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

by Michael Bronski

The social purity movement’s impulsive regulation of sexual desire and promotion of healthy bodies through gender, class, and racial segregation had an unintended consequence: the use of single-gender residences and recreational venues as meeting places for homosexual women and men. George Chauncey charts how the YMCA, especially through the 1920s and 1930s, became a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing. He notes that by the 1930s some gay men joked that YMCA meant “Why I’m So Gay.”17 The YMCA, and other all-male facilities that promoted socializing and health through (nude) swimming, calisthenics, and other forms of physical exercise, were logical places for homosexual men to meet one another. Historian John Donald Gustav-Wrathall describes how the friendships promoted by the YMCA “had an embodied element: a delight in one another’s physical proximity, an awareness of each other’s bodies, a sort of excitement that overtook them at the prospect of spending time together.”18