Fifty Books Project 2023

Gay New York by George Chauncey
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

The twentieth century inherited a penchant for classification from the nineteenth century, with its delirious enthusiasm for the new science and its conviction that everything - even affection and sexual feeling - was unquestionably categorizable.

I read Chauncey's history of gay life in New York City first and found Faderman's earlier work in the endnotes.  I was driven by curiosity about New York City history and not-quite-idle speculation about the lives of family members and loved ones.  The two histories make excellent companions, approaching similar territory from different angles and reinforcing each other's general point of view even while looking at very different specifics.

The central idea both works is that the defining gay and lesbian life by what Chauncey refers to as "sexual object choice" is a relatively recent idea and one that may be fading.  Both historians point out that sexual activity with members of the same sex was neither unknown nor particularly shocking in 19th Century America.

Within the strict, silent parameters of Victorian era prudishness, it was an accepted fact that some men released their sexual tension with other men - and that there were well known parts of town and commercial establishments known for such liaisons.  The practice was not exactly accepted, but it was not the gender issue that New Yorkers got incensed about.  What got a man condemned in the 19th Century was perceived effeminacy - abandoning socially acceptable male behaviors involving work, dress, makeup, voice and assertiveness.  Chauncey uses the now offensive term "fairy" to describe the kind of man who faced hatred and ostracism from 19th Century society.

For lesbians, acceptance in 19th Century America was tied up with economics as much as sexual object choice.  Women could form romantic or spiritual friendships and live together in ways that might remind people of marriage - sharing a bed for example - without raising eyebrows, provided they had the means to live independent of male support.  Faderman discusses several such relationships, Jane Addams for one, that were built on the women's upper class status allowing them to pursue independent lives and unconventional relationships without social condemnation.  There was no such freedom for working class lesbians because there was no way to live in society without a man's support - not because love between women was not acceptable.

What changes for both groups is the ascendence of a certain view of psychology, post-Freud, that argues that sexual object choice is a permanent, defining characteristic of a person's life.  Whether it was viewed as a disease or simply a sin, sexual activity with a person of the same sex in 20th Century America is seen as defining who a person is.  Walt Whitman could declaim on the power of male affection, "the manly love of comrades," without being labeled because the label gay does not really exist.

This does not mean that life was better for gays or lesbians 150 years ago.  Sexual freedom of any type was frowned upon and there was no possibility of a gay or lesbian community or even of a long-term same sex relationship within any community.  The Twentieth Century chapters in both books tell the story of how men and women survived and occasionally thrived within the context of social condemnation.  They tell the story of communities that grew slowly and fitfully, supporting their members, sometimes publicly, sometimes secretly, but consistently.

Chauncey's writing is livelier and by focusing his study on NYC, he allows room for greater specificity, so there is fascinating material here about the difference between the gay community that grows up in Greenwich Village and that of Harlem.  Faderman is more strictly academic and ends with a stronger thesis about the social nature of sexuality.