Gay New York

This book taught me that there are always sources for determined historians to find on any topic. Like most good stories about subcultures, It reveals the influence of the marginalized on the mainstream, even when it’s been hidden from history.

Chauncey explodes the false perception that gay men before the 1960s did not share a common culture but were closeted and isolated from each other. I love his humanizing use of unpublished personal sources like diaries. He also reveals how the pathologizing of homosexuality by medical professionals accidentally supported the creation of vibrant gay communities.

Rarely have I learned so… show more.

If you’ve ever wondered about where the terms “coming out,” “tea room,” or “fairy” came from, this book has the answers. But more importantly, this book showed me the extent to which my preconceived notions about the relationship between gender and sexuality were simply wrong.

Chauncey’s careful and readable reconstruction of gay communities in early twentieth-century New York illustrates very clearly that ideas of masculinity and deviance and the meanings attached to sex between men are socially constructed and change over time.

His story also showed me how much history can hide in plain sight and how there are still… show more.

Americans might think gays appeared with the Stonewall Rebellion. But there was a thriving queer culture in New York City long before. This book describes how a growing urban life created opportunities for same-sex communities to develop. Punk and queer and trade and fairy, all varieties of same sex interaction, illuminate a world hidden in plain sight; where drag balls are the talk of the town. And maybe most surprising, having sex with men did not make one gay; it depended on the role one took during sex.

New York has long been considered the epicenter of gay history and culture, and Chauncey wrote its single most comprehensive chronicle. What was going on in the lives of gay New Yorkers at any given moment in gay history was also going on in the lives of gay men living in other cities across the U.S. Consequently, Gay New York is a wonderful guide to gay life in Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and cities between. I’ve relied on it time and time again in my nonfiction to steer me through the complicated culture gay men created for themselves. Katz’s… show more.

The “urban culture” mentioned in the subtitle of this book will remind us of themes in other books about the modern city: the urban experience as one of flux and diversity, uncertainty and possibility, community and alienation, class and gender, sex and violence. Chauncey focuses on urban geography and spaces, especially boundaries, interstices, and enclaves. Most astonishing, and an important discovery, are the many spaces of “ambivalent toleration” for sexual and gender difference in pre-1930s New York. This meant spaces like the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Broadway, and Harlem, but also working-class, immigrant, ethnic, and racial subcultures where dominant normativities could… show more.

If there’s one book that truly decentered my understanding of New York, it’s this one. Like most people, I had my own map of New York that I assumed was the “real” map; the history that I assumed was the “real” history. Chauncey’s exploration of Gay life in New York City drew an entirely different map over places that I thought I knew, adding meaning to things I was positive I already understood.