1920s Gay Culture
The 1920s saw the emergence of a vibrant and underground gay culture in urban centers like New York, Paris, and Berlin. This period marked a time of increased visibility and social acceptance for LGBTQ individuals, with the rise of gay bars, clubs, and artistic communities. However, this cultural flourishing was also accompanied by widespread discrimination and persecution.
5 Key excerpts on "1920s Gay Culture"
- Jerald Podair, Darren Dochuk, Jerald Podair, Darren Dochuk(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As masculinity was associated with men and the public sphere, masculine gender presentations for queer women made their desire for women more visible as well as their feminist aspiration to be as powerful as men. 14 Gender transgression was also readily found at masquerade balls featuring “female impersonators,” as drag queens were then known, which were incredibly popular annual events in black districts of northern cities, attracting crowds of thousands of curious heterosexual onlookers. 15 This was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, when African American writers like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Nella Larsen created cultural texts that scholars have mined for their queer content, both explicit and implicit. 16 By the early 1930s, a new “anti-gay vigilance” led to the closing of many queer venues that thrived during Prohibition, as regulations against queer gathering spaces serving alcohol expanded. George Chauncey argues that the rapid growth and visibility of gay subcultures during Prohibition precipitated a powerful, negative cultural backlash in the 1930s. Even during the “Anything Goes” 1920s, queer representations on the stage were taken to task for obscenity. The first Broadway play to focus on the theme of lesbianism, The Captive (1926), was subjected to an obscenity trial and all its actors were arrested...
eBook - ePubBoots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
The History of a Lesbian Community
- Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...When we began researching how the bar culture of the mid-twentieth century contributed to the formation of gay liberation, we also held a static model of bar culture. Our discoveries led us to tell a significantly different story: In the context of the changing social conditions of the twentieth century, lesbiarte acted to shape the possibilities for their future. The turn of the century was a time of transition for leisure-time activities. The nineteenth-century community and family-based forms of entertainment and relaxation were replaced by commercialized leisure. At the same time the homosocial forms of socializing, such as quilting parties, were supplanted by heterosocial forms, which brought young men and women together in movie houses, dance halls, and amusement parks. 6 Kathy Peiss argues that this new leisure culture, while offering women some independence and autonomy in the pursuit of pleasure and romance outside of the strictures of their families, also institutionalized a restrictive heterosocial culture. 7 Thus, while working-class lesbian culture of the 1930s could draw on a tradition of working-class women’s independent pursuit of fun and pleasure, it also by definition had to counter the powerful forces creating an exclusively heterosocial environment. For lesbians to establish a public social life was a challenge; each opportunity had to be created and persistently pursued. Bars were the only possible place for working-class lesbians to congregate outside of private homes. They were generally unwelcome in most social settings. Open spaces like parks or beaches, commonly used by gay men, were too exposed for women to express interest in other women without constant male surveillance and harassment. This was a time when it was still dangerous for unescorted women to be out on the street. In addition, many working-class lesbians could not even use their own homes for gatherings...
eBook - ePubA Queer Capital
A History of Gay Life in Washington D.C.
- Genny Beemyn(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Race, Class, Gender, and the Social Landscape of the Capital’s Gay Communities During and after World War II World War II is commonly considered a watershed event for gay people, resulting in a large increase in the number and visibility of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in cities such as Washington and a dramatic rise in the number of bars, restaurants, and other meeting places that they could frequent. 1 As historian John D’Emilio states, “the unusual conditions of a mobilized society allowed homosexual desire to be expressed more easily in action. For many gay Americans, World War II created something of a nationwide coming out experience.” 2 The war also seems to have been a transformative moment for many gay individuals who would be referred to today as drag queens; the creation of additional spaces where drag was accepted enabled them to discover and meet more readily with others like themselves. In the nation’s capital, the migration of both black and white people during and after World War II was instrumental to the formation of same-sex sexual communities, which developed both within and outside of existing, predominantly heterosexual, communities. More than at any previous time, those attracted to people of the same sex had opportunities to find each other and to socialize publicly together. Besides the proliferation of bars and the continued popularity of parks and other cruising locations, a growing number of house parties, late-night cafeterias, local drag events, and out-of-town drag balls provided gay individuals with places to meet in the 1940s and 1950s. But while histories of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people typically present the wartime and post-war migration to cities only in terms of its positive contributions toward the growth of explicitly gay communities and social institutions, I will demonstrate in this chapter that it had negative effects as well...
eBook - ePubAIDS, Communication, and Empowerment
Gay Male Identity and the Politics of Public Health Messages
- Roger Myrick(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This sets the stage for contemporary identity politics and gay liberation movements. Equally as important as medical discourse is the government’s increasingly influential role in the cultural discourse on sexuality and gay identity, a role that becomes more complex, pervasive, and dangerous for gays with the health crisis of the 1980s. EARLY RUMBLINGS OF GAY AND LESBIAN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS-1950 TO 1969 The 1950s mark a watershed in the construction of gay desire and the erotic as gay and lesbian communities flourished during this postwar period (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1988). Men and women, for the first time for many, found themselves in large metropolitan cities, thrived in same sex worlds, and were unwilling to return to isolated areas where community based on gay desire was unspeakable. Beyond this geographic movement, which resulted in community-building, several other forces were at work that formed fragments of this early reconstruction of gay desire. For the economic and political analysis of D’Emilio and Freedman (1988), 1920-1960 marks the rise and fall of liberalism, which was often based on discursive contradictions: “on the one hand, the discourse on sexuality expanded enormously, blurring the distinction between private and public that characterized middle class life in the previous century … on the other hand even as the erotic seemed to permeate American life, white middle class Americans struggled to maintain sexual boundaries … homosexuality remained beyond the pale” (p. 277, also see D’Emilio, 1993)...
eBook - ePubQueer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television
Screening the Closet
- Melanie Kohnen(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...While he admits that his three-year relationship began out of necessity, he also underlines that, as someone who came of age in the early 1980s, he “had no history of untamed promiscuity to fall nostalgically back on” and that, for this generation of gay men, cruising is not an ideal lifestyle (ibid). In other words, it is not only mainstream press outlets that foster an alignment of safe sex with monogamy (an alignment that depends on the condemnation of the supposedly misguided and hedonistic late 1970s), but it is also the gay press that participates in this reframing of what many previously considered the embodiment of gay liberation. It is important to keep in mind that neither the condemnation nor the celebration of the days of “drugs and disco” offer the “true” story of gay life in the late 1970s; rather, both are frameworks for organizing and understanding queer sexualities. It is the differing implications of these narratives that are most important to understand: one allows for the construction of gay sexuality that actively resists heteronormative patterns (but is not without its alienating and destructive elements); the other favors carving out a niche within the constraints of heteronormativity (one that possibly allows for participation and eventual acceptance into the nation). Both narratives also privilege white perspectives as they concentrate on ideas about sexual identity, community, and practices—ideas that had become central to a definition of gay identity during the gay liberation movement. The fight over the closure of gay bathhouses in New York City in 1985 is an incident that illuminates how intersecting discourses of “general populations” versus “risk groups” and a condemnation of “promiscuity” produce a framework for the renegotiation of queer visibility under the banner of safe sex...
