Table of Contents

* Introduction Male (Homo)Sexual Practices and Indentities in the Early Twentieth Century * The Bowery as Haven and Spectacle * The Fairy as an Intermediate Sex * Trade, Wolves, and the Boundaries of Normal Manhood * The Forging of Queer Identities and the Emergence of Heterosexuality in Middle-Class Culture The Making of the Gay Male World * Urban Culture and the Policing of the City of Bachelors * Lots of Friends at the YMCA: Rooming Houses, Cafeterias, and Other Gay Social Centers * Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public: Forging a Gay World in the Streets * The Social World of the Baths * Building Gay Neighborhood Enclaves: The Village and Harlem The Politics of Gay Culture * The Double Life, Camp Culture, and the Making of a Collective Identity * Pansies on Parade: Prohibition and the Spectacle of the Pansy * The Exclusion of Homosexuality from the Public Sphere in the 1930s * Epilogue: The Strange Career of the Closet

Promotional Information

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians; and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History

About the Author

George Chauncey is professor of American history at the University of Chicago and the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the distinguished Turner and Curti Awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the 1993 trial of Colorado's Amendment Two, which resulted in the Supreme Court's Romer v. Evans decision that antigay rights referenda were unconstitutional, and he was the principal author of the Historians' Amicus Brief, which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court's landmark decision overturning sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives and works in Chicago.

Reviews

"A brilliant ethnographic analysis."--The Nation

"A brilliantly researched gift of history...unassailable."--Boston Globe

"A first-rate book of history...about all urban life, telling us as much about the heterosexual world as about the homosexual one."--New York Times

"A stunning contribution not only to gay history, but to the study of urban life, class, gender--and heterosexuality."--Kirkus

"Chauncey's genius is the way he combines real lives and theory...a sharp and readable analysis of the way boundaries between 'normal' and 'abnormal' men bent and blurred in the early parts of the century."--Out

"Even if you are not a devotee of theory or history, you will want to read Gay New York for its profusion of anecdotal detail--its coordinates of a Gay Atlantis, a buried city of Everard Baths, Harlem drag balls, and Vaseline alley. Chauncey has found evidence of a gay world whose complexity and cohesion no previous historian dared to imagine."--Wayne Koestenbaum, Los Angeles Times

"Gay New York isn't just the definitive history of gays in New York from 1890 through 1940; it's also a wonderful account of the metropolitan character of modern gayness itself."--L.A. Times

"It's the fun, more than anything--the pleasure, the parties, the high jinks, the sex, and, yes, the love that gay men bear one another--that shines through so brightly...[a book of] erudition, discernment, sympathy, and wit."--New York Observer

"Monumental...a vital achievement in redefining and reassessing gay history."--Washington Post

"One of the most fascinating works of American social history I've ever read."--Frank Rich, New York Times

"The impact made by this richly textured study is powerful."--Publisher's Weekly