Sam Gosda
Response 3 of 5: Gay New York by George Chauncy
George Chauncy uses his book, Gay New York, to write about the gay population of New York city in late 19th century into the early 20th century. He discusses how the gay community is effected in different areas of the city as well as different events that occurred at the time. He also touches on the subsets of different types of gay communities. While Chauncy can be over-explanatory at times, he does a great job showing contrasting sides of homosexual life in the city.
An important aspect that Chauncy talks of is the enclave of African American homosexuals in Harlem. He gives multiple stories to show how Harlem was a center of visible homosexuality and that New Yorkers came from other boroughs to take part in speakeasies and other such parties. Homosexuals were more excepted here and while white visitors could leave and still hide their homosexuality in their home borough, African American homosexuals had to still be rejected on a daily basis because of their skin. Chauncy even mentions the realization that anti-gay groups left Harlem alone because they didn’t find it important enough to fix.
This combination of different identities in one person (this case homosexual and African American) links very closely to our class curriculum. The people of Harlem that were a part of the black community as well as the LGBT+ community had twice as many hardships as most of the New York population. They were forced to hide one half of themselves because it was illegal while there was no way to hide the other half which segregated them from their neighbors. We talk in class about how most people today identify with more than one enclave. The same was true for the time this book is talking of. People now still have to deal with discrimination for not just one, but possibly multiple perspectives of their identity.
George Chauncy uses small anecdotes to explain aspects of the city and its homosexual citizens. Though I agree that this method is an effective way to give context to events and facts, Chauncy does it to a point of redundancy. There are sometimes three anecdotes for one small fact. I find this to become tiresome and it takes away from the exciting story of the homosexual lifestyle during this time. I would enjoy the reading much more if once a point was made with an explanation and one anecdote the author moved on and the story continued. Chauncy is also very repetitive when it comes to his storyline. He circles around so often that he references his own chapters in the book. Sometimes they are previous chapters and sometimes they are chapters that are upcoming. It is understandable that the storyline of something as complex and the underground life of LGBT+ people in the late 1800s to the early 1900s is anything but linear, however, the important moments referenced in the book could be more coherently connected. The information could have been presented in a more linear way with more flow for easier reading.
I did enjoy learning about a movement of the underground homosexual life during this time. I did not know it was this prevalent and cultivated as having lesbian and gay lounges already established. Learning about the effect of Harlem on gay life as well as all the ways homosexuals met and socialized at a time when it was illegal was intriguing.
Questions:
Which part of their personality did gay black men/women get more persecution for in Harlem during the late 1800s to the early 1900’s?
Did World War I (with soldiers traveling/living in different countries) have a big effect on the amount of men being openly homosexual because it was more accepted in the countries they were stationed in?
