NYC's Gay Culture of the 1920s, and the Invention of 'The Closet'

A group of lesbians at NYC venue Webster Hall [Public Domain]

In the popular imagination, most people imagine that gay culture in New York City started in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots. This has always kind of pissed me off as a gay person, if only for the reason that if you even try to bring up the idea of anyone having a gay life before the 60s people just assume it couldn't be possible. As if we as LGBT folk didn't exist until the late 60s as anything other than the occasional person hung for sodomy or something. Condescendingly, many straights imagine that the gays of yore must have become self-loathing and passively spent their entire lives in the closet until Stonewall happened. Not that the Stonewall Riots weren't tremendously important, of course - that's not at all what I am saying - but gay clubs didn't get their start with Stonewall and Julian's and the Duplex, and the systematic suppression of the LGBT community was not due to some age-old, unchanging social antipathy, nor was it a sign of passivity by LGBT people. Anti-gay forces created the closet in the early 20th century.

Believe it or not, there was actually an earlier gay subculture in NYC - and it wasn't some hidden illicit thing! Granted, of course many straight people disapproved, but people were open about this subculture, and it was even written about in papers! And when else could this have happened but in the era of, as Cole Porter (a gay man himself) put it, "Anything Goes" - The Roarin' Twenties?

This was an era of, after all, the breaking down of pre-WWI social norms, as well as cultural experimentation and an overall irreverence for authority. Greenwich Village and Harlem in particular had a huge number of speakeasies that catered to gay men and lesbian women. One such club was known as the Hamilton Lodge. (It wasn't named directly after Alexander Hamilton, but after the neighbourhood of Hamilton Heights where it was located, which was named after Hamilton.)

Picture this - uptown, at Hamilton Lodge in Harlem, a large crowd is amassed to watch performers of both genders in full drag at a Drag Ball - or, as it was sometimes more derogatorily called, a "F*ggot Ball". A number of well known LGBT people casually mingled with the crowd of people straight and gay. Hamilton Lodge could hold up to 6,000 people—and it was often packed for its annual Masquerade ball and frequent drag shows. Even the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and others from high society often came to watch.

Downtown in Greenwich Village, lesbians like Eve Adams ran clubs with signs stating things like "Men admitted but not welcome". The larger bohemian subculture already associated with the Village at the time provided cover for LGBT folk of all stripes.

Yes, the "Pansy Craze" as it was called was in full swing, with songs like the "B.D. Woman's Blues" explicitly talking about same-sex relationships. And - just like today - even straight people who didn't exactly support our lifestyle sometimes came to gawk.

Chad Heap, a professor at George Washington University, says of this: “It’s pretty amazing just how widespread these [drag] balls were. Almost every newspaper article about them has a list of 20 to 30 well known people of the day who were in attendance as spectators. It was just a widely integrated part of life in the 1920s and 30s.” He later says, "It’s not just that they were visible, but that popular culture and newspapers at the time remarked on their visibility - everyone knew that they were visible."

1920s drag ball at Webster Hall

This is not to say, of course, that the 1920s were some gay utopia, of course. Many of these people still maintained marriages to other-sexed people. Cole Porter, for example, who I mentioned before? Married to a woman who may have also been a lesbian. Actually, "lavender marriages" - gay men marrying lesbian women as a cover so they could still have day jobs - were not uncommon. (Some of these also may have involved bisexual people in relationships.) In addition, LGBT people who didn’t live publicly as a pansy or a bulldagger didn’t necessarily “identify” as anything in particular, even if they acted on their desires and had same-sex partners.

Richard Bruce Nugent, who lived through this time, said, ”You didn’t get on the rooftop and shout, ‘I fucked my wife last night.’ So why would you get on the roof and say ‘I loved prick.’ You didn’t. You just did what you wanted to do. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

I'm also gonna quote our friend Chad Heap again: “They [the LGBT people of this time] didn’t see a conflict between not being openly gay at work and sort of only being gay during their leisure time. These were moments when working class gay men and women could more freely explore their sexuality, desires, and interests in cross dressing, but probably no doctor or lawyer is going to dress up in drag at these events, out of risk of being exposed.”

1920s lesbian couple

Prohibition, for all its faults, was actually a huge reason why such a vibrant gay subculture was possible, believe it or not. With people seeking out alcohol wherever they could do it, inevitably social groups that would not have intermixed before were coming more and more into contact with each other. And the Great War seemed to prove to people that societal norms of the Gilded Age no longer applied. Monarchies had been overthrown! Women could vote and were cutting off their hair and wearing short skirts! Even New York's mayor, Jimmy Walker, openly disdained prohibition.

The cultural climate was just right for people of New York to just lap this shit up. But this relative tolerance didn't last forever.

So... what happened?

The Stock Market crashed in 1929 and tanked the economy, catapulting us into the Great Depression. And with millions of male breadwinners suddenly losing their jobs and being cast out onto the streets,, people were fearful of any additional threats to traditional family hierarchies. So the State built the closet and forced gay people into it - as part of a wider Depression-era condemnation of the cultural experimentation of the 1920s, which many people blamed for the economic collapse.

In Hollywood, the Hayes Code went into effect, and thus after a slew of films which had dealt with gay images, this new production code banned gay characters and even talk of homosexuality, on the silver screen.

In addition, the New York City Police, thanks to little-enforced sodomy laws that had been updated in 1923, began sending undercover officers into gay bars to talk to men, lead them on, and arrest them if they showed interest. This dirty trick led to more than 50,000 gay men to be arrested by the time Stonewall rolled around. Sex-crime panic grew, and gay men and lesbians were seen as dangerous to society. Prohibition was repealed, and the New York State Liquor laws were updated to serve alcohol only in places that were “orderly”, which didn’t apparently include gay and lesbian nightclubs.

LGBT people did not take this shit lying down. In the 1920s, some gay bars challenged this in court, but were unsuccessful, and unfortunately anti-gay policing around the country intensified in the 40's and especially the 50's, when Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that homosexuals in the State Department threatened national security. Oh, and, police departments and newspapers around the country began to demonize homosexuals as child molesters; arrest rates increased dramatically. This isolation of homosexuals made it easier for them to be demonised.

If any of this is starting to sound weirdly familiar to what is happening in our country today, well, not to get political but it should. We are all going to have to be vigilant to avoid history repeating itself - especially with it about to be the 20s once again. Bring back jazz and flapper dresses, leave homophobia in the past please!

LGBT men dancing together

Sadly, up until recently, this gay culture has been mostly forgotten in the public imagination. But it's important to remember it. Both for LGBT people looking to find representation of themselves in the past, and thus assurance that WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE, and for those of us worried about LGBT rights in light of today's current joke of an administration.

-Nym

P.S.
If you'd like to learn more about this scene, all three of the articles I referenced for this post reference the book Gay New York by George Chauncey. Though I haven't read it yet myself, I imagine a lot of information can be found within this book.