LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out: What's the History of New York City's Gay Community? |
by David Bianco |
Historians date the gay liberation movement to a few nights in 1969, when New York City queers took to the streets to protest police harassment of gay bars. But the city's gay community can actually trace its roots back at least 100 years. In the last decades of the 19th century, many young people came to New York City from small towns, rural areas, and Europe, looking for economic opportunities that the country's largest city offered. The new residents crowded the predominantly working-class neighborhoods. Among them were many queer folk who had felt isolated and alone in their hometowns. An array of saloons and dance halls catered to the social needs of the new urban dwellers, and patrons included numerous male "degenerates." The "fairies," who frequented establishments like Paresis Hall on the Lower East Side, "call each other sisters," wrote one observer, "and take people out for immoral purposes." Vice squad reports from the early 1900s show that gay men also frequented public spaces like parks and bathhouses looking for sex. Because women led less public lives than men did, little is known about lesbians in New York before the 1920s. However, many of the city's labor organizers, social workers, suffragists, and academics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were never-married women who lived in domestic arrangements with other women and had networks of close female friends. The membership of Heterodoxy, a middle-class women's political club founded in 1912 in Greenwich Village, included quite a few pairs of "devoted companions." The period between the world wars witnessed an expansion of the artistic life of the city. Bohemian culture, which embraced both artistic and sexual freedom, took root in the Village. Queer artists like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eva Le Gallienne, and Hart Crane epitomized the Village's "anything goes" atmosphere, making it a popular haven for gay men and lesbians. At the same time, a queer subculture blossomed in Harlem. Many of the greatest contributors to the Harlem Renaissance of 1920-1935 were gay or bisexual. Drag balls and private parties called buffet flats "were not gay, but they were open," said artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. As it did in many major cities, World War II furthered the development of a queer community in New York. After the war, many gay service members who were dishonorably discharged stayed on in New York instead of returning to disapproving families. In 1945, a group of gay ex-soldiers formed the Veterans Benevolent Association, a social club that held dances and parties with hundreds of gay men attending. Bars remained the center of gay male social life in New York throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, helping to foster a sense of queer community. Separate women's clubs like the Bagatelle and the Sea Colony offered lesbians a way to meet friends and lovers, too. The "gay girl" culture of 1950s Greenwich Village, heavily dominated by butch-femme role playing, was popularized in pulp novels of the day, like Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon. Queer New York had its political side, too. Activist Randy Wicker, a member of the local Mattachine Society, launched a one-man campaign in 1962 to improve gay coverage in the media. Wicker's efforts culminated in the running of a gay story on the front page of The New York Times in December 1963a first for a mainstream paper. Although the headline was far from positive"Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern"the story cracked the wall of silence surrounding what had become a bona fide community. In 1967, gay activist Craig Rodwell, also a Mattachine member, founded the first gay bookstore in the world in Greenwich Village. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop was an ad hoc community center, where as much organizing took place as did book buying. After the historic riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, New York was at the forefront of the new gay liberation movement. Over the next few years, the city witnessed an explosion of gay and lesbian groups. Some organizations founded in the city in the 1970s, like the National Gay Task Force (now NGLTF) and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, are still leaders of gay activism. New York City also took center stage during the AIDS crisis. The news story that broke in the July 3, 1981 issue of The New York Times"Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals"led to the organizing of a powerful array of gay social service organizations and activist groups in New York, like Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1982 and ACT UP five years later. In 1985, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) got its start when some queer New Yorkers became fed up with biased mainstream media reporting about the epidemic. Both ACT UP and GLAAD grew out of meetings held at the city's gay community center, which opened in 1984. Many national gay organizations now call Washington, D.C., home and San Francisco is still the country's gay Mecca. But New York City has remained the symbolic heart of the gay and lesbian rights movement. In a June 1999 ceremony in the Village, the Stonewall Inn was officially placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first gay site in the country to be so honored. David Bianco is the author of Gay Essentials ( www.alyson.com ), a collection of his history columns. He can be reached at DaveBianco@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 7, June 16, 2000. |