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

Based on diaries and letters, Chauncey argues that gay men in New York City not only maintained social contacts and relationships with each other but helped other gay men move to the city. Gay men developed “extensive social networks” just as “other migrant groups” migrated, supported each other, and “adapted to the urban environment” (272). Some men managed to create lives in which they mostly or entirely communicated with other gay men and lesbians, even finding jobs where they could be openly gay. Maintaining a double identity as a gay man was easier because these men “managed multiple identities or multiple ways of being known in the many social worlds in which they moved” (273). Similarly, someone like an African American gay man might be a target primarily as a gay man in his own neighborhood but as a Black man in another place. Certain restaurants, hotels, and department stores as well as the entire theater industry were known as places that employed mostly gay men, although they were not allowed to be “out” at other work places. Even for those men, though, the middle-class cultural norm of not discussing one’s private life in the workplace gave them a way to protect themselves: “Most middle-class men believed for good reason that their survival depended on hiding their homosexuality from hostile straight outsiders, and they respected the decision of other men to do so as well” (276).