Welcome to Fairyland

Queer Miami before 1940

Julio Capó

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469635217
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today's Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami's transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami's queer past from its 1896 founding through 1940, Capo shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own. Drawing from a multilingual archive, Capo unearths the forgotten history of "fairyland, " a marketing term crafted by boosters that held multiple meanings for different groups of people. In viewing Miami as a contested colonial space, he turns our attention to migrants and immigrants, tourism, and trade to and from the Caribbean--particularly the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti--to expand the geographic and methodological parameters of urban and queer history. Recovering the world of Miami's old saloons, brothels, immigration checkpoints, borders, nightclubs, bars, and cruising sites, Capo makes clear how critical gender and sexual transgression is to understanding the city and the broader region in all its fullness.

1: QUEER FRONTIER

We never had an arrest oftener than about once a month. All the disturbances occurred in the north Miami section where the only saloons were.

—JOHN B. REILLY, MIAMI’S FIRST MAYOR, 1917

Florida had been looked upon as a semi-invalid resort, not a pleasure ground, but the construction of these houses started Florida as a playground for the Nation, and railroad construction and the construction of other large and beautiful hotels followed the success attending upon Mr. [Henry] Flagler’s developments.

—JOHN SEWELL, MIAMI’S THIRD MAYOR, 1933

In late 1908, municipal judge John C. Gramling commended “vigilant” Chief of Police Frank B. Hardee for his role in making Miami respectable. Gramling, a native Alabamian, had moved to southern Florida just a decade prior, when Miami was incorporated as a city. Hardee also settled in Miami in those years, leaving Georgia to become the city’s first police chief. Hardee received Gramling’s praise for zoning Miami’s segregated, black neighborhood, “Colored Town,” as the area’s site for deviant sex, crime, and vice. “Through his efforts,” Gramling claimed, “several resorts of questionable character have been completely broken up and the inmates [of the houses of ill fame] made to seek legitimate employment or leave the City.” He also applauded Hardee for “put[ting] the gambling places out of business.” Because of Hardee’s work, the judge argued, “Miami is given credit for having the most respectful and law abiding class of negroes as any city in the south.”¹

Chief Hardee had visited all the saloons in Miami a few months before to inspect whether they complied with a new ordinance passed that May regulating those spaces. Miami’s city council responded to residents’ complaints over the area’s vice culture and passed a law that literally shed light on saloons and made them visible, especially from the outside.² This law also sought to police the discreet sexual encounters, often interracial, that took place within the establishments. The saloon’s poorly lit backrooms, sometimes furnished with beds, made quick sexual flings convenient. The local ordinance prohibited the placement of screens on front doors to allow more light in and greater transparency. The ordinance banned women and minors not just from purchasing alcohol in saloons but even from entering them.³

Efforts to purge red-light districts from Miami proper advanced the city’s segregation efforts. Hardee expressed concern over the presence of saloons outside of Miami’s black district. Like many of Miami’s other white urban designers and powerbrokers, Hardee believed racial mixing could lead to sexual urges deemed unnatural.⁴ From the early 1890s through World War I, Progressive reformers throughout the United States launched campaigns like this to suppress or tame urban red-light districts. As Mara Laura Keire has observed, “They wanted to separate residence from commerce and respectable from disreputable, but they never expected to eliminate completely one side of the divide.”⁵ They negotiated the virtues of disciplining the city’s vice culture or making it less visible, with the “imperative” of keeping the races apart. Into the early twentieth century, a “segregated district” was not a concept that necessarily corresponded to racial division in U.S. cities. Rather, the phrase served as a euphemism for a city’s red-light district.⁶ This also occurred in the “instant city” of Miami, which, unlike established metropolitan areas, had not yet “matured” from its status as an “urban frontier.”⁷

Like the very concept of an urban frontier, Miami was bursting with paradoxes connected to city boosters’ efforts to establish boundaries, turn a profit, and maintain social order—all of which helped carve out distinct spaces for gender and sexual subversives to exist and even thrive. Incorporated as a city in 1896, Miami was built from ambitions dreamed up by wealthy, white pioneer-settlers. They, along with a growing middle class, were transplants from the U.S. South, Midwest, and Northeast. But calling Miami a city did not make it so. Its urban center did not develop as a product of industrialization, nor did its red-light districts mature organically. Miami took shape through countervailing forces.

For instance, Miami’s developer-pioneers played a juggling act between designing and promoting the area’s built and natural environments, or marketing all sides of the area’s urban frontier. Even before Miami became a city, boosters touted the area’s tropical environment as a health resort where moneyed women and men could gain better mental and physical vigor away from the confines and ills of urbanity and industrialization.⁸ “Conquering” Miami’s untamed wilderness provided an opportunity to reclaim white masculinity during an era of widespread urbanization and immigration.

Miami’s identity and traditions were constantly in flux, imbued by numerous effects from the area’s colonial past, its roots in the U.S. South and North, and a multitude of Caribbean influences. After centuries of colonial transfers of power among European states, the U.S. federal government waged violent wars in Florida to purge and regulate indigenous communities and cultures. Indeed, empire proved critical to building Miami, a frontier just south of the U.S. South. Early Miami capitalists also banked on the 1898 U.S. war against Spain in the name of Cuban independence. In addition to using federal funds to help develop the city, U.S. control of the island opened new markets for sexual tourism. This was often linked to Miami’s own burgeoning tourist economy.

Once the area’s “backwardness” had been tamed—whether by subduing the Seminoles, advancing U.S. imperialism, or draining swamplands—Miami boosters got to work building a “model city” that was also modern. Modernity, however, came at a price. Many early boosters believed saloons, houses of ill fame, opium dens, and gambling houses represented “a ubiquitous symbol of urban life,” even as they often decried their existence.⁹ This necessary evil, they believed, would make Miami appear modern at a time when people increasingly sought pleasure through vice, sex, and “slumming.”¹⁰

As Hardee’s efforts demonstrate, Miami’s urban designers initially zoned the city in such a way that areas of vice, crime, and sexual exploration were relegated to just outside Miami’s borders. These “interzones” remained within reach, and many respectable white residents crossed city lines to explore this “dangerous,” yet appealing, underworld.¹¹ When powerbrokers contained and pushed these operations into a northwest district that became known as Colored Town, Miami’s black residents became sitting ducks for local law enforcement officials, who could arrest them on any number of charges. Even in the early twentieth century, Miami lacked a cohesive and stable economy, remained sparsely populated, and was in great need of better transportation and roads. These police roundups helped solve the latter problem in particular, as the working-class, ethnic, and black residents caught up in police raids became a free labor force that helped build the city and enrich its white powerbrokers’ pockets.

Miami’s queer frontier took shape through the prism of these colonial exchanges, transgressive sex acts, interracial encounters, and working-class vices. When Miami became an instant city, boosters negotiated the promotion of numerous countervailing visions: the natural environment and the urban landscape, the traditional and the modern, and the respectable and the subversive. In this urban frontier rife with paradoxes, residents and visitors could explore the frontiers of their own inhibitions by physically venturing outside the white and respectable city limits to experience subversive expressions of gender and sex. Criminal records help re-create this demimonde and the experiences of women and men police targeted for crimes such as prostitution, sexual assault, and vagrancy. Miami’s early interracial sexual economy thrived despite policing efforts. It grew in spite of—or as a result of—the fact that the black, ethnic, and working-class residents who lived in the neighborhoods that provided these services combated crime, poverty, and discrimination.

The Frontier Just South of the U.S. South

In many ways, Florida’s colonial past helped shape concepts of gender, sexuality, race, and nation in what became the City of Miami in the late nineteenth century. Prior to being admitted as a U.S. state in 1845, parts of what we today know as Florida passed through the hands of numerous colonial powers, including Spain, France, and Great Britain. Despite many border disputes and colonial transfers of power, Spain claimed dominion over Florida for most of the period between 1565 and 1821, when it ceded control to the United States. Although frequently designated a backwater of the Spanish Empire, Florida’s cultures, traditions, peoples, and resources had been linked to the Caribbean for centuries.¹² Although this relationship evolved and changed over time, it has never ceased.

Not only did the acquisition of Florida increase U.S. territory, it also factored into the nation’s larger imperial ambitions, which increasingly turned to the Caribbean. U.S. politicians cautiously negotiated the acquisition of Florida from Spain. Prior to the formal 1821 cession, President James Monroe’s administration balanced the U.S. desire to obtain Florida with the imperative of trading with new Latin American republics that waged war against Spain. Once Florida had been secured, the United States recognized several of Spain’s previous colonies as independent nations, and in 1823 Monroe articulated a new cornerstone in U.S. foreign policy. The “Monroe Doctrine” asserted the U.S. sphere of influence in the Americas that anticipated the nation’s territorial expansion across the continent and beyond.¹³

The growing U.S. empire had immediate and long-term effects on regional concepts of race, gender, and sex. Under Spanish rule, African slavery in Florida constituted a condition that could also prove temporary through manumission. These policies were, in part, a product of Spanish Catholic teachings and several economic and political circumstances, such as the need for homesteaders and militiamen.¹⁴ This stood in stark contrast to the rigid two-caste system of race institutionalized in the 1820s when Florida became a U.S. territory. Florida’s territorial council passed numerous laws targeting free blacks that decade, including prohibiting them from giving seditious speeches, selling alcohol to slaves, voting, testifying against whites, and carrying firearms.¹⁵ Regulating gender and sex proved similarly important. By 1832, Florida outlawed interracial marriage and invalidated any such existing unions, which, in effect, bastardized and robbed progeny of their inheritance. The legislative council also criminalized white men who fornicated or committed adultery with black women.¹⁶ When southern planters migrated to Florida’s panhandle after 1821, they clashed with the masculine ideals and traditions of the area’s nonplanter “countrymen.” Economic and social pressures soon facilitated new alliances between these two classes, which helped forge a mythologized narrative of a unified Old South that reified rigid racial codes and consolidated political power for years to come.¹⁷

Meanwhile, as a frontier, Florida largely “remained Indian country” until the early nineteenth century, which contributed to the preservation of multiple forms of gender and sexual difference among the area’s indigenous peoples.¹⁸ Sixteenth-century Spanish and French explorers made numerous references to what their colonial eyes interpreted as “hermaphroditic” behavior. While the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca observed “a devilish thing” of “one man married to another,” Frenchman René Goulaine de Laudonnière documented the presence of “many hermaphrodites.”¹⁹ Detailed reports of gender and sexual difference into the nineteenth century are scant, but it is clear that indigenous peoples “lived in semi-autonomous villages that routinely disregarded the interests of Spain, Great Britain, and then the United States.”²⁰ Colonial prejudices regarded them as transgressive in multiple ways: as harborers of runaway slaves, polygamists, and practitioners of miscegenation.²¹ By the eighteenth century, Anglo-colonial sources referred to diverse tribes from modern-day Florida, Georgia, and Alabama as “Creeks.” The Seminoles—the multiethnic Creeks who migrated to Florida—resisted numerous policies of removal and extermination once the land became a U.S. territory. While the nineteenth-century “Seminole Wars” resulted in the forceful relocation of thousands of indigenous peoples to Creek territory west of the Mississippi River, hundreds retreated to Florida’s southern frontier, particularly the Everglades.²² Even though most of Florida was a frontier until 1860, when the United States surveyed the land, the area encompassing present-day Miami remained an untamed frontier for several more decades.²³ In this way, the Seminoles maintained a culture of gender and sexual difference into the twentieth century that was “considered normal and socially acceptable for certain members of the community.”²⁴

In part, it was this frontier status and the perceived masculine virility associated with the uncivilized wilderness that attracted many of Florida’s and Miami’s late nineteenth-century visitors and settlers. After the U.S. Civil War, Floridians aggressively marketed their state as a health resort, whose unmatched tropical climate made it an ideal place for people in the Midwest and Northeast to live in ...