A Response to "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940"

          George Chauncey's goal in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940, was to bring into the public consciousness a forgotten segment of American History, the history of a culture that was “not supposed to have existed”.¹ He confronts three widely held misconceptions of the homosexual culture in pre-World War II New York City, which form the modern conception until the latter half of the 20^th Century; homosexuals lived in isolation from one another, were invisible to the public sphere, and that they internalized a self-loathing and other negative attitudes from the mainstream culture.² His task is to show evidence that none of those were universally true.

          The means with which Chauncey sets about this task is to give the reader a glimpse into the “gay world” were modern readers might expect to find “the gay closet”.³ The gay world was a loosely connected web of social networks, each separable and distinct from one another,⁴ creating their own common folklore, unique linguistic style, and establishing their own (long running) cultural festivals.⁵ In drawing the map of the “sexual topography” of NYC, he leaves behind the familiar lines that now separate heterosexual from homosexual, by illustrating the extent, uses, and intermixed character of both the physical and social spaces at the time.⁶

          In order to offer evidence, this project necessitated the extensive use of primary sources, but the nature of the culture being studied offered “daunting” challenges that are not often found in more established areas of inquiry, like an inability to get federal funding, given the topic.⁷ The most extensively used sources were the archived field reports of agents for purity/anti-vice organizations, like the Counsel of Fourteen.⁸ Sometimes the investigations and court records are the only evidence outside accounts left decades later.⁹ One specifically difficult issue was that most organizations were generally disinterested in homosexuals at the time, and while agents did document what they found, it was mostly incidental.¹⁰ Being outsiders, Chauncey used those reports to confirm other sources, like newspapers and guidebooks, which were closer to the culture.¹¹ Additional sources included novels, books, films, and magazines.¹²

          However, these outsider views are mostly limited to confirming the existence and visibility of the gay culture. In order to counter the internalization myth, to get an understanding of the qualia, the “what it's like” of a given experience, there is no substitute for the diaries and interviews with gay men that lived through the period. For instance, it is likely impossible to find a credible outsider's perspective on “coming out” and learning about the gay world, but one gay man's testimony about his experience stands as a representative instance in the place of other records.¹³ Such accounts neither can, nor need to be qualified or substantiated by arrest records, newspaper articles, or hostile field reports. Another person's qualia, emotional reactions, and self-reflective views are beyond external legitimation. Nonetheless, a plethora of evidence of this type is necessary to establish a trend, and where possible, Chauncey provided as much as he could, but many surviving diaries rest in private collections, and available interviews often focused outside the scope of this work.¹⁴ It is likely because the culture being studied was supposed to be forgotten.

          It is not that the entire history of the turn of the last century was suppressed, as Chauncey made wide use of various secondary sources, which seemed an excellent wellspring of historical information about the period. These secondary sources provided him details about broader city life to contextualize homosexual behaviors, and they included seemingly mundane things, like the general cultural importance and purpose of parks.¹⁵ They even include several scholarly histories of the suppression of the homosexual culture, but stopped short of discussing homosexuals themselves because of the lingering effects of Cold War censorship.¹⁶

          Overall, this book can be characterized by Lockean “homesteading”, in a similar fashion to the common-law property rights tradition, but applied to scholarly works.¹⁷ Chauncey's work on this project opened up “unowned land” on the frontier of History and established a research “chain of title”.¹⁸ The placement of this homestead is adjacent to other histories that already have a title-record, and unlike many other historians that seek to prove that other academics somehow “got it wrong”, he need only borrow the products of their labors to fill in the wider, already researched histories surrounding his “new property”.

          When explicating the homosexual culture in Harlem, Chauncey had no need to reproduce the works that already recounted the establishment and prevailing cultural attitudes about Harlem as a black neighborhood; there were histories that already explored those questions.¹⁹ Instead, he need only consult the available secondary sources, and pull out of them the details necessary to understand what bearing they had on the gay community, like the tendency of whites to go “slumming” in African-American clubs, where they could cast off some of their social norms.²⁰ That point he uses to better understand how the environment allowed homosexuals to open a larger “space” for themselves in Harlem than was possible in other places.²¹

Bibliography:

Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940. New York: BasicBooks, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Raymond, Eric. 1999. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musing on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.

1 Chauncey 1994, 1.

2 Chauncey 1994, 2-6.

3 Chauncey 1994, 7.

4 Chauncey 1994, 3.

5 Chauncey 1994, 280-99.

6 Chauncey 1994, 23.

7 For funding see Chauncey 1994, ix. Otherwise, Chauncey 1994, 365.

8 Chauncey 1994, 367.

9 Chauncey 1994, 218.

10 Chauncey 1994, 369.

11 Chauncey 1994, 176.

12 Chauncey 1994, 450.

13 Chauncey 1994, 277-8.

14 Chauncey 1994, 369-72.

15 Chauncey 1994, 180.

16 Chauncey 1994, 8-9.

17 Raymond 1999, 76.

18 Raymond 1999, 76-7.

19 Chauncey 1994, 245.

20 Chauncey 1994, 246-7.

21 Chauncey 1994, 248-9.