A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Cities, providing anonymity as well as diversity, promoted a new blurring of traditional ideas about privacy. George Chauncey charts the vital, public “fairy” culture that thrived in New York’s Bowery and Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s. As ideas of public space changed, homosexuals found public streets and parks useful for meeting one another. These public places became a space to enact formerly private aspects of life. Earl Lind, in his 1919 Autobiography of an Androgyne, describes at length an active homosexual culture, often centered around the role of fairy or pansy, in New York City earlier in the century. Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent wrote about public homosexuality in his 1932 novel Gentleman Jigger: In Washington Square he sat and watched the people pass. Lithe Italian hoodlums in exaggerated clothes creased to razor sharpness, with dark, sallow skin and oiled hair, strutting with clicking heels and a cocky grace. . . . Painted boys who ogled the hoodlums hungrily and lowered their eyes in false modesty and brazen coquetry as they passed, leaving trails of perfume. . . . A hoodlum would say “hello, sweetheart,” and then turn to his companions and pass some remark that would cause them to laugh loudly.38 This emerging street culture was present in New York’s Harlem and Greenwich Village, but also in other major cities. Public cruising often relied on sexology’s inversion stereotypes, which Nugent portrays here, to make same-sex desire leg...