Summary Of Gay New York

In the book named Gay New York, the author yet a historian, George Chauncey, brought to the world audience a vibrant yet astoundingly transparent cultural history of gay men in the New York City between 1890 and 1940. In the book, Chauncey unearths a hidden gay male world that was thought that never existed before the World War II in New York City because of “the myths of isolation, invisibility, and [self-hatred or] internalization” of gay men in the early twentieth century. (Chauncey 2) In the 1920s, gay men had their secured yet semi-public space such as local YMCAs, bath houses, and cafeterias within the New York City’s urban world to socialize, search for jobs, and network with other gay men. (Chauncey 155-163) Until the 1930s, authorities

The occurrence of violent crackdowns on gay bars forced gay men to reconstruct their urban gay life by building up exclusively gay places hidden from the public. Simply as Chauncey illustrates in the book, “the state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.” (9) Concurrently yet surprisingly gay men developed their “codes of dress, speech, and style” such as gay jargons for communication that enables them to recognize other gay without being caught by hostile heterosexual men. (Chauncey 4) Therefore, solely gay men would recognize those jargons such as “dropped hairpins” stands for the status of queerness (7) This demonstrates that the gay life was deeply hidden underground in the early twentieth century. Owing to this hidden status, the past gay history was surely thought to have never existed in the modern history without a scrutinized

(65) Faderman illustrated that lesbians participated in the drag balls just like many other gay men did in the Greenwich Village and Harlem in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the working women gained the financial support from working in the capitalistic industrialization in the 1920s during the time of World War I. Henceforth, women at that time challenged the male prerogatives for their equal rights in the public such as the right of suffrage with the aim of the influence of capitalistic industrialization. Thusly, “the social patterns and cultural expectations that had formed men's sense of themselves as men were being challenged or undermined” in the 1920s. (Chauncey 111) As a result, middle-class men valued heterosexuality even more because it signified their manhood and the status of a real man. (Chauncey 117) Chauncey notes that this shifting thinking ensued a few generations later in minority and working-class culture as well. (68) In compared lesbians to gay men’s life in the 1920s, lesbians similarly had their subculture within the dominant heterosexual urban world like gay men did. At the period, women might have “an erotic interest in another female, and even sex with