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GEORGE CHAUNCEY'S GAY NEW YORK: A VIEW FROM 25 YEARS LATER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2018

Brian Stack  and
Peter Boag
Brian Stack*
Affiliation:
Washington State University
Peter Boag*
Affiliation:
Washington State University
*
email: brian.stack@wsu.edu
email: boag@wsu.edu
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Extract

When George Chauncey's Gay New York appeared a quarter century ago, it did so with deserved fanfare. Reviewers celebrated it as “brilliant,” “magisterial,” “exceptional,” “monumental,” “light-years ahead,” “masterful,” “seminal,” “groundbreaking,” “absolutely marvelous,” a “new beginning,” and a “landmark study.” While reviews of Gay New York appeared in the usual American history journals, many of these were uncommonly long, indicating the book's immediate importance. This importance was also felt beyond the discipline of history with reviews appearing in sociological, anthropological, environmental, American Studies, and even speech journals. The Association of American Geographers held a roundtable on Gay New York in 1995 in which a participant dubbed it, “one of the more important texts written by a nongeographer to be included in a canon of new social geography.” Beyond the academy, the popular press also expressed considerable interest in the book, with the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Gay Community News each taking up the matter of Gay New York in its pages. And beyond the bounds of the United States, scholarly publications in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom also commissioned reviews of Gay New York. A year after its American debut with Basic Books, the parent firm of HarperCollins released it in the United Kingdom, and then eight years later the noted historian Didier Eribon translated it into French for the Parisian publisher Fayard. Within its first few years of publication, Gay New York also collected a number of notable prizes, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's studies, and the Merle Curti Award from the OAH.

Type
Classic Book Reflection
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 120 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Robert D. Johnston and Marc Stein, whose insights and suggestions helped to improve this essay.

References

NOTES

1 See reviews by Bullough, Vern L., American Journal of Sociology 100:6 (May 1995): 1637CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gutiérrez, Ramón, “Mapping the Erotic Body: Gay New York,” American Quarterly 48:3 (Sept. 1996): 506CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plummer, Ken, Contemporary Sociology 24:3 (May 1995): 355CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elder, Glen, “Reading the Spaces in George Chauncey's Gay New York,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:6 (1996): 758CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knopp, Lawrence, “Space(s) lost in George Chauncey's Gay New York,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:6 (1996): 759Google Scholar; Brown, Michael, “Closet Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:6 (1996): 762Google Scholar; Faderman, Lillian, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 (Oct. 1995): 340Google Scholar; Trumbach, Randolph, “The Third Gender in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of Social History 30:2 (Winter 1996): 500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miron, Janet, “The Queering of History: A Review Essay,” Maryland Historian 27:1 (1996): 28Google Scholar; and Koppes, Clayton R., “A Golden Age in Gay Gotham,” Reviews in American History 24:2 (Jun. 1996): 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 For Chauncey's discussion of such issues, see Gay New York, 27.

11 Loftin, Craig M., “Los Angeles and the Closing of the Gay Historical Frontier,” review of Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians by Faderman, Lillian and Timmons, Stuart, Reviews in American History 37:1 (Mar. 2009): 101–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 108 cited); Stein, Marc, “Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 11:4 (2005): 605–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 Armstrong, Elizabeth and Crage, Suzanna, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71:5 (Oct. 2006): 724–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 American Experience, episode 10, season 23, “Stonewall Uprising,” directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, aired Apr. 25, 2011, on Public Broadcasting Service; Stonewall, directed by Roland Emmerich (Los Angeles: Roadside Attractions, 2015).

16 See, for example, Timothy Stewart-Winters, “Stonewall and the Politics of Memory,” Process: A blog for american history, http://www.processhistory.org/stonewall/ (accessed Feb. 13, 2018).

17 Garber, Eric, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Duberman, Martin, Vicinus, Martha, and Chauncey, George (New York: New American Library, 1989), 318–31Google Scholar; Duggan, Lisa, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Mumford, Kevin J., Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Shah, Stranger Intimacy; Somerville, Siobhan B., Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Thorpe, Rochella, “‘A House Where Queers Go’: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975” in Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, ed. Lewin, Ellen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 40–61Google Scholar.

18 Chauncey, Gay New York, 207.

19 Chauncey, Gay New York, 276.

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22 On the influence of the medical model and top-down approaches, see Duggan, Sapphic Slashers; Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers; and Newton, Esther, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984): 557–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Chauncey, Gay New York, 27.

24 On the experiences of immigrants and ethnic group formation, see Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1951)Google Scholar; Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Sánchez, George, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Matsumoto, Valerie J., Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

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27 Capó Jr., Welcome to Fairyland; Harris, Andrea, Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Summers, Martin, Manliness and its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Boag, Same-Sex Affairs.

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32 On the debate over the connection between Progressivism and the New Deal, see, for example, Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955)Google Scholar; Brinkley, Alan, “Richard Hofstadter's the Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13:3 (Sept. 1985): 462–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 475–77; and Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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34 Chauncey, Gay New York, 9.

35 Gutiérrez, “Mapping the Erotic Body,” 505.

36 Chauncey, Gay New York, 9 (quoted), 12 (quoted), 23, and 360–61.

37 We reached out to Professor Chauncey for clarification about his book in progress, but he did not respond. See https://history.columbia.edu/faculty/chauncey-george/ (accessed Mar. 24, 2018).