Gay Men And The Covert World Of Working Class Homosexuality

Through the 1940s-50s, gay bars were a crucial time for the gay community. Gay bars were not just a place for gays and lesbians to go to but it also was a “safe haven” for them because they were be able to be comfortable in their own skin. Homosexual men had more “freedom” to express themselves in public (such as parks, and bars) than homosexual women. The only places that homosexual women could express themselves were at lesbian bars. Lesbian bars enabled them to form their identity, including black lesbians. According to Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, in their article “I Could Hardly Wait to Get Back to that Bar,” they define a lesbian bar as “a place where patrons felt relatively safe,” (33). This quote demonstrates the fact that

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions.” Richard Bruce Nugent, who was considered the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement” said, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their

According to Sullivan (2008), same-sex attraction has not always been considered a deviation. However, post-war societal reaction to prohibition, gay bathhouses and other establishments were adverse and a new war on immorality arose, which was supported by American individuals, religious and governmental institutions. This outlook prevailed throughout the 1950's and led to blatant anti-gay attitudes. The persecution of the gay life style brought on renewed shame and guilt for the homosexual community as gay men were forced to cope with the stigmatization by "passing" as heterosexuals and thus become invisible. This resulted in the development of their own discriminatory social construct, with a hierarchy where males who were able to prove their masculinity through assimilation were held in the highest regards, while those that did not were looked down upon by their own gay communities

Throughout the 1950’s, the United States belonged to the Leave It To Beaver era. Families were structured around a strong, hard working father and a wonderful homemaker mother. Children were brought up with solid ideologies on what society expects from them and were warned about living a different and dangerous life. Only one-year separates Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room from there publishing dates during this decade of unwavering beliefs. These texts were seen as extremely controversial during their time due to their themes of homosexuality. Sexual orientation was an awkward topic during such a “to the book” time period and these texts pushed the limits, making them remarkable and memorable works. Both Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin explore the panic men experience while trying to comprehend what sexual orientation they belong to and highlight the masculine gay man. These texts also examine the woman’s role in the mist of it all.

This investigation assesses the New York City Stonewall Riots of 1969, concerning their influence on the rise of the modern gay rights movement, specifically regarding political emergence, social unity, and demographic shifts. The investigation will attempt to answer the following question: To what extent were the Stonewall Riots of 1969 a catalyst for the LGBT social movement in America?

Post-World War II, everyday gay life and consciousness transformed. The war stressed the segue from connecting gender inversion with sexual non-conformity to constructing and adhering to the binarism between homosexual and heterosexual identities. The pre-war notion that anyone could capitulate to homosexual temptations was replaced by the omnipresent fear of contracting and developing homosexuality as an indeterminate hybrid of both illness and mental disorder. A homosexual was considered and regarded as a security risk to the sanctity of a functioning society. The diaries of Donald Vining and Martin Duberman, both well-educated gay men working within academia, shed light on the lives and consciousness of gay men in the years following the end of World War II. As they both recount, the post-war years witnessed widespread fear, policing, and marginalization of homosexuals, and this resulted not simply from the construction of homosexuality as an entity separate from gender. Rather, this marginalization stemmed largely from the recognition that homosexuality, in the way that it was expressed by gay men such as Vining and Duberman, defied the constraints that constituted the heterosexual paradigm of relationships.

Vining had a social sphere consisting of predominantly homosexuals due to his metropolitan location. Vining, a gay male living in Manhattan, had a very complex social life that consisted mainly of gay, white men. Vining frequently went to the theater, parties, and dinner with his gay friends, and he would constantly be in contact with at least one of his friends (Vining Diary, p. 9, February 5 1947). World War II placed men in all-male, close quarters and allowed them to sexually explore, so men in the postwar period sought an extension of this freedom to explore. Fortunately, cities in the postwar period afforded men this continuation (Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire). Rather than being trapped in a small town with community policing, cities allowed men to be

George Chauncey’s Gay New York Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, goes where no other historian had gone before, and that is into the world of homosexuality before World War II. Chauncey’s 1994 critically acclaimed book was a gender history breakthrough that gave light to a homosexual subculture in New York City. The author argues against the idea that homosexual men lived hidden away from the world. Chauncey’s book exposes an abundant culture throughout the United States, especially in New York. In this book Chauncey not only shows how the gay population existed, but “uncovers three widespread myths about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movement which was isolation, invisibility, and internalization.” Chauncey argues against these theories that in the years 1890-1940, America had in fact a large gay culture. Chauncey book is impactful in the uncovering of a lost culture, but also works as an urban pre-World War II history giving an inside view of life in the city through sexuality and class.

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. (hb). ISBN: 0-226-35471-7.

During the 1960s, homosexuals were subject to major legal and social persecution. Not only did the gay community struggle with a homophobic legal system and with strict police enforcement, but they also faced resentment from other members of the community. One of the major themes in this course is freedom, and freedom for the LGBT people in the 1960s was very restricted. Not many places allowed the presence of gay or transgender people, but the most popular places that allowed gay people were bars. Members of the gay community did not feel as judged there and actually felt like they could be themselves at these establishments.

In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people

Rupert Everett provides primary sources in Paragraph 175 interviews of aging survivors, still photos, and archived footage on the experiences of homosexuals during the Weimar Republic to the persecutions during the Third Reich. These sources, among many others used in this film, are most important

The most widely accepted statistic concerning homosexuals is that one in every ten people are homosexual. Although some research argues that the number is closer to one in every twenty, this statistic still claims that five percent of the human population prefers their own sex to the opposite. While it is still an extremely controversial issue to whether we can “pray the gay away” or people are simply born with a homosexual identity the same way they are born with brown hair, the numbers cannot be ignored, even though historically they have been. In this paper, however, I will not be discussing how or why people are or are not gay, I will be discussing the masculine image forced upon the men of Cuba. The idealized image of the New Man was impossible to meet for all men especially homosexual men which is evident through the unrealistic expectations put forth in Che Guevara’s Man and Socialism and The Cuban Family Code, the social constructs laid out by Pedro Juan in Dirty Havana Trilogy and Fresa y Chocolate.