequented by working-class young people. In 1912 an antivice crusader in New York observed two fairies who went by the names Elsie and Daisy hanging out at a dance hall with a group ofwomen and borrowing their powder puffs. 24 Straight men interviewed by the Chicago sociologists commented on

<U14»

COMING TOGETHER

the presence of queers; one man expressed his dislike for men who "when they shake hands with you ... have that peculiar look in their eyes that have a wanting feeling of expression:'25 Although some straight young men preyed on fairies, rob­ bing, beating, or even raping them, fairies had a niche in working-class culture. An African American man described moving easily between the two worlds, having sex with both women and men. "Some of ... [the men] you cannot tell from a woman if they never have whiskers or mustash," he added.26 Like the "straight" men in Newport who had sex with the queers, men in the eroticized environment of the dance hall subculture might engage in sexual acts with individuals of the same or different sex.

Outside the dance halls too, men sought out sex with men without any consequences for their identity. When the fleet sailed into New York harbor, sailors might patronize female prostitutes or they might rush to the Times Square Building, known, as the owner of a newsstand there reported in 1927, as "the place to go if they want to meet fairies." 27 One Chicago man described, with a certainty that belied some anxiety, getting a blow job from a drag queen in 1933: "To myself I know in my own heart that I am not a real bitch, because a woman thrills me. A man will do when there is nothing else in the world, preferably a she man, because he is more womanly or closer to a woman."28 Ifany man in the bachelor subculture of sailors, hoboes, and laborers might be tempted to have sex with another man, and to consider his masculinity enhanced by doing so, some men seemed to prefer such relationships. These men went by the names "husbands;' as in Newport, "wolves;' or "jockers:' But even "wolves;' who sought out sex with younger and slighter "punks;' "lambs," or "kids," were not the same as "fairies" because they were not effeminate.29

In New York, the way people-both participants and observers-thought about these interactions seems to mirror

<!.115»

CHAPTER FIVE

customs in the Mediterranean world from which many im­ migrant New Yorkers came. Italian neighborhoods sheltered "fairy resorts" far more frequently than did Jewish sections of town, and fairy folklore rated Italian men, along with Irish and African Americans, more likely than Jewish men to be interested in same-sex encounters. This may be because of the large number of single men among Italian immigrants, the traditional sex-segregation ofltalian immigrant commu­ nities, and the fact that southern Italian culture in particular categorized sexual interactions according to gender and sex­ ual role rather than the sex of the partners. 30

In addition to housing fairies, "normal" men who had sex with them on occasion, and "wolves" who sought out such sexual contacts, big cities were also home to men who preferred sex with other men, saw themselves as different because of it, but did not express this difference through effeminacy. In New York these men identified as "queers" (note the contrast with what this label meant in Newport),

«116»

COMING TOGETHER

Paul Cadmus, The Fleet's Inf 1934. Oil on canvas, NH 92806-KN. Courtesy of the Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.

and most were middle class. They shunned the flamboyance, effeminacy, and publicity of the fairy. As one man put it in the mid- l 930s, "I don't object to being known as homosexual, but I detest the obvious, blatant, made-up boys whose pub­ lic appearance and behavior provoke onerous criticism:'31 "Queer" men themselves on occasion used feminine names and adopted styles of dress and behavior that were, if not outright effeminate, certainly not traditionally masculine. But they tended to do these things in private. Jeb Alexander, the Atlanta-born man we met as he initiated his long relationship with his lover Dash, threw parties at his Washington apart­ ment during the 1930s and 1940s. His friends sometimes wore women's clothing and engaged in what Alexander described disapprovingly as "effeminate carrying on:' 32 Such disavowal of public, or all, effeminacy was very much a class difference.

We can also get a glimpse into middle-class gay worlds through the life of Richard Cowan, who graduated from

«117»

Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In! 1934

CHAPTER FIVE

Cornell University in 1933 and went to live in Boston at the invitation of Stewart Mitchell, an editor of the literary magazine the Dial. Mitchell rented Cowan an apartment, and Cowan wrote in his diary that "I love S. very much;' but he added that he was "incapable of being true to anyone person." He recorded his encounters with young men he met at the Symphony or the Copley Theatre or the Boston Public Garden:

Met a Dartmouth boy on the Common one night after the Sym­

phony. His name was Jack .... He was a bit obvious but I liked

him. He claimed he loved me etc. Stayed at his home one Saturday

night while visiting some friends of his I met George, a Dartmouth

boy .... He called me the next day & I went to the movies, with

him-and that started that. I think I really did love him at first and he-very passionately-said he loved me. 33

Clearly, middle-class men used cultural institutions such as the theater to meet comrades with similar sexual desires.

Yet the class (and age) differences between fairies and queers did not mean the creation of entirely separate so­ cial worlds. In the YMCA, residential hotels, restaurants, baths, and other public places, gay worlds developed that sometimes transcended class barriers. Middle-class queer men, like working-class fairies, sometimes sought out "nor­ mal" working-class men for sexual trysts. Charles Tomlinson Griffes, a modernist composer of the early twentieth century, had a thing for Irish policemen. In the 1910s he recorded in his diary his approaches and progress: "I talked for about 20 minutes with the policeman stationed at 42-5 in the evenings. He remembers me this time and was so respon­ sive I asked him to go to the theater with me:'34 Men like Griffes found themselves attracted to such men's traditional masculinity, but they also found workingmen responsive to their advances.

«118»

COMING TOGETHER

The real class difference seemed to be between the working-class male view of sexuality and that of middle-class straight men, who had increasingly come to mark their mas­ culinity through their sole attraction to women. No longer working with their bodies, subjected to employee status in white-collar occupations, and faced with women's demands for greater social and political power, middle-class men felt increasingly cut off from other forms of expressing virility. In this context, not only the "homosexual" but the "heterosex­ ual" too came into being.

The visibility of same-sex sexuality and the lack of struc­ tural barriers between gay and straight worlds was most vivid in the world of entertainment. In the early 1910s, a national enthusiasm for female impersonation reached its height with the popularity of Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator with impeccable offstage masculine and heterosexual credentials. Eltinge's performances conjured up not the fairy but the gender equivalent of the minstrel in blackface: "Just as a white man makes the best stage Negro;' one critic wrote, "so a man gives a more photographic interpretation of femininity than the average woman is able to give:'35 And in fact Eltinge's audiences and supporters clung to what separated him from "the usual creeping male defective who warbles soprano and decks himself in the frocks and frills of womankind:' Yet despite Eltinge's emphasis on his difference from the "freaks" who "always flock together" and were " 'crazy about him;" that they besieged him at the stage door makes it clear that they did not necessarily respect the distance he tried to maintain. 36

By the 1920s, cross-dressing entertainers with more du­ bious reputations began to surface in New York. In Harlem, "Gloria Swanson;' a graduate of the Chicago drag scene, and Gladys Bentley, a tuxedo-dad and top-hatted lesbian singer of impromptu raunchy lyrics, helped to make drag, if not respectable, at least a little less remarkable. Drag as entertain­

«119»

CHAPTER FIVE

ment led to the largest annual gathering of gay people in New York, the Hamilton Lodge Ball or Masquerade and Civic Ball, known by the late 1920s as the "Faggots' Ball." Attracting black and white spectators from across the city, the ball featured "effeminate men, sissies, wolves, 'ferries; 'faggots; the third sex, 'ladies of the night; and male prostitutes ... for a grand jamboree of dancing, love making, display, rivalry, drinking and advertisement."37 As a "pansy craze" hit New York in the early 1930s, setting off an avalanche of entertainment featuring the kind of effeminate men that had set Eltinge's teeth on edge, the ball attracted nearly seven thousand to prance, dance, or gawk.

That respectable citizens of Harlem and other parts of New York flocked to the Faggots' Ball to take in the lavish costumes and elaborate impersonations does not, of course, mean that same-sex sexuality or gender transgression met with total approval. The antivice crusaders who went out to investigate the goings-on at queer places, as their often­ hostile descriptions make clear, hoped to do away with the gay subcultures of Chicago, New York, and other cities. The authorities raided establishments known to harbor same-sex subcultures, arrested cross-dressed people or those caught in compromising positions, and censored plays, films, and novels that dealt with same-sex sexuality. The: Lafayette Baths in New York suffered a police raid in 1929; a visiting Ger­ man tourist reported that "various people were struck down, kicked, in short, the brutality of these officials was simply indescribable."38 In 1920 two women wearing men's clothes were arrested in Boston. As the Boston Post reported the incident, the women "said they were out on a 'lark; " but the police took them to the House of Detention, "where they were told that they would have to stay until they procured women's clothes to wear away."39 The Captive, a play that opened in New York in 1926 and dealt with what the New

«120»

Gladys Bentley, ca. 1920s. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER FIVE

York Times critic called "a twisted relationship" between two women, provoked public discussion of censorship, the arrest of the producer and cast, and eventually the passage of a bill in the New York state legislature outlawing the depiction of "sex degeneracy, or sex perversion:'40 Things were far from idyllic. Still, the Faggots' Ball and pansy craze gave greater public visibility to people with same-sex desires than most people today expect to find in the past.

The Great Depression, which began in 1929, and the end of Prohibition, which had fostered a flouting of law­ abiding, middle-class codes of behavior in socializing and sexuality as well as drinking, pushed the homosexual culture out of the public eye, at least in New York. Homoerotic entertainment passed out of vogue, and the mixing of gay and straight that had characterized speakeasy life came to an end. In San Francisco, in contrast, where the tourist industry touted the city's reputation for sexual license, gay men and lesbians continued to mingle with adventurous tourists who took in the drag performances at Mona's and Finocchio's.41 The repeal of Prohibition in states (like New York) that established liquor control boards meant more, not less, government control of drinking establishments, and ironically this would give rise to the exclusively gay bar.42 These changes set the scene for what we have come to think of as "traditional" gay and lesbian life before the late 1960s.

Urban developments in cities such as Chicago and New York do not, however, cover the whole story of identities and communities in the early twentieth century. We simply have more evidence of what went on in places where observers­ often, as we have seen, hostile ones-plied their trade. In particular, they tell us little about the lives of women, provid­ ing only a glimpse of those who ventured out into the social spaces still controlled to a large extent by men. To flesh out

«122»

COMING TOGETHER

the picture, we turn to some unlikely places far away from big-city life.

Ladies' Afternoon at the Sauna

Salt Lake City, Utah, stronghold of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, which publicly excommunicates homosexuals (despite the histories of Evan Stephens, Louie Felt, and May Ander­ son), sheltered an unseen lesbian community in the 1920s and 1930s. We know of it only because a member interviewed her friends, wrote up her analysis, and left the manuscript to her partner's daughter, a scholar interested in the his­ tory of sexuality.43 Twenty-five women, all of them white, educated, and middle-class and most from Mormon homes, lived discreetly as lesbians in this community. They knew gay men, and together with them many socialized in a bohemian literary club, although they also interacted with heterosexual couples. The main social characteristic that distinguished them from comparable nonlesbian women was that most worked outside the home. Although three were married to men and two were housewives in lesbian relationships, the rest worked as teachers, nurses, waitresses, or secretaries or in other predominantly female jobs.

No doubt the lingering tradition of romantic friendship protected them to some extent from exposure as lesbians. The author of the manuscript, a photographer, lived in the 1920s with a social worker. They made what she described as an "ideal home" and found social acceptance. This was a gendered relationship. One took responsibility for the "male part ofthe household;' the other "delighted" in being a "happy wife at home."44 Gender differences emerged in other ways as well. Perhaps in part because the author was much influenced by the sexologists' ideas about inversion, the manuscript described half of the women in the community as having

«123 »

CHAPTER FIVE

a masculine build and ten as having a "masculine psychol­ ogy," meaning interest in sports and preference for feminine women as lovers. In contrast, the gay men these women knew merited disapproval for their "attempts at femininity;' their "mincing gait;' and their ability and desire to "sew, cook, and keep house."45

These lesbian women in Salt Lake City strove for re­ spectability, voicing disapproval of sexual expression. They socialized at home and protected their secret, although several longed for the life of San Francisco and went to bars when they could afford to visit there. When Radclyffe Hall's famous lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness appeared in 1928, to great controversy, they shunned the very idea of publicity. Fearing exposure, they lived as conventionally as possible, kept their heads down, and apparently succeeded in avoiding denunciation in a Mormon stronghold.

The life story of Julia Boyer Reinstein, a lesbian born in 1906 who taught school in Deadwood, South Dakota, and Castile, New York, during the 1920s and 1930s complicates the picture of lesbian worlds in the years before the Second World War. For Boyer Reinstein lived as a lesbian among lesbian friends, did not hide her relationships from her fam­ ily, yet did not name or talk about her sexual identity or publicly reveal her interest in women. She was "out," but only in private, with her lovers, suggesting how differently some lesbian communities developed in contrast to public male worlds. 46

Boyer Reinstein was the daughter of divorced parents, and when her father first reconnected with her when she was in college, he recognized right away that she was a lesbian. In 1928 she went to live with him in Deadwood, where he had had great financial success. She threw herself into affairs with women when she traveled with her father. Amazingly, when she went out to nightclubs with him and his business

<U24»

COMING TOGETHER

associates, she would always find a woman with whom she would have sex. (He too always seemed to find willing female partners.) "Invariably, there was a lesbian among them .... I would team up with her:'47 Some ofthem were married, some not. About one, Boyer Reinstein commented, "She was very much a lady. You would never have known it to look at her that she was a lesbian. Never known it-until she went to bed."48

Boyer Reinstein also flirted with and engaged in sexual relationships with young women at home in Deadwood, but it was not until she fell in love with another teacher and formed a serious relationship that she felt she had found a truly supportive lesbian world. She and her partner Dorothy became friends with what she called an "odd" couple, the daughter ofa local doctor and the masculine female friend she had brought home with her from college. These friends had set up housekeeping together and ran a hair salon, where they put in a sauna and began sponsoring a women's afternoon one day a week.

Such a world could exist, as in Salt Lake City, because the women "were not too obvious;' because they were "re­ spectable," and because they had families to protect them. Boyer Reinstein commented that the doctor's daughter's part­ ner was "too obvious, almost;' so "there were eyebrows raised" when she first arrived in Deadwood.49 Boyer Reinstein sus­ pected that people "talked about us behind our backs" and noted that her mother occasionally got upset over snide com­ ments. But on the whole everyone-including the women liv­ ing with woman lovers-ignored the existence oflesbianism even though they knew about it. These lesbians themselves never talked about it-not only to show that they could be trusted to keep quiet in public, but also because they liked their ambiguous status and had no desire to be publicly la­ beled a "kind ofperson:' But failing to call themselves lesbians, in either private or public conversation, did not change the

«125»

CHAPTER FIVE

fact that they found erotic and emotional satisfaction in their relationships with women.

These peeks i~to private lesbian worlds-afforded only because of the accident of an inherited manuscript and the good fortune of a willing interviewee-suggest that all over the ~ount~y there were women and men living in same-sex rel~tlonships and building worlds that supported them in their love and desire. Mary Casal, whom we have met as ~he pseudonymous author of an autobiography published m 1930, told of a series of same-sex relationships from her upstate New York girlhood on, culminating in her love for a woman she called Juno. Casal and Juno believed that "we wer~ the only ones in the world who cherished such a love" until an actress who sometimes played male roles introduced them to "a most astonishing personality-a little woman with sh?rt, black ha!r tinged with gray, wearing heavy white silk paJamas, smokmg, and very hospitable."

She looked us through, and I knew at once that she too knew! ...

At last, and too late, did I find that I was not a creature apart as I

had always felt. How much suffering would have been saved me and what a different life I would have led ifl had know 1.n ear ier that we are not all created after one pattern nor according to any set rules but that each is as "normal" as any other!SO '

Experiencing the same joy at discovering, through the work of Edward Carpenter, that he was not alone, a Detroit man ~ave t~a~ks: Writing Carpenter in 1921 for freeing him from the hmitat10ns of my hitherto paradoxical and inexpli­ cable nature:' ~o~' th~ "long cruel years" of "the most rigid state of repression, this man put into words what same-sex love and desire meant to him:

Oh what a sweet and sacred thing it is to love and to be loved!-to

hold within one's arms the visible representation of that beautiful

«126»

COMING TOGETHER

spark which daily seems to grow brighter and more wondrous, to

remove one's thoughts from the realm of self and let them dwell

rapturously and selflessly upon some beloved companion, to press

his glorious body close to one's own, to feel the warm, red blood

pulsing deliciously through both, to feel his soft arms lie caressingly

about one's shoulders, to pillow one's head upon his breast, to

touch one's lips to his hair, his eyes, his lips! Is Paradise more

wonderful?51

Similarly, Jeb Alexander, living in Washington in the 1920s in a circle of friends who shared his same-sex desires, described a day of picnicking on the cliffs below Great Falls with his

beloved Dash:

We wandered the woods, observing the flowers and trees and climb­

ing rocks. I am passionately in love with Dash. I believe that if I

could have him with me I could be happy the rest of my life on

a desert isle. Just the two of us alone. I feel that I should like to

be father, mother, brother, wife, friend, and lover to him all at the

same time. 52

If the fairies of the big cities led the way in constructing a public homosexual persona, they were not the only ones

building communities.

The lesbian worlds of Deadwood and Salt Lake City may have been a far cry from the cruising grounds ofNewport, the Near North Side and South Side ofChicago, the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Harlem, or the Boston Public Garden, but in all these locales, as well as in cities and towns across the country, individuals with same-sex desires were finding each other and forming communities. Depending on a whole raft of factors, but especially class, they defined themselves in different ways, marking their gendered presentation, their preferences for particular sexual acts, and their desire for same-sex love and

«127»

CHAPTER FIVE

intimacy. Like the "straight" men of Newport or the "wolves" of New York, married middle-class women might have sex with a woman like Julia Boyer Reinstein yet not think of themselves as lesbians. The association between sexual acts and identity was complex, contradictory, and changing. The work of the sexologists might have had an impact on those, like Jeb Alexander, who read Havelock Ellis and took on them­ selves the concept of "inversion;' but many different ideas about same-sex sexual acts rubbed metaphorical shoulders in the bustling streets of urban neighborhoods.

In a variety of locales, middle-class men and women seemed to shun public expressions of a "gay" or "lesbian" identity. Samuel Kent and Arthur Green in Newport differ­ entiated between their "Christian Brotherhood" and queer desire. Middle-class men in New York embraced the term "queer" but rejected fairy effeminacy as too visible and too vulgar. Middle-class women in Salt Lake City and Deadwood emphasized respectability and discretion, in contrast to the cross-dressed working-class women in Chicago and New York who ventured into bars and dance halls.

All these different kinds of communities depended on access to social spaces, whether the Long Beach Bathhouse, the YMCA, the Michigan Avenue bridge, "fairy resorts," drag balls, rent parties, street corners, bohemian restaurants, pri­ vate homes, or the sauna in Deadwood on "ladies' afternoon." The existence of heterosexual bohemian or artistic commu­ nities served as the wedge for men and women seeking same­ sex contacts. From the artistic world of Greenwich Village to the institutions of the Harlem Renaissance to the bohemian literary club of Salt Lake City, gay men and lesbians built new worlds alongside heterosexual women and men experi­ menting with social and sexual freedoms. And in this context, people with different sexual desires mixed far more easily than we might expect.

«128 »

COMING TOGETHER

Much of this activity-the formation of different kinds of identities and the building of diverse same-sex communi­ ties-was new in the early twentieth century. Yet the salience of gender differences for the expression of same-sex sexuality, so crucial in the past, remained. The fairies who took women's names, the queer men camping it up in their private lives, the working-class women in men's clothes, and the middle­ class lesbian housewives all continued to associate their sexual desires with gendered appearances and behaviors. In this sense these early twentieth-century communities sat on the cusp of old and new ways of expressing same-sex desire.

«129»