A fascinating look at a gay world that was not supposed to have existed, this book shows that gay life in prewar New York was not only remarkably visible but extensively integrated into the straight world.. Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Based on years of research and access to a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, this book is a fascinating portrait of a gay world that is not supposed to have existed.

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

Prizes

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