A Queer History of the United States (19 page)

In Washington Square he sat and watched the people pass. Lithe Italian hoodlums in exaggerated clothes creased to razor sharpness, with dark, sallow skin and oiled hair, strutting with clicking heels and a cocky grace. . . . Painted boys who ogled the hoodlums hungrily and lowered their eyes in false modesty and brazen coquetry as they passed, leaving trails of perfume. . . . A hoodlum would say “hello, sweetheart,” and then turn to his companions and pass some remark that would cause them to laugh loudly.
38

This emerging street culture was present in New York’s Harlem and Greenwich Village, but also in other major cities. Public cruising often relied on sexology’s inversion stereotypes, which Nugent portrays here, to make same-sex desire legible. Making desire visible, however, could also elicit violence.

Bars, clubs, and night spots that catered to a homosexual clientele, even if nonhomosexuals were there slumming, were frequently targets for police raids instigated by public outrage or by politicians promising to make public spaces “safe” for women, children, and families. More dangerous to homosexuals, however, were the legal and moral crusades that emerged in the late 1930s. These climaxed in the summer of 1937, when widespread panic broke out over alleged sexual psychopaths who would harm and murder children. The frightening image of the sexual psychopath was clearly linked to the emerging figure of the male homosexual. These campaigns were connected to the local police assaults on homosexual venues in Los Angeles.
39

The crusades against homosexuality had a tremendous impact in other cities as well. In September 1937, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI (who was emotionally, if not sexually, involved with his assistant, Clyde Tolson), wrote an article called “War on the Sex Criminal” that was published in the
New York Herald Tribune
and widely reprinted. Hoover’s article was clearly inciting fears of the more public homosexual:

The present apathy of the public toward perverts, generally regarded as “harmless,” should be changed to one of suspicious scrutiny. The harmless pervert of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and murderer of tomorrow. . . . The ordinary offender [turned] into a dangerous, predatory animal, preying upon society because he has been taught he can get away with it.
40

These attacks, always in coded language that never mentioned “fairy,” “pansy,” or “homosexual,” were primarily aimed at homosexual men. Illinois, California, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio almost immediately passed “sexual psychopath laws,” and other states followed. Over the next decade, more waves of “sex panics” spread across the country and similar laws were passed. The laws differed in detail from state to state, but usually allowed the courts to incarcerate suspected “sexual psychopaths” for undetermined periods of time in mental institutions. These laws were broadly written, and the definition of “sexual psychopath” always remained vague so that it could be applied as indiscriminately as possible.

Sexual psychopath laws, clearly influenced by social purity concerns, almost always presumed children were being victimized. By the mid to late 1940s, “during the nationwide campaigns against sexual psychopaths, the terms
child molester,
homosexual,
sex offender,
sex psychopath,
sex degenerate,
sex deviate,
and sometimes even
communist
were used and became interchangeable in the mind of the public.”
41
The conflation of vague “sexual deviancy” with homosexuality and child molestation set up what was to become a widely accepted myth: that male homosexuals were innately driven to seduce or sexually assault male children. This myth was a strong influence in shaping the public discussion about homosexuality well into the twenty-first century.

The more public homosexuals became, the more they were believed to threaten society. Many women and men felt that personal, and even community, safety would more likely be secured by fighting for a right to personal privacy rather than a right to public security. This emphasis on privacy dovetailed with the accepted sentiment, and mandate, that all sexuality was private. Mandated privacy of sexual expression was what social purity activists, vice squads, and religious leaders were attempting to achieve in their attacks on all public manifestations of desire and fantasy in popular culture. What they could not ban or eradicate, however, was the individual, private imagination. Certainly women and men who read sex and marriage guides had their sexual curiosity piqued and were encouraged to think about these matters in greater detail. One of the unintended effects of these publications was the rise of public discussions about what roles sexuality, sexual behavior, and gender played in people’s lives.

Fictional depictions of homosexuality were becoming common during these decades. While some of them were censored, the private act of reading a book was less upsetting to the guardians of public morals than the more theatrical, and public, manifestations of homosexuality. European works such as Marcel Proust’s 1922
Cities of the Plain,
Thomas Mann’s 1912
Death in Venice
(published in the United States in 1925), and Radclyffe Hall’s 1928
The Well of Loneliness
were influential in shaping American ideas about homosexuality. The character Stephen Gordon, a masculine woman who loves other women, in
The Well of Loneliness
became the prototype of the mannish lesbian. The novel was banned in England and published in the United States after a lengthy court battle. Its extraordinary popularity affirmed widespread interest in the subject of homosexuality, as well as how strongly the idea of the “invert” had taken root.

The concept of the “tragic” male invert was so pliable that Americans Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, in their 1933
The Young and the Evil,
made him the center of a quirky, madcap romance. Published in Paris because of its blithe acceptance of homosexual sex and comic tone, the novel was banned for years in the United States and Great Britain, where customs offices confiscated and burned copies. Lesbian and gay male themes also surfaced in popular American novels, such as Nella Larsen’s 1929
Passing
and Blair Niles’s 1931
Strange Brother,
both set in Harlem, and Gale Wilhelm’s critically acclaimed
We Too Are Drifting
(1934) and
Torchlight to Valhalla
(1938). Gay male themes were prevalent in lowbrow novels, such as André Tellier’s 1931
Twilight Men
and Lew Levenson’s 1934
Butterfly Man
,
but also in more literary works, such as Kay Boyle’s 1933
Gentlemen, I Address You Privately
and Djuna Barnes’s 1936
Nightwood.

Readers encountered the ideas of sexologists through fiction. Novels with homosexual themes—which drew on and often described homosexual subcultures—would routinely mention sexologists and their works. Blair Niles’s 1931
Strange Brother,
set in Harlem’s ambisexual nightclubs and homosexual milieu, mentions so many authors and their books—Edward Carpenter’s
Love’s Coming of Age,
John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis—that it functions as a basic reading list on homosexuality. Foreman Brown’s 1933
Better Angel,
written under the pseudonym of Richard Meeker, notes that Kurt, its main character, has read Ellis, Carpenter, Freud, and German playwright Frank Wedekind’s
Spring Awakening
,
which included a positive portrayal of homosexual love between teenage boys. Sometimes the references in popular writing are simply allusions; the “modern” poet Helen Havelock in Tellier’s
Twilight Men
is a clear reference to the sexologist.

The popularity of these books indicated that many people were interested in homosexuality. In a cultural climate that fostered fear of public homosexuality, the privacy of reading even popular material on the subject holds political significance, reinforcing the idea that personal and community safety can be secured through privacy. This was a different model than the fight for access to public space for which many in the African American community were waging. Most movements for social change were not open to explicitly discussing homosexuality.

Despite the vibrancy of homosexuality in popular culture in Harlem’s clubs and streets, most of the homosexuals involved in the Harlem Renaissance were not open about their sexuality outside of their art. There was overt and covert hostility to homosexuality within some of the African American community—more overt in the middle class, who were more concerned about social respectability.
42
Even the insightful W. E. B. Du Bois seems to have been both bewildered by and oblivious to the issue. He dismissed his longtime, highly valued coworker, Augustus Granville Dill, from
the
Crisis,
the official magazine of the NAACP, after Dill was arrested in a men’s room for a homosexual encounter. (Du Bois later apologized in his autobiography.) Yet he also encouraged his daughter Yolande to marry the brilliant Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who was widely thought to be homosexual and who, three months after the wedding, sailed to Europe with his best man, the bisexual Harold Jackman. (Yolande followed a month later.) The message here was the same for African Americans as it was for homosexuals: if you are seeking political gains, then the requirement is to appear appropriate in public.

One model that marginalized groups often follow in order to gain social acceptance is to produce culture that will be acknowledged and valued by people outside the group. The Harlem Renaissance was a “civil rights enterprise masquerading as an arts movement.” Noted white literary critic Carl Van Doren emphasized the importance of black voices when he stated in 1924 that “what American literature decidedly needs at the moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute those items, I do not know what Americans are.”
43
Across art forms and races, homosexuals had a similar relationship to mainstream culture. They also formed community and gained visibility through the arts and popular culture. In some ways this eased the road to full citizenship for both African Americans and homosexuals. The road, however, was not a smooth one, as both homosexual and black cultural production—in particular, black-originated music such as jazz—was frequently attacked by moralists as overly sexual, provocative, and dangerous.

The insistence on policing images of homosexuality and gender deviance in public, as well as the bodies and spaces with which they were associated, was a manifestation of social and cultural anxiety. This anxiety was less about an individual play or film than about larger changes in social structure and mobility of deviant types. Stallybrass and White note that “what is
socially
peripheral is so frequently
symbolically
central.” Social leaders, clergy, and legislators focused on manifestations of homosexuality in the so-called social periphery of the “low other” because they were able to, in varying degrees, regulate and control them.

They could not, however, as easily control how women and men chose to live their lives now that urban areas were growing and offering a plethora of choices, from living to leisure. Complicating this situation was the reality that as homosexuals themselves were moving away from the social periphery toward the symbolic center of mainstream life and culture, many nonhomosexuals were valuing homosexual-created forms of art and entertainment. The presence of same-sex-desiring people in single-gender urban spaces led to the blossoming of a homosexual arts scene. This newly defined and influential subversive culture began to change mainstream culture in myriad ways.

Seven. Production and Marketing of Gender

The hectic vitality of the United States between 1900 and 1940 can clearly be seen in the rise of the population, which grew from 76 million in 1900 to 131.7 million in 1940. In 1910, 26.1 million people lived in metropolitan areas, as opposed to 65.9 million in nonmetropolitan areas. By 1940 those numbers had shifted to 63 million people living in cities and 68.7 in nonmetropolitan areas.

In this radical reshaping of the country, American cities became centers of commerce and industry. They were also becoming centers of influential artistic production, the clearest examples being the modern theater and publishing industries in New York and the film industry in Hollywood—venues that were extraordinarily influential in shaping contemporary, progressive attitudes about gender and sexuality.

The emergence of the new, strange, ambiguous, intermediate third sex—the invert—led American culture to clearly define the physical, social, and cultural parameters of the first and second sexes. Officially, homosexuality was condemned, although it was certainly an object of fascination and was often tolerated in urban areas. In addition to the sexual anxiety it caused, homosexuality also generated confusion about gender that had to be addressed. Heterosexuality was painstakingly constructed by the medical profession. Homosexuality was scrutinized, pathologized, and policed. But this was not enough. One clear, proactive response to the potential confusion and threat of the invert was the invention and promotion of the strong, forceful, muscular male as an icon of white heterosexual masculinity.
1

The form and impact of this response must be understood in the context of American economics and consumerism. Each was a fundamental force in the lives of U.S. citizens. Together they were the basis for what would increasingly be called “the American way of life.” This new national economic condition was largely a result of the economic systems and substantial amount of capital created by the entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age. These men, called “robber barons” by their critics, acted ruthlessly and often illegally, but laid the foundation for the United States to be at the forefront of the world economy. More important, these economic changes also produced a culture in which personal identity was formed not just through gender, race, sexual identity, and class, but through consumption.

As people migrated from rural areas to urban centers, there was a profound shift in economic and consumption patterns. The United States was slowing turning from a culture of production to one of consumption—a process that would reach its apotheosis in the 1950s. This culture shift is illustrated by the success of the assembly line (often attributed to Henry Ford, but actually based on ideas from employees) and the production of the Model T car. Efficiency and relative worker safety made the Model T so inexpensive that by 1916, eight years after its inception, 472,000 were sold. By 1918 one family in thirteen owned a car; eleven years later, four out of every five families possessed one. Ford also broke with other manufacturers by offering the unheard-of wage of five dollars a day (so that his workers could buy one of his cars). The interplay between mass production and mass consumption was later called Fordism.

The invention of the car was transformative for American culture. It greatly increased personal mobility, thereby destabilizing patterns of living that were based on the biological family. More important, it gave people access to private space away from home. The 1912 song “Bump, Bump, Bump in Your Automobile,” in which Willie Green and Molly May go driving, ends suggestively with the lyric, “Molly May said she loved Willie Green. Best of all, she loved Willie’s machine.” By the 1920s the automobile was fully established as a site of sexual freedom, especially for young people, who now had access to “lover’s lanes.” This new innovation in romantic and sexual privacy was also a boon to those engaged in same-sex relationships.

At the same time, the new wave of mass consumption worked with the cultural need to define and reinforce traditional gender roles. The gender of consumption could never start too early. By 1902 department stores had inaugurated “children’s day,” and by 1926 the United States was the largest toy producer in the world.
2
While there had always been some differentiation between girls’ and boys’ toys, the mass production and consumption of toys during this time became increasingly gendered. In 1916
American Boy
magazine offered boys incentives for selling subscriptions, including “erector sets, a Daisy Air Rifle, a rotary press, and even a Big Dick machine gun.”
3
After World War I and through the 1940s, boys’ toys were often military, while girls’ toys taught them about motherhood. Dolls, in particular, were instrumental in teaching girls how to be mothers. In 1919 as much money was spent manufacturing doll carriages as baby carriages.
4
As the national birthrate dropped in the late 1920s and 1930s, leaving many girls without younger siblings for whom to care, sales of baby dolls increased.
5
This push toward traditional gender norms was, like the rest of the growing consumerism of the decades, an attempt to solidify the place of the heterosexual family as the cornerstone of American life.

The organization, through mass consumerism, of American culture as heterosexual, middle-class, and white rearticulated a masculine—and by extension, American—manifest destiny. The car, as well as advances in other forms of transportation and the rise of a middle class, led to institutionalized vacations and formalized leisure time. With the rise of commercial beach resorts, mountain lodges, dude ranches, and other holiday destinations, vacations quickly became integral to American consumption and were structured around either family-based activities or heterosexual flirting and coupling.
6
This gendered image intersected politics, society, and popular culture; it encompassed individual achievement, economic opportunity, nationalism, and imperial expansion as the American way. Finally, it aligned with ideas from the social purity movement, sexology, and the new science of eugenics.

Producing Manliness

Teddy Roosevelt—soldier, hunter, adventurer, and president of the United States in the first eight years of the century—became emblematic of American masculinity in the popular imagination. Born to wealth in 1858, he overcame a habitually unwell childhood by sheer force of will to become a star college athlete. In 1898 he became the leader of the Rough Riders, volunteers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish Civil War. Their exaggerated exploits became mythical accounts of American manhood. For Roosevelt, manhood and the strong, athletic, white male body were inseparable from America and patriotism. By the time Roosevelt was in the White House, “the entire nation knew of Roosevelt’s youthful bodybuilding to overcome frailty” and “young boys began strengthening regimens, and grown men reveled in what the
New York Tribune
in 1907 called Roosevelt’s ‘opulent efficiency of mind and body.’” He even brought a professional boxer to the White House as a sparring partner.
7
The conflation of robust maleness, heterosexuality, and whiteness set a standard for citizenship that was the antithesis of the invert.

Roosevelt’s representational power drew strength and scope from Progressive Era reform thinking. Progressivism involved fighting for shorter working hours in factories, rehabilitating dangerous tenements, starting regulatory commissions for labor and finance, and battling corruption in government, as well as social purity projects such as Prohibition and protecting women and children from nonwhite people. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a brilliant feminist economist and theorist who supported many progressive social reforms, believed in the supremacy of the “white race.” She argued that Jews had “not passed the tribal stage,” that “orientals” were innately connected to crimes, and that African Americans essentially should be forced into industrial work because of their low intelligence.
8
Such thinking was a logical outcome of social purity advocates’ valuing, in their language, the “white race” over others. As Beryl Satter points out:

The white middle-class vision of Progressive-era reform could embrace censorship campaigns, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, and even lynching, as well as sanitation and tenement reform, factory regulations, women’s suffrage, and socialism. All were potential means for safeguarding the evolutionary development of the Anglo-Saxon or human race and hence of inaugurating a purified republic.
9

Given these attitudes about race, it is not surprising that Gilman, and many other women and men involved in these movements, believed in eugenics—a social-political theory that advocated the improvement of the human race by deterring the reproduction of those people deemed to have less-than-desirable traits. Eugenics was not just a social purity movement belief but was widely taken up by the legal and medical systems in the United States. Sixty-five thousand Americans were sterilized from the turn of the century into the 1970s, and in 1927 the Supreme Court ruled in
Buck v. Bell
that compulsory sterilization was constitutional “for the protection and health of the state.”
10
Michael Amico notes that eugenics produced a scientific model of “fitness” that would be used for the next century to describe and limit the lives of LGBT people in numerous, substantial ways. Their obvious “unfitness” denied them full citizenship and rendered them medically inferior, legally unequal, morally suspect, and socially outcast, with no right to reproduce.
11

Roosevelt embraced eugenic thought. For Roosevelt, masculinity and nationhood were completely tied up with worries about “racial degeneracy.” In a speech to the National Congress of Mothers on May 13, 1905, Roosevelt bemoaned the idea of family planning and claimed that “if the average family in which there are children contained but two children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction.” He added that such “race suicide” would not be regrettable, since a race that wants to have fewer children does not deserve to exist.
12

As Roosevelt was becoming the emblem of American manhood, a group was forming in Great Britain that would soon affect American boys. In 1907 Robert Baden-Powell, a noted lieutenant general in the British Army stationed in India and Africa, adapted a military training manual,
Aids for Scouting
,
for boys. A year later he wrote
Scouting for Boys
and founded what would become an international movement, the Boy Scouts. Baden-Powell was a product of British colonial political policies, and they are reflected in his thinking. In 1896, in a book about one of his African campaigns, he wrote, “The stupid inertness of the puzzled negro is duller than that of an ox; a dog would grasp your meaning in one-half the time. Men and Brothers! They may be brothers, but they are certainly not men.”
13
Like Roosevelt, Baden-Powell was deeply concerned with racial degeneration.

For Baden-Powell, Scouting was a “character factory” whose purpose “from the very beginning [was] conceived as a remedy to Britain’s moral, physical, and military weakness.”
14
Intrinsic to Baden-Powell’s vision of the Boy Scouts was the formation of an idealized national citizen who would embody the perfect white male. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on national patriotism flirted with fascism, since as late as 1937 he was arguing for links between the British Scouts and the Hitler Youth groups; he was overruled by the Boy Scouts International Committee.

The production of the perfect male citizen (not unlike Ford’s mass-production factories), combined with the ideals of the social purity movement, produced a refined American national identity and bolstered a national concept of masculinity. The Scouting movement quickly moved to the United States and was formally recognized in 1910. It drew on the British movement but combined it with two earlier boys’ movements that were symbolic of the American West and the new American man: the Woodcraft Indians, founded in 1902 by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, and the Society of the Sons of Daniel Boone, founded in 1905 by writer Daniel Carter Beard.

For Baden-Powell and Roosevelt, personal sexual immorality and racial degeneration were unarguably connected. Both men repeatedly voiced concerns that boys were being physically and morally harmed by social ills, including smoking, card playing, swearing, indecent literature, movies, public dancing, and sexual immorality. Echoing the concerns of religious guides for girls and marriage manuals, guides for boys suggested that young, impressionable boys were as susceptible to social threats as were girls. The widely read 1910
A Young Man’s Guide: Counsels, Reflections, and Prayers for Catholic Young Men
by Rev F. X. Lasance makes a point of singling out masturbation—“it is said of Onan that the ‘Lord slew him because he did a detestable thing’”—as well as homosexuality: “Remember also the fate of the cities of the plain: ‘The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is multiplied, and their sin is become exceedingly grievous.’”
15

Yet unlike religious instructional guides for girls, which focused on what
not
to do in order to remain pure, the messages for boys in these guides were about becoming a man through correct action and belief. Lasance continually equates morality with traditional manliness: “Manliness implies self-control, conscientiousness, moral courage, fearless discharge of duty in the face of obloquy and prejudice, firm determination to do what is right and pleasing to God.” He routinely identifies the opposite of manliness as “effeminacy.”
16