Creating a Place For Ourselves

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories

Brett Beemyn, Brett Beemyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135222406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines gay life in the United States before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. Along with examining areas with large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., Birmingham and Flint, demonstrating that gay communities are truly everywhere. Contributors: Brett Beemyn, Nan Alamilla Boyd, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis, Allen Drexel, John Howard, David Johnson, Liz Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Tim Retzloff, Marc Stein, Roey Thorpe.

1. The Policed

Gay Men's Strategies of Everyday Resistance
in Times Square

George Chauncey

“Forty-Second Street was it when I was a teenager,” recalled Sebastian (“Sy”) Risicato, referring to the days in the late 1930s when he still lived with his parents in the Bronx but was beginning to explore New York's gay world. “Forty-Second Street then was our stamping ground,” he continued:

Closet queens, gay queens, black, white, whatever, carrying on in men's rooms, and in theaters. There was a Bickford's [cafeteria] there all night, and a big cafeteria right there on Forty-Second Street, one of those bright cafeterias where johns used to sit looking for the young queens. Lots of queens, everybody was painted and all, but they weren't crazy queens: drugs weren't big then. Forty-Second Street was like heaven—not heaven, [but] it was a joy to go there! And the sailors at the Port Authority, and the soldiers, and the bars…. During the war, all the soldiers and sailors used to go to the “crossroads” and you'd pick them up—Forty-Second Street and Times Square—and you'd take them out to the furnished rooms in the neighborhood: furnished rooms, and dumpy little hotels and Eighth Avenue rooms, which you'd rent for the night. There were a lot of gays living in that area, [too,] oh yes, people from out of town, and the boys whose fathers had pushed them out, with the tweezed eyebrows and beards…. You'd go down to Forty-Second Street and feel like, here's where I belong.¹

Forty-Second Street was almost heaven in the 1930s for the self-described “painted queens” and “street fairies” like Sy Risicato who were forced to escape the hostility of their own neighborhoods and families in order to forge a community of their own. The world they built in the furnished rooms, cafeterias, theaters, and streets of Times Square offered them enormous support and guidance in their rejection of the particular forms of masculinity and heterosexuality prescribed by the dominant culture. By the 1930s, they had made Times Square one of the most important centers of gay life—particularly white, working-class gay male life—in the city. But the heaven such men created seemed hellish to many of the other people who knew the Square. Risicato's coterie was a notable part of the “undesirable” element regularly implicated in the “decline” of the theater district by more respectable New Yorkers, who mobilized a variety of policing agencies and strategies to eradicate their presence from the Square. They also appalled many other gay men who frequented the theater district, particularly middle-class men more conventional in their behavior, who regarded the “fairies” as undesirable representatives of the homosexual world. These men constructed their own, more carefully hidden gay world in the theater district; but they, too, had to contend with the agencies of moral policing.

Ironically, the world gay men created in the 1920s and ’30s has remained even more invisible to historians than it was to contemporaries; most historians who have bothered to consider the matter have assumed that gay men remained isolated from each other and were helplessly subjected to the self-hatred preached by the dominant culture. This essay proposes an alternative view of gay life in these years. It examines the manner in which gay men, like other criminalized and marginalized peoples, constructed spheres of relative cultural autonomy in the interstices of an amusement district governed by hostile powers. It analyzes the stratagems different groups of gay men developed to appropriate certain commercial institutions and public spaces as their own and their complex relationship to the district's commercial entrepreneurs and moral guardians. A battery of laws criminalized gay men's association with each other and their cultural styles as well as their narrowly-defined “sexual” behavior. Their social marginalization gave the police even broader informal authority to harass them and meant that anyone discovered to be homosexual was threatened with a loss of livelihood and social respect. But the culture of the theater district, the weakness of the policers themselves, and the informal bargains struck between the policers and the policed— often with the mediation of certain commercial entrepreneurs, including those of the criminal underworld—enabled gay men to claim much more space for themselves than those obstacles implied.

Thus, while this essay surveys the ways in which the agents of the dominant cultural order sought to police the presence of gay men in the Square, it focuses on the informal strategies gay men developed to resist that policing on an everyday basis in the decades before the emergence of a gay political movement. Analyzing the emergence of a gay world in Times Square illuminates the character of urban gay male culture in the interwar years more generally, since gay men visiting the district were forced to draw on the same panoply of survival strategies they had developed in other settings as well. It also illuminates the history of the Square itself, for the changing fortunes of gay men's efforts in the 1920s and ’30s both depended upon and highlighted the changing character of the Square during the transition from the era of jazz and Prohibition to that of Depression and Repeal.

The anonymity of urban amusement districts such as Times Square has often been cited to explain their development as “vice” zones and, indeed, the relative anonymity enjoyed there by gay tourists from the American heartland—and even from the outer boroughs—was one reason they felt freer there than they would have at home to seek out gay locales and behave openly as homosexuals. To focus, however, on the supposed anonymity of Times Square (a quality that is always more situational and relative than its absolutist formulation suggests) is to imply that gay men remained isolated (or “anonymous”) from each other. But Times Square was not so much the site of anonymous, furtive encounters between strangers (although there were plenty of those) as the site of an organized, multilayered, and self-conscious subculture or, to use gay men's own term, a “gay world,” with its own meeting places, argot, folklore, and norms of behavior. Rather than focusing on the supposed “anonymity” of Times Square, then, it will prove more productive to analyze the ways in which people manipulated the spatial and cultural complexity of the city to constitute the Square as their neighborhood, where some of them worked or lived, and where many others joined them to build a community.

Indeed, a gay enclave developed in Times Square in part because so many gay men lived and worked in the area. The theater and the district's other amusement industries attracted large numbers of gay workers, who got jobs as waiters and performers in restaurants and clubs, as busboys in hotels, and as chorus boys, actors, stagehands, costume designers, publicity people, and the like in the theater industry proper.² Although gay men hardly enjoyed unalloyed acceptance in such work environments, the theatrical milieu offered them more tolerance than most workplaces. As one man who had been a theatrical writer in the mid-teens observed, “the New York theatrical world [of that era was] … a sort of special world … with its own standards of fellowship [and] sexual morals.”³ Homosexuality, along with other unconventional sexual behavior, was judged by unusually tolerant standards by people who were themselves often marginalized because of the unconventional lives they led as theater workers. Some men could be openly gay among their coworkers, while many others were at least unlikely to suffer serious retribution if their homosexuality were discovered. The eccentricity attributed to theater people and “artistic types” in general provided a cover to many men who adopted widely recognized gay styles in their dress and demeanor.⁴

Moreover, many men working in the amusement district lived there as well, and they were joined by other gay men who appreciated the advantages of the transient housing the district offered. Times Square and, to the west of Eighth Avenue, Hell's Kitchen together comprised one of the major centers of housing for single adults in the city. In many respects, the area constituted a prototypical furnished-room district, the sort of neighborhood dominated by a nonfamily population in which, as the Chicago sociologists discovered in the 1920s and historians such as Mark Peel and Joanne Meyerowitz have more recently remarked, unconventional sexual behavior was likely to face relatively little community opposition.⁵ The district was crowded with rooming houses, theatrical boardinghouses, and small residential and transient hotels serving theater workers, as well as most of the city's elegant bachelor apartments.⁶ The housing varied in quality and social status, but most of it shared certain qualities useful to gay men, as well as to transient theater workers. Most of the rooms were cheap, they were minimally supervised, and the fact that they were usually furnished and hired by the week made them easy to leave if an occupant got a job on the road—or needed to disappear because of legal troubles.

Middle-class men tended to live to the north and east of the Square in the West Forties and Fifties, where many of the city's fashionable apartment hotels designed for affluent bachelors were clustered, and where many of the elegant old row houses between Fifth and Sixth Avenues had been converted into rooming houses as the intrusion of commerce resulted in the departure of their original residents. Another, poorer group of men lived to the west of the Square in the tenements of Hell's Kitchen and in the large number of cheap hotels and rooming houses to be found west of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Many gay men, for instance, lived in the Men's Residence Club, a former YMCA hotel at West Fifty-Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue; a number of the theatrical boardinghouses in the area housed gay men; and, some tenement apartments served as collective homes for the poorest of gay theater workers.⁷ Groups of theater and restaurant workers were joined by gay teenagers forced out of their natal homes by hostile parents (as Risicato recalled), gay migrants from small towns and the outer boroughs, hustlers, gay bartenders, and men who had more conventional jobs elsewhere in the city but who valued the privacy, convenience, and tolerance such housing offered. The district also included numerous transient hotels and rooming houses where gay male (or heterosexual) couples who met in a bar or on the street could rent a room for an hour.⁸

The men who lived and worked in the district formed the core of a social world—or several social worlds, really—in which men who both lived and worked elsewhere could participate. Times Square served as the primary social center for many such nonresidents, the place where they met their friends, built their strongest social ties, “let their hair down” (once a camp expression for being openly gay), and constructed public identities quite different from those they maintained at work and elsewhere in the straight world. They built a gay world for themselves on the basis of the ties they developed in the commercial institutions that entrepreneurs had created to serve the needs of the theater workers rooming in the district and the tourists who flocked there.

Gay men mixed unobtrusively with other customers at most of the district's restaurants, but a few places attracted a predominantly gay patronage and developed a muted gay ambiance. Louis' Restaurant on West Forty-Ninth Street, for instance, was well known to gay men and lesbians as a rendezvous in the mid-1920s, and even came to the attention of private anti-vice investigators in 1925 as a “hangout for fairies and lady lovers [lesbians].” But the people who met there were sufficiently guarded in their behavior—at least in the main public dining rooms—that outsiders were unlikely to suspect that they were gay. A sedate 1925 restaurant guide even recommended Louis' to its readers, describing it, clearly without apprehending the full significance of its observation, as “one of the institutions of the neighborhood.”⁹

Such restaurants had existed before the 1920s, but, ironically, they proliferated and became more secure during Prohibition. Prohibition had been enacted in part to control public sociability'and in particular to destroy the immigrant, working-class male culture of the saloon, which seemed so threatening to middle-class and rural Americans. But in cities such as New York, Prohibition had resulted instead in the expansion of the sexual underworld and had undermined the ability of the police and anti-vice societies to control it. By depriving the hotel industry of liquor-related profits, for instance, Prohibition led some of the second-class hotels in the West Forties to begin permitting prostitutes and speakeasies to operate out of their premises.¹⁰ More significantly, the popular opposition to enforcement, the proliferation of speakeasies, the systematic use of payoffs, and the development of criminal syndicates to safeguard those speakeasies all served to protect gay as well as straight clubs. It became easier during Prohibition for establishments where gay men gathered, such as Louis', to survive because they stood out less. All speakeasies—not just gay ones'had to bribe the authorities and warn their customers to be prepared to hide what they were doing at a moment's notice.

Prohibition also changed the character of the Square in ways that led to the increased visibility of a group of gay men different from those who patronized Louis'. It drove many of the district's elegant restaurants, cabarets, and roof gardens out of business, to be replaced by cheap cafeterias and restaurants whose profits depended on a high turnover rate rather than on a high liquor-based profit margin. Moreover, by the end of the ’20s, the decline of the district's theater industry, due to the collapse of the national theatrical road circuits as well as the rise of the movies, forced growing numbers of theaters to convert into movie houses, often of the cheaper sort. Both factors combined to transform the Square in the 1920s and early 1930s, in the eyes of many contemporaries, from a distinguished theater district to a tawdry amusement district, a development only hastened by the onset of the Depression.¹¹

It was in this context that the flamboyant gay men known as fairies began to play a more prominent role in the culture and reputation of the Square. Part of the attraction of amusement districts such as Times Square, after all, was that they constituted liminal spaces in which visitors were encouraged to disregard some of the social injunctions that normally constrained their behavior, allowing them to observe and vicariously experience forms of behavior which in other settings—particularly their own neighborhoods— they might consider objectionable enough to suppress. This appeal was only enhanced by the cultural developments of the Prohibition era, for the popular revolt against the moral policing of Prohibition, the shifting character of the Square, and the culture of the speakeasies themselves encouraged club-goers to transgress conventional social boundaries and experiment with the norms governing acceptable public sociability.

The Square already had something of a reputation for fairies in the early 1920s (one 1924 account bemoaned the number of “impudent siss...