The Slide, like the Stonewall 77 years later, could be forced to close, but both establishments existed – and others replaced them when they shut – whereas in most cities there were no such establishments. New York may have been repressive, but it was less so than other cities in the US, because its greater size and diversity made legal and social control less effective. The best-known was called the Slide, on Bleecker Street, forced to close by a press campaign in 1892.īy the 1890s, New York’s developing gay world was already in a paradoxical situation and that remained typical of the city until the 1970s. They were frequented by men who were attracted to or, at least, amused by them. These gay bars were known for their ‘fairy’ waiters, who, according to police reports, ‘rouge their necks’ and sang ‘ filthy ditties’, ie performed in drag.
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As George Chauncey explains in his masterly book Gay New York, at that time people tended to divide men not into gay and straight, but into ‘normal men’ and ‘fairies’ and it was considered possible for ‘normal men’ to have sex with ‘fairies’ without bringing their normality into question, so long as they retained the insertive role in sex. By the 1890s, however, New York already had what we’d call gay bars or, more precisely, drag bars. There is less evidence of gay life in New York in the decades after the 1850s, perhaps because the Civil War retarded the development of alternative lifestyles in the US. Whitman read his most clearly homoerotic works, the ‘Calamus’ poems, aloud to the circle of his friends who gathered at Pfaff’s beer cellar, at Broadway and Bleecker Street, which suggests that they were at least what today we call ‘allies’. Two key New York writers of the time referenced same-sex desire in their work: novelist Herman Melville did so subtly, while poet Walt Whitman did so explicitly. Gay or gay-friendly social groups were starting up too.
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Same-sex relations of some kind have taken place in every culture and time, no matter what the cultural norms were, and there’s evidence of same-sex love in 1640s Dutch New Amsterdam, for instance, where a young barber-surgeon called Harmen Meyndertz van den Bogaert was accused of sodomy with his slave Tobias and sadly died, falling through the ice as he tried to escape across the frozen Hudson.īy the 1850s, people that we would today call gay began to play an important role in New York – at least in the cultural life that was becoming a significant feature of the city. Role in world gay history in the late 1960s, 70s andĨ0s, but many people are unaware that the city was These and other events cast New York in a pivotal Sadly, the AIDS epidemic, too, was centred in New York, at least as far as the Eastern US was concerned. New York City – and Greenwich Village, in particular – are associated worldwide with gay rights and gay history because of the Stonewall uprising of June 1969 and the newly visible gay world that flowered in the Village as a result of it.