The Lavender City
The Gay World Before Stonewall
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The Hamilton Lodge Ball was the height of fashion and the social season. Beneath a canopy of shimmering chandeliers, two thousand dancers dazzled on the floor. Ballgowns glittered with sequins, jewels, and peacock feathers as dashing tuxedoed figures waltzed among them. Liquor sloshed from martini glasses while three thousand spectators crowded the edges of the ballroom and craned their necks from the balconies above. Mrs. Astor had paid a fortune for a box near A’Lelia Walker. Journalists from every city paper jotted notes. New York’s Finest kept the gawkers at bay.
This was Harlem in 1930: liquor was illegal, the crowd was racially mixed, and the ballgowns were worn by men.
Long before the riots at the Stonewall Inn launched the modern gay rights movement in 1969, a vibrant, increasingly visible gay world existed across New York City, from Greenwich Village to Harlem. Attracted by the freedom of the city—its anonymity, its capacity for self-invention, its commercial life—young gay men sought new opportunities and an escape from family surveillance, small-town norms, and the everpresent threat of exposure. As George Chauncey details in Gay New York, the city opened new possibilities and liberties for gay men from the 1890s and into the early 1930s—until a newly censorious cultural and regulatory backlash forced gay life underground.1
New York gay life first emerged visibly in the 1890s, amid the working-class saloons and men’s clubs of the Irish and Italian neighborhood around the Bowery red-light district. By the turn of the century, it had spread across the city and into middle-class life. Men of means found respectability in bachelor flats and apartment hotels, while those with fewer means increasingly lived in rooming houses—discreet, cheap furnished bedrooms, rented by the week, that housed much of unmarried New York. A 1940 study of gay men incarcerated for “degeneracy” found that 61 percent lived in rooming houses, also known as single-room occupancy units.2
Rooming houses, with their “casual intermingling of strangers,” drew the ire of Progressive Era moral crusaders, who set out to “protect” young men from urban temptation by building safe havens for them. The most famous were the residential hotels built by the YMCA. By the 1920s, the Y’s seven residential hotels housed more than a thousand young men and had become a central part of gay social life. They also served visiting gay men, offering hotel rooms, gym and pool access, meals—and “never ending sex” in the showers, according to one happy customer.
Before the emergence of gay bars, bathhouses “were some of the first exclusively gay commercial spaces in the city.” At the Ariston Baths on the Upper West Side, gay men could socialize openly and meet with gay friends as early as 1902—until it was shut down by anti-vice crusaders the following year. The Everard Baths on West 28th Street served gay men from at least 1919 until it burned down in 1977. Cheap restaurants, lunch counters, and cafeterias “dotted the city’s commercial and furnished-room districts” and became vital and visible gay social infrastructure, safe places for gays and lesbians to meet, professionally network, monitor police activity, and be themselves. While the smart set enjoyed “Café Society Uptown,” gays and lesbians enjoyed a campier, more ironic “Cafeteria Society Downtown.” Life Cafeteria on Christopher Street was a notorious “fairy hangout,” while Vanity Fair’s 1931 guide to New York noted that the Paramount cafeteria in Times Square had a “dash of lavender,” for any tourists who wanted to gawk.
In the 1910s and ‘20s, gay life had begun to cluster in two neighborhoods, creating enclaves in Greenwich Village and Harlem. The Village offered cheap rents, cheap restaurants, and an anti-bourgeois artistic culture that tolerated nonconformity. Uptown, Harlem was the only place in a segregated city where Black gay men could congregate in commercial establishments, but in the age of the Harlem Renaissance and jazz, many white gay people found its blues clubs and basement speakeasies “wide open” to them, too. Gay residential enclaves emerged in the rooming house districts of Hell’s Kitchen and in the tonier bachelor flats north of the “Frenzied Forties” around Times Square, dubbed the “Faggie Fifties.”
Across the city, gay New Yorkers built what Chauncey calls an “organized, multilayered, and self-conscious gay subculture, with its own meeting places, language, folklore, and moral codes.” They developed sophisticated systems of dress, speech, and behavior that made the gay world visible to other gay people while remaining largely hidden from everyone else.
As Chauncey writes, if this was a closet, it was a “very large closet indeed.”
In the 1920s, the closet burst open with, counterintuitively, the onset of Prohibition. New Yorkers resented the moralism of Prohibition, a sentiment shared by Mayor Jimmy Walker and Tammany Hall, who gave their tacit approval to the emerging nightlife underworld by frequenting it nightly. The city’s moral guardians feared the social and class mixing welcomed by the transgressive new speakeasy culture, as well as its “rejection of convention and interest in the outré.” Indeed, the “popular revolt” against Prohibition’s moralism made middle-class New Yorkers gay-curious, and they nudged open the closet door for gay men they called “pansies.”
And so the Pansy Craze was born.
In this underworld of corruption and bathtub gin, bribery was the coin of the realm, paid by nightclubs serving straight and gay clienteles alike. Here, gay culture emerged as part of the city’s nighttime entertainment economy. The “pansy act”—a camp gay man playing a camp gay man—became a fixture of Times Square nightclubs like the swanky Club Abbey, where Jean Malin, in the words of Vanity Fair, entertained “through a lavender mist a somewhat bewildered clientele.” Elsewhere, drag queen impresario Jack Mason helped to cultivate an appreciation of camp as “the pinnacle of sophistication.” Of course, the spectacular was as much a spectacle, and Chauncey describes much of the Pansy Craze as “the gay equivalent of blackface.”
If the Pansy Craze in the clubs was all knowing winks and bewildered smirks, Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball was something far more public. One of many gay drag balls of this era, the Hamilton Lodge Ball was the largest gathering of gay men and women in the city and the most visible stage on which they sashayed. Officially called the “Masquerade and Civic Ball,” by the late 1920s everyone knew it as the “Faggots Ball.” The [white] writer Max Ewing described a ballroom “packed with people from bootblacks to New York’s rarest bluebloods,” all the men dressed as women and “wearing plumes and jewels and decorations of every kind.” Eight hundred guests attended in 1925, but up to 7,000 spectators and dancers were regularly attending by the early 1930s—peaking at 8,000 in 1937. As the Amsterdam News headline of 1937 blared: “PANSIES CAVORT IN MOST DELOVELY MANNER AT THAT ANNUAL HAMILTON LODGE ‘BAWL’.” For many men, it was their “one-night-a-year freedom.”
The Faggots Ball “made the existence and scope of [the gay] world manifest.” It was not to last.
Just as Prohibition unintentionally spawned the nightlife underworld and the Pansy Craze, Repeal inadvertently ended the party. The backlash was swift. Under Repeal, alcohol was licensed and controlled by New York’s State Liquor Authority, which set out to prevent a return to the perceived disorder of the working-class saloons by prohibiting licensed establishments from becoming “disorderly.” The SLA interpreted homosexuals themselves to be “lewd and dissolute,” meaning that a bar could become disorderly simply by serving them. In practice, anything coded as homosexual—from campy behavior to discussing the opera—could be treated as evidence of disorder. Undercover SLA agents routinely entrapped gay men, going to gay bars, ordering drinks, encouraging advances, and then arresting the man once they were both outside for “degenerate disorderly conduct.”
In the decades after Repeal, the SLA’s surveillance regime pushed gay life into exclusively gay bars. These were often short-lived, as the SLA targeted and shut down “literally hundreds” of gay or gay-friendly establishments—and bar owners had no legal defense. As gay life went underground and became invisible to the broader public, the “sexual deviant” became a postwar bogeyman accused of causing “drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” While gay men had always been subject to fines or imprisonment for “lewd” behavior, arrests reached the thousands in the postwar years. To one closeted Wall Street executive, the “constant, deadening fear” of bar raids kept many men away.
As Chauncey concludes, the “state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.”
The gay world that had existed in bathhouses, cheap cafeterias, and campy nightclubs withdrew behind closed doors. The closet door became a liminal space between the secret gay city and the straight city outside. Every gay bar was, in a sense, a speakeasy accessible to those who knew the password—the coded language, the sartorial cues, the flicker of eyes or the flick of a wrist. Gay men stepping through that closet door crossed back and forth between the worlds of visibility and invisibility. The closet wasn’t merely a metaphor; it was a physical geography of actual doors, actual thresholds, actual streets in New York. The Stonewall Inn was behind one of those doors, already a symbol of the peculiar state of gay life: a Mafia-owned dive in Greenwich Village, it had been regularly raided by the police, its patrons accustomed to the humiliation of arrest.
The story we tell of Pride is of a movement born in the humid early hours of June 28, 1969, when gay people stepped out of the darkness of the closet into the full visibility of the streets for the first time. It was not the beginning. The Stonewall riots were a reclamation of a world that now refused to hide itself behind a lavender-painted door.
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All quotations are from Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey (Basic Books, April 2019).
In an essay that did not anticipate this one, I referred to these single-room occupancy (SRO) rooming houses as the “banished bottom of the housing market.”
This is fascinating - thanks for sharing this history of this "very large closet indeed"; I'm interested to learn more, if you have any particular book recommendations!