A Desired Past by Leila J. Rupp

Author:Leila J. Rupp [Rupp, Leila J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Sociology
ISBN: 9780226775333
Google: gjfnDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 592293
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Paul Cadmus, The Fleet's In! 1934. Oil on canvas, NH 92806-KN. Courtesy of the Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.

We can also get a glimpse into middle-class gay worlds through the life of Richard Cowan, who graduated from Cornell University in 1933 and went to live in Boston at the invitation of Stewart Mitchell, an editor of the literary magazine the Dial. Mitchell rented Cowan an apartment, and Cowan wrote in his diary that “I love S. very much,” but he added that he was “incapable of being true to anyone person.” He recorded his encounters with young men he met at the Symphony or the Copley Theatre or the Boston Public Garden:

Met a Dartmouth boy on the Common one night after the Symphony. His name was Jack . . . . He was a bit obvious but I liked him. He claimed he loved me etc. Stayed at his home one Saturday night while visiting some friends of his I met George, a Dartmouth boy . . . . He called me the next day & I went to the movies, with him—and that started that. I think I really did love him at first and he—very passionately—said he loved me.33

Clearly, middle-class men used cultural institutions such as the theater to meet comrades with similar sexual desires.

Yet the class (and age) differences between fairies and queers did not mean the creation of entirely separate social worlds. In the YMCA, residential hotels, restaurants, baths, and other public places, gay worlds developed that sometimes transcended class barriers. Middle-class queer men, like working-class fairies, sometimes sought out “normal” working-class men for sexual trysts. Charles Tomlinson Griffes, a modernist composer of the early twentieth century, had a thing for Irish policemen. In the 1910s he recorded in his diary his approaches and progress: “I talked for about 20 minutes with the policeman stationed at 42–5 in the evenings. He remembers me this time and was so responsive I asked him to go to the theater with me.”34 Men like Griffes found themselves attracted to such men's traditional masculinity, but they also found workingmen responsive to their advances.

The real class difference seemed to be between the working-class male view of sexuality and that of middle-class straight men, who had increasingly come to mark their masculinity through their sole attraction to women. No longer working with their bodies, subjected to employee status in white-collar occupations, and faced with women's demands for greater social and political power, middle-class men felt increasingly cut off from other forms of expressing virility. In this context, not only the “homosexual” but the “heterosexual” too came into being.

The visibility of same-sex sexuality and the lack of structural barriers between gay and straight worlds was most vivid in the world of entertainment. In the early 1910s, a national enthusiasm for female impersonation reached its height with the popularity of Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator with impeccable offstage masculine and heterosexual credentials. Eltinge's performances conjured up not the fairy but the gender equivalent of

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