Gender Roles In Chicago

spaces, and the othering that took place there. With the influx of southern African Americans and European immigrants, Chicago neighborhoods began to develop along racial and ethnic lines. In turn, government authorities became worried about the purported vice in these districts. According to Kevin Mumford, these moral reform campaigns pushed prostitution into new zones of vice that allowed for interracial and homosexual entertaining, pleasures, and interactions. These neighborhoods slowly became the queer spaces for non-conforming behavior, be it sexual or racial; to the authorities, these communities “epitomized moral degeneracy and the perverse results of industrialization.” These zones also transformed sexual practices, gender expression,

The city of Chicago often neglected these economically depressed communities. This did not stop residents though from creating a world rich with public baths, tearooms, saloons, speakeasies, dance halls, and other spaces for entertainment strewn among the furnished rooms, flats, and local businesses. Working class immigrants and fairies lived side-by-side, mostly out of necessity, although most of the scholarship observes these spaces as mostly congenial. Essentially, these areas became sites of resistance to the prevailing and dominant ideology of traditional gender roles and white (American)

Consequently, a historian needs to look outside of traditional archival sources in an attempt to locate the individual’s voice. One strategy is to study the prevalent gay and lesbian themed fiction available at the time. Commercial rental libraries were scattered throughout Chicago. Even though many featured the tragic homosexual trope, this literature allowed gay men and lesbians a glimpse into a world they may have previously not known. According to David K. Johnson, the queer life portrayed in these novels “provided the discourse which gay men [and lesbians] interpreted their experiences.” Kevin Mumford adds that homosexuals just beginning to grapple “with a conflicted sexual desire … sought to make sense of their feelings by readings texts that dared to mention the unspeakable