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

>Well, that's correct, but if you grew up in the early 1800s or earlier, that idea wasn't even part of social commentary;

That isn't true.

> in the 90s and early 00s, it was accepted if not encouraged to make note and/or make fun of homosexuality.

You are totally ignoring the mass gay rights movement, that by 1990 was very large.

>It wasn't until very recently that there was more of a push for more tolerant or socially acceptable treatment of LGBT people.

Gay rights movement started in the mid 1800s. I suggest this book, for more info on the Gay rights movement in the US from 1890 to 1940

Not my area of expertise, but as I understand it, it actually goes back further to the 1890s-1920s which was the period in which homosexuality began to be conceived in opposition to masculinity. In this period, however, gay men were not ostracised as they would be in the post-war era, insofar as they did not threaten heteronormative masculinity.

As I understand it, these norms were very closely tied to penetrative roles. Men acting as penetrators were acceptable in masculine roles. Men who were the penetrated were increasingly feminised and assumed that identity, in part to avoid being in conflict with established norms of masculinity.

Again, not my wheelhouse, but all of this I'm gleaning mostly from a couple of books I read a few years ago. Can recommend Geoffrey Chauncey's Gay New York as a pretty solid history of the emergence of gay identities (plural) which will challenge your understanding of sexual identity on a number of levels and also demonstrate the extent to which our current (though fast evolving) framework of sexuality is a relatively recent one.

That's not really accurate... one of the most well-respected, even-handed, and historically sourced resources on the Stonewall Riots is Stonewall by Martin Duberman. You should read it.

Yes, the extent to which the sparking incident and the subsequent riots were (or were not) "trans PoC"-driven is very often misrepresented, particularly today where we get all these things about how Stonewall apparently didn't have any white or cis people (which is total bullshit), but there most certainly were drag queens and trans people (at the time, those two things were strongly conflated) and nonwhite people heavily and frequently involved at Stonewall and in the riots.

Other great resources include Gay New York by George Chauncey and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lilian Faderman about gay male and female, respectively, identity and culture from the late 1800s through the 20th century.

I definitely would recommend everyone here read Stonewall by Duberman, though. It's a good look at just how involved everyone was and in what ways. Conservative, middle-class white gay men, black trans drag queens, working class people, Latino people, white women, etc. Anyone who claims that one group or another "wasn't really involved" is either ignorant or misrepresenting the facts.

This is literally what Americans thought around 1900. See Chauncey's Gay New York when men who "topped" were considered "wolves." Cultural figures of the dandy were around, too, but this was before The Well of Loneliness came out and the idea of "sexual inversion" took hold to explain gay behavior. Sex was all about verbs, not nouns. The gerund-ification of sexuality is one of the most significant changes in 20th century culture.

Read [George Chauncey's Gay New York] (http://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214)

Basically, the heterosexual-homosexual binary wasn't created until the years surrounding WWII. Before then, there were a great deal of sexual options available to men...fairies, queers, wolves, etc. A man could have sex with another man and, as long as he did not take the submissive position, it did not necessarily affected his sexual identity or lead anyone to question his masculinity.

Wow, I look forward to sitting down and reading through what you linked to. On the subject of hidden or forgotten queer/gender history, have you read George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940?

Read this if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

Chauncey taught "U.S. Lesbian and Gay History" last fall, and after hearing him reconstruct U.S. sexual history through his unique gloss, I actually felt like I understood myself a lot better in the context of not only today's gay culture. I appreciate a lot more deeply now how the way I interact with and feel around other gay men didn't just pop out of nowhere. Seriously; I really recommend it.

____

"Short" answer: Legal discrimination, oppressive social norms, and post-WWII pressures to maintain a nuclear family structure pushed gay life "underground" and created a collective consciousness. Once gay people understood sexual orientation to be an identity category, (similar to race or gender or class), spaces unique to gay men began to form their own counterculture. In such spaces, where secrecy and discretion were critical to maintaining a "double life," traditional relationship structures like monogamy didn't often fit the bill. On the flip side, these spaces afforded the privacy necessary to play with norms (e.g. drag). Many features of contemporary gay life are thus remnants of this past, and the fact that gay people can even imagine living a suburban life with 2.5 kids, white picket fences, and a happy marriage is an indication of sexual assimilation...well, depending on who you ask.

I obviously glossed over a lot of nuance in that paragraph, but I hope that helps.

It's probably more of a spectrum, and any given person's place on that spectrum shifts over time due to environmental factors, hormones, brain chemistry, and arguably choice (to the extent that choice exists independent of all of those other factors). This was recognized throughout most of human history going back to antiquity, with many first nation tribes recognizing gender fluidity, ancient assyrian cults based around transgenderism, Indian Hirja, transgender poet mystics in Persian Sufism, Greek clergy of Sappho and Cybele, much of the apprenticeship structure of Japanese culture- particularly during the Edo period, tribes of the Madzimbabwe changing their gender as a way of commanding powerful magic linked to creation of life and virility, first nations berdache, mezoamerican guevedoces, Oaxacan muxe. There were transgendered persons through the Parisian courts of love, in the courts of the Venetian doges, and the courts at Lisbon.

Even the U.S. has a more complex history of gender fluidity than most people assume. Our current bivalent view of being either straight or gay, male or female is only as old as the 1930's, and reflects more of a shift towards cultural assimilation that coincided with the mass migration of population away from ethnic centered city neighborhoods to suburban neighborhoods (where extended kin network and local tavern was replaced by local church and high school) that began with the Temperance/Progressive Movements.

Prior to that, there was an extensive and highly visible transgender culture, particularly in larger eastern cities, particularly in NYC, from the 1880's through the 1930's, and views on orientation and gender were much more fluid than what's assumed to be the natural order today. Transgender "faerie" prostitutes were pretty common. Equally common was male patronage of said prostitutes, which was viewed not as "gay", but as normative, even specifically masculine behavior.

George Chauncey wrote a good monograph about it. https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

It bears remembering that human beings are more weird and complex than simplistic explanations give them credit for.

The ball scene extends back into the 20s too. Check out Gay New York by George Chauncey: https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

The post was about queer history books. My favorite queer history book is George Chauncey's Gay New York, a fascinating study of the role of urban space in New York's gay community in the first half of the twentieth century. Your response is pretty bewildering and unhinged tbh.

edit: oh, this is an /r/TIA troll, nevermind

Thank you so much for this, really helps my research. I will look into contacting the OED. I'd never heard of Leyendecker before but looking into him there is a high probability that my research subject and this guy knew each other. There seems to have been a lot of somewhat open gay people in New York around the turn of the century. The whole Elsie de Wolfe circle, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, Chalfin, Leyendecker. I wonder if there are any books on this subject. From what I've heard it was somewhat fashionable to be gay then (as well as owning Chow Chows).

EDIT: I've answered my own question vis-a-vis New York gay culture.

There's a lot of hate for shippers in general and slash shippers in particular in this subreddit, so that's probably why the other person assumed you were asking in bad faith.

I enjoy Steve and Bucky's platonic relationship in canon, but also ship them romantically, so assuming that you are asking in good faith, here's a few of the "undertones" as I see them.

As someone else pointed out, Bucky (and to a lesser extent Sam) are both given roles in the Cap films that are more commonly given to female love interests. Bucky is given a Damsel in Distress type role in The First Avenger when Cap goes AWOL to save his life after learning his unit was captured by HYDRA. Later, Bucky is (seemingly) killed by HYDRA and Cap becomes The First Avenger to avenge his death. A dead wife or girlfriend is an extremely common element in superhero origin stories, to the point that it's seen as a cliche. Later, when Bucky re-appears as the Winter Soldier, Cap breaks through 70 years of brainwashing and torture with a catchphrase ("I'm with you to the end of the line") that's practically a marriage vow ("til death do us part"). And so forth. Basically, the way the story tropes are set up, if you substituted Peggy for Bucky in Bucky's storyline, nearly everyone would expect their reunion to involve some swelling music and a kiss, and it's natural that people are responding to that even though in this case the characters are two guys.

Additionally, Bucky's role in the MCU is not the same as his role in the comics. MCU Bucky is more of a combination of comics Bucky and the comics character of Arnie Roth - an older and larger friend who protected comics Steve while he was growing up skinny and sickly. Arnie is canonically gay.

Moreover, it's known that the Russos are aware of and sympathetic to the Stucky shippers, even though they don't ship it themselves, and that some members of the crew on The Winter Soldier and Civil War were shippers, so there are some film-making choices that shippers tend to interpret as Easter eggs of sorts. For example, moments before Steve sees Bucky for the first time in the 21st century, the song playing in the background is a WW2 era love song with decidedly non-platonic lyrics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dh3Ape1GmU

Though I don't know anything about the director and crew of The First Avenger's feelings on Stucky, the lyrics in the background of the bar scene are downright tragic if you believe Bucky is in love with Steve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1bPRotpQDQ

I could go on, but it's also just a matter of personal taste. I love Friends to Lovers stories, so Steve and Bucky's relationship is a type that I often end up shipping whether the couple is m/f, m/m, or f/f. I also think it adds a very interesting twist to their story given historical attitudes towards gay relationships, and the more tolerant attitudes in the 21st century that they would have had to adjust to after defrosting. Entire books have been written about LGBT life in New York City in the early 20th century, and LGBT soldiers during World War 2, and a lot of Steve/Bucky fanfiction draws heavily from that research, so as a historical fiction nerd, the fic is some of my favorite of any fandom that I've ever been involved in. For example, one of the fics I read just last month was an imagining of Bucky's wartime diary that was really immersive and helped fill in the gaping holes left by the Howling Commandos montage in the film. It's a really active and fun fandom to be a part of, and frankly, people who are so tied to a heterosexual interpretation of Steve's character that they refuse to consider other options are missing out. :)

I am not a scientist, I am a historian, however... if you would like to know some academic titles that go to the route of the problem I can suggest Coming Out Under Fire and Gay New York. Neither book is directly about the now debunked decision that homosexuality was a mental disorder but both make multiple references to it and Coming Out Under Fire is a book that deals with some of the immediate backlash of that not-so-scientific, scientific claim.

the short version of the history here though is that in 1952 it was put into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the APA. This was a political move and a result of 60 years of cultural shift. What had happened since 1890 is really the birth of a gay identity. Until this time, people had discussed homosexuality in obscure medical contexts or works like Krafft-Ebing's work Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study (1886) which concluded that it was a degeneration and talked about it more like a fetish. Later in his life after more work on the subject he retracted that hypothesis. A bit later Havelock Ellis and John Symonds came along. Their work concluded that Homosexuality was definitely not a disease but instead variation of sexuality. Then in 1948 the first Kinsey Report came out in which he definitively stated "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual." The findings of his research was that sexuality is a range, its not black and white. This was all well before the APA's ruling.

Shortly after the ruling the work of Evelyn Hooker, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual came out which determined that homosexuals could be perfectly well adjusted humans. The next Kinsey Report came out in 1953 and with that he once again concluded that sexuality was not black and white. According to him 37% of males and 13% of females had some sort of homosexual experience to orgasm in their lifetime. So to say somebody was exclusively heterosexual would be difficult.

Further supporting evidence of the political or social nature of the initial decision can be see in the APA's decision to remove it from their list of mental disorders. Stonewall has happened in 1969 and the entire gay liberation and gay rights movement has become very visible in media and in the public eye. Probably because of this, when the decision was made to remove it as an officially classified disorder it was also accompanied with a statement from the APA that supported the civil rights of homosexuals.

This book might make an interesting read for you if you're into history at all.

This looks interesting though I kind of hope this book paid more attention to historical accuracy and nuance than this review of it did.

Another excellent work on early gay culture and the development of a distinctly gay identity in the United States is Chauncey's Gay New York, a fairly serious scholarly review or pre-WWII gay life in NYC.

Another great read:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465026214?pc_redir=1407908281&robot_redir=1

There's also Gay New York, by the gay history professor I've mentioned.

This was the norm. There were openly homosexual bars in the U.S. back then, too:

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

There are some great books and articles on this subject. I think that you should avoid the 1950s onwards, because that would be like confirmation for Peterson fans.

For the gay identity that the books that I recommend are:

https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522048690&sr=8-1&keywords=gay+new+york
https://www.amazon.com/Gay-Berlin-Birthplace-Modern-Identity/product-reviews/0307473139/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
https://www.amazon.com/Homintern-Culture-Liberated-Modern-World/dp/0300218036/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522048869&sr=8-1&keywords=Homintern


A free source that is full of primary sources.
http://rictornorton.co.uk

George Chauncey

Here's the book we were required to read for his class http://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

Nice guy. Didn't make students buy his books if the bookstore was selling it at a ridiculous price.

> blaming society

I agree that he does it himself, but if you are familiar with discourse analysis (think Michele Foucault), there is validity to the proposition that society is, in fact, to blame for linguistic violence and socially oppressive forces. Society forms a collective discourse regarding what is and what is not acceptable, and how things should be as opposed to how they shouldn't be. Think about the discursive definition of masculinity vs. femininity: men are supposed to be "manly" while women must remain "feminine." What do these terms really mean? Obviously, these terms do not have set definitions, but are rather constructed by society and change dramatically over time. Thus, when someone does not necessarily fit into one of those discursive definition, they are "othered (marginalized)," and discursive violence is inflicted upon them. The same goes for gender identities: what is considered homosexual vs. heterosexual? In the early 20th Century, men could have sex with another man, and as long as they didn't "receive" they were considered "straight". After WWII, however, the Christian right in this country began construction of the "closet" through discursive violence, changing the definition of what was socially acceptable.

I obviously cannot go deeply into critical discourse analysis, but the point is, there is substantial academic support for the proposition that society is to blame for many ills facing marginalized individuals.

> Judeo-Christan values are the real counterculture.

Yeah, all but two Congressional Representatives are Judeo-Christian... Solid argument, Prager.

You might be interested in Gay New York