Labor of Love (7 page)

After Prohibition passed in 1921, the speakeasies that sprang up around New York and other major cities became places where people from different backgrounds could mix beyond the reach of the law. The atmosphere was exciting—and a little dangerous. You were surrounded by strangers you could not necessarily trust. The thing was, you did not have to.

“What does it matter if an unsavory Irish politician is carrying on a dull and noisy flirtation with the little blond at the table behind us?” Ellin Mackay wrote in
The New Yorker
in 1925. “What does it matter if the flapper and her fattish boy friend are wriggling beside us as we dance?”

Mackay signed her essay “A Post-Debutante.” She was the heiress to a mind-boggling mining fortune. Starting with the “coming out” ball that her parents threw for her when she was sixteen, she attended an endless string of engagements with her mother. The young men she met at these events were all highly eligible. They were all on the Social Register. But they were all boring. “Hundreds of pale-faced youths, exactly alike,” Mackay called them. So after the balls finished, she would take her father's car and tell the driver to take her downtown.

One night early in the spring of 1925, she caught sight of a man sitting alone at a popular speakeasy called Jimmy Kelly's. Her friend whispered what the bartender had just told her: “That man sitting alone over there is Irving Berlin!”

Just a few years earlier, the idea of an heiress crossing paths with a popular songwriter would have been unthinkable. Like Chotzinoff, Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant who grew up in a tenement; he got his start singing in Chinese restaurants for tips.

That was exactly what attracted Ellin Mackay. She walked over and introduced herself. Irving bought her a drink. It was the beginning of a whirlwind romance. Within a year, the pair had eloped to the Municipal Building. The paparazzi had taken to following his car, so they took the subway downtown. Her family's disapproval made the front page of
The New York Times
. “Ellin Mackay Weds Irving Berlin; Surprises Father.” But they stayed together for sixty-three years, until her death.

Singles have headed out hoping to find this kind of luck ever since.

*   *   *

Ralph Werther moved to New York to study medicine around 1900. In his autobiography, he described his amazement at discovering the city's open secret: It was full of men like him. “Adhesive” personalities, the great, adhesive poet Walt Whitman had called them. The medical literature of Werther's time called them “inverts.” Both terms meant men who were sexually attracted to other men.

In a textbook he wrote in the 1890s, the famous sexologist Havelock Ellis claimed that there were large communities of inverts scattered across the United States. In the largest American cities, Ellis wrote, they had their own “‘clubs,' really dance-halls, attached to
saloons
, and presided over by the proprietor of the saloon, himself almost invariably an invert, as are all the waiters and musicians.” Ellis reported that the authorities tended to look the other way—or more. “It is not unusual,” he wrote of the clubs, “for the inquiring stranger to be directed there by a policeman.”

In New York, Werther met dozens of gay men in bars and cafés. Late at night, the most ordinary-looking cafeteria could turn into “a gathering spot for that nocturnal clan, the third sexers,” as the tabloid
Broadway Brevities
called them. Crowds gathered every night at Childs, a large twenty-four-hour cafeteria near Columbus Circle. In establishments like Childs, Werther saw powdered and rouged men who called themselves “fairies,” construction workers whose biceps bulged out of rolled-up shirtsleeves, and men in suits playfully debating the merits of new literary magazines. There was always at least one group of female prostitutes clustered around a table. The rest of the space teemed with boisterous cliques of Bohemians, male and female. Some were there with queer friends; others came simply to take in the scene. After the cafeteria, they could move on to one of the saloons called “black and tans,” where interracial couples cavorted openly.

It was not always easy to tell who was who, or what they wanted. Was the man quietly sipping his coffee at the counter just passing time? Or was he looking to get picked up? The uncertainty was exciting, but it could be dangerous. Just weeks before the first time he went to Childs, Werther noted in his diary that the police had raided the Hotel Koenig, a bar in the East Village. They had found a room packed with men who danced together and kissed. Twenty-three were charged with “degenerate, disorderly conduct,” and sentenced to ten days in the workhouse.

To stay safe, you had to learn to hide in plain sight. As shopgirls did their hair and chose their clothes in order to broadcast their personalities and attract the attentions of eligible customers or colleagues, men who wanted to attract other men developed a secret language. Like shopgirls, they often used their taste to speak it.

Werther recalled wearing white kid gloves and a red bow tie to identify himself as a “fairy” to the working-class youths on Fourteenth Street. Other “inverts” were known to favor green. These articles of clothing served as badges of identification. To don them was a way of announcing your sexuality to those in the know, without giving yourself away to straight colleagues or acquaintances. If a man like Werther wore his red tie to a lecture or a laboratory, the men he worked with might raise an eyebrow at his eccentric fashion sense, but they would not think to call the cops about it. And if Werther liked the look of a man in a red tie he saw sitting on a park bench smoking a cigarette, he could safely approach him, asking,
Do you have a match?

*   *   *

The signals that men like Werther used to flirt turned ordinary streets and parks into a kind of secret theater. The subculture supplied the costumes and the scripts. This color. That hand gesture. In 1951, the psychologist Edward Sagarin described how it worked. Published under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory,
The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach
became the most famous of a series of gay manifestos that appeared over the decade. It also served as a how-to manual for many nervous cruisers.

Cory explained that a “gay street” might look like any other street. If you were a man interested in men, when you struck up a conversation on such a street, you had to pay close attention. So would your interlocutor, if he was what you hoped. “In the exchange of words,” Cory wrote, “each is seeking a clue. Neither desires effeminacy, yet each needs just a suggestion of it, in a softness of tone, an over enunciation of word sounds, an affectation in the movement of the hands or in the method of holding the cigarette.”

To get what you wanted, you had to recognize, while being recognizable. And so you played it, slightly, up. Men learned to imitate the signals they saw other men send: the lift of a voice, the tilt of a head. But to out yourself in the 1940s or '50s was still dangerous. You had to walk a thin line.

The homosexual man, Cory said, looked for a “mere iota of the mannerisms of the opposite sex, or to be more exact the mannerisms of the outcast group, in order to reassure himself that this is no trap, no folly that will lead to frustration or even worse.”

Slang, too, could do the trick. When Cory was writing—and, presumably, cruising—the word “gay” was just starting to be used as a synonym for “homosexual.” To most people it still just meant “bright” or “fun.” When a man worked up the courage to drop a hint like
You should come here more often; it's a gay place!
or
This bar looks gay!
, he subtly tipped his hand. If the man he said it to replied by saying something like
Yes it does look gay
, Cory explained, “the
word
has been uttered … From that moment on, there is no doubt as to the direction of the evening.”

*   *   *

The hope was that if you learned these scripts, you became freer to choose your role. Not only could you meet anyone, you also could
be
anyone. Going out let you imagine it, anyway. Who, gay, straight, or otherwise was not wearing some kind of costume?

During the era of the speakeasy, “drag balls” became wildly popular among black gay men in New York City. The most famous one took place in Harlem, at a hall called Hamilton Lodge (full name: Hamilton Lodge No. 710 of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows). Starting in the early 1920s, Hamilton Lodge began throwing an annual party that quickly became a highlight of the Harlem social calendar. Its official title was the “Masquerade and Civic Ball.” By the late 1920s, however, it was widely known as the “Faggots Ball.” Every year it drew hundreds of drag queens and thousands of spectators.

Like the Village and the Bowery, Harlem was a haven for homosexuals during Prohibition. Sure, African American leaders who preached the importance of “respectability” condemned the participants. But other authorities gave winking approval, and even encouragement. At the Hamilton Lodge Ball, every year, thousands of “queers” were openly applauded.

“It was fashionable,” the great poet Langston Hughes later wrote, “for the intelligentsia and the social leaders of both Harlem and the downtown area to occupy boxes at this ball and look down from above at the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor.” Hughes was known to be a little queer himself. But ostensibly straight socialites from the Astor and Vanderbilt families attended, too. So did the actress Tallulah Bankhead.

Large black newspapers like the
Amsterdam News
covered the Hamilton Ball. In 1931, the
Baltimore Afro-American
ran “Debutantes Bow at Local ‘Pansy' Ball.” They described it as “coming out … into homosexual society.” Other papers picked it up. In 1932, the tabloid
Broadway Brevities
scandalized its readers with the headline “Fag Balls Exposed: 6,000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance.” By that point, “pansy parades” were taking place at mainstream locations including Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel downtown.

Adopting a drag persona was a good way for inverts to keep the lives they led “out” a secret from their families. In the 1930s, Mae West was the rage with queens. A man could introduce himself to people he met out at the Hamilton Lodge as Mae West or the “sepia Mae West” (meaning the nonwhite one), and even get quoted in the paper that way, and still return home unrecognized. He could go out and do what he wanted without endangering his “real” life.

The real Mae West was all for it. In 1926, she wrote a play called
The Drag
, which featured dozens of gay singers and dancers. In preparation, she asked them questions about the apartments they lived in in Greenwich Village and the constant police raids on their favorite bars. She used material and one-liners that she elicited from the cast to build her script.
The Drag
sensationalized gay life, but also sympathized with its challenges. The third act included a drag show. Rumor had it that a wealthy, well-connected high-society man offered West an enormous pile of money for the chance to play in it one night.

Can you imagine?
the chorus boys gossiped.
Some Vanderbilt or some guy onstage!
The man had been willing to pay a high sum for a chance to step out in women's clothing. Because no one would recognize him, he could keep his desires secret, even as he boldly declared them to the world. After try-out performances in Connecticut and New Jersey,
The Drag
was deemed too salacious for Broadway; it soon closed. But the daydreams it inspired remained. Not only could you find privacy in public. Performing in public might also give you a chance to find new versions of yourself.

*   *   *

Going out to a speakeasy or a drag ball created opportunities to demand new kinds of recognition. But it had its disadvantages, too. Then, as now, you could get priced out of the very spots you had made cool.

By the middle of the 1920s, many Harlem residents could not afford to go out in their own neighborhood. The black journalist Wallace Thurman complained that by 1927, the legendary Harlem clubs were becoming “shrines to which white sophisticates, Greenwich Village artists, Broadway revellers, and provincial commuters make eager pilgrimage … In fact,” he continued, “the white patronage is so profitable and so abundant that Negroes find themselves crowded out and even segregated in their own places of jazz.”

In the famous cabarets, the daily wages of a day maid would hardly buy a soda. But most young black women in the 1920s and '30s were working as “domestics.” Unlike (mostly white) shopgirls or waitresses, maids did not meet men they could date at work. If they hoped to find love, they had to go out and look for it.

Luckily, “rent parties” offered alternatives to the pricey clubs. These gatherings took place in private homes. White landlords had long charged Harlem residents above-market rates, confident that segregation would keep black tenants from fleeing to cheaper neighborhoods. As prices rose, a new trend developed: If you were struggling to afford your rent, you might throw a party, charging a small admission fee at the door.

These parties usually had good cheap food and drink; sometimes musicians from the expensive jazz clubs came by to play after hours. Some people even began making careers of hosting rent parties, turning their homes into permanent “buffet flats.” They distributed invitations to friends, and friends of friends.

We got yellow girls, we've got black and tan

Will you have a good time?—YEAH MAN!

A Social Whist Party

—
GIVEN BY
—

MARY WINSTON

147 West 145th Street        Apt. 5

Saturday Eve., March 19th, 1932

GOOD MUSIC
                
REFRESHMENTS