Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
by George Chauncey
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Book Summary Information
Author: George ChaunceyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-05-18
ISBN: 0465026214
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Basic Books
Book Reviews of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Book Review: An engaging and informative book
Summary: 5 Stars
George Chauncey has written an engaging and informative book that provides entry into another American era's conceptualizations of what we today think of as homosexuality.
Gay New York takes great pains to debunk what Chauncey terms "the three myths" of isolation (gay men led solitary lives prior to Stonewall), invisibility (the gay world was difficult for isolated men to find) and internalization (gay men were self-loathing and universally accepted their denigration by the dominant culture). In addition to gay men's diaries, the book provides a glimpse into a bygone world through personal interviews, meticulous documentation by police investigators and arrest reports, sensationalistic newspaper accounts of police raids, cartoon illustrations from popular magazines, advertisements for drag balls, medical writings and other ingenious and esoteric sources. Combining serious scholarship and humor, the book capably documents the perspective of a culture that defined sexuality and gender roles using criteria that are altogether different from those we use today. In demonstrating the fluidity with which human beings define their own sexual behavior, Chauncey provocatively stirs the postmodern debate between essentialist and social constructionist explanations of sexuality.
In reading Chauncey's book, one appreciates how a culture makes sense of sexual activities. In the days of Gay New York, the terms pansy or fairy were used to define a gender role, what we would today refer to as effeminacy, rather than a sexual orientation. Effeminacy was presumed to indicate that a man was sexually available to other men. In that cultural nosology, the man who had sex with another man was not stigmatized as long as he did not act effeminately and if the homosexual acts in which he engaged were masculine, meaning insertive.
Some sex researchers treat sexual orientations as irreducible traits or markers while many cultures, like the one described in Gay New York, treat gender role behavior as such. Today, many laypeople are willing to accept a sexual orientation as the basic component of human sexuality that can be studied, dissected and for which an eventual etiology will emerge. The incorporation of this newer view into the culture has had interesting political ramifications. On the left, if a homosexual orientation is defined as an intrinsic, genetic trait over which a person has no control, then denying people equal rights because of that trait is akin to racism or discriminating on the basis of a disability. On the right, even if a homosexual orientation is intrinsic, it is considered part of man's baser nature and should be controlled, like a genetic tendency to drink or take drugs. Further on the right, religious and historical beliefs condemn homosexuality as a transgression of rigid, gender roles defined by ancient texts and customs presumed to go back to the dawn of civilization. These latter beliefs totally reject the modern classification of orientations and as in the world of Gay New York, they conflate sexual attraction with gender identity.
In his successful portrayal of a once-thriving same-sex culture, Chauncey makes the point that the oppression that immediately preceded Stonewall was not always the norm. He ably does the job he set out to do in disproving the myths of isolation, invisibility and internalization. He makes the case that "the excoriation of queers served primarily to set the boundaries for how normal men could dress, walk, talk, and relate to women and to each other" and that "the normal world constituted itself and established its boundaries by creating the gay world as a stigmatized other" (pp. 25-26). He argues, somewhat ominously, that an increased visibility of the homosexual culture ultimately led to its own demise. Starting in the 1930's, restrictive and sometimes violent enforcement of laws against gay men evolved in reaction to the openness of their lives. Although the nature of the debate has changed, today we see a backlash in response to the increasing numbers of gay men and women coming out. History teaches us many lessons and Gay New York is highly recommended reading for both the historical facts that it provides as well as for the scientific, political and cultural questions that it raises.
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Summary of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Based on years of research and access to a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, this book is a fascinating portrait of a gay world that is not supposed to have existed.
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