Queer consumers also congregated in cafeterias, coffee shops, and restaurants where they found other members of their social group, though in most cases they maintained their discretion. Neighborhoods with higher concentrations of gay bars often included a higher concentration of businesses and institutions adapted by queer consumers, like rooming houses, women’s boarding houses, single room occupancy hotels, and YMCAs. But bars provided institutional contexts for socializing and the establishment of relationships that endured one-night stands. Interracial sociability and sexuality, which were socially forbidden if not totally illegal, was also a key feature of many of these bars and speakeasies.įor most of their history, queer bars were but one segment of larger red light districts-which included brothels, burlesque theaters, peep shows, and shops selling erotic literature and apparel-in large cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. By the 1920s, bars and cafes that catered exclusively to queer consumers began to appear in bohemian and “vice” districts throughout the U.S., like Greenwich Village, Harlem, North Beach, and Bronzeville. Public bathhouses, a staple of immigrant communities living in tenement housing without running water, also served men who had sex with men-including some of the first to identify themselves as “inverts,” “intermediates,” “ androgynes,” or “homosexuals” (using the terminology of sexology), or “gay” or “fairies” (using the terminology of popular culture). (and much earlier outside of the U.S.) was the drinking institution, whether it was bar, saloon, or dance hall. Since at least the 1880s, the center of queer communal and economic life in the U.S. because gay life is not based on productive relationships…” If we reorient our view of economics from production to consumption, however, we can begin to see not only a queer economics but also-defined as “productive” activities-the emergence of a queer economy, and the institution at the center of it: the queer bar.Īlberta Hunter, who was very popular in South Side cabarets and lived in Bronzeville in the 1920s, recorded several queer-themed songs. Writing about queer bars and drag culture in the 1972 classic Mother Camp, Esther Newton observed that queer communities had “an economics but no economy. But most of them are male hangouts where a few women stroll in…”) (“ rarity in the larger cities but not unknown,” writes Cory, “is the bar where the Lesbians gather. Bars were also one of, if not the only institution shared by gay men and lesbians. Furthermore, while gay men (but not women) adapted theaters and bathhouses as cruising zones, bars were the sole business marketed explicitly to queer consumers. For lesbians, bars represented vital gathering places, since women’s access to non-domestic space was often restricted by law and by custom. For gay men, they were the only alternative to ephemeral spaces that were almost completely sexual and devoid of social interaction. In a formative, fragile community strung together by informal networks of friends socializing in private homes and strangers and acquaintances at cruising sites, gay bars were central in fostering a public (or quasi-public) culture with the potential for political action. “Where to go?” The Homosexual in America asks, searching for alternatives to the bars.
Although bars provided a “convivial spirit,” bar-goers frequently complained of the lack of alternatives.
Few businesses or other economic institutions catering to sexual minorities existed before the 1960s, and most often they were bars.
The Homosexual in America provided the definitive sociological account of queer life in the immediate post-war era, when queer bars-the central cultural, economic, and social institution of queer life-were all but criminalized by state liquor laws and local zoning and vice laws in the U.S. The pseudonymous author, Donald Webster Cory, pseudonym of sociologist Edward Sagarin, went on to be a major, if controversial figure in the homophile movement. ––Edward Sagarin (aka Donald Webster Cory), The Homosexual in America (1951)įirst published in 1951, The Homosexual in America, also known as the “ Cory Report,” served as an unofficial gay bible in the immediate post-war years, continuously in print throughout the 1950s and 1960s. One does not hide one’s head as an acquaintance walks by one does not deny encounters, but on the contrary makes appointments, utilizes the meeting-place for social convenience.” “One wanders into the bar in the hope of finding the convivial spirit that comes from being with one’s own… From the gay street to the gay bar may be but a few steps, or several miles, but an aura of respectability is to be found at the latter that is lacking at the former. First published on OutHistory June 19, 2017