Books : Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Price: $32.72 Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.389664097471
EAN: 9780465026333
ISBN: 0465026338
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: 1994-05
Publisher: Basic Books
Sales Rank: 130997
Studio: Basic Books
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Product Description:
Through the diaries of gay men and other primary materials, the author demonstrates that gay society thrived in the open in pre-World War II New York long before the current prominence of homosexuality. National ad/promo.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
George Chauncey has written an engaging and informative book that provides entry into another American era's conceptualizations of what we today think of as homosexuality.
Gay New York takes great pains to debunk what Chauncey terms "the three myths" of isolation (gay men led solitary lives prior to Stonewall), invisibility (the gay world was difficult for isolated men to find) and internalization (gay men were self-loathing and universally accepted their denigration by the dominant culture). In addition to gay men's diaries, the book provides a glimpse into a bygone world through personal interviews, meticulous documentation by police investigators and arrest reports, sensationalistic newspaper accounts of police raids, cartoon illustrations from popular magazines, advertisements for drag balls, medical writings and other ingenious and esoteric sources. Combining serious scholarship and humor, the book capably documents the perspective of a culture that defined sexuality and gender roles using criteria that are altogether different from those we use today. In demonstrating the fluidity with which human beings define their own sexual behavior, Chauncey provocatively stirs the postmodern debate between essentialist and social constructionist explanations of sexuality.
In reading Chauncey's book, one appreciates how a culture makes sense of sexual activities. In the days of Gay New York, the terms pansy or fairy were used to define a gender role, ... Read More
Rating: -
George Chauncey gave himself an incredibly daunting task when he set out to reconstruct the sexual and gender landscape that Gay Male New Yorkers inhabited from the fin de sielce until the beginning of World War II. In order meet this challenge, and make sense of the awe inspiring amount of research he was able to amass, Chauncey finds it necessary to set himself up with a mega question--what did it mean to be a gay man in New York during the period in question?--with a series of much smaller topical questions. From the myriad of smaller questions I have mined Chauncey's work in order to concentrate upon four questions. First, what was the dominant understanding gender, male sexuality and sex practices during the period in question? Second, how did Gay men in New York negotiate their way through a city that was largely hostile to their existence and make themselves visible to each other? Third, how were Gay men able to appropriate public and private spaces for their own purposes? Fourth, how did the increasingly draconian laws and regulations that followed in the Great Depression's wake affect Gay life? Only by exploring these questions can we even begin to understand how Chauncey was able to construct Gay New York.
Chauncey asserts, quite convincingly, that we have a fundamentally different understanding of sexuality and gender than the generations that he studied. Most peoples' understanding of sexuality is a binary one based on the anatomy of the two ... Read More
Rating:  -
This book was preceded in my conciousness by high critical praise and so I approached it with great expectations. And in great part it met these expectations.
More than anything else, this is a work of love, being the excavation of forgotten facts in the history of gay life as it was lived by decades of gay men, experiences now mostly forgotten or scattered in obscure and fading documents. It is an extraordinary work of social archeology, resurrecting a world I never knew exisited. And Chauncey does this in exceptional detail, using clear prose, so that by the end the geography of this world has been salvaged and reconstructed, like Combray from Marcel's teacup.
As the book proceeds, the writing becomes stronger, particularly as the facts become more readily available, and the arguments and conclusions become more convincing. The last chapter is especially good on the submergence of gay life after Prohibition. This book is clearly one of the masterpieces of gay history, on par with John Boswell's work especially in it's dependence on primary sources.
The only criticism I have lies in the fact that Chauncey often has trouble shaping his information and often can't create a forest out of the trees. Especially in the earlier chapters, he often fails to make a summary statement without such a host of qualifiers that you wonder why he bothers in the first place. And as a previous reviewer has noted, there are alot of repetitions that a good editor should ... Read More
Rating: -
Chauncey's book offers serious and original thinking about queer history and about general urban history as well. Freed from the myths that have persisted about the place of homosexuals in U.S. society, the author paints a new portrait of what transpired just before the turn of the last century and into the early decades of the 20th century.
The most important idea he explains is that the concepts of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" as we understand them today didn't exist one hundred years ago. Chauncey's research shows that it was adherence to traditional gender role, rather than choice of sex partner, that labelled a man as either a "fairy" or "normal." The author provides detailed descriptions of the process by which working class men in particular could have sexual relations with other men and perserve a "normal" identity so long as the sex partners were effeminate. He uses extensive supporting materials that undergird his conclusions, including accounts of the "pansies" who were not, in fact, demeaned or ostracized but instead were tolerated, courted, and may even have served a vital purpose to working men who had relocated alone to the city to support families that lived elsewhere or to make their way into adulthood.
Chauncey shows how the definition of "invert"-- detour from standard gender role-- shifted gradually to the notion of "degenerate" or "homosexual"-- men who chose other men as sex partners. He makes clear how the emerging definition ... Read More
Rating: -
Great book that has ushered in queer theory. Great for gay history people and NYC history people. Great evidence. Great everything.
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