Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940

Gay men such as Willy W. tried to find housing that would ensure “freedom from supervision” (152). Rooming houses provided cheap, furnished housing with significant privacy, although gay tenants being caught by their landlords was a constant threat. Moral reformers tried to offer an alternative via residential hotels for unmarried people who moved to the city, such as the ones provided by the YMCA. However, “such hotels often became major centers for the gay world and served to introduce men to gay life” (154). By the World War I era, YMCA hotels became famous for being hubs and sexual hotspots for gay men. Some hotel supervisors cracked down, but others were more tolerant or were gay themselves.

Apartments became much more popular among the middle class in New York City by the 1920s as they became more comfortable, larger, and respectable, while houses became prohibitively expensive. Instead of a landlord supervising their activities, the new apartments of the 20th century offered almost as much privacy as a private home. This shift helped facilitate gay life. The Raines Law of 1896 had tried to promote urban morality by forcing saloons to close on Sundays. However, many saloons exploited a loophole in the law by becoming hotels when they rented rooms. These new hotels often made sex workers available, which prompted the establishment of the anti-vice society Committee of Fourteen. Ironically, this committee’s efforts to shut down female sex work at the saloon-hotels led some to instead cater to gay men.

Cafeterias and restaurants were likewise important sites where gay men could be open. Cheap dining became common in the late 19th century because of the number of single people living in New York City, increasing in 1920 when the Prohibition Act shut down all saloons. The two most popular chains were Childs and Horn & Hardart, which successfully catered to single workers and families in which both parents worked. Horn & Hardart also opened up Automats, which served meals through vending machines. Such places became popular meeting places for working-class people and the unemployed. There, gay men “regularly tested the boundaries” against managers afraid to let gay clientele become too obvious by talking openly about their sex lives and dancing (169). Some managers acted against their gay clientele who became too visible by calling the police or anti-vice societies. Other places did not cooperate, like the cabaret Hotel Koenig, which protected itself and its gay customers by offering free services to local police. Nevertheless, the Committee of Fourteen put pressure on the Hotel Koenig until, in 1920, police raided it and several of its gay customers were arrested for “degenerate disorderly conduct” (172), a charge usually brought against gay men and lesbians who gathered in public places.

The statute on “degenerate disorderly conduct” was used to “mandate a much broader ban on gay cultural practices” (173), specifically to raid places with an openly gay clientele and to arrest individuals who dressed as the opposite sex or danced with the same sex, punishing them with fines and imprisonment. Restaurants tried to mitigate the risks of raids by bribing neighborhood police, only allowing gay men to sit in a certain section, or requiring gay customers’ discretion. Even so, throughout the 1920s, gay men’s “numbers and boldness grew” (176).

Gay men had subversive strategies to safely appear in public but wanted to meet in public spaces anyway. Certain streets and parks were known for “cruising,” meaning gay men looking for each other in public for sex. Central Park was an especially well-frequented cruising spot. As a result, police would often engage in arrests and sweeps of the park, but Central Park proved difficult to regulate. Beaches were likewise popular public spaces for gay men, and Washington Baths at Coney Island in 1929 was the site of a male beauty contest.

On the city’s streets, police arrested gay men, usually charging them with disorderly conduct, which was easier to prove and convict than sodomy. Gay men responded to such threats in a various ways. One was to publicly present oneself as a “fairy,” “even though this could result in harassment from onlookers” (187). The majority instead used “codes and tactics” to identify each other (188), such as gazing at each other, certain mannerisms and fashion, and speech patterns. Additionally, gay men had to have a mental “gay map of the city” (189), knowing the friendlier neighborhoods such as the shopping and theater districts, where other gay men tended to work. Such places included the Rialto, a working-class shopping and entertainment area, and Times Square, which was host to many male sex workers and to gay men engaging in cruising by the 1920s. By the start of the 20th century, 42nd Street in Times Square had transformed from a distinguished theater neighborhood to a working-class area filled with burlesque houses and working-class bars and restaurants. Consequently, it became a place where gay men met straight soldiers and sailors for sex.

Burlesque and movie theaters also became “part of the gay circuit” (194). Standing-room areas and balconies particularly became notorious as sites for gay trysts. Going to movies was a popular and accepted way for single men to spend time in public alone, so it was an ideal site for gay men to meet, though police would sometimes raid theaters. Public bathrooms were another popular spot for gay men, especially working-class men, to meet, particularly restrooms at subway stations. These were called “tearooms,” which was based on slang that called them “t-rooms,” short for “toilet-rooms” while comically subverting the typical cultural image of tearooms. Public bathrooms were easy to manipulate so that other people would be unaware of sexual activity, giving gay couples “privacy in public” (197). Police and anti-vice societies knew of tearooms, but so many potentially existed that monitoring them all was impossible. Middle-class men sometimes went to tearooms since they “valued sexual adventurism, experimentation, and variety” (199). Tearooms influenced a negative view of the gay male community, since it put “homosexuality and homosexuals almost literally in the gutter” (200). However, it gave gay men the impression that more of them existed in New York City than they thought.

For gay people (and even straight couples seeking illicit sex with each other) public places paradoxically offered privacy. Women were picked up by men on the streets “to finance their excursions to music halls and amusement parks” (202). Such activity, made possible by the size and anonymity of cities, concerned anti-vice societies since it was more evidence of “the apparently pernicious social effects of urbanization” (203), especially on the working class. More than simply an attempt to suppress gay activity, police efforts to prevent gay men from using public spaces represented part of the efforts by the state to keep working-class people at home with their families and “to impose a bourgeois definition of such distinctions on working-class communities” (204).

Bathhouses were “the safest, most enduring, and one of the most affirmative of the settings in which gay men gathered in the first half of the twentieth century” (207). Private and public bathhouses became common in New York City by the dawn of the 20th century. Also, the “transition from ‘mixed’ (straight and gay) to exclusively gay bathhouses foreshadowed the arrival of other exclusively gay establishments” (207). The first such baths were established to serve the ritual cleaning requirements of Jewish New Yorkers, as private Roman- and Turkish-style baths for the upper class, and to encourage hygiene in working-class areas. They became popular by World War I, especially given the focus on health and the body for middle-class people. The earliest baths were supervised and forced patrons to stay for limited periods, making sexual encounters between men unlikely. Some bathhouses became tolerant or downright protective of gay sexuality, even discouraging non-gay patrons, and only stopped sexual activity if “it became too obvious” (209). One bathhouse catering to gay men, the Ariston Baths, became a gay bathhouse by at least 1902. In addition to bathing facilities, it offered a manicurist, massages, a sauna, dressing rooms, and a gym. Police raided the Ariston Baths in February of 1903, arresting 26 men.

While other raids and arrests at bathhouses occurred, many were simply ignored by the police, possibly because the owners bribed them. Still, their “relative security” made them popular sites for gay men. One well-known establishment was the Everard, which lasted until a fire destroyed it in 1977. Records of those arrested there in a 1919 police raid show that they were mostly working-class but also well-off. The Everard was famous enough that it was known to foreign visitors in the city. Another popular bathhouse was the Lafayette Baths, which attracted a white but ethnically diverse clientele. As private baths became less popular by the 1930s because of the advent of indoor plumbing and public baths, more baths started catering to gay men.

In New York City’s gay culture, different bathhouses became known for different things. The Everard was considered the safest and “classiest,” partly because it excluded non-gay customers and was rumored to be safe from police raids since it was owned by the Police Athletic League. The Penn Post Baths were much cheaper than the Everard, so middle-class gay men avoided it. The Mount Morris Baths, the only baths that admitted African American customers, were known for “rough trade.” Most baths were safer than other places that gay men could gather because they could keep their identifying items in a locker, reducing the risk of being blackmailed, gay patrons could protect each other, and police did not raid the baths as often as other establishments. Also, sex work was rare because of the entrance fees, and men could easily get help if they were hassled for money. More importantly, men in a bath were unlikely to be carrying cash. Many baths were frequented by men in heterosexual marriages since they offered a “relatively safe and anonymous setting” (220).

Besides sexual contacts, the baths “served to introduce gay men to one another and foster their sense of allegiance to other gay men” (221). As the diary of Charles Griffes indicated, men befriended other bathhouse patrons and met with them outside the baths. Chancey argues that the baths “became a part of gay folklore” (223), helping create and sustain the gay subculture. While the bathhouses allowed gay men to secretly carry out romantic and sexual trysts, they were also part of a wider social world. Chauncey admits that baths could be considered a “closet” location, they were nonetheless a big closet in which “a gay world was built” (225).

By the 1920s, New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood had become a famous gay center as well as a middle-class, bohemian area. Harlem likewise became an important gay neighborhood, being the only place African American gay men “could congregate in commercial establishments” (227). Harlem was home to the largest event of New York’s gay subculture, the Hamilton Lodge Ball, which drew many Black and white people. Speakeasies in these neighborhoods became social sites for both lesbian and gay men.

The gay “enclave” in Greenwich Village “was closely linked to the development of the bohemian community there” (228). Artists and writers came to Greenwich Village, which had only just become part of New York City, because of the affordable apartments for single men and women, cheap restaurants, and its isolation from most of the rest of the city. The attitudes of the bohemian crowd in Greenwich Village, where residents were already notorious for being “long-haired men” and “short-haired women” (229), facilitated its development as a gay enclave. In fact, conservative observers had already labeled the bohemian residents there as “queer” by more conservative observers. Nonetheless, some of the bohemian and radical male residents of Greenwich Village were more conservative than widely believed, since they “remained deeply troubled or ambivalent about the independence of women and strove to protect their prerogatives and identities as men from the demands made by the ideologies of feminism and bohemianism” (230). These men disliked being identified as queer and sometimes held views that “condemned homosexuality in scientific rather than more overtly moralistic terms” (230). For example, Floyd Dell, who ran the radical magazine The Masses in Greenwich Village, wrote in his book Love in the Machine Age that “‘homosexuality was characteristic of patriarchal societies in which women were subordinated to men, and […] was a social anachronism and a sign of personal regression’” (231). Other prominent residents of Greenwich Village were more accepting, like anarchist Emma Goldman.

Despite the ambivalence of some prominent residents of Greenwich Village, a gay enclave began to develop as new subway routes and the extension of Sixth and Seventh Avenues made it more accessible. Its national reputation as a bohemian and “free love” center also made it a famous tourist spot after World War I. By the 1920s, it was well-known for increasingly visible gay residents, as the 1932 film Call Her Savage illustrated. Greenwich Village became “a liminal space where visitors were encouraged to disregard some of the social injunctions that normally constrained their behavior” and could observe people acting in ways they could not in their own neighborhoods (236). Gay men and lesbians started opening tearooms and restaurants like the Jungle, the Flower Pot, and Paul and Joe’s. Such establishments often had arrangements with the police, although sometimes pressure from anti-vice societies such as the Committee of Fourteen, parents who disapproved of their children going to such places, and real estate agencies attempting to gentrify Greenwich Village led to raids. One lesbian tearoom was run by Polish Jewish immigrant Even Kotchever, or Eve Addams. Her place was shut down after a police raid in 1926, but Greenwich Village residents celebrated her and her business’s presence.

Some journals and newspapers established by Greenwich Village writers were hostile to the gay presence, but others celebrated it. Chauncey argues that such acceptance represented a shift, wherein middle-class bohemian youth culture imitated working-class cultures in becoming more accepting of gay sexuality in their midst. While working-class gay men “had simply been circumscribed by a different pattern of social regulation” (243), however, openly gay men in Greenwich Village could exercise a wider range of mannerisms and gendered behavior. Also, the interactions between gay men here were not primarily sexual. Both straight and gay men thought of themselves as united by a shared rejection of traditional middle-class values.

In Harlem, white gay men found it easier to be open about their sexuality than the Black gay men who actually lived there. Nonetheless, Chauncey writes that “[B]lack gay men […] turned Harlem into a homosexual mecca” (244). In addition, the gay neighborhood at Harlem was more “visible” and “bold,” boasting drag queens and speakeasies where men danced together. Harlem had become a majority Black neighborhood by the 1910s, receiving many African Americans who migrated from the South. Additionally, it became one New York’s most famous “entertainment districts.” Harlem offered gay Black people freedom they lacked in the South. Still, they enjoyed less freedom to be openly gay in Harlem than the white gay men who came to enjoy Harlem’s nightlife. Even so, “perhaps nowhere were more men willing to venture out in public in drag than in Harlem” (249), although they were harassed by passersby or subject to arrest by cops.

Harlem was home to numerous buffet flats, rooms rented out of apartments. These became sites for gambling, drinking, sex work, and gay encounters. Culturally, Harlem’s gay community embraced the music genre of the blues. Numerous successful blue singers were bisexual, like Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, and Gladys Bentley, who performed dressed in men’s clothing, which in the local slang made her a “bulldagger” (a lesbian who cross-dressed). Drag performers like “Gloria Swanson” who modeled themselves after actresses. They all performed at gay and lesbian clubs and speakeasies, which reached their “heyday” in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

However, the former leading resident merchants and professionals, a new middle class of office workers and teachers, and the local religious community all opposed Harlem’s gay enclave. In particular, these groups criticized Harlem’s gay culture as damaging African Americans’ public image. A major critic of Harlem’s gay neighborhood was minister Adam Clayton Powell, who accused gay people and single heterosexual women of undermining the African American family. Like the anti-vice societies, Powell viewed the situation as one where modern city life threatened morality. Likewise, local newspapers attacked the gay subculture, while simultaneously urging recent Southern migrants to assimilate to the ways of Harlem’s Black middle class.

Such controversy surrounded the Hamilton Lodge Ball, the largest drag ball held in New York, also known as “the Faggots Ball” (258). It drew attendants and participants even from outside Harlem. The ball received mostly negative attention from the press throughout the 1920s. As more attendants came from outside Harlem’s gay subculture, “most papers adopted the more positive (or at least bemused) attitude of those spectators” (259). While some observers also decried the presence of white people as participants and audience members at the ball, others “took delight in watching the transgression of racial boundaries that seemed to accompany the transgression of gender and sexual boundaries” (261). Even so, racial boundaries continued to exist: While African American drag queens sometimes dressed as white celebrities, white drag queens never dressed as Black celebrities.

While the Hamilton Lodge Ball became a city attraction, “Harlem's social elite and intelligentsia made it clear that the open expression of one’s homosexuality precluded participation in respectable society” (264). The writers, artists, and patrons of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance were actively gay or bisexual but carefully hid their sexuality. For example, poet Countee Cullen married women twice while hiding his gay sex life.