Stud

Architectures of Masculinity

Joel Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367445379
  9780367445355
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000023145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Originally published in 1996, Stud: Architectures of Masculinity is an interdisciplinary exploration of the active role architecture plays in the construction of male identity. Architects, artists, and theorists investigate how sexuality is constituted through the organization of materials, objects, and human subjects in actual space. This collection of essays and visual projects critically analyzes the spaces that we habitually take for granted but that quietly participates in the manufacturing of "maleness." Employing a variety of critical perspectives (feminism, "queer theory," deconstruction, and psychoanalysis), Stud's contributors reveal how masculinity, always an unstable construct, is coded in our environment. Stud also addresses the relationship between architecture and gay male sexuality, illustrating the resourceful ways that gay men have appropriated and reordered everyday public domains, from streets to sex clubs, in the formation of gay social space.

Outings

Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’: Gay Uses of the Streets

GEORGE CHAUNCEY

There is no queer space; there are only spaces used by queers or put to queer use. Space has no natural character, no inherent meaning, no intrinsic status as public or private. As Michel de Certeau has argued, it is always invested with meaning by its users as well as its creators, and even when its creators have the power to define its official and dominant meaning, its users are usually able to develop tactics that allow them to use the space in alternative, even oppositional ways that confound the designs of its creators.¹

1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. pp. xviii-xx, pp. 29–42.

Nothing illustrates this general principle more clearly than the tactics developed by generations of gay men and lesbians to put the spaces of the dominant culture to queer purposes. Struggles over the control of space have been central to gay culture and politics throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, after the upheavals and urban cultural experimentation sparked by Prohibition (1920–33) had allowed gay life to become remarkably integrated into the broader cultural life of New york (and other cities) and visible in its “public” spaces, a series of measures were enacted to exclude homosexuality from the public sphere—the city’s cafés, bars, streets, and theaters—where authorities feared it threatened to disrupt public order and the reproduction of normative gender and sexual arrangements. For the next thirty years, many of the most important sites of public sociability, including bars, restaurants, and cabarets, were threatened with closure if they allowed lesbians or gay men to gather openly on their premises; and men and women risked arrest if they carried themselves openly as homosexuals on the streets of the city or even at gay parties held in “private” apartments. Even before formal anti-gay regulations were enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, the social marginalization of homosexuals had given the police and popular vigilantes even broader informal authority to harass them. The formal and informal prohibition of gay visibility in the spaces of the city had a fundamental influence on the development of gay cultural practices.²

2 For a more fully developed analysis of the changing regulation of gay life in the early twentieth century, see my Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New york: Basic Books, 1994), from which this essay is drawn.

This essay examines the tactics used by gay men in early twentieth-century New york City to claim space for themselves in the face of the battery of laws and informal practices designed to exclude them from urban space altogether. One of my purposes is to challenge the myths that govern most thinking about gay life before Stonewall, particularly the myths that gay people before the 1960s inevitably remained isolated from one another, invisible to straight people and to other gay people alike, or confined to the most marginalized and hidden of urban spaces. But analyzing the queer uses of urban space also highlights the degree to which struggles over the production and control of space played a central role in shaping gay cultural practices more generally—and the degree to which the struggles over queer uses of the city were shaped by and influenced broader class, gender, and racial/ethnic struggles over urban space. Analyzing the role of the production and contestation of queer space in the everyday life of gay men with a high degree of historical specificity also has implications for the theorization of urban space in general. Most importantly, it demonstrates the degree to which the boundaries between spaces defined as “public” and “private” are socially constructed, contingent, and contested; and it illuminates the range of forces—informal as well as official, oppositional as well as dominant—seeking to exert definitional and regulatory power over the production of urban space.

To many New yorkers in the early twentieth century, gay men seemed to be an almost ubiquitious presence in the streets, parks, and beaches of the city. In 1904, the bodybuilding publisher Bernarr Macfadden denounced “the shoals of painted, perfumed, Kohl-eyed, lisping, mincing youths that at night swarm on Broadway in the Tenderloin section, or haunt the parks and 5th avenue, ogling every man that passes and—it is pleasant to relate—occasionally getting a sound thrashing or an emphatic kicking.” In the following decade another New yorker declared that “Our streets and beaches are overrun by… fairies,” and in the 1920s and 1930s one of the city’s tabloids regularly published cartoons that caricatured the supposed efforts of fairies to accost sailors and other men on Riverside Drive.³

3 Bernarr Macfadden, Superb Virility of Manhood: Giving the Causes and Simple Home Methods of Curing the Weaknesses of Men (Newyork: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1904), pp. 175–176; E. S. Shepherd, “Contribution to the Study of Intermediacy,” American Journal of Urology and Sexology 14 (1918), p. 242.

As the comments of observers attest, gay men claimed their right to a place in the city’s public spaces. It was in such open spaces, less easily regulated than a residential or commercial venue, that much of the gay world took shape. The city’s streets and parks served as vital meeting grounds for men who lived with their families or in cramped quarters with few amenities, and the vitality and diversity of the gay street scene attracted many other men as well. Streets and parks were where many men—“queer” and “normal” alike-went to find sexual partners, where many gay men went to socialize, and where many men went for sex and ended up being socialized into the gay world.

Part of the gay world taking shape in the streets was highly visible to outsiders, but even more of it was invisible. As Macfadden’s comment makes clear, gay men had to contend with the threat of vigilante anti-gay violence as well as with the police. In response to this challenge, gay men devised a variety of tactics that allowed them to move freely about the city, to appropriate for themselves spaces that were not marked as gay, and to construct a gay city in the midst of, yet invisible to, the dominant city. They were aided in this effort, as always, by the disinclination of most people to believe that any “normal-looking man could be anything other than “normal,” and by their access, as men, to public space.

Although gay street culture was in certain respects an unusual and distinctive phenomenon, it was also part of and shaped by a larger street culture that was primarily working-class in character and origin. Given the crowded conditions in which most working people lived, much of their social life took place in streets and parks. The gay presence in the streets was thus masked, in part, by the bustle of street life in working-class neighborhoods. Gay uses of the streets, like other workingclass uses, also came under attack, however, because they challenged bourgeois conceptions of public order, the proper boundaries between public and private space, and the social practices appropriate to each.

CRUISING THE CITY’S PARKS

The city’s parks were among the most popular—and secure—of New York’s gay meeting places, where men gathered regularly to meet their friends and to search (or “cruise,” as they called it by the 1920s) 4for sexual partners.⁴ One of the ostensible purposes of parks, after all, was to offer citizens respite from the tumult of city life, a place where citizens could wander aimlessly and enjoy nature. This provided a useful cover for men wandering in search of others.⁵ Few gay men stood out among the other couples, families, and groups of friends and neighbors who thronged the parks, socializing, playing sports, and eating their picnic suppers.

4 In a 1929 letter that also confirms Fifth Avenue’s significance as a cruising area, Parker Tyler wrote: “Took a walk on Fifth Ave. last Sunday night, just to see what it was like after over a year of absence…. Some ‘cruisers’ but all pretty stiff except undesirables.” (Tyler to Charles Henri Ford, 9 July 1929; see also his letter of 4 July 1929)

5 On the middle-class ideology of parks and the class conflict generated over their use, see the masterful study by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven: yale University Press, 1991), pp. 7–61; and Roy Rosenzweig, “Middle-Class Parks and Working-Class Play: The Struggle over Recreational Space in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1870–1910,” Radical History Review 21 (1979), pp. 31–48.

Cruising parks and streets provided many young men and newcomers to the city with a point of entry into the rest of the gay world, which was sometimes hidden from men looking for it by the same codes and subterfuges that protected it from hostile straight intrusions. “It was quite a handicap to be a young guy in the 1920s,” remembered one man, who had moved to New york from Michigan. “It took an awfully long time to learn of a gay speakeasy.”⁶ The parks and streets were perhaps the most common place for newcomers to meet men more familiar with that world, and these men became their guides to it. A German Jew who immigrated to New york in 1927, for instance, recalled that within two or three weeks of his arrival, “I found my way to Riverside Drive and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.” He still knew almost no one in the city, but his cruising quickly remedied that. “It was 1927, about two or three days before the big reception parade for Lindbergh after he came back from his flight to Paris, and the bleachers were already up there. I met a man there and we started talking. He was a Harvard man and taught ethical culture. And that was the best contact I made, he and I had a wonderful affair.” The affair lasted two years, the friendship many more, and his Riverside Park pickup became his most important guide to the new world.^{7 [see FIGURE 1]}

[FIGURE 1] Soldiers and Sailors Monument Riverside Drive

Photos courtesy of Gay Beach Collection, National Museum and Archive of Lesbian Gay History.

6 Leo, interview by author.

7 Jeffrey Gottfried, interview by author. Rene Hubert, also an immigrant German Jew, had a similar experience ten years later, when he arrived in New york with no job and knowing no one. While sitting in Central Park, he was approached by a man who subsequently invited him to a series of parties where he met other gay men. Within a year he had developed an extensiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication Page
• Preface to the 2021 Reissue
• Introduction
• Home
• Homework
• Bathroom
• Gym
• Outings
• List of Contributors