The Boys of Fairy Town Quotes

“The men who trusted Kinsey—a hard-won trust that he achieved only because one man vouched for him to another, who did the same to someone else, who followed suit—unwittingly became part of a movement that was only just beginning, one that was little more than a hope for some, such as Henry Gerber two decades earlier, but a seeming impossibility to most. However small and obscure it was in the beginning, it would help to stoke the fires of the sexual revolution that would explode in New York in 1969 in what has been called the Stonewall riots and in the gay liberation movement that the riots spawned. It would be too late for Raymond Carlson and hundreds of other men like him who, caught up in the insidiousness of the time, took control of their destiny in the only way available to them. It also would be too late for those who, like Ralph Wright, charged into marriage to hide their sexuality. Others, like the men of the Rush Street boardinghouse, would make due, devise strategies that would allow them to survive the very real threats that surrounded them—threats not only to their bodies but also to their sense of self—while keeping what we think of as their sexual identity intact. Chicago was full of such men, all heroes and virtually all forgotten now or, if remembered at all, relegated to a footnote to the narrative of the period in which they lived and loved and over which, in time, they triumphed.”
― Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century

“there seemingly is not race distinction between them.” But African Americans weren’t the only disenfranchised people these men noticed. Vollmer recalled “a preponderance of Jews and the Latin Nationalities” among the revelers, adding, “Many of the men are of Polish blood.” With more than a tinge of disdain, he concluded from his observation that “homosexuality is no respecter of races.”
― Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century

“Young, socially liberal women whom society called flappers and their male counterparts, labeled sheiks, crowded the cabarets where jazz was performed.”
― Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century

“Like the sodomite, “normal” men looked and acted like any non-queer man in Chicago, and so they too fit seamlessly into, and went unrecognized by, society. The investigator did learn, however, that they had a way of recognizing each other, often wearing red neckties to signal to others in the know that they were queer.”
― Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century

“She—Sometimes you appear really manly and sometimes you are effeminate. How do you account for it? He—I suppose it is hereditary. Half of my ancestors were men and the other half were women.”
― Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century