This week, to honor Pride and self-education, I finished reading Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940, by George Chauncey (in the Second Trade Paperback Edition from 2019; the First Edition was published in 1994). I wish I had read it twenty-seven years ago, but as with planting trees, the present is better than ten years from now. The book covers a lot of very interesting ground related to the transformation and, to some extent, the formation of a modern gay identity, which should not be conflated with the existence and expression of homosexual desire -- the secret, magical ingredient of humanity -- which of course is a constant throughout history. The book also covers the ebb and flow (mostly flow, except perhaps counterintuitively during Prohibition, which sent everyone underground) of the regulatory and policing measures designed to inhibit or punish homosexual acts (and those engaged in them), which cannot be considered separately from the above question of identity, because the laws -- in effect, if not always in intention -- dictated where and how gays could meet (or not) in public or semi-public (bars, etc.), which in turn played a big part in how they (we) began to understand ourselves as gay people (as opposed to people having gay sex, which understanding was more prevalent 100 years ago).
The idea of a gay identity arising to some important degree out of an opposition to the state is something I think about a lot in the present, when the state often seems more benign but only, I would argue, to the extent that it encourages gays to replicate the heterosexual/family mode essential to the reproduction of our extreme, market-oriented (neoliberal) society. If you accept the idea that our current government is run by and for corporations, the attempt to co-opt a new, apolitical gay identity is especially loathsome in light of our anti-state origin story. Putting aside all the pink-washing talk of achievements and acceptance and pride, gay sex is what they fear because gay sex is still radical (in the political sense) precisely because it's never reproductive, and it should be recognized as such -- by gays and non-gays alike -- in any attempt to fight the current regime or to refashion a new and better one.
Another interesting facet of the book, which I was thinking about on my run through the park, was its description of the many places in New York City that once existed where gays could meet each other, to socialize and to have sex, including countless saloons and bars and cafeterias; the west side docks, all of Riverside Drive apparently (!?), subway and hotel restrooms, 42nd Street, movie theaters, bathhouses, parks big (Central) and small (Bryant). (Partial list.) It was not exactly a nirvana: most of these places were heavily policed, which lead to many arrests, beatings, public shaming, and ruined lives. But there were far too many gays for these places to be eradicated. As last summer demonstrated, there are only so many people the police can arrest at any given moment.
To read this history left me with a sense that, over the past fifty or more years, gay life -- and gay sex -- like so much else in our culture, has been 'privatized.' Market forces have largely eradicated the more chaotic, unregulated spaces (parks, docks) that were once relegated to gays (and other marginalized populations), and have even reduced the number of semi-private spaces (bars, bookstores) that catered to gays. Gays no longer need these spaces to have sex or to socialize; it can happen over (or largely by way of) the internet, where everything is -- tragically -- market-driven and, for that reason, a little sad.
One of the casualties of the pandemic in my neighborhood was the closure of a gay bar that had opened in 2019, just a few blocks away from me on Broadway.
This week, I realized how much I missed it. Not because I was a regular, but because it was comforting to know that there was a space nearby where, for a few minutes, I could pretend to be in a different time.
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