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

By the late 1890s, Columbia or Paresis Hall on the Bowery at Fifth Street was known to the police and the City Vigilance League as a place where effeminate men solicited other men for sex. In 1899, some claimed that six similar dance halls or saloons existed on the Bowery. These were “not the only gay subculture in the city, but […] established the dominant public images of male sexual abnormality” (34). The area was a red-light district and a working-class part of the city where Jewish and Italian working-class immigrants as well as female sex workers coexisted. The existence of an area like the Bowery fit the ideology of the time. Unlike the middle classes, who could afford privacy and seemed to have orderly private lives, the working class was defined by a “lack of such control” (36). Society considered the working class deviant in their sexual behaviors and saw the working-class practice of renting rooms out to boarders as evidence that they did not value the privacy of their families.

Nonetheless, many middle-class men and some women enjoyed “slumming,” the practice of going into working-class neighborhoods like the Bowery for shock value, to escape from the constraints of middle-class life, and “to see the spectacle of the Sodom and Gomorrah that New York seemed to have become” (37).