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

Content Warning: This section of the study guide contains descriptions of anti-gay bias. In addition, the source text contains sexually explicit descriptions and outdated and offensive language, which is replicated only in direct quotes.

“In the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world took shape in New York City.”

At the time Gay New York was published, historians generally believed that no real gay subcultures existed before the Stonewall riots of 1969. The book disproves this idea by revealing the gay subcultures in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the factors that enabled them to thrive.

“Numerous doctors reported their astonishment at discovering in their clinical interviews with ‘inverts’ that their subjects rejected the efforts of science, religion, popular opinion, and the law to condemn them as moral degenerates.”

This is one example of what Chauncey means when he argues that gay men were assertive in developing their own history. Rather than passively letting the dominant culture and medical professionals define their lives and identities, gay men asserted and developed their own views and identities.

“This book argues instead that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.”

Chauncey argues that not only did gay subcultures existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were in a way more open. This contradicts what is often termed a “Whiggish” view of gay history, which insists that social and cultural progress has always increased throughout history.