--- product_id: 141295686 title: "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940" price: "33034CFA" currency: XOF in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.sn/products/141295686-gay-new-york-gender-urban-culture-and-the-making-gay store_origin: SN region: Senegal --- # Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 **Price:** 33034CFA **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 - **How much does it cost?** 33034CFA with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sn](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/141295686-gay-new-york-gender-urban-culture-and-the-making-gay) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description The “monumental” ( The Washington Post ), field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed in the closet, where all gay men were isolated, invisible, and ashamed. Based on years of research in diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and police reports, George Chauncey describes the saloons, speakeasies, and streets where queer men gathered; the intimate parties and immense drag balls where they celebrated; the highly visible residential enclaves they built in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square; and the complex prewar sexual culture they inhabited, which did not divide men into heterosexuals and homosexuals. It offers new perspectives on the LGBT rights revolution of our time by showing that the oppression the movement attacked in the 1960s was not unchanging, but had intensified in the 1930s as a direct response to the visibility of the prewar gay world. Awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Organization of American Historians' prize for the best first book in any field of history upon its publication in 1994, Gay New York remains a revelatory account of a long-forgotten world and the most widely taught book in American LGBT history. Review: Chronicles the rise of un-closeted homosexuality in the early part of the 20th Century. - I read this book for a History of LGBTQ in America, and it was a very good book. The book is full of facts. Not theories. Not arguments. Not philosophies. Historical Facts. In short, it is a historical look at the first few decades of the 1900s in NYC, and how open the gay lifestyle became--and how popular it became to schmooze with. It also chronicles how much difficulty people had with the concept of people being gay or wearing the wrong clothes. There were actually laws against people wearing too many articles of clothes that were gender-inappropriate. Naturally, if you paid off the local cops your gay bar might get a faux raid, and a small fine for the owners. Or, for the wildly popular gay gala events, you could purchase a license from the police department to hold a "costume" ball--which meant now men could dress as women and women could dress as men. But this could lead to issues because the flatfoots would still try and enforce the "no inappropriate gay activities" by prohibiting people of the same gender form dancing together--even when they were not the same gender. One incident involved a man dressed as a woman dancing with an actual woman also dressed as a woman. A police officer at the gala informed them that the law still prohibited couples of the same sex from dancing together. They informed the officer that they were a man and a woman. The officer informed them that because the event was sanctioned by the police license, and the man (dressed as a woman) had purchased his ticket to attend, and came as woman, he was a woman for that evening, and thus could only dance with people dressed as men--even if they were real men, which was fine. Some of this stuff you just can't make up... Interestingly, gay bars got raided a lot, while the gay bath houses got raided once. The civic leagues were more focused on the gay bars because there was open "gayness" going on, and even though actual sodomy (a felony) was going on in the bathhouses, they were not as concerned with that because the bathhouses were discreet and you had to go on knowing what it was before you could see what was going on. In a gay bar, however, the homosexuality was open for anyone walking past to see--men wearing makeup and otherwise acting as sissies. There is a myth that gay culture is new in America. It is not. America has never been comfortable with the fact there are gay and transgender people, and tries to force them--via draconian laws--to go back and hide in the closet again. This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the problem that America has with just accepting that gays exist... Review: A Brilliant & Necessary Work - In "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 – 1940", George Chauncey argues “that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.” (pg. 9) Further, he argues “that in important respects the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.” (pg. 13) Through his work, Chauncey maps both the physical and social topography of gay culture in New York City. Finally, Chauncey argues “that the construction of male homosexual identities can be understood only in the context of the broader social organization and representation of gender, that relations among men were construed in gendered terms, and that the policing of gay men was part of a more general policing of the gender order.” (pg. 28) One of the most interesting parts of Chauncey’s analysis details the manner in which gay and heterosexual men interacted. Chauncey writes, “The earlier culture [pre-1950s] permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves – or to be regarded by others – as gay.” (pg. 65) Due to this, “many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other, or that their occasional recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, indicated an abnormal, ‘homosexual,’ or even ‘bisexual’ disposition, for they neither understood nor organized their sexual practices along a hetero-homosexual axis.” (pg. 65) Chauncey adds an element of class to his analysis, specifically when discussing the differences between those groups of gay men that self-identified as queer and those that identified as fairies. Chauncey writes, “The queers’ antagonism toward the fairies was in large part a class antagonism. Not all queers were middle class…just as not all fairies were of the working class. But if the fairy as a cultural ‘type’ was rooted in the working-class culture of the Bowery…the queer was rooted in the middle-class culture of the Village and the prosperous sections of Harlem and Times Square.” (pg. 106) His discussion of police power further demonstrates the complex relationships between the queer and normal worlds. Chauncey discusses the anti-vice societies’ and police focus on sexuality targeting primarily female prostitutes. Chauncey writes, “The campaigns to control assignation hotels illustrate the degree to which the anti-vice societies often neglected homosexuality because of their preoccupation with controlling female prostitution, as well as the ability of ‘normal’-looking gay men to manipulate observers’ presumption that they were straight to their own advantage.” (pg. 163) When the police did charge gay men, they usually did so with disorderly conduct charges. Chauncey writes, “The use of the disorderly conduct law against gay people was consistent with the intent of the law, which effectively criminalized a wide range of non-normative behavior in public spaces, as defined by the dominant culture, be it loitering, gambling, failure to hire oneself out to an employer, failure to remain sober, or behaving in a public space in any other manner perceived as threatening the social order.” (pg. 172) After the end of Prohibition, the State Liquor Authority controlled both those spaces where patrons could drink and what type of clientele they could host. According to Chauncey, “The genius of the licensing mechanism lay in the way it expanded the state’s ability to survey and regulate public sociability…By threatening proprietors with the revocation of their licenses if its agents discovered that customers were violating the regulations, it forced proprietors to uphold those regulations on behalf of the state.” (pg. 336) This public role of policing fed into later Cold War fears, in which “the specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America. The new image was invoked to justify a new wave of assaults on gay men in the postwar decade.” (pg. 360) This effectively ended the broader public realm open to gay New Yorkers while cementing the hetero-homosexual binary. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #280,529 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #60 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies #192 in Sociology of Urban Areas #1,082 in U.S. State & Local History | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 283 Reviews | ## Images ![Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81CPN39pX5L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Chronicles the rise of un-closeted homosexuality in the early part of the 20th Century. *by G***S on June 29, 2023* I read this book for a History of LGBTQ in America, and it was a very good book. The book is full of facts. Not theories. Not arguments. Not philosophies. Historical Facts. In short, it is a historical look at the first few decades of the 1900s in NYC, and how open the gay lifestyle became--and how popular it became to schmooze with. It also chronicles how much difficulty people had with the concept of people being gay or wearing the wrong clothes. There were actually laws against people wearing too many articles of clothes that were gender-inappropriate. Naturally, if you paid off the local cops your gay bar might get a faux raid, and a small fine for the owners. Or, for the wildly popular gay gala events, you could purchase a license from the police department to hold a "costume" ball--which meant now men could dress as women and women could dress as men. But this could lead to issues because the flatfoots would still try and enforce the "no inappropriate gay activities" by prohibiting people of the same gender form dancing together--even when they were not the same gender. One incident involved a man dressed as a woman dancing with an actual woman also dressed as a woman. A police officer at the gala informed them that the law still prohibited couples of the same sex from dancing together. They informed the officer that they were a man and a woman. The officer informed them that because the event was sanctioned by the police license, and the man (dressed as a woman) had purchased his ticket to attend, and came as woman, he was a woman for that evening, and thus could only dance with people dressed as men--even if they were real men, which was fine. Some of this stuff you just can't make up... Interestingly, gay bars got raided a lot, while the gay bath houses got raided once. The civic leagues were more focused on the gay bars because there was open "gayness" going on, and even though actual sodomy (a felony) was going on in the bathhouses, they were not as concerned with that because the bathhouses were discreet and you had to go on knowing what it was before you could see what was going on. In a gay bar, however, the homosexuality was open for anyone walking past to see--men wearing makeup and otherwise acting as sissies. There is a myth that gay culture is new in America. It is not. America has never been comfortable with the fact there are gay and transgender people, and tries to force them--via draconian laws--to go back and hide in the closet again. This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the problem that America has with just accepting that gays exist... ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Brilliant & Necessary Work *by R***D on March 4, 2017* In "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 – 1940", George Chauncey argues “that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first, and that the very severity of the postwar reaction has tended to blind us to the relative tolerance of the prewar years.” (pg. 9) Further, he argues “that in important respects the hetero-homosexual binarism, the sexual regime now hegemonic in American culture, is a stunningly recent creation.” (pg. 13) Through his work, Chauncey maps both the physical and social topography of gay culture in New York City. Finally, Chauncey argues “that the construction of male homosexual identities can be understood only in the context of the broader social organization and representation of gender, that relations among men were construed in gendered terms, and that the policing of gay men was part of a more general policing of the gender order.” (pg. 28) One of the most interesting parts of Chauncey’s analysis details the manner in which gay and heterosexual men interacted. Chauncey writes, “The earlier culture [pre-1950s] permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves – or to be regarded by others – as gay.” (pg. 65) Due to this, “many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other, or that their occasional recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, indicated an abnormal, ‘homosexual,’ or even ‘bisexual’ disposition, for they neither understood nor organized their sexual practices along a hetero-homosexual axis.” (pg. 65) Chauncey adds an element of class to his analysis, specifically when discussing the differences between those groups of gay men that self-identified as queer and those that identified as fairies. Chauncey writes, “The queers’ antagonism toward the fairies was in large part a class antagonism. Not all queers were middle class…just as not all fairies were of the working class. But if the fairy as a cultural ‘type’ was rooted in the working-class culture of the Bowery…the queer was rooted in the middle-class culture of the Village and the prosperous sections of Harlem and Times Square.” (pg. 106) His discussion of police power further demonstrates the complex relationships between the queer and normal worlds. Chauncey discusses the anti-vice societies’ and police focus on sexuality targeting primarily female prostitutes. Chauncey writes, “The campaigns to control assignation hotels illustrate the degree to which the anti-vice societies often neglected homosexuality because of their preoccupation with controlling female prostitution, as well as the ability of ‘normal’-looking gay men to manipulate observers’ presumption that they were straight to their own advantage.” (pg. 163) When the police did charge gay men, they usually did so with disorderly conduct charges. Chauncey writes, “The use of the disorderly conduct law against gay people was consistent with the intent of the law, which effectively criminalized a wide range of non-normative behavior in public spaces, as defined by the dominant culture, be it loitering, gambling, failure to hire oneself out to an employer, failure to remain sober, or behaving in a public space in any other manner perceived as threatening the social order.” (pg. 172) After the end of Prohibition, the State Liquor Authority controlled both those spaces where patrons could drink and what type of clientele they could host. According to Chauncey, “The genius of the licensing mechanism lay in the way it expanded the state’s ability to survey and regulate public sociability…By threatening proprietors with the revocation of their licenses if its agents discovered that customers were violating the regulations, it forced proprietors to uphold those regulations on behalf of the state.” (pg. 336) This public role of policing fed into later Cold War fears, in which “the specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America. The new image was invoked to justify a new wave of assaults on gay men in the postwar decade.” (pg. 360) This effectively ended the broader public realm open to gay New Yorkers while cementing the hetero-homosexual binary. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Absolutely tremendous book *by C***S on September 28, 2011* I think this book is what being a historian is all about. Chauncey's research, writing, and analysis is amazing. He has opened our eyes to an entire subculture of American society that had been ignored or largely forgotten. This is the kind of real-world history that's extremely important but would never be taught in school. Chauncey uses rarely explored archives to bring to life a thriving yet changing male gay subculture in NY during the early part of the 20th century. He discusses some of the most popular gay spots around the city, yet the perils people faced in visiting these locations. He goes into the ways in which gays would have to pay close attention to where they could and could not go with their friends, and the consequences of getting caught. It's eye-opening to say the least. Who knew that Harlem was such a popular spot for gay expression? Who knew that Prohibition actually boosted gay life, while repeal helped to stifle that part of society? Or that there was a "pansy craze" in the 1920s? Or that some male soldiers were OK with seeking sexual gratification from effeminate males if women weren't available? It's all fascinating, probably the most interesting history book I've ever read in that I had absolutely NO idea about any of it. And while Chauncey does not make his book a sermon against homophobia, the simple facts he uses show that our society treated gays like dangerous pariahs in most cases. Sadly, that homophobia would intensify before it started to subside, and I can't wait for Chauncey's next book, which will pick up where Gay New York ended. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.sn/products/141295686-gay-new-york-gender-urban-culture-and-the-making-gay](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/141295686-gay-new-york-gender-urban-culture-and-the-making-gay) --- *Product available on Desertcart Senegal* *Store origin: SN* *Last updated: 2026-10-13*