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

"Most people date the gay liberation movement, as it was known, to the uprising sparked by the arrests at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. George Chauncey looks back beyond Stonewall to the late 19th century and he finds that a very robust gay culture existed in New York nearly a century earlier. Gay men were able to enjoy intellectual achievement and social freedom and exercise their sexuality in ways that were since forgotten. Chauncey’s work shows, once again, that the fruits of the seeds planted in one period of history can be recaptured in future moments. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He shows how 19th-century gay culture provided opportunities for men in various quarters to congregate and socialize freely. He also talks about a culture in which gayness, so to speak, was not viewed as deviant (as it would later come to be viewed), but as something that was within a range of masculinities. He focuses on men in the book, not exclusively, but almost exclusively. To think of a range of masculinities, of men who either enjoyed the company of gay men, of men who were gay and able to enjoy their sexual freedom, is a very different environment from the one in which we typically think of prior to the gay liberation movement. He shows us a side of New York that is more consistent with the way we like to think about ourselves today—as open and giving opportunity to all people to express themselves in whatever ways they wish. That ended, very sadly, with prohibition, and particularly with the condemnation of the Catholic Church which was instrumental in making sexual practices that they did not condone forbidden. In the early 20th century, we began to see legal apparatus to suppress sexuality and crackdowns by police which made it almost impossible to be openly gay. We see something of our city in George Chauncey’s work. Virtually every nook and cranny of New York City has been influenced by people of all sexual orientations. One of the things that George Chauncey points out in his book is the flowering of gay reviewers setting the taste for the rest of New York City. The impact on culture has really been huge, but it’s a stereotype to think only about the impact on culture. New York also made great strides in getting rid of discrimination of all kinds because of LBTGQ activism in the wake of Stonewall. And activists set the tone for many other cities in terms of reversing the discrimination that had been faced by people who were gay or lesbian or trans."