5. The Beginning of the End, 1930–40

In some ways, the thirties are the beginning of modern Brooklyn. The borough’s population hit 2.5 million in 1930, and it’s stayed near that mark ever since. Although Manhattanites would mock Brooklyn residents as “bridge and tunnel” visitors who were still technically not part of “the city,” Brooklyn was now bigger than Manhattan for the first time, with some seven hundred thousand more residents, and Brooklyn’s black population would double over the decade, bringing the borough closer to the multiethnic enclave it is known as today.

Physically, too, Brooklyn was entering its modern incarnation. The subway now connected Brooklyn to every other part of New York City (aside from Staten Island). The twenties had seen a boom in skyscraper and high-rise construction along the Brooklyn waterfront, but that ended in 1929, right after the creation of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower in downtown Brooklyn. One of the borough’s most recognizable landmarks, the Bank Tower is a domed art deco skyscraper that thrusts priapically into the sky, with clock faces that can be seen throughout the neighborhood. Shortly after it opened, Black Tuesday wiped out some $14 billion from the New York Stock Exchange ($199 billion in today’s money), decimating a wide swath of US industries, from housing to manufacturing. Impoverished families were unable to buy homes, so throughout the thirties, Brooklyn saw a major downturn in residential construction, which eventually led to extreme housing shortages after World War II—one of the prime factors for the suburbanization of New York in the 1950s, which again reduced demand for construction in Brooklyn. Thus, post-1930, Brooklyn’s skyline would stay largely the same for decades, with its newest and tallest buildings all sharing a unified art deco style. The Bank Tower would remain Brooklyn’s tallest building for the next eighty years.

Even before the stock market crash, there were signs that the Roaring Twenties were grinding to a hoarse whisper. The decade’s artistic byword was modernism, a celebration of all things new and untraditional, but the movement splintered as the thirties rolled in and political concerns began to trump stylistic ones. In literature, modernism had largely been supported and spread by a host of “little magazines,” which published and employed the likes of Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell (girlfriend of the actress Ada Dwyer). Few of these publications survived the twenties, and even most of the holdouts didn’t last through the first years of the Great Depression. The Little Review, Secession, Broom, Contact, and The Dial had all stopped publishing by the time the stock market crashed; Pagany, Hound & Horn, and This Quarter folded soon after.

Of those magazines, The Dial was arguably the most famous and most important. When it published its last issue in July 1929, it was eulogized in newspapers from Minneapolis to Nashville. One reporter wrote upon its passing, “Brilliant editors gathered some of the finest thought of the period in its pages.… It will be necessary for most of us to subscribe to three magazines to replace it.”¹ During the last five years of its existence, The Dial was almost entirely steered by one brilliant, yet unassuming woman (and her mother): the poet Marianne Moore. Within a few months of The Dial’s demise, Moore would leave Greenwich Village for an apartment at 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn, where she would live for the next thirty-six years.

Redheaded and slight, Moore stood five feet four inches and at times weighed less than eighty pounds, yet she was one of the lions of modernism: a bold writer, a tough editor, and a scintillating conversationalist, despite her reflexive modesty. T. S. Eliot called her “one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.”² Aside from poetry, she also wrote book reviews, translations, essays, a novel, a play, and the liner notes for Muhammad Ali’s 1963 spoken-word album, I Am the Greatest! Before her death in 1972, Moore won nearly every imaginable writing award, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Robert Frost Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, and over a dozen honorary degrees.

For queer historians, Moore’s life provides a wealth of information that adds up to no definitive conclusions. Hart Crane’s nickname for her, “the Right Reverend Miss Mountjoy,” was a jab at her austere life and sexless public persona. Moore had no known sexual or romantic relationships as an adult and lived with her mother (often sharing a bed) for almost her entire life. Indeed, had the labels been available to her, Moore might well have identified as asexual or a-romantic, since most of her recorded thoughts about sex, marriage, and children range from modest disavowal to downright repugnance. According to biographer Linda Leavell, “Marianne showed no more sexual interest in women than she did in men.” In her poetry, “never does she long for a lover’s embrace.… She comes to distrust unifying metaphor as much as she does romantic love.”³

However, despite the enduring mystery of her own sexual desires (or disinterests), what is inarguable is that Moore lived the vast majority of her long life in a queer milieu, and that her home in Brooklyn hosted some of the most famous queer artists of the mid-twentieth century. Moore may well be the first prominent American to have been largely raised by a queer couple. Moore’s father was institutionalized with schizophrenia in 1887, right before Moore was born. When Moore was thirteen, in 1900, her mother, Mary, began the most significant relationship of her life, with Mary Norcross. Norcross was the youngest daughter of the Moores’ neighbors in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When Mary Moore and Mary Norcross met, Norcross was twenty-five, a fresh-faced graduate of Bryn Mawr who tended to wear old-fashioned brown petticoats (for which Marianne gave her the nicknames Ruffles and Beaver). Mary Moore was a thirty-eight-year-old teacher and mother of two. Yet despite the thirteen-year age gap, the two women fell in love almost immediately. Their letters show a caring, romantic, and erotic relationship. While traveling in 1904, Mary Norcross envisioned the next time the two would be together, writing, “Think of having each other at night and all through the day for a whole month, Darling! I’ve never been so starved.”⁴ Their relationship spanned the next eleven years, and Norcross remained close to the family even after the two women broke up.

Norcross encouraged Marianne Moore to study at Bryn Mawr, starting in 1905. Not only did Moore begin her career as a writer while there, she also met many other queer women in its manicured lawns and high Gothic halls. The school was overseen by Dean Carey Thomas, who lived on campus with her partner, Mary Garrett. Moore was close to two of her English professors, Lucy Martin Donnelly and Katherine Fullerton, who were also a couple. And although they wouldn’t become friends until after college, Moore first met queer modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (better known as H.D.) while both were Bryn Mawr students.

At Bryn Mawr, Moore expressed her most romantic feelings, in a series of “crushes” on other students. Romances between students were expected at Bryn Mawr; students even wrote a daily roundup of “bird news,” a gossip column that covered older students and their admirers (who were colloquially called birds). Moore was no exception, and over the years she developed strong feelings for a series of other students. She told her mother, brother, and Mary Norcross about them in her voluminous letters home. Of one she wrote, “I have liked her ever since last November, but never would have said as I can now, ‘She can have me any time she wants me.’” About another, a senior when Moore was a freshman, she wrote, “I’d give anything but my family’s health and happiness to have her ‘fond on me.’” Moore’s most serious crush was on Peggy James, the niece of author Henry James, whom Moore greatly admired. Peggy James, she wrote, was “exactly like a wild horse—Too beautiful to leave unbroken, and yet too perverse not to make you want to swear.” Unfortunately for Moore, James liked her only a little and didn’t “feel any terrific excitement” over her.⁵

Nothing indicates that any of these relationships, although intense and erotic, were sexual. Aside from her feelings for Peggy James, Moore’s infatuations were all fairly short-lived. What is most suggestive about these feelings is not their existence, but their quick passing. Although some scholars have read Moore as a closeted lesbian, her crushes actually seem to belie that notion. Moore had a supportive family of queer women, older role models for happy same-sex couples, and an environment that treated relationships between women as normal and healthy. She obviously had little problem discussing her intense feelings for other women, but those feelings seemed to fade quickly. When it came to sex, she seemed less closeted and more disinterested. As an adult, Moore attracted a wide array of suitors, male and female, all of whom she worked assiduously to dissuade. At least three lesbian heiresses served as patrons to Moore: British author Bryher (heir to the Ellerman shipbuilding fortune); Boston socialite Katherine Jones (whose family owned fruit plantations in Jamaica); and Louise Crane (heir to the Crane paper fortune). While Moore valued all three as friends and occasionally allowed them to provide her with money, food, or clothing, she shut down any attempts at flirtation or romantic entanglements (although her mother encouraged them). Displaying the degree to which psychology was becoming the dominant way to understand sexuality, a frustrated Bryher referred to Moore as “a case of arrested emotional development.”⁶

Without a doubt, Moore’s closest relationships were with her mother and brother who was called Warner. The three kept up an intense correspondence throughout their entire lives, and aside from a brief period during college and immediately after, Moore and her mother always lived together. Interestingly, Moore (at her own insistence) was usually referred to with male pronouns within the family. Whether this speaks to a transgender identity, a lack of interest in typically “feminine” behaviors, or an over-identification with her brother (as some scholars have argued) is unknowable. But it adds further fuel to the image of Moore as a queer and gender-transgressing figure—if not specifically a lesbian, bisexual, or transgender one.

As a poet, Moore was one of the first imagists, who were antiromantic modernist writers and used precise language to draw detailed pictures, which were often metaphorical or symbolic in ways the poems suggested but did not unpack at length. Moore drew many of her images from science, nature, and museum exhibitions. Take, for instance, the start of one of her most famous poems, “The Pangolin,” which minutely describes that variety of Asian anteater:

Another armored animal-scale

lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they

form the uninterrupted central

tail row! This near artichoke with head and legs and

grit-equipped gizzard ⁷

As “The Pangolin” demonstrates, modernists played with meter and rhyme—or else abandoned them entirely. The resulting poems were far removed (in both form and content) from the epics, odes, and sonnets that were popular in earlier decades.

Unlike Hart Crane, who achieved almost immediate success with his late-adolescent poems, Moore labored for nearly six years after college without publishing more than a handful of pieces. However, by the 1920s she was finally recognized as a major new poetic voice, although because of the difficulty of her writing, she was often called a poet’s poet, and her work wouldn’t sell widely until much later. When she won the prestigious Dial Award in 1924 (beating out Hart Crane), she was working as a librarian to afford the tiny apartment she shared with her mother in Greenwich Village; the prize was awarded to allow her to work “untroubled by financial considerations.”⁸

Immediately after winning, Moore joined The Dial’s staff as acting editor. She was soon making nearly all editorial decisions, with assistance from her mother, one of the few people whose opinions Moore valued. As an editor, Moore championed the works of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Alyse Gregory, James Joyce, and many others. For five years, from 1924 to 1929, she helped steer the course of modernism in America. Moore loved her position, and although she was only paid to work part-time, she worked on The Dial six days a week, often until midnight. But her work came at a steep personal price: despite being “at the height of her creative powers when she took over The Dial,” she published no new poetry of her own during her five-year tenure as editor.⁹ As a result, although she at first viewed leaving Greenwich Village as an exile, her first decade in Brooklyn would be one of the most fecund periods of her life.

In Brooklyn, the air was cleaner, the neighborhood was quieter, and Moore had fewer demands on her time (although she always maintained an active literary and artistic life). In an essay entitled “The Plums of Curiosity,” Moore described her new life in Brooklyn thusly:

An atmosphere of privacy with a touch of diffidence prevailed, as when a neighbor in calling costume, furred jacket, veil, and kid gloves would emerge from a four-story house to visit the meat-market. Anonymity without social or professional duties, after the conflicting pressures of our life in New York, was welcome.¹⁰

Moore and her mother lived in a fourth-floor apartment, chosen by her older brother, Warner, who was stationed as a chaplain at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and wanted them close to him. Although in Fort Greene, a little removed from the water, the apartment was still close enough to the docks that Moore’s mother complained that the “silt from the coal-burning smokestacks along Brooklyn’s waterfront could soon cover a freshly made bed.”¹¹

That would not be true for much longer. Unbeknownst to anyone in 1929, Brooklyn was in its last year as a truly thriving industrial zone, when its waterfront was still a critical nexus for international trade. The Great Depression would soon decimate much of Brooklyn’s economy. However, even had the stock market never crashed, another threat was slowly leaching into the borough, transforming both its economic and physical worlds: automobiles. Cross-country shipping over land radically redrew the lines of trade in America, diminishing Brooklyn’s importance to the country as a whole. Inside the borough, neighborhoods were being torn apart to make room for ever-widening streets, mostly pushed by the ruthless city planner Robert Moses. One of his earliest city street projects was the four-lane Gowanus Expressway, which smashed through the neighborhoods of Gowanus and Sunset Park and helped to isolate the waterfront and was “obsolete almost immediately” because it lacked details (such as shoulders) that were necessary for car traffic.¹² More than one hundred businesses were closed and twelve hundred families evicted to build the highway—and this was just a tiny taste of what Moses would do to New York City post–World War II. Access roads such as the Gowanus Expressway were the crucial arteries that allowed suburbanization to transform America in the fifties, by creating easy commutes for now-far-flung workers. Brooklyn was becoming dominated by cars, as was the entire country. According to the Federal Highway Authority, in 1920 a little more than 8 million cars were on the road in the US; by 1930 that number had more than tripled, to 23 million.¹³ And one in every ten of those vehicles was located in New York State.¹⁴

Most likely, one of those cars—perhaps a hired hack or a Model T owned by a friend—brought Marianne Moore and her mother across the Brooklyn Bridge to their new life in Fort Greene. There, Moore entered into a “prolific five-year period during which [she published] two new books of poetry and some of her finest reviews and essays.”¹⁵ She also hosted a who’s who of queer cultural luminaries out of her Brooklyn apartment, with frequent visitors including publisher Monroe Wheeler, novelist Glenway Wescott, photographer George Platt Lynes, the poets Hilda Doolittle and W. H. Auden, and the English heiress Bryher. Moore’s mother loved hosting these distinguished guests and “preferred the company of homosexuals to that of heterosexuals.”¹⁶

Many have speculated that Mary Moore kept a stranglehold on her daughter’s life and affections. While the pair were inseparable, and Moore allowed her mother’s health and needs to dictate her own travel and work schedules, the poet was also clear that having her mother so close not only allowed her to write, but also pushed her to create the best work she could. Her biographer Linda Leavell described Moore’s complex relationship with her mother as having “hindered her to succeed as a writer,” meaning it held her back, but that that very impediment was also necessary for her success.¹⁷

A few years after moving to Brooklyn, in March 1934, Moore began mentoring one of the most famous poets of the mid-twentieth century: Elizabeth Bishop. Moore was introduced to Bishop via a friend from Moore’s college days at Bryn Mawr, who was now the librarian at Vassar, where Bishop was an undergraduate. In turn, Bishop introduced Moore to Louise Crane, a fellow Vassar student who was also a philanthropist and Bishop’s first serious girlfriend. Crane would be a valued friend and patron to both Moore and Bishop throughout their lives, and Bishop and Crane would be frequent visitors to Moore’s home in Brooklyn. Aside from poetry, Bishop and Moore bonded over their difficult family circumstances: Bishop’s mother had been institutionalized when she was young, much as had Moore’s father.

According to Moore biographer Linda Leavell, for many years “Bishop took her poems to Marianne’s apartment to ask for advice.”¹⁸ After an afternoon at the zoo or the theater, Moore and Bishop would return to Moore’s small, cluttered Brooklyn apartment to discuss writing (sometimes with Moore’s mother present as well). It is easy to picture these two diminutive giants of poetry in the back of a taxi arriving at the squat yellow brick building with the “two mothballs in front,” as Moore described the gaslights to drivers. The walls of her apartment’s narrow central hallway were lined with books, pictures, and gifts from friends. A set of carpenter’s tools, which Moore used to build shelves, hung by her kitchen door. She’d also installed a trapeze in the doorway that led to the living room, which she used for exercise. Piles of new books were always on the floor, surrounding unique and expensive gifts, such as the bronze bust of Moore that had been given to her by the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Big bay windows looked out on the Brooklyn street below, letting in the light and giving Moore and Bishop a place to gather and look over Bishop’s carefully written poems.

An interest in everything—old and new, books and tools, trapeze and Lachaise—was a defining aspect of Moore’s life and of her poetry. Her Brooklyn apartment, more than any other home she ever had, was the distillation of all of these elements. Moore would remain in Brooklyn throughout the thirties—and the forties, fifties, and into the sixties. She lived in Brooklyn when her mother died in 1947, and when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951. She published some seventeen books during her time in Fort Greene, earning her the moniker “the poet of Brooklyn.” As she got older, her verses became less dense, her poetic structures less demanding, and her topics more topical, such as 1961’s “Baseball and Writing,” which begins:

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting

and baseball is like writing.

You can never tell with either

how it will go

or what you will do;¹⁹

This new poetic lightness resulted in a sudden burst of popularity for the aging Moore. She was photographed for a Life magazine spread, although she disliked most of the photos, except for one that showed her holding a baseball bat while smiling at three confused small boys. Her signature look—a tricorn hat and a dark capelet—was now so out of style that it was amusingly kooky, not just old-fashioned or severe. Her new writing was seen as approachable, and her older (as much as it was remembered) was seen as canonical. As years passed, Moore became a symbol of a bygone era of literary greatness. She would only leave Brooklyn in the last decade of her life, when economic distress and shortsighted urban planning blighted her neighborhood—part of the larger downfall of Brooklyn’s working waterfront, which helped to destroy and erase the area’s queer community as a whole.

Like Walt Whitman and Hart Crane before her, Moore helped to cement the idea of Brooklyn as a poetic destination. One of the last poems she ever wrote was an ode to both Brooklyn and Crane. “Granite and Steel,” the title poem of her last book of new work, is directly in conversation with Crane’s writing. Not only is the title drawn from The Bridge, but she quotes Crane directly in the poem’s third stanza:

“O path amid the stars

crossed by the seagull’s wing!”

“O radiance that doth inherit me!”

—affirming inter-acting harmony!

Untried expedient, untried; then tried;

way out; way in; romantic passageway

first seen by the eye of the mind,

then by the eye. O steel! O stone!

The first two lines of the final stanza refer to the construction of the bridge, a crossing that went untried until John and Washington Roebling made it possible. But they can also be read as describing Moore’s own experience of the bridge—that untried expedient, which was at first a way out of Greenwich Village, but would become a way in, a “romantic passageway” taken by the many eager artists who flowed across the East River to knock upon the poet’s door. A few years before she left Brooklyn for good in 1966, Moore wrote of her adopted home, “Brooklyn has given me pleasure, has helped to educate me; has afforded me, in fact, the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive.”²⁰

Although there are no records of lesbian bars or other gathering places for queer women in Brooklyn at this time, evidence is ample that individual queer women, such as Moore, were also finding their own “tame excitement” on Brooklyn’s waterfront. This follows a pattern with queer neighborhoods in general, which often cater initially (and primarily) to men and develop institutions for women only later. This renders the lesbian and bisexual pioneers of so-called gayborhoods relatively invisible to historians. Yet they helped create the early queer density necessary for these areas to thrive.

In Brooklyn, these pioneers included women such as Jerre Kalbas, who was born in Harlem in 1918 and moved to Brooklyn Heights sometime in the late thirties to live with her lover, Patty Storm. Storm and her mother shared an apartment in a rooming house on Hicks Street. Storm worked as a ballroom dancer, and Kalbas was an electrician, welder, and jewelry smith. Kalbas recalled that at the time she “walked like a truck driver,” and Patty helped her femme up to get work, going so far as to buy her a purse so she would stop carrying her money and cigarettes in a brown paper bag. Before World War II depleted the city of working-age men, even factories weren’t open to women who seemed too masculine.

Most of the gay and lesbian venues the two women visited were in Manhattan, but Kalbas recalled that they “had a lot of gay friends” in the area, and that a restaurant down the block in the Heights was known for having a gay clientele.²¹ But Kalbas and Storm didn’t stay long in Brooklyn. Shortly after Kalbas moved in, the mobilization for World War II began, and the pair left New York for California, where they would find jobs on a ship working for the war effort.

Around the same time, a trio of women came to Brooklyn to make an unusual purchase. Their leader was Dorothy Bennett, a solidly built woman in her late twenties with short dark wavy hair and a penchant for button-down shirts. Bennett was an assistant astronomy curator at the American Museum of Natural History, who would go on to live a long and storied life (mostly outside of New York). She not only created and edited the Little Golden Books series for children, but she also wrote multiple books of her own, mentored the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roy Glauber, and eventually moved to Berkeley, California, where she worked as a museum anthropologist and lived for four decades with her “close companion,” Rosamund Gardner.²²

On a sunny summer day in 1936, Dottie (as Bennett was called) brought her roommates Ruhe and Gibby out to the Gowanus Canal to buy a sixty-foot barge that they christened The Barnacle. In the fifty years since the funeral of the Great Ricardo, the Gowanus had only gotten muddier, murkier, and more polluted. Today in New York State, water is defined as unswimmable if it has more than 24 bacteria per cubic centimeter; according to Brooklyn historian Joseph Alexiou, in 1908 parts of the Gowanus were found to have 625,000 bacteria per cubic centimeter.²³ Over the 1930s, a variety of factors would diminish the canal’s importance as a working waterway. First, the Depression hit the industries clustered around the canal hard, closing many of its factories. Second, what shipping remained was being done out of larger and larger boats, which couldn’t pass through the narrow, shallow canal. Third, the spread of electric light and heating had greatly reduced the call for manufactured gas and coal, two of the biggest industries in the area. Finally, as mentioned before, early efforts to convert New York City into a car-friendly metropolis had cut the canal off from the rest of Brooklyn. While World War II would provide the city with a needed economic reprieve, looking backward, the decline of the canal was like a canary in a coal mine, signaling bad things for all of Brooklyn’s working waterfront. By the time Bennett and her friends arrived in 1936, the Gowanus was well on its way to becoming an abandoned Brooklyn backwater, which was most likely why The Barnacle was for sale in the first place.

According to writer Amy Sohn, the three women “spent the remainder of the summer restoring [The Barnacle] with the help of the junkies, drunks, and captains they met on the canal of the canal, as well as their bohemian friends from Greenwich Village”—yet another connection between the Village and bohemian Brooklyn.²⁴ Despite the smell of the canal, the women considered this an ideal summer, tucked away from the concerns of the larger world on their own private adventure. The trio didn’t stay long in Brooklyn, though, as the water was too fetid to provide the kind of private idyll they had imagined. After a year of repairs and a few months living on board, they had The Barnacle towed to Long Island, where they would host parties and have weekend getaways up into the 1940s.

The histories of early female gayborhood residents such as Bennett and Kalbas are often forgotten, but one group is even less visible in the early stories of gayborhoods: those who never identified publicly as queer at all. Not far from where The Barnacle was moored, an unlikely source was making his own evocative entries into Brooklyn’s queer waterfront history. Edward Casey came to Brooklyn to attend Pratt Institute after World War I and never left the borough again. He was originally from upstate New York, but little is known about Casey’s life, except that he was a married high school art teacher and devoted Catholic. Yet throughout the 1930s, he created beautiful, detailed canvases that featured large groups of naked men horsing around on Brooklyn’s shoreline, such as his watercolor painting Stevedores Bathing Under the Brooklyn Bridge, which depicts dozens of black and white men toweling off in the bridge’s shadow. Today, the painting is housed at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Casey is buried. The intense homoeroticism of his private paintings seems at odds with the quiet, married, heterosexual life that is evident from the few contemporaneous news clippings that mention his name. While his sexual identity is unknown, his paintings are either evidence of easily observable homoerotic practices among Brooklyn men, or evocations of private fantasies. Either way, they gorgeously demonstrate appreciation for masculine beauty.

Moore, Kalbas, Bennett, and Casey might have found tame excitement in Brooklyn, but for many other visitors in the 1930s, Brooklyn was a party destination. In particular, post–World War I the area near the Brooklyn Navy Yard became synonymous with nightlife. Slumming Manhattanites could find titillation and a sense of the exotic there, much as in Harlem. Sailors had a reputation for loose morals, rough excitements, and international experience. When New Yorkers wanted to find sailors, they headed across the East River to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, right where Antonio Bellavicini had been busted for serving gay men in his saloon twenty years earlier.

By now, however, the police weren’t the only ones keeping watch on gay bars. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, a national magazine called Broadway Brevities advertised itself as “America’s First National Tabloid Weekly.” It specialized in sex scandals and thinly veiled gossip, with tawdry headlines and bawdy comics screaming off every page. “Sex Torture Bared—Whips, Thumbscrews, Handcuffs Found by Dicks in Raid on Immoral Establishment” read a typical cover story from 1932. While it was far from a legitimate news source, in one respect Broadway Brevities had every other publication in America beat: when it came to reporting on queer life, no one else wrote as prolifically or as accurately. Although its articles were disapproving and salacious, the writers of Broadway Brevities clearly had intimate knowledge of New York City’s queer scene. In Gay New York, George Chauncey wrote that Brevities had a “remarkable familiarity with gay slang,” and that it was “the one paper that delighted in identifying the haunts of even the most discreet gay men”—including the haunts of gay men in Brooklyn.²⁵

In November 1931, Broadway Brevities’ back-cover story was explicitly about gay Brooklyn. Under the headline “Third Sex Plague Spreads Anew! Sissies Permeate Sublime Social Strata as Film Stars and Broadwayites Go Gay,” a subhead read, “Brooklyn Navy Yard Center of Flagrant Camping for Gobs and Society Slummers.”²⁶ Gob was slang for “enlisted sailor,” and the article was a tell-all exposé on queer celebrities and the bars they cruised. This was the era of the “pansy craze,” when it was fashionable to have dishy, effeminate gay men in Hollywood films, and when hip straight people began visiting drag reviews and gay cafés in larger numbers. Both of these trends are evident in the 1932 film Call Her Savage, in which Clara Bow’s character was romanced by a man who took her to a café in Greenwich Village where “only wild poets and anarchists eat.” There, they watched a musical number performed by a pair of campy queer waiters. According to Broadway Brevities, the bars of the Navy Yard were another common stop for the era’s pansy-crazed socialites.

In particular, the article described the scene at Frank’s Place, a gay bar “just back of the Navy Yard,” which had been repeatedly raided and reopened. The author wrote:

The average citizen would scarcely believe his eyes had he been transported there as recently as the late spring, when the “fleet was last in.” Night after night, but especially on Saturdays and Sundays, anywhere from fifty to seventy-five sailors were there, and anywhere from fifty to a hundred men and boys, with painted faces and dyed tresses, singing and dancing. “High Society” dropped in, on “slumming” tours, of course. One recognized Mons. T^______, the Scandinavian whose portrait has graced the society publications, and Adolphe D^______, rich and fashionable, whose brother married the widow of one of the outstanding millionaires of America.

As the piece continues, it becomes clear that the author is very familiar with the bar. He describes the hostesses, a pair of drag queens named Violet and Blossom, as having their own “special following” thanks to their “elaborate drags.” Interestingly, from this point on, male and female impersonators almost exclusively used professional names of the gender they performed under. This was a sea change from the time of the Great Ricardo and Florence Hines and perhaps indicates that the impersonators were less concerned with, or capable of, projecting a traditionally gendered image offstage.

At Frank’s Place, the Brevities author picked up rumors from sailors from California, who talked about the “star who likes them ‘salty and sea-going,’” and the one who owned an antique store to conceal his faggy interest in period décor. Later in the article, the author discusses a variety of gay men and their lives in Brooklyn, from “Frank M—,” who has “an elaborate abode in Brooklyn” and “occasionally cultivates the society of some pretty actresses” to throw off suspicion about his homosexuality, to “another and much younger actor, one who still earns good money,” but also “makes frequent trips to the vicinity of the Navy Yard Y.M.C.A., in Sands Street.”

Overall, the piece makes it clear that a high-end gay scene in Brooklyn was directly connected to a network of gay nightlife around the city and country. According to a gay New York City resident named Thomas Painter (who provided Alfred Kinsey with a wealth of anecdotal information about gay New York during the 1940s and ’50s), “from Brooklyn to Harlem there were a score of bars catering exclusively to homosexuals and their prostitutes.”²⁷

By the mid-1930s, thanks to the decreased size of the military between the two world wars and the end of Prohibition in 1933, the neighborhood around the Navy Yard lost some of its rough edges—but it retained its gay clientele. In 1935, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle devoted an entire article to not-so-subtly suggesting that something about Sands Street was queer. “Sinful Sands Street Really Just a Sissy,” ran the headline. If that wasn’t clear enough, the subhead explained that the “Picturesque Brooklyn Thoroughfare” was “like Greenwich Village,” which had been the epicenter of the pansy craze. The neighborhood was “cosmopolitan,” filled with “brightly-lighted bars” and “strolling sailors.” On the weekends, “crowds of expensively-clad men and women from the five boroughs and from out-of-town roll down Sands Street in luxurious automobiles, and seek the excitement and glamour they’ve heard about, in the bars, the one cabaret, and in the passing characters on the street.”²⁸

That one cabaret was Tony’s Square Bar, which serviced sailors and their admirers throughout the 1930s and well into the ’40s and ’50s. Tony’s was just “a couple of hundred yards” from the Sands Street entrance to the Navy Yard and had a sign on the door that read NO MINORS UNDER 20 ALLOWED (in response to which one journalist wryly noted, “Minors age rapidly in Sands Street”).²⁹ Inside, the bar was painted in a dark-red-and-black-checkerboard pattern, which confused the eye (and hid any unsightly stains from the evening’s entertainment). At one end of the room was a small, triangular-shaped balcony, where a band nightly performed jazz and torch-song favorites. One journalist derisively wrote that tourists had to “cross the ocean and pay guides” to find European cafés that had an atmosphere quite so “shivery.”

By 1939, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s nightlife columnist would go so far as to refer to Sands Street as “The Navy’s Broadway” and called out Tony’s as the bar from which he had “never come away disappointed.” The manager of Tony’s told him that when the navy was in town, the bar’s orchestra started going at noon and went all night.³⁰ That same year, Kinsey’s informant Thomas Painter included Tony’s on a list of “Homosexual Resorts in New York City, as of May 1939.” He listed the clientele as “Navy sailors and homosexuals.” In small script under his description of Tony’s, Painter listed “another bar near by, the same”³¹—possibly Frank’s Place or another queer sailor bar in the area.

Who were the slumming Manhattanites out cruising for gobs at these bars? They were men such as Lincoln Kirstein, who cofounded the New York City Ballet in 1948 and was one of the cultural leaders of postwar New York. On April 18, 1932, a twenty-five-year-old Kirstein wrote in his diary that he and some friends had attempted to go to Frank’s Place, but discovered it had recently been raided. After talking to a sailor at the YMCA, they ended up at another speakeasy nearby, “a dive full of sailors and a few tarts,” which was filled with “crepe paper decorations as the place had only opened.”³² The unnamed sailor from the YMCA (whom Kirstein described as “sweet hot subservient”) accompanied them. As well, Kirstein brought along his friend Sergei Eisenstein, the famous Russian director who had just finished his film ¡Que viva México! and whose queer sexuality was an open secret that the Russian government tried to suppress.

After a little while at the bar, “a very large, very drunk and quite attractive gob shuffled across the room and started being offensive” to Kirstein and his friends. At first, he seemed annoyed that they were slumming, but he was soon persuaded to take a seat and join them in a round. Suddenly, Kirstein wrote, the sailor “got a perfect idea: ‘we’ll all put a dollar on the table and then we’ll all jerk off, until the first guy that comes picks up the pot.’” Despite Kirstein’s attempts to dissuade him, the sailor’s “erection grew under his pants,” until one of the “tarts” intervened to make certain he wasn’t bothering the group, after which Kirstein and friends hightailed it back to Manhattan.

Bars such as Frank’s Place and Tony’s—where gay and straight worlds mixed—appeared and disappeared throughout the next few decades, but two changes that occurred in the mid-1930s set gay bars on a path to being smaller, more dangerous, and more insular: the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the movie code.

In 1933, Prohibition was officially repealed, once again drawing a thin blue line between straight bars and their queer counterparts. Mixed queer-straight venues would slowly begin to disappear, as the law encouraged straight people to avoid (still illegal) gay bars, and to keep queer people out of straight establishments (to prevent them from being raided). In Gay New York, George Chauncey called this “the most significant step in the campaign to exclude the gay world from the public sphere.”³³ Once there were safer options, the appeal of slumming in dangerous queer bars quickly cooled. As legal drinking establishments pushed out those that were controlled by organized crime (which had greatly expanded during Prohibition), the Mafia maintained a stranglehold on gay bars. In large part, this was thanks to the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA), which was created in 1934 to regulate drinking establishments. “While the legislature did not specifically prohibit bars from serving homosexuals,” Chauncey wrote in Gay New York, “the SLA made it clear from the beginning that it interpreted the statute to mandate such a prohibition. The simple presence of lesbians or gay men, prostitutes, gamblers, or other ‘undesirables,’ it contended, made an establishment disorderly.”³⁴ In essence, the SLA was continuing the work of the Committee of Fourteen, but now with the entire power of the government behind it. Pushed into the shadows, gay bars became a staple among mob-owned and mob-protected businesses (which remained true into the 1990s). More than any other single factor, the repeal of Prohibition created the seedy, underground world of gay bars that came to the fore after World War II.

Simultaneously, in June 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code (aka the Hays Code) was suddenly given new teeth. When it was written in 1927, the Hays Code banned films from exploring a long list of subjects, including “any inference of sex perversion,” “any licentious or suggestive nudity,” “miscegenation,” and “sympathy for criminals” (including homosexuals).³⁵ The code was drafted by two prominent Catholics, a Jesuit priest named Daniel Lord and a layman named Martin Quigley, which explained some of the other rules, such as the prohibition of any ridicule of the clergy.

At first, the code was routinely flouted. Little money was put toward oversight, and the people tasked with enforcing the code found it prudish and censorial. However, that changed in 1934, when all films were required to obtain a certificate of approval from the newly created Production Code Administration (PCA) before they could be released. The PCA was headed by Joseph Breen, another prominent Catholic, who demanded dogmatic adherence to the Hays Code before he would approve a film. The pansy craze, which presented America with a vision of queer people as odd and unusual but also harmless and exciting, was over. Even in vaudeville, where queer people had an established presence dating back to the mid-1800s, they were now persona non grata; in 1931, the RKO vaudeville circuit banned performers from using the words fairy or pansy in their acts.³⁶ Largely in response to the gains in public representation queer people had made during the progressive 1920s, they were now being driven out of most American mass culture. In the late 1930s, this antihomosexual panic would begin to spread to government institutions, and post–World War II, American culture would increasingly be filled with images of homosexuals as violent psychopaths and pathetic failures.

Other forms of entertainment also faced increased regulation in New York City at the end of the 1930s. The vestiges of variety’s early, bawdy roots clung to life as burlesque. Although today burlesque is synonymous with stripping, in the 1930s it was a small but still-active live-theater scene where sexualized forms of classic variety acts (dance, comedy, music, etc.) ruled the day. Although burlesque venues primarily catered to heterosexual men, they still created space for queer people. Queer women worked in these venues, as did drag performers of all kinds; lesbianism—or at least the suggestion of it—was a frequent part of the show. But in 1937, newspaper coverage of a string of lurid sex crimes convinced reform-minded Mayor Fiorello La Guardia that burlesque was a blight on the city’s soul. La Guardia placed a former theater producer, Paul Moss, in charge of licensing theatrical venues, with explicit instructions to shut down burlesque. At the start of Moss’s tenure, fourteen theaters in the city produced only burlesque; he shuttered all of them and pursued burlesque acts when they performed in so-called legitimate theaters as well. According to the New York Daily News, “more than 2,000 girls, stagehands, musicians and ticket sellers were put out on the street” by Moss’s campaign.³⁷ The word burlesque was banned from theater marquees, and yet another space where queer and straight worlds overlapped was erased from the city’s landscape.

Thus almost overnight, queer people were removed from straight movies, straight people disappeared from queer bars, and the final remnants of vaudeville’s sexually permissive edges were filed down. As the prosperity of the twenties gave way to the poverty of the thirties, all kinds of experimentation—from literary to sexual—became less enticing, exacerbating the conservative retrenchment that always follows periods of intense social progress. Moreover, the increasing racial diversity of cities around the United States (including New York) fueled white-supremacist fears, which were channeled into (and empowered by) eugenic doctors and organizations. Although the repression of queer sexuality was rarely the primary goal of these institutions, it was certainly on the agenda.

This physical separation was accompanied by a psychological one, as the idea of sexual orientation took hold in popular culture. For most of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, being gender variant was the primary marker of sexual difference, and the actual sexual history of a man or a woman mattered less than how well he or she conformed to an idea of masculinity or femininity. Sexuality, as a concept separate from gender, didn’t exist. But Sigmund Freud’s ideas about psychoanalysis made huge gains on American soil throughout the 1910s and ’20s, introducing the idea of psychosexual motivations—hidden sexual aspects of our personalities that drive many of our other behaviors. Freud visited America in 1909, and psychoanalytic organizations opened immediately in his wake; in 1910, the Psychopathological Association was founded in Washington, DC, and the next year it was joined by the New York Psychoanalytic Society, which was followed in 1914 by the American Psychoanalytic Association in Baltimore. Although it took a few decades for their theories to spread beyond their nascent profession, by the 1930s these theories were becoming the dominant way to understand sexuality and gender in America. Thanks in large part to psychiatry, the world was increasingly divided between homosexuals and heterosexuals, and while gender normativity still mattered, Americans were coming to understand that a deviant sexual nature could lurk within the most manly man or feminine woman. The need to actively define oneself as straight, and police any activities that might imply queerness—from going to a gay bar, to enjoying a movie with gay characters, to having any sexual contact with a person of the same sex—became paramount. As historian of sexuality Jennifer Terry points out, “Although homosexuality was talked about more openly in New York during the 1930s than it had been previously, popular and police attitudes toward it tended to be more vicious and condemnatory than they had been in the 1920s.”³⁸ This trend would continue post–World War II, leading queer and straight people to inhabit increasingly separate worlds.

Yet even as gay and straight life were separating, an unprecedented assemblage of queer people and straight medical professionals were coming together in NYC to launch a vast research project called the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants (CSSV). Over the next thirty years, the project would splinter into many different groups, but along the way it would interview hundreds of queer people, publish an important treatise on queer sexuality, attempt to create a secret gay espionage ring during World War II, and help launch the first ever alternatives-to-detention program for men arrested for having gay sex in public places. But it all started in 1931, when a young lesbian named Jan Gay traveled to Berlin to study with Magnus Hirschfeld, the foremost sex researcher in the world at the time and an early proponent of gay rights.

Born Helen Reitman in 1902, Jan Gay was a journalist, professional nudist, and children’s book author who attended the University of Chicago. At the age of twenty-five, she took the last name Gay, as did her girlfriend, Zhenya Gay. According to her half sister, Gay was an old family name, but the significance of the choice was obvious.³⁹ Ostensibly, Gay went to Germany to study the organized nudism movement, and upon returning to America, she would write a book (On Going Naked) and open a nudist resort (the Out-of-Doors Club in Highland, New York). According to newspaper accounts from the time, Gay was “the leader of nudism in New York,”⁴⁰ who “apparently cuts her own hair” and is “a little dandy.”⁴¹ Photos show a strikingly handsome woman with short dark hair, an athletic frame, and an intense gaze.

However, Gay traveled to Berlin with an ulterior motive: she wanted to understand female homosexuality. She had already begun collecting case histories from lesbians, detailing their lives, their sexual practices, and their families. She visited Hirschfeld to learn how he, as a professional sex researcher, conducted his voluminous interviews. She would use a modified version of his questions to collect information from some three hundred lesbians, mostly in New York, Berlin, and Paris.

Gay hoped to publish her research, and to establish an organization for the study of homosexuality, à la Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research. However, as a young woman with no formal medical or scientific training, she needed to find a partner who could legitimate her work. Around 1933, she contacted a venerable scion of Brooklyn, the now seventy-two-year-old obstetrician Robert Latou Dickinson. Although he and his wife, Sarah Truslow, had continued to work with the Brooklyn auxiliary of the Committee of Fourteen for decades, they had recently left Brooklyn for Manhattan, and for most of the previous ten years Dickinson’s energies had gone toward the National Committee on Maternal Health (NCMH), which he founded in 1923. As part of his work with the NCMH, Dickinson used his five-thousand-plus case files on female patients (primarily from Brooklyn) to write two books on women’s sexual health: A Thousand Marriages (1933) and The Single Woman (1934). A planned third volume, looking at married and single women combined, was never completed.

The white-haired patriarch of a large family, Dickinson was not interested in the sex lives of women for purely educational reasons; he wanted to promote heterosexual marriage, which he believed was endangered by the pressures of modern life. Unlike many physicians of his time, however, Dickinson believed that sexual pleasure for women was crucial to a healthy union. As he wrote in the introduction to The Single Woman, since 1890 he had believed that “sex desire is not sin; that the sex parts are not shame parts (Schamtheile); and that autoerotism is apparently natural and rarely physically harmful.”⁴² He approached lesbianism in much the same vein: while it was not a priori wrong or evil, it represented a threat to (or at best, a distraction from) heterosexual marriage, which was the ideal. In The Single Woman, Dickinson defined homosexuality as “a transient attempt” to ape heterosexual love with someone of the same sex, whether or not sexual contact was involved. However, he made it clear that he respected his queer female patients. He wrote that they tended to have good health, steady employment, and appearance and social class “above the average.” None of the women were involved in pedophilic relationships, he noted, and all of their relationships had emotional, not just sexual, components. Furthermore, he said that none of his queer patients wanted to be men, but that they did tend to have absent fathers and maladjusted mothers and perhaps distrusted heterosexual family formations for that reason.⁴³

To a young lesbian such as Gay, this attitude would have been refreshingly forward thinking, as it didn’t present lesbians as psychotics, men trapped in women’s bodies, or feebleminded idiots, and it paid more attention to their mental and emotional states than to the shapes of their bodies. Today, talking about missing fathers and unstable mothers seems pejorative, but at the time Freudian theories of sexual development were relatively progressive, in that they didn’t present homosexuals as some kind of in-between, inverted, or third sex. Dickinson’s medical training in the late 1800s emphasized those kinds of eugenic beliefs, as is obvious in his case notes, in which he frequently tried to deduce a woman’s sexual history and identity from the shape, size, and plasticity of her vagina. Yet his writings show that he was willing to keep up with advancements in the field (such as psychology), which may have attracted Gay’s attention.

Gay might also have met Dickinson through his coauthor on both of his books, Lura Beam. Beam worked closely with Dickinson for over a decade. It’s likely that some of Dickinson’s progressive ideas about sexuality came from Beam, who was primarily a lesbian and spent most of her life in a relationship with Louise Stevens Bryant, a social reformer who served on maternal-health committees with Dickinson. According to a sexual-history interview that Alfred Kinsey did with Dickinson sometime in the 1930s, Dickinson had a long-standing affair with a secretary who was primarily a lesbian—either Beam or Bryant. According to Kinsey’s notes, Dickinson described the woman as “vigorous, widely experienced in very active homosexuality, [but] she enjoyed men as much.” The relationship “lasted years” and was wildly passionate for both of them. Dickinson said they would have sex “at an instant’s notice on a chair, or all night with three sessions, [giving] her several strong orgasms and he would have one or more.”⁴⁴

According to historian Jennifer Terry, in 1933 Dickinson “tried unsuccessfully to get the Committee on Maternal Health to sponsor a study of ‘sexual inversion’ under the guidance of Jan Gay and a young gay man named Thomas Painter” (the same Painter who would go on to work with Alfred Kinsey).⁴⁵ Two years later, Dickinson and Gay decided to start their own group, which they called the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. Dickinson invited a wide range of experts to join them, including psychologists, physicians, social workers, anthropologists, and officials in the state penal system. The committee included some prominent Brooklynites, such as August Witzel, a psychologist from Brooklyn State Hospital. In an informal way, it also included several queer people who would be instrumental in legitimating the CSSV within queer circles, enabling it to recruit a wide array of research subjects. This was different from many previous studies, which often focused on inmates, psychiatric patients, or isolated individuals who were already receiving treatment for their sexuality or gender variance.

Thomas Painter was one of the committee’s “inside men.” Born in 1905, Painter was the dissipated heir of a well-off New York City family. Like Jan Gay, he was also working on a book, a sprawling, never-published two-volume look at male prostitutes (his prime interest in life). According to his papers at the Kinsey Institute, Painter and Gay met first, and she introduced him to Dickinson. Painter described Dickinson as a “militant liberal” who pushed Painter to pursue his research, “though the work that I had done at the time scarcely warranted it.” Although Painter worked closely with the CSSV for a number of years, in his private notes he described them as “a sorry crew” who were “exploiting the old idealist,” Dickinson. He described Jan Gay as “the dominant type,” who used homosexual men “as stooges, messenger boys and furniture movers.” As one might guess from that description, he and Gay had a prickly relationship, and they didn’t appear to be close (for instance, Painter thought her last name was Goldberg). However, when she wasn’t trying to get him to become a nudist, Painter described Gay as “pleasant, intelligent, and agreeable.”⁴⁶

Aside from Gay, Painter, and Dickinson, the two most important individuals to join the committee—and the ones who accomplished the majority of the work done under its auspices—were two New Yorkers named George Henry and Alfred Gross. George Henry was a psychologist who worked at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital, and who had previously conducted research on incarcerated “psychopathic homosexuals.”⁴⁷ Alfred Gross was a defrocked Episcopalian priest who worked with Henry, and who was interested in this research because of his own homosexuality. Gross conducted most of the interviews done by the committee, although this was kept from the rest of the CSSV and the Payne Whitney Clinic, all of who believed Dr. Henry was the primary investigator. Had the truth been known, it’s unlikely the CSSV would have been able to pursue their work. Decades later, Gross told people that they “used each other,” and that he pushed their work in directions that Henry either did not know about or turned “a blind eye” to.⁴⁸

The active participation of queer people at every stage of this study, from formulation to execution, distinguished it from previous American sexuality research. But it also created tension within the group. Over all, the CSSV was divided into two subtly separate factions: the heterosexual scientists, who were sympathetic to the plight of queer people but primarily saw their work as a first step toward preventing or curing homosexuality; and the queer laypeople, who believed this work would help heterosexuals understand queer people and help queer people receive the care and study they needed.

However, despite the best efforts of Gay, Painter, and Gross, the committee’s work was steeped in homophobic and eugenic assumptions about sexuality. Henry suggested that the CSSV conduct their study out of the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where he worked. In his initial proposal to the clinic, he stated that the CSSV study would begin with one hundred secured subjects, fifty men and fifty women, all obtained “through the agency of Miss Jan Gay.”⁴⁹ The inclusion of men and women, as well as people of all races, further differentiates the CSSV study from previous efforts and highlights that sexuality was beginning to be understood as a characteristic that could be examined on its own, separate from gender or race.

Henry’s proposal framed homosexuality as a threat to heterosexuality and society broadly; in his words:

Since homosexuality is a form of arrested psychosexual development which seriously interferes with reproduction and leads to personality conflicts often ending in mental illness and many other forms of tragedy, its causes, methods of prevention and the ways in which those already distorted may be aided in achieving a socially acceptable adjustment should be studied with the greatest care.

In one convoluted sentence, Henry captured the thoughts of the entire committee: his own interest in psychosexual development; Dickinson’s belief in an embattled heterosexuality; and (at the very end), Gay, Painter, and Gross’s hopes to help other queer people find “socially acceptable adjustment.” Although it doesn’t mention race, as the entire committee was white, the proposal’s framing of homosexuality as endangering reproduction carries overtones of Dr. R. W. Shufeldt’s concerns about preserving the “white race.”

The Payne Whitney Clinic accepted Henry’s proposal, and from 1935 to 1943, the CSSV interviewed an incredible number of queer people in their offices. Just from ’35 to ’37 alone, for example, they saw eighty-four patients who submitted to incredibly thorough interviews, mapping out their family histories (with an eye toward homosexuality, narcissism, and psychiatric problems), their life stories, their sexual experiences (in incredible detail), and their thoughts on the future. They also underwent intensive medical study, which included X-rays, physicals, the taking of semen samples, and internal vaginal examinations so invasive they would definitely be illegal today. They pursued physical data that seem esoteric and strange to a modern reader, such as cataloging the “thickness and angularity of the cranium” in each patient.⁵⁰ The committee collected such a variety of data because one of their initial questions was whether sexuality could more easily be deduced from the body or the mind. Dickinson urged what we might call a “eugenics 2.0” approach, which argued that sexuality might not reside in the body directly, but that a life of homosexuality, or even a homosexual orientation that went unconsummated, left evidence that could be read via physical examinations. He believed gay men would have bodies more like women’s (and vice versa), and that lesbians would have larger, tougher, and more responsive vaginal areas than their heterosexual counterparts. Dr. Henry, on the other hand, came from a post-Freudian mentality, which believed that sexuality was mostly caused by adverse childhood experiences and preexisting pathological leanings and was more likely to be divulged via psychiatric techniques than by physical exams. According to Jennifer Terry, “by the end, both Dickinson and Henry realized that one could not determine whether an individual was a sex variant or not merely by looking at his or her body.”⁵¹ Although the idea that you can tell a person’s sexuality just by looking at them has never gone away, the research of the CSSV would help to push most future legitimate sexuality studies in a firmly Freudian direction.

Around 1940, the CSSV began preparing its research for publication, choosing forty men and forty women for discussion in a two-volume book entitled Sex Variants. The introduction to the book was a hodgepodge of tolerance and homophobia. This research was important because “the sex offender must be studied if progress in the prevention as well as in the treatment of sexual maladjustment is to be achieved.”⁵² Yet at the same time, “it is clearly evident that a homosexual is being punished by society largely because he is a homosexual rather than because of an actual offense he has committed.… [He] becomes the symbol of iniquity to his enemies and he is promptly and automatically purged by his former friends.” Dr. Henry wrote that “no two homosexuals are alike,” which sounds positive until he continued, “Homosexuality is associated with an almost endless variety and complexity of human problems.” Overall, Sex Variants has a tragic air of missed opportunity to it. Thanks to their queer insiders, the experts of the CSSV were given an unvarnished look into the difficulties that queer people faced in America in the 1930s. However, thanks to their preexisting prejudices, the committee members continually interpreted what they saw as evidence that homosexuality itself was pathological and damaging—but also often incurable, and therefore deserving of pity more than punishment.

One of the people examined by the committee was none other than Othilie Spengler, the trans woman who had come to the defense of Elizabeth Trondle. In Sex Variants, the committee spent over ten pages meticulously diagramming her body, her life story, and her family history. The committee appreciated her “interest in promoting a more tolerant attitude toward transvestites” and how she was “ready at any time to present [herself] for study and examination.” Since her time being studied by sexologist Bernard Talmey, Spengler’s life had been difficult; her wife had left her (despite her in-laws wanting them to remain together, even knowing she was transgender), and her children had become much less accepting as they grew older. The committee was cold toward her, calling her a “caricature” and a “hermit,” and saying that she “dwell[ed] in a world of classical fantasy,” while taking pains to highlight the squalid nature of her home. But they also managed to capture her many attempts at advocacy for herself and other trans people: working with prominent sexologists; petitioning the police for the right to wear dresses in public; writing to other trans people around the world; joining a club for lesbians in Berlin; and even taking hormones and agreeing to an experimental procedure in which X-rays were applied to her testicles to render her sterile. They also recorded the thing that would make her most famous: during and immediately after World War I, Spengler compiled a four-hundred volume history of the war, told entirely through newspaper clippings. Originally housed at the New-York Historical Society, it now resides in the Library of Congress.

By the time Sex Variants came out, Thomas Painter had quit his involvement with the CSSV, as had Jan Gay (who may have been forced out after recruiting subjects). Although the introduction to Sex Variants recognized that “the general plan of approach embodied in this project was first laid before the members of the Committee by Miss Jan Gay,” she was given no authorship credit, and her years of independent research were viewed as preliminary to the real study. The book listed none of the queer members of the CSSV as part of the official committee. Although Thomas Painter respected Dr. Dickinson, Painter’s notes for Alfred Kinsey savaged Gross and Henry and their work:

[Gross] was Dr. George Henry’s stooge and man-of-all-work.… Henry has a hold on him somehow, and uses it, like a ring in his nose. Gross has a lot on Henry, too, I feel, and I picture them as a couple of evil beings—a magician and gnome—snidely running a half legitimate racket on the public ignorance of homosexuality. Gross admits Henry is a cold-blooded, mercenary phoney [sic]—but his position with Henry is one where he can play big shot and petty tyrant to a lot of frightened, helpless, dependent homosexuals and ex-convicts—and does, and enjoys it immensely.⁵³

Painter had to fight the pair to reclaim his manuscript on male prostitutes, and to prevent it from being absorbed into the CSSV’s official reports. In his notes at the Kinsey Institute, Painter wrote that he “had to raise hell to get it back.” Afterward, Painter gave the manuscript to Kinsey, who preserved the entire book in his files.⁵⁴

Sadly, Jan Gay’s own manuscript was completely incorporated into Sex Variants, and no extant copy has ever been found, leaving it impossible to say how much of the work of this first incarnation of the CSSV was hers. Undoubtedly, the committee would not have existed without her. Over the 1930s, she developed a severe drinking problem and, according to a few sources, moved to Mexico to dry out. There, she became an expert on US–Latin American foreign relations, and she continued to be a lifelong proponent of nudism, but her experience with the CSSV seemed to have destroyed her interest in studying sexuality. In the mid-1940s, she contacted Alfred Kinsey, who proclaimed to have been inspired by the CSSV to conduct his own sexuality work. Unasked, he wrote that she could “very definitely help on this research.”⁵⁵ A few years later, as Gay was preparing an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship to analyze the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, she contacted Kinsey again to ask for a reference. His terse response seems to have been their final communication:

I am not the person to recommend you.… I met you once for a short time and know nothing more about you than general hearsay. I know nothing of your specific scientific training and have had no opportunity to observe you in scientific work.⁵⁶

Over and over, Jan Gay’s pioneering research was seen as good enough to further the careers of men with advanced degrees, but never good enough to stand on its own. Today, she is perhaps the most important, most forgotten footnote in the history of American sexuality studies.

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In 1930—the year before Jan Gay made her pilgrimage to meet Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany—a very different kind of educational experiment launched in downtown Brooklyn: Brooklyn College. This was not the first institute of higher education in the borough. It was created from the merger of two earlier schools, both of which were satellites of Manhattan campuses. But from its beginning, Brooklyn College was a new educational experiment. It was the first public, coeducational liberal arts college in all of New York City, and as a municipally funded institution, it was basically free for all city high school graduates. It was often compared—favorably—to the top colleges in America. An adage at the time went, “While not every student at Brooklyn College would have been accepted into Harvard, at least half of the students in Harvard would not have qualified for Brooklyn.”⁵⁷ As one alumna from the class of 1934 remembered, “We were the children of peddlers, tailors, first-chance Americans, and everybody pointed to the city colleges and said, ‘This is your opportunity, take it.’”⁵⁸

Most schools in America did not share this egalitarian approach to their student bodies. Just two years before Brooklyn College opened, the dean of Yale’s medical school wrote in a letter that the admissions office should “never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.”⁵⁹ In this, Yale was no racist, anti-Semitic outlier; the leaders of many major universities sat on the boards of eugenics organizations (with such ghastly names as the American Breeder’s Association), which encouraged white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and biological determinism.

Brooklyn College was the mongrel upstart in this purebred field. It opened with approximately ten thousand students, about equally divided between men and women. Even though Brooklyn’s black population was still small, the school was integrated, and it was noted for its large number of Jewish students. (New York City as a whole was then about one-third people of Jewish descent, including many new refugees from Germany, Eastern Europe, and the USSR.) The school prided itself on community involvement, educational achievement, and a progressive vision for society. Thus, it’s no surprise that it attracted many queer people to both its faculty and student body from day one. However, as the decade wore on, its radical roots would make it an easy target for conservative anticommunist activists, whose purges would provide an early blueprint for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s.

Opening a new school immediately after the start of the Depression could not have been easy. For the first seven years of its existence, the college’s “campus” consisted of a scattering of repurposed sites in downtown Brooklyn, including three floors of a squat brick commercial building on Joralemon Street, and an evening annex inside a boys’ high school. The original school song, “These Are Not Towers of Marble,” celebrated the school’s humble origins and was written by Robert Friend, a gay Jewish poet who was among the first students to grace its grubby halls.⁶⁰ A stooped, owlish young man, Friend was a closeted radical during his days at Brooklyn and would only come into his own—erotically and literarily—after leaving the city, first for a stint teaching English in Puerto Rico and Panama, and then eventually to Israel (where he fled to escape the Red Scare). But even in his first book of poetry, 1941’s Shadow on the Sun, Friend’s sexuality could be deduced from such poems as “Meaning,” which read in part:

This love is solitary that will die this death;

it weeps on your breast, gathers loneliness

of all men who at the self-same hour

lying behind dark shades in a rotting house

shut out the light of history, shut out that love⁶¹

All around the college’s campus were signs of the worsening Depression: unemployed men wearing their suits to go sit in the park outside Brooklyn’s City Hall so their families wouldn’t know they had lost their jobs; shoeless children begging for change outside the entrance to every subway; entire families waiting in line at the Salvation Army for a handout. Encampments of homeless people, all named for President Hoover, sprung up around the country. In Brooklyn Heights, a “Hoover City” was located between Henry and Clinton Streets, where the homes were just “makeshift shacks built of packing boxes, scrap iron and barrel staves,” some of them with small vegetable plots tilled into the city’s polluted soil.⁶²

Still, it was by all accounts an exciting time to be in downtown Brooklyn. The borough’s population had exploded in the 1920s, so that distant neighborhoods such as Flatbush and Park Slope had become the new suburbs to downtown Brooklyn’s urban center. Busy Brooklyn families could now take an elevated train to their homegrown department store, Abraham & Straus (which had just completed an $8 million expansion of their flagship space on Fulton Street), and buy everything from lingerie to gardening shears. As the Depression was forcing stores across America to fold, A&S instituted an across-the-board 10 percent salary reduction and was thereby able to stay open and avoid laying off a single employee. For the new American transplant craving a taste of home, downtown Brooklyn’s specialty grocers offered everything from gefilte fish to platanos. But the neighborhood’s shining jewels were its glorious new movie palaces, which offered a whole evening of fantasy for just a single quarter. By 1930, downtown Brooklyn was home to five of these newfangled temples of amusement, all clustered within spitting distance of Brooklyn College. After slipping out of class in some anonymous office building full of peeling plaster and rusting pipes, a student could easily find her way to the Paramount Theater, sashay through the ornate three-story, vaulted, art deco lobby, and join four thousand other avid moviegoers in its gilded baroque auditorium.

Photo of Brooklyn College student and Beat poet Harold Norse (c. 1931). (Photo courtesy of the collection of Todd Swindell.)

For some students, the college’s downtown location also held other, more esoteric delights. The swarthy, diminutive Beatnik poet Harold Norse was born in Brooklyn in 1916 and raised in one of the large Jewish ghettos that had sprung up down by Coney Island. One of his earliest sexual memories was staring down from his narrow tenement window at the naked Italian boys horsing around in the showers of the nearby municipal bathhouse, “bodies glistening in the sun … flicking wet towels on bare butts.”⁶³ But not until he enrolled at Brooklyn College in the midthirties would he finally be “cured” of his virginity (as he put it).

The son of an impoverished Lithuanian single mother, Norse wrote in his autobiography, “Today an unwed mother and her bastard raise no brows. But when I was born we were untouchables.”⁶⁴ Norse was the very definition of the gifted child of the striving class that Brooklyn College wanted to attract. However, while Norse went to the college to get an education, it wasn’t the kind you received in a classroom. As he recalled many years later:

If our “campus” consisted of city streets, only a few blocks away lay an area venerable for its literary tradition: Brooklyn Heights.… There in 1855 Walt Whitman hand-set the first edition of Leaves of Grass on Cranberry Street; in the 1920s on Columbia Heights Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel, and a few doors away Hart Crane conceived and wrote sections of The Bridge.… If spirit of place means anything, a case can be made for a literary line of succession that links Whitman, Wolfe, and Crane in a family of rhapsodic, visionary writers established there. I had found my literary place. There was another link, the manly love of comrades (even about the lofty head of Wolfe hovered hushed rumors)—the “adhesiveness” of brotherly love, as Whitman called it. My initiation into this brotherhood began there.⁶⁵

Specifically, his initiation began at the hands of one of his teachers, a young Communist activist and English-literature professor, David McKelvy White.

The son of the governor of Ohio, White had a patrician upbringing, which included an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s from Columbia. Tall, skinny, balding, and bespectacled, White looked like your standard-issue 1930s nerd, but beneath his placid exterior beat a militant heart. In 1926, in between schooling, he taught briefly at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The head of the English department there described him as a “homo-sexualist” who lived openly with his “male wife.”⁶⁶ According to historian Matt Young, White was out to his family from an early age, which is perhaps why several contemporaries described him as “a great disappointment to his father.”⁶⁷ To Norse, White was an “aesthete,” as well as an “idealist,” “an unfailing gentleman,” and “a fervent Communist.”⁶⁸ The ranks of the Communist Party were swelling at this time in America. Not only was the USSR seen as one of the strongest voices pushing back against Hitler, but the American Communist Party took a strong progressive line on issues of race, class, and religion. The party also strongly supported domestic government intervention to provide relief from the Great Depression. That, as well as its anti-anti-Semite politics, made the party incredibly popular in Brooklyn, and particularly at Brooklyn College.

White was among the first instructors in Brooklyn College’s English department, and he was the faculty adviser to the men’s student lit magazine, which is how he met Norse. At first, he hired Norse to organize his extensive record collection and tried to “drop a hairpin” (as the saying went) about his sexuality by playing contemporary camp classics when Norse came over: “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden,” by Beatrice Lillie; “Mad About the Boy,” by Noël Coward; and “Falling in Love Again,” by Marlene Dietrich. Seventeen and scared, Norse was oblivious, so White tried harder and invited him to go swimming at the St. George Hotel—perhaps the most elegant cruising ground in all of Brooklyn’s history. The vast, Olympic-size saltwater pool was surrounded by deep emerald green tiles, a completely mirrored ceiling, large art deco mosaics on the walls, and—at one end—a two-story waterfall. In the thirties, men’s bathing suits tended toward tight, high-waisted shorts, sometimes with a stretchy top, and the muscular, pouty-lipped Norse must have gotten a lot of attention in his. “You have a fine figure,” White told him one night. “Why do you hide it?” Norse was beginning to have an inkling into the truth of White’s interest in him, but he believed that a “respectable” man such as White “didn’t have such thoughts.” It would take White a full year of dinners at the St. George before he and Norse finally consummated their relationship.

The St. George Hotel, a popular Brooklyn cruising ground, in 1943. (Photo courtesy of the Irving I. Underhill photograph collection—Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection.)

However, this was sometime around 1936, and the global conflagration that was leading to World War II soon separated Norse and White. White was increasingly active in the local chapter of the Communist Party, which also included many other faculty members. According to Bernard Grebanier, another English-literature professor at Brooklyn (and according to Harold Norse, a closeted homosexual), White was recruited to join the party by Marxist philosopher Howard Selsam. As Grebanier described it years later in an interview:

Even sex was used as a way to draw people in. One man, who was the son of a governor in the middle west, was very very plainly a homosexual, living with another man at the college, and he developed a crush on Selsam. Now Selsam was perfectly straight, but seeing this he encouraged the man’s feelings.… And as soon as he became a member, Selsam stepped on him like a steamroller.⁶⁹

Grebanier was himself a member of the party, although he would later claim to have joined reluctantly and only because the party was working to improve life at the college, and he felt it would have been unfair to benefit without taking part. According to Grebanier, White’s new boyfriend, Murray Young, quickly joined the party as well. Young was also an instructor in the English department at Brooklyn College, and the two lived together on Columbia Heights, just a block from Hamilton Easter Field’s old home where Hart Crane used to write.

(The Communist Party in the thirties also attracted queer women in Brooklyn, such as labor activists Eva Kollisch and Gerry Faier. However, the party was militant in its promotion of women’s heterosexuality, as Kollisch documented in her book, Girl in Movement. Young women were encouraged to wed, so that if and when their husbands went off to fight fascism, they could receive government subsidies that could be donated back to the party. Kollisch described feeling “blackmailed” into marriage, as if the movement and matrimony were one and the same for women.⁷⁰ Both Faier and Kollisch would only realize their queer desires after leaving the party, post–World War II.)

Despite the party’s rather coercive approach to sexuality, White was firmly committed to the cause. In 1937, he walked off his job at Brooklyn College midsemester to become a machine gunner with the Loyalists fighting against the fascist rebellion of General Francisco Franco in Spain; two years later he was back in Brooklyn, now a national spokesperson for the fight against fascism and the promise of Communism. But as Americans became increasingly worried about Hitler, and dependent on government support to survive the Depression, White’s criticisms of the United States and their allies—“the so-called democratic governments of Great Britain and France and even of the United States [which] are branded with the blood of the Spanish people”—resonated less and less with America’s political mood.⁷¹ Unsurprisingly, Brooklyn College refused to hire him back. Then, in 1939, as White was helping to release a report that praised Stalin and condemned the United States, Russia signed a surprise nonaggression pact with Hitler. What good feeling the American Communist Party had garnered over the rest of the decade for their progressive politics was destroyed overnight. Only the most fervent—such as White—stayed involved.

Regardless of their parting ways, White cited his experiences at Brooklyn College as the reason he fought in Spain. “Eight years ago I wouldn’t have thought of going over,” he told a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Teaching in a municipal college strengthened my interest in democracy.”⁷² Unfortunately, the school system’s own interest in democracy was swiftly waning, particularly when it came to Communists (and homosexuals). In early 1940, New York State launched the Rapp-Coudert Committee to investigate the extent of Communist influence in New York public education. According to historian Marjorie Heins, the committee “honed [the] techniques that came to define Red hunting in the late 1940s and early ’50s: equating communist beliefs with subversion, conducting inquisitions behind closed doors, and using secret information of sometimes dubious credibility to expose and stigmatize the people they named.” The lead investigator of the committee, Robert J. Morris, would go on to head the incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, which destroyed the lives of many suspected Communists (and some homosexuals) in the fifties.⁷³

The same year that the Rapp-Coudert Committee was inaugurated, a Brooklyn woman named Jean Kay sued the Board of Higher Education in New York for hiring philosopher Bertrand Russell to teach at City College. Her case alleged that his views on free love and nonmonogamy, as well as that he “approved of homosexuality,” would harm her daughter, who was a student in a public city school (although not the one Russell was to teach at). Kay won the case, and the judge declared Russell “morally unfit” to teach.⁷⁴ The message was clear: neither Communists nor queers were welcome in New York City’s educational system anymore. Queer people were now persona non grata in the classroom, much as they were in bars (thanks to the end of Prohibition) and movies (thanks to the Hays Code).

The gay Communist professors at Brooklyn College soon came under the fearsome eye of the Rapp-Coudert Committee. Bernard Grebanier quickly agreed to turn over evidence. At first in a secret hearing, and then publicly, he named more than twenty other professors as current or previous members of the party—including David McKelvy White and Murray Young, both of who refused to testify or name names. Young struck back publicly, denying his membership in the party and saying that Grebanier’s cowardly testimony was “typical of a man who, having been educated in the New York public school system, allows himself to be used to destroy it.”⁷⁵ However, despite his testimony, Young was dismissed from his position, while Grebanier stayed on and had a long, lauded, and closeted career in higher education. In 1982, the city officially apologized and made restitution to Young’s estate (and to nearly a dozen other professors). But by then, the damage was long done. The Communist Party faction at Brooklyn College was broken by the Rapp-Coudert Committee and would be a negligible presence in local and national politics thereafter. The English department’s small knot of gay professors was simply collateral damage. Murray Young continued to teach in other schools as an adjunct and lecturer for the rest of his life. White soldiered on as a militant antifascist and Communist organizer, even though the party declared “degeneracy” (aka homosexuality) incompatible with being a Communist Party member in 1938.⁷⁶ By the end of World War II, the party was prepared to oust White over his sexuality, and he committed suicide in 1945, a fact that his family long tried to cover up.⁷⁷

However, while politics consumed the gay professors at Brooklyn, as the thirties came to a close Harold Norse was pursuing that perennial college-student obsession: sex. After he and White parted ways, Norse met another gay Jewish poet at the Brooklyn College literary magazine, the young Chester Kallman. The two were near opposites: Kallman was tall, while Norse was short; fair, while Norse was dark; and well-off, while Norse was poor. Yet they were instantly drawn to each other. According to Norse, Kallman had “androgynous appeal: willowy grace combined with a deep, manly voice.” He was thin, but unathletic, and Norse wrote that Kallman “disliked all physical exercise except cruising, which developed his calf muscles.”⁷⁸

For a year, the pair pretended to each other to be straight, before drunkenly hooking up on New Year’s Day 1939. Kallman might have been closeted, but he was no stranger to sex with men. According to Norse, Kallman had “from the age of twelve molested adults in subway toilets” and had “at least a thousand and three conquests on his belt, which loosened so easily.”⁷⁹ The two commenced upon a tumultuous relationship, where Kallman held all the power. Kallman introduced Norse to a cavalcade of Brooklyn’s gay sex spots, such as the apartment of two middle-aged men with an open-door policy for the young and the beautiful. In return for sexually satisfying the hosts, the young men were fed, entertained, and given free rein to have sex with one another in a safe and semiprivate space—an arrangement that was similar to the way most gay brothels functioned at the time, only without the exchange of money. “In those late-Depression, prewar years … the number of young men we had was mind-boggling,” Norse recalled.⁸⁰ Like many gay men of his generation, Norse remembered this period as allowing significantly more sexual freedom and experimentation among otherwise straight men. The Depression had put many young men on the road, tramping from one city to the next looking for work. The ramp-up to World War II drew thousands upon thousands of these men to Brooklyn, where they found jobs in war-related factories or were drafted into the Navy Yard. It was like World War I on steroids, as the streets of Brooklyn were flush with lonely men and boys, set free from any restrictions they might have previously known in small communities or while living near their families.

Norse and Kallman drifted apart largely because of those other young men (and, according to Norse, because of Kallman’s casual cruelty). But they were still technically lovers on the momentous April day in 1939 when the pair went to see Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden give a reading in Manhattan—the first reading the two British authors ever gave together in the United States. Kallman and Norse were certain that the wry, celebrated British pair were homosexuals, so they hatched a plan: they dressed up, sat in the front row, and winked at the two authors throughout the talk. Isherwood noticed them; Auden didn’t. Isherwood gave Norse a card and told the two to come by the house where the pair were staying, but Kallman “borrowed” it from Norse and went on his own. Although at first Auden was disinterested, when he discovered that Kallman was well endowed (reportedly clutching his hands together in prayer and announcing, “Thank God it’s big!”),⁸¹ the two became lovers. Almost overnight, Norse was iced out; he and Kallman remained friendly, but Kallman’s relationship with Auden rapidly became the primary love of his life.

At the time, Auden was renting a room in a tony section of Brooklyn Heights. But his relationship with Kallman created a problem. His landlady was already suspicious of Auden, and the last thing Auden wanted was Kallman coming around and causing a scene. The encroaching war had driven Auden from England, and he was looking for a place to call home, one where he could live (and write) freely and without stress. Thankfully, a good friend of his, the writer and magazine editor George Davis, had a solution. In a dream, he’d envisioned a house in Brooklyn where he and his friends could live together in a creative communal home. In 1940, Davis would make that dream come true at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, which would become an epicenter for global culture throughout World War II. As the Swiss author Denis de Rougemont put it, “All that was new in America in music, painting or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art I found in any large city of the country.”⁸²

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Throughout the thirties, queer life in America had grown ever more visible, continuing a trend started by the pansy craze of the late 1920s. But the lightheartedness of America’s early flirtations with queer people did not hold. “Awareness” quickly transitioned into “surveillance,” and queer people went from “novelty” to “threat.” Soon the press of fascism would unexpectedly and temporarily halt America’s growing homophobia. As a result, the 1940s are a sharply divided decade in queer history: five years of comparative sexual freedom during the war, followed by an almost immediate crackdown. This homophobic postwar panic would be compounded in Brooklyn by a turn away from urbanism, which would tear apart the services, neighborhoods, and pro-diversity mentality of the city, all of which nurtured its queer residents. The wide gay world of the 1920s and ’30s would be exposed as a fragile bubble, and when it popped, even the evidence of its ever having existed would be destroyed.