A Queer History of the United States (17 page)

I seemed to hold you in my arms and whisper all of this. . . . If you want me to stay all night tomorrow night just say so when you see me. . . . Then I can hear you say “I love you”—and again and again I can see in your eyes the strength, and the power and the truth that I love.
13

In the following letter to Wald, Alice Lewisohn recalls a trip that the two took, along with Alice’s sister Irene and Ysabella Waters, during their time in Henry Street:

Why attempt to tell a clairvoyant all that is in one’s mind? You know even better than I what those months of companionship with you and Sister Waters have meant. For way and beyond even the joys of our wanderings I have some memories that are holier by far than temples or graves or blossoms. . . . Much of my heart to you!
14

The cultural and social influence of Henry Street was interwoven with the new city. The growth of contemporary urban culture and the interconnectedness of leisure, work, and politics were direct results of homosocial community building. Unmarried women, freed from caring for home, husband, and children, were a vitalizing force behind these major shifts in American life and thought. Under Wald’s leadership, Henry Street thrived, adding the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1915 and Henry Street Music School in 1927. These additions connected homosocial communities with the city’s burgeoning arts and entertainment scene. Kathy Peiss charts how urban entertainments aimed at female consumption—including dance halls, community-based girls’ clubs, theater, movies, and “refined vaudeville” (an important advance from vaudeville’s roots in saloon culture)—provided real outlets for women, particularly working-class women, to gain a more active role in public life. Peiss notes that while many of these activities, such as public dancing, were aimed at promoting heterosexual relations, they were often facilitated through homosocial activity and bonding, which ensured a larger degree of safety in group activities.
15

Howard Chudacoff notes that single-gender male communities in clubs, bars, and other venues for leisure activities helped give rise to a culture of bachelorhood that existed from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Participation in all-male sports teams, in events such as boxing matches (often with all-male spectators) and in physical exercise such as calisthenics and swimming, reinforced a single-gender culture that created emotional and physical male intimacy not found in heterosexual family environments.
16
Like Hull House and Henry Street, male-segregated spaces and the acceptance of bachelorhood as an appropriate social status for young men were catalysts for same-sex community formation.

The social purity movement’s impulsive regulation of sexual desire and promotion of healthy bodies through gender, class, and racial segregation had an unintended consequence: the use of single-gender residences and recreational venues as meeting places for homosexual women and men. George Chauncey charts how the YMCA, especially through the 1920s and 1930s, became a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing. He notes that by the 1930s some gay men joked that YMCA meant “Why I’m So Gay.”
17
The YMCA, and other all-male facilities that promoted socializing and health through (nude) swimming, calisthenics, and other forms of physical exercise, were logical places for homosexual men to meet one another. Historian John Donald Gustav-Wrathall describes how the friendships promoted by the YMCA “had an embodied element: a delight in one another’s physical proximity, an awareness of each other’s bodies, a sort of excitement that overtook them at the prospect of spending time together.”
18

Battles over inequality in race, sexuality, and gender are often articulated around questions of private and public space. Severely limiting access to public and social spaces and institutions through the legacy of “separate but equal” was one of the most effective and destructive means used by the dominant white culture to continue the subjugation of African Americans (and other people of color) in the decades that followed slavery. This model of segregation informs how we think about LGBT lives and communities when we examine the links between antiblack racism and the treatment of homosexuals during the twentieth century.

Like African Americans, many homosexuals moved to urban areas to live in communities of similar people. In these neighborhoods they could live openly and possibly more safely. This situation is strikingly illustrated by the African American aphorism of the 1920s: “I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the governor of Georgia.” Ironically, an unintended side effect of segregation was that African Americans, in the space that they were allowed, formed vibrant, thriving communities. These spaces gave birth to and nourished African American cultural expression. They were also centers of political activity. For similar reasons, homosexual communities such as Greenwich Village were crucibles of exciting culture and politics. Venues such as cafés, bars, clubs, and theaters, as well as events such as semipublic parties, dances, art shows, and literary readings, built and preserved a sense of sexual community.

The social acceptance on which these communities were predicated often manifested itself in complicated ways. Homosexuals and African Americans shared a sense of social stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization. George Chauncey charts the growth of homosexual neighborhoods in New York, such as Greenwich Village and Harlem. Greenwich Village was in many ways accepting of people of color. Harlem, a primarily African American community, was accepting of homosexuals of color as well as some white homosexuals. Chauncey details how Harlem, the center of African American life in New York, became the site for both exciting artistic explorations of black culture and public manifestations of homosexual culture. Harlem’s world of jazz clubs, speakeasies, cellar clubs, and low-end and upscale nightclubs (the latter frequented by wealthy white patrons) encouraged sexualized performances. In the early 1930s, performers such as African American Gladys Bentley, who performed dressed as a man, and “Gloria Swanson,” a renowned Chicago drag queen who moved to Harlem to open his own club, were extraordinarily popular.
19
The sites of arts and entertainment that blossomed around African American and same-sex communities continued in the sexual tradition of nineteenth-century same-sex-loving artists to turn homosociality into sexual fluidity.

Entertaining New Ideas About Gender

In the first four decades of the twentieth century, entertainment in the United States grew and diversified enormously. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, burlesque, a form of theatrical parody, was extraordinarily popular. Its main objective was to parody existing social norms, frequently gender norms. (The Latin root of “burlesque” is “burra,” meaning “trifles” or “nonsense.”) The popularity of burlesque—and later vaudeville, which presented a collection of acts, including burlesque, in a revue—greatly shaped American popular culture. This was even more true of film, which in the late 1920 and 1930s became the cheapest and most available form of entertainment in the country.

One of the effects of these entertainments was to subvert traditional ideas about morality, gender, sexual behavior, and sexual identity. Cultural theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allen White write about burlesque as promoting the “low other”; the same might be true of much of popular theater and film in America. Here the low other “is reviled by and excluded from the dominant social order as debased, dirty, and unworthy, but . . . is simultaneously the object of desire and/or fascination.”
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Homosexual community developed, in part, through the public discourse of sexology and the invention of the “invert.” Simultaneously, popular theater and film were subverting this pathologized image by challenging what “invert” meant. This conflict animated the career of the most noted male performer of these decades: William Julian Dalton, internationally famous as female impersonator Julian Eltinge. Born outside Boston in 1881, Eltinge began performing as a female impersonator in a local theatrical revue at age fifteen. By 1904 he was performing on the New York stage in musical comedies. Some stage performers dressed in women’s clothing for a comic effect; Eltinge convincingly portrayed women who dressed beautifully and embodied the gender ideals of the day.

Eltinge played theaters all over the United States and Europe. He made his producer, Al Woods, so much money that in 1912, the businessman named his newly constructed Broadway playhouse the Eltinge 42nd Street Theater. Eltinge’s popularity rested on his subversive ability, in a society “in which gendered behavior was understood as the natural, inevitable expression of physical sex,” to expose these roles as culturally constructed. Little is known about Eltinge’s personal life. Many historians now presume he was homosexual; making the matter more complex, he was also famous for aggressively promoting a masculine persona offstage.
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Whatever his personal life, Eltinge easily promoted the idea that gender and sexuality were far more complicated than traditional standards held. The power and common sense of these new ideas is evident in “A Musical Comedy Thought,” a short, comic 1916 poem by Dorothy Parker about Eltinge and British male impersonator Vesta Tilley:

My heart is simply melting at the thought of Julian Eltinge;

His vice versa, Vesta Tilley, too.

Our language is so dexterous, let us call them ambi-sexterous—

Why hasn’t this occurred before to you?
22

The implications of these theatrical presentations were far-reaching. If Julian Eltinge could transform himself from a virile man to a beautiful woman—a process that was thoroughly, even compulsively, documented in the popular press through drawings and photographs—what did this say about paragons of theatrical beauty such as the tall, stately, elegantly adorned, internationally famous Ziegfeld Girls, who were promoted as the glorification of perfect (white) American womanhood?

Other noted male performers were undermining the cultural presumption that “real masculinity” was “white masculinity.” They did this by playing with stereotypes and preconceived notions of race and ethnicity. Vaudeville and Broadway comics such as Eddie Cantor and Bert Lahr, both of whom emerged from Jewish immigrant traditions of masculinity that often countered the idea of the aggressively heterosexual “all-American man,” were famous on stage and screen for their brilliantly realized, nontraditional, and self-acknowledged masculine personas. Cantor, who often performed in blackface, referred to this character as a “cultured, pansy-like negro” who was “slight and effeminate, with white-rimmed glasses and mincing step.”
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Lahr’s characters were equally flamboyant. His most famous role, as the Cowardly Lion in the 1939
The Wizard of Oz,
is animated by the sheer joy of nonmasculine emotional display.

While the pansy was a stock figure in popular culture, this was not true of the female invert: the mannish lesbian, recognizable by her masculine clothing and short-cropped hair. She was present in some comic, visual images that lampooned her, but largely absent from popular culture’s images of lesbians. Perhaps this is because the image was associated with progressive causes such as suffrage, and was specifically, not generally, subversive. In contrast, the pansy was rarely connected to public figures or overt political activity. Also, the stereotype of the mannish lesbian was relatively new (the effeminate man can be traced back to the European fop). For this reason—as well as because the pansy was more flagrantly sexual and instantly recognizable, fluttering his hands and fussing over women’s clothing—the pansy image enjoyed much wider appeal.

Questions raised by sexology about gender roles and sex were also explicitly “staged,” and this became part of a public discourse. The opening scene of Mae West’s 1927 play
The Drag
has two characters openly discussing the ideas of Karl Ulrichs, and the play later examines the relationship of these ideas to medical practice. Even drama critics, writing for a broader audience, felt free to casually drop sexologists’ names in print. Robert Benchley, in 1928, reviewed West’s
Pleasure Man
and wrote: “The cast included Cases 1 though 28 in Volume Two of Havelock Ellis.”
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Popular Broadway musicals were replete with slyly mocking references to sexology, as demonstrated by this 1939 Dorothy Fields song, “A Lady Needs a Change,” sung by Ethel Merman in
Stars in Your Eyes
:

When Mr. Havelock Ellis tries to tell us

Why we’re so complex,

I say “Mr. Ellis, what the hell is

Scientific sex?”
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In the first two decades of the twentieth century, there were already distinct links in the public imagination between the theater, subversive gender performances, and homosexuality. In 1908 Maud Allan, a San Francisco resident, created international headlines with her erotic, scantily clad performance as the title character of Oscar Wilde’s verse play
Salome.
The Maud Allan phenomenon generated anxiety in the American press. The
New York Times
editorialized in 1908 that “at the present rate [of Allan’s European popularity] it is probable that Salome dances will invade the fashionable drawing rooms of New York . . . unless a halt is called.”
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Not surprisingly, men called for the censoring of Allan’s dancing, but women loved the image of freedom it presented.