>> Roswell Encina:
In your book, "Why Marriage?"
you write the history of
anti-discrimination is typically
misremembered in at least two
important ways.
First, the history is almost
forgotten.
Why do you say that?
>> George Chauncey:
Well, the history of LGBTQ
people has been forgotten, in
part because it's almost never
taught.
I teach a big lecture class at
Columbia every fall on U.S.
lesbian and gay history. And at
the beginning of the course this
semester in September, I asked
my students how many of them had
gone to a high school where
this was a significant part of
the curriculum? There were
about 240 people in the room and
five raised their hands.
It's just not taught, so people
have no way of remembering it.
But I think it's actually more
accurate to say that the history
has been erased.
Inquiry into this history was
systematically suppressed.
I know that when I began my
graduate studies and wanted to
write a dissertation on LGBTQ
history, I was cautioned against
doing it because the Academy
was so unsympathetic to this, so
unsupportive. And so for many
years, historians of
homosexuality were stigmatized
almost as much as homosexuals
themselves. And it really, I
think of this as just one aspect
of the general effort to
suppress the visibility of LGBTQ
life and people.
>> Roswell Encina:
Before we take a deep dive into
other anti-gay laws and
policing, you wrote in "Gay New
York" that the, "Gay world
that flourished before World
War II has been almost entirely
forgotten in popular memory.
And you wrote that by the
1890s, gay men had made the
Bowery a center of gay life.
And by the 1920s they had
created three distinct gay
neighborhood enclaves in
Greenwich Village, Harlem and
Times Square, each with a
different class and ethnic
character gay cultural style
and public reputation.
What does this symbolize
what people don't know about
gay life in the early 20th
century or the turn of the 20th
century?
>> George Chauncey:
Well, one of the most surprising
things I found in my own
research, surprising for me and
for everyone else, was just how
extensive and vibrant queer
world there was in the early
20th century.
It typically was located in
immigrant working class 
neighborhoods
and in the early
20th century
by immigrant, I mean mostly
Catholic immigrants from Europe,
Jewish neighborhoods were
rather different.
And in Black neighborhoods
where there were saloons and
dance halls, where people
called fairies in those days
interacted quite openly with
so-called normal men.
They danced together.
They initiated social
relations, sexual relations
together. And by the 1920s, gay
life had become incredibly
visible in cities like New
York, Chicago, some of the other
big cities where it moved from
these working class
neighborhoods and Black
neighborhoods into Bohemian
neighborhoods and then into the
center of entertainment
districts. So that in New York,
for instance, two of the three
most popular clubs in Times
Square in the early 30s had
openly gay masters of ceremony
whose entire persona revolved
around their campy repartee
with their customers.
There were huge drag balls that
hundreds and hundreds of drag
queens and their partners and
lesbian butches and their
partners went to but also
literally thousands of straight
people flocked to and bought
seats in the balconies to watch
the incredible spectacle.
And in Harlem, especially,
which had the largest balls, and
in Chicago's South Side, they
were just extraordinary
spectacles, very well known, a
lot of press attention.
So this world was much more
visible and gay life was much
more integrated into the
general life of the city in the
early 20th century than we
imagined.
>> Roswell Encina:
I think that's probably one of
the maybe bigger misconceptions
as well. People just assumed
everybody was maybe closeted and
scared to even live their
normal lives.
But do you think you also wrote
in your book that did it feel
like New York City and other
bigger cities felt like an
escape, or was this mostly a
distinct urban phenomenon then
compared to what was happening
in the rest of the country?
>> George Chauncey:
You know, so LGBTQ history is
still a new field, developing
field. And so we know much more
about the history of life and
cities than we do in rural
areas.
It's clear that there were
social networks and various
forms of connection in small
towns and farm areas, but people
needed to move to a city to
really create a larger
commercial culture.
Cities provided people with
anonymity so that they didn't
necessarily lose their jobs or
families support if they became
involved in the gay world,
which were big enough that they
could go to one neighborhood
and be gay and in another
neighborhood pass as straight.
And so many people did move to
cities which they saw as a site
of freedom. This is true for
many groups that the city has
always been a place that where
unconventional forms of life
could take shape.
>> Roswell Encina: You mentioned
 the term fairies earlier.
I know there's a lot of terms
in your book that includes trade
and passing. To understand the
at least gay men in the early
20th century, is it fair to say
that we have to define what male
masculinity, how we define that
and how it was 
defined back then?
>> George Chauncey:
Right. So part of what's so
interesting about this history
is that it shows us how sexual
categories are historically
constructed and specific, but
also gender norms vary.
So in the early 20th century,
especially in working class
immigrant and Black
neighborhoods, the sexual
categories were very different.
You had, on the one hand, men
who today we might be more
likely to think of as trans.
That wasn't really a category
that was operative in their own
era, who were gender
non-conforming, often highly
flamboyant, effeminate,
sometimes thought of as women,
sometimes some sometimes
thought of themselves as women
trapped in the wrong body.
Probably more often thought
this was somehow express the
gender difference that they
felt.
And it was also a way to signal
to other people their gender
difference, their queerness,
and they could approach normal
men and I have lots of evidence
of them doing so.
And normal men felt free to
socialize with them and even
have sex with them without
feeling that they lost their
status as men, as normal men,
because of this highly
choreographed gender
performance in which you
couldn't have them. As one
blues song says, you know, I
woke up one morning, wanted sex.
If you can't send me a woman,
send me a sissy man.
It was just they were options
out there that didn't confer a
stigmatized status on normal
men.
So the way people understood
masculinity, normal man maleness
was really different in those
days.
>> Roswell Encina:
And the early 20th century, the
way you write in your book.
And I think that this is what
people need to learn about is
how the LGBTQ community was
really flourishing.
How did Prohibition affect all
of this, especially in 
New York City?
>> George Chauncey:
Well, Prohibition had an
enormous impact on this world.
And of course, in American
culture as a whole, the point of
Prohibition by the time it was
passed in 1919 was
as much as it was about
controlling consumption of
alcohol. It was about
controlling the working class
immigrants saloon and
suppressing the saloon.
And so basically it
criminalized the sale of
alcohol. Suddenly, middle class
people discovered this ban
criminalized their nightlife as
well, and it shut down a lot of
nightclubs and hotels and
restaurants that depended on
liquor sales for their profit.
And so a whole world developed
in the big cities where a
criminal underworld ran
nightlife and supplied liquor.
And in that context, when the
state lost all capacity to
regulate this nightlife, it was
easier for gay nightlife to
emerge. It wasn't just gay
spots that have to worry about
the cops. Every spot did. A
whole system of payoffs and
criminal syndicates and
connections with the police
developed to protect nightlife
in general.
So this created many new
possibilities for a criminalized
world like gay life.
And eventually,
as clubs competed with one
another for an audience, they
began to look for the most
outre acts that they could.
And so female impersonators,
male impersonators, queer life
in general became a part of the
culture industry in big cities
like New York and Chicago,
which is why, as I said before,
you had these nightclubs in
Times Square that brought in
pansy performers, as they were
called, who were completely out
there. And people were
fascinated by this because there
was just no law, in effect,
governing speakeasy culture.
>> Roswell Encina:
Speaking of before we go post
Prohibition, how was qeer life
in Harlem? I know that played a
big role not only for the Black
community, but for the city as
a whole.
>> George Chauncey: Right.
So gay life was very open in
Harlem in the 1920s.
A number of the writers that we
associate with the Harlem
Renaissance were queer.
I mean, typically tried to keep
it sort of quiet, but people
knew, Countee Cullen,
Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes
is very enigmatic, but probably
but also in the culture of
everyday folks were in the
cellar clubs and rent
parties where poor people who
lived in Harlem went to party.
Very open gay and lesbian
presence.
People were very aware of
so-called women's parties that
were just for women.
It was very much a part of
blues culture.
So the primary musical form of
poor African-Americans
constantly talking about sissy
men and mannish women and their
relations with more so-called
normal folks.
And again, the drag balls in
Harlem were the biggest in the
city, and lots of whites came
to Harlem to explore this
burgeoning Black culture, but
also were fascinated by the
queer culture that they found
there.
>> Roswell Encina:
Many people are familiar with
the drag balls now because of
the show, "Pose."
What do contemporary Americans
have to know between the
differences between the drag
balls of the 70s and to today to
the balls of the early 20th
century?
>> George Chauncey:
So the drag balls of the 1920s
and 30s and really even into the
40s and 50s were very different
from the ballroom scene that we
know today. The ballroom scene,
in fact, emerged out of the drag
ball scene in the 1970s and
80s.
But in the 20s and 30s, these
balls were very open,
lots of straight people went to
them, were fascinated by them,
wanted to see the spectacle,
they drew a racially mixed
crowd, organized by Black
queens, but they drew whites
and others and they got a lot of
attention in the Black press
in the 1920s showed pictures of
the beautiful gowns that the
queens had worn and so forth.
So they really show you how
integrated queer life was into
Black communities at that
point.
By the 70s and 80s, life had
become much harder for queers in
these communities.
And so the ballroom scene is
much more inward looking than
the drag ball scene had been.
They were not racially mixed.
They drew Latinx and African
American queers together, but
very few whites there.
And they weren't
speaking to the larger Black
public, the way the drag balls
had, they were focused on
providing a safe space for
people who felt pretty
brutalized out on the streets
and homes and Black
neighborhoods, and so provided
new alternative families and
support for people who became a
part of the houses.
So I think there's a shift that
sort of marks a changing
cultural politics of queer life
and Black communities 
over the 20th century.
>> Roswell Encina:
Speaking of changes, when
Prohibition happened, did that
feel like the tipping point
when policing got more rampant
or did more laws come out of
that to enforce anti-gay laws?
>> George Chauncey:
So the end of Prohibition kind
of counterintuitively led to a
whole new regime of
surveillance of gay life.
You see that most dramatically,
of course, in the bars itself.
Suddenly, bars were legalized
again.
But now bars that served
homosexuals were singled out as
still criminal, and they
therefore had to continue to pay
off the police, continue to
have connections with criminal
syndicates, which were the only
organizations powerful enough to
really protect them.
And so after Prohibition, the
gay bar life was really pushed
underground in a way that it
hadn't been in the 20s because
it was criminalized when the
rest of nightlife 
became more open.
>> Roswell Encina:
When you were talking about the
bars and theater or the bar and
restaurant community went
underground, what's the
difference between going
underground to what it was in
the early 20th century?
>> George Chauncey:
What we know today as gay bars
really date from the end of
Prohibition and the
legalization of the rest of the
liquor business.
Before then, whether or not
they were all illegal and
speakeasy days or they'd been
legal as saloons before
Prohibition, gay life had been
more open in these spaces, more
likely to have social
interactions between gay and
straight people, whereas after
the repeal of Prohibition,
other places that serve liquor
were legalized.
But in most states, including
New York, the new liquor
regulations prohibited a bar
from becoming disorderly.
And many state liquor
authorities ruled that the mere
presence of homosexuals in a
bar made that bar disorderly.
And so bar owners realized that
they could lose their licenses
and their whole investment in
their small business if they
allowed openly gay people to be
served there.
So some places decided to make
the leap and turn themselves
into gay bars and serve an
exclusively gay clientele,
pay off the cops,
very often in cities like New
York, organized crime got
involved and owned most of
these places.
They were a good income stream
because you could charge people
higher prices since they had so
few places to go.
People flocked to them.
But they were exclusively gay
and the rest of the bars would
not allow openly gay people to
come in because they could lose
their licenses.
So part of what this caused was
a new segregation of urban
nightlife that separated gay
and straight people from one
another. Now, of course, there
are always gay people going to
so-called normal restaurants
and bars, but they had to be
very careful in how they
presented themselves and not
make it clear that they were
gay.
>> Roswell Encina: You can feel
the shift,
it sounds like actually.
>> George Chauncey: Yeah. You 
really feel a shift in the 30s.
>> Roswell Encina: And so when
we talk about
this shift, the anti gay...
regime of the early 20th
century, what do you think is
important for people to know
about that change 
in the 30s to today?
>> George Chauncey:
So what's really new in
especially the 30s, 40s and 50s
is the emergence of
a legal regime that for the
first time classified and
discriminated against some
American citizens on the basis
of their identity or status as
homosexual.
So the state started
classifying people as homosexual
and discriminating against
them.
And we can see this in a
variety of ways.
One is in the bars, which began
prohibiting bars and restaurants
from serving homosexuals.
We can see it in employment
both in federal and municipal
employment. So the federal
government during the Second
World War for the first time
prohibited gay men or lesbian
from serving in the military.
Now, of course, many did,
most did. They wanted to serve
their country, defend the
country, but they always ran
some risk
and 9000 were pushed out of the
military when they were
discovered to be gay and lost
all the benefits that veterans
had because of that.
But then after the war in 1953,
the very first executive order
issued by President Eisenhower
prohibited the employment of
homosexuals by civilian
agencies of the government as
well, and actually required
private businesses that had
federal contracts to ferret out
and fire their homosexual
employees. Municipal
governments around the country
did the same thing prohibiting
gay people from working for the
city or the state.
So there's again, just this
extraordinary discrimination.
It extended to questions of
representation as well.
There was a mass censorship
movement in the early 1930 led
by the Legion of Decency,
primarily a Catholic led
organization which demanded a
new federal censorship code to
control what they saw as the
immorality of Hollywood films
and to stave off federal
censorship or the threat of mass
boycotts. The Hollywood studios
enacted a production code which
tried to bring morality into
studio films.
You could still have crime,
extramarital affairs and so
forth. I mean, how could you
have films without crime and
extramarital affairs so long as
they were punished at the end.
But the code strictly
prohibited, including things
that the church and others
thought were so immoral,
including interracial
relationships, abortion or
homosexuals. They made them
invisible for the next 30 years.
And you can see here that the
purpose was really to try to
make gay life unthinkable and
just erase it from what was the
most powerful medium of the
day, Hollywood films.
Likewise, in New York in 1927,
after a serious lesbian drama
was staged and translated from 
the French and Mae West, of all
people threatened to bring a
play she'd put together called
"The Drag," which included a lot
of gay drag queens she'd
recruited in Greenwich Village
had to bring that to the
Broadway stage.
The New York State legislature
enacted what they called the
padlock law, which threatened
to padlock or shut down a
theater for a year if it let a
play be staged on premises that
included gay or lesbian
characters.
And so, again, you can just see
this sort of suppression of
queer visibility, the
discussion of gay issues, and
also an effort to exclude gay
people from normal urban life
where they might have been
encountered by straight people
in bars and restaurants and so
forth, just to totally render
gay life invisible.
>> Roswell Encina:
How it affected folks in the
military and the folks who work
for the federal government. Here
in Washington,
everybody's I won't say most of
the people here are pretty
familiar with the purge during
the McCarthy era, not counting,
you know, Hill staffers,
members of Congress who were all
affected by this.
How did it affect especially
folks who worked at the State
Department and other
federal government employees?
>> George Chauncey: At
the height of the McCarthy era
so-called red scare,
the State Department actually
dismissed more employees
suspected of homosexuality than
suspected of being communist.
There was a huge outcry because
of the thought that gay people
were working in the federal
government and new regulations
were put in place both to
prohibit them from working in
federal jobs and to ferret them
out.
Investigative apparatus was set
up to find them.
So this meant, of course, that
gay workers here but this is
true for gay workers really
across the country had to be
much more careful.
I mean, there were some jobs
not for the federal government,
some jobs which people kind of
associated with gay men or
lesbians where they were
relatively safe.
But for most jobs to be
identified to your boss as gay
was a sure way of being fired.
So people had to be much more
careful about where they went,
who they told they were gay,
and it had the effect.
And in many ways, these
employment bans were one of
the most powerful ways of
forcing people to keep their
gayness hidden because the risk
was so great if they were going
to lose their job.
>> Roswell Encina: Probably
like weaponized, you know, some
members of Congress and some
staff members. I mean, I've
read some stories that commit
suicide in the 50s,
others just they were so scared
to lose their jobs.
They had very little resort
of trying to, you know, combat
how it was done. How did they
get around it of trying to at
least live a normal life with
this kind of hovering over them.
>> George Chauncey:
So the threat of losing your job
or losing your family's love and
support were very powerful
cudgels against people 
being openly gay.
We often retrospectively talk
about them living in a closet.
In fact, that's a term that
really just emerged in gay
vernacular in the 1960s.
The idea of the closet suggests
that people were isolated not
just from straight people, not
just hidden from straight
people, but isolated from one
another, often ashamed of
themselves and hidden in
isolated in the closet.
In fact, in the 30s, 40s and
50s, people used a different
term. They spoke of living a
double life so that they
presented themselves as
straight when they were with
their families or when they
were at work and then led a
double life and their second
life, their nightlife, their
social circles, their dinner
parties and so forth.
They were openly gay and
socialized exclusively with
other gay people who supported
them and embraced them as gay,
did not reject them on that
basis.
And so I think the double
life is a good term.
It's their term and it's a
good way to think about this.
The closet as a spatial
metaphor implies a very tiny
space where someone is alone.
I think of the closets of the
40s and 50s as very large
closets. You could throw
parties in those closets and
people did. And it's important
for us to remember that people
did create very extensive, rich
and rewarding social lives, even
in the context of this very
scary repression, all the
threats facing them.
And I think that's always a
trick for us in thinking about
the LGBTQ past, how to balance
recognition of just how severe
the police scene was, with a
recognition of how resilient
people were in that context and
how hard they worked to find
other people, to create
friendships, to create social
circles, even when the straight
culture, the dominant culture,
is trying to keep them isolated
and lonely.
>> Roswell Encina:
Speaking of resiliency, for the
folks who fought back, like for
the folks who got fired and
wanted to kind of get their jobs
back, they received a lot of
backlash.
You know, like the Mattachine
Society was created,
Frank Kameny came out of this,
and most of these people who
fought back ended up either
being bankrupt or really
struggling financially. How did
this hurt them when they decided
to fight back and try to get
their jobs back?
>> George Chauncey:
Most people, when they were
threatened with the loss of a
job, especially a government
job.
Just decided not to fight the
charge at all because they knew,
in fact, there was a clear
policy banning homosexuals from
these jobs. They were gay and
that to fight it would only make
their life more painful and
more difficult to have to go
through a whole trial and
inquiry and raise all these
issues, have their lives
investigated even more.
So most people decided it was
just the wisest thing to move
on, but it destroyed a lot of
people's careers.
We have all the stories
of civil servants in Washington
whose lives were destroyed.
I certainly have stories in New
York of people who had been very
successful professionally or
had been successful in city
government, and suddenly they
were found out and fired and
they could never get one of
those jobs back again.
And so were forced into lower
paying jobs that were not nearly
as rewarding to them as before.
Then on the other hand, there
were a handful of people, and
Frank Kameny, of course, is the
most famous example.
He is a trained astronomer, PhD
from Harvard, works for the Army
Map Service, and they
discovered he'd been arrested
once in California, and so he
lost his job.
Part of what made Kameni
different was...
he wanted to continue working
as an astronomer, and in those
days, almost every job that
called on his skills was a
government job or required a
government security clearance.
And so in the end, first he
tried to deny it, and then he
realized he just couldn't deny
it.
And he was so headstrong, he
just decided he was going to
take on the whole government
that had destroyed his life and
just try to overturn this
policy.
So he filed the first lawsuits
against it, went all the
way to the Supreme Court, which
refused to hear it.
He appealed to every authority,
went as high as he could, even
appealing to the president
himself. Didn't get anywhere, of
course. And after that, he
became a full time activist,
living on almost no money.
There were not big fundraisers
out there.
People supporting him just had
odd jobs here and there.
But he became a kind of a
council, unpaid volunteer
counsel as other civil
servants tried to challenge
their loss of jobs through the
civil service agencies and
eventually was successful.
But it took years and years.
>> Roswell Encina:
I mean, people are familiar with
the Human Rights Campaign now
and PFLAG way before that,
there were no groups like this
advocating for the queer
community.
So when people try to organize,
they were so scared because they
were nervous that the list of
the people in this, I guess,
group may be passed on to
police.
Was that very rampant back then
of people too scared to, you
know, to work together to fight
back?
>> George Chauncey:
So gay rights organizing began
long before Stonewall, but it
was always pretty small and
pretty risky thing to do.
I actually have evidence of one
guy, a German American, who
discovered the German gay
movement, which was enormous in
the early 20th century when he
was a part of the American army
of occupation in Germany
after the First World War, he
went back to Chicago, tried to
start a gay group.
He was raided, his files were
seized,
he went to jail, other people
went to jail.
They just completely suppressed
that group.
There are a few other small
groups
and then the Mattachine
Society, primarily a male
organization, Daughters of
Bilitis, women's organization
were founded in the 1950s.
Established chapters in a
handful of cities around the
country and did very important
work in creating safe spaces for
people developing early
communication networks, whether
it is newsletters and magazines
and so forth.
But these were always very tiny
organizations.
Most people were afraid to
become involved in them, and in
fact, they regularly had to
promise people who were thinking
of becoming members that they
would absolutely guard their
membership list because people
were so afraid of their names
somehow coming to the attention
of the police because they were
members of these groups.
So it's really those groups
grew over the course of the 60s,
but were still relatively
small.
And what's so dramatic in the
early 70s in the wake of
Stonewall is the dramatic
expansion in the number of these
groups and the mass number of
people who became 
involved in them.
>> Roswell Encina:
Enforcing the laws in the 50s
and the 40s and the 50s and the
60s. How did police actually do
that?
Did they fold in like
prostitution laws in there to
help really kind of enforce
some of these laws and the
liquor laws, too, of course.
>> George Chauncey:
So the clearest place to see how
these laws were enforced is in
how they are enforced against
the bars.
So the question is, how would
the police know that a bar was a
gay bar, attracted gay and
lesbian customers. When they were
focused on a gay male bar,
one of the easiest strategies
was simply to send in a handsome
policeman in plain clothes,
actually sort of dressed in
whatever the gay style was of
the day, to go in, strike up
conversations with other bar
patrons and to lead someone
along and get an invitation
home and then arrest that person
and then charge the bar with
having allowed a homosexual
solicitation to take place on
premises, which was very clear
evidence in the eyes of the
courts that this was a bar where
homosexuals gathered.
And so it wasn't just that one
person who was arrested who was
in trouble. The bar itself
could lose its license because
of that. But they also used all
the sort of stereotypical signs
of homosexuality, which
again, still very connected to
gender nonconformity.
So I've seen court cases where
the courts upheld a bar being
closed because the police
testified that they saw women
with hair that was too short
for normal women or women sort
of swagging around a bar,
walking as a man might walk or
two women dancing together.
You know, I've seen the defense
attorney in a case,
haven't you ever seen two women
dance together at a wedding?
But that didn't really matter.
This was a bar and they could
use it as evidence.
Likewise for men, men who were
maybe wearing a little makeup or
who called each other Mary or
she or her or literally in one
case, two men talking about
opera seemed like a sign that
surely they must be queer,
because what normal man would be
interested in opera and in any
bar,
people with same sex dancing
together.
That was always the most
dangerous thing because it was
clear evidence that they were
gay couples and it meant that
dancing was prohibited even in
most gay bars
or it could take place only in
a back room or in the basement
where it would be hidden away.
>> Roswell Encina:
For people watching this today,
they may think this is a very
elaborate sting to get such,
you know, people may call it
entrapment type of evidence.
How often do they do these
type of stings to enforce this
against bars and restaurants?
>> George Chauncey:
So the curious thing is that
these regulations were always
there and they always
threatened bar owners.
So bar owners always knew they
could lose their license if a
plainclothes investigator came
in and saw something going awry.
And so this turned the bar
managers into the local
enforcers of these rules.
So even if they knew that they
were gay people there, they
tried to regulate their
behavior, not let them become so
gay, either expressively gay or
touching one another or dancing
together. That said, there
weren't raids every day.
They were typically clustered
during crackdowns on gay life
and a lot of cities,
those crackdowns happened in
the few months before the
election for mayor and an
incumbent who wanted to show
that he was tough on crime in
the city, tough on vice in the
city, could order a crackdown
on gay bars and get some
newspaper headlines from it,
show people that he was vigorous
anti-crime unit and he could do
that knowing no one was going to
leap to the defense of these
bars. The churches weren't,
the ACLU wasn't, respected
jurists weren't.
So it was a kind of easy target
for them.
So and the bars that I've
studied in New York, some could
go months at a time not
encountering any real problem,
so long as they paid off
the cops kept the stream of
corruption going.
And then periodically, there'd
be crackdowns and the cops could
show up 2 or 3 times a night.
>> Roswell Encina: I know we've
been focusing a lot on New York.
Is it the same like in other
cities, like whether it's here
in D.C. or Los Angeles?
>> George Chauncey: Oh, yes,
absolutely. Absolutely the same.
And all the cities were gay
bars operated.
And one way that bars tried to
protect themselves was
especially during crackdowns,
was literally to put up signs
that said it is against the law
to serve homosexuals.
Do not ask us to serve you if
you are homosexual.
There's a famous picture of a
bartender at a bar in Los
Angeles leaning against the bar
with a sign behind him that says,
"Faggots, keep out."
And that sign was there for
everyone to see.
And just a reminder that
faggots, gay people were a
stigmatized, outcast group that
you shouldn't associate with.
>> Roswell Encina:
Hollywood was a big part of
American life, especially the
early in the first half of the
20th century.
How did Hollywood who
had a good
chunk of queer actors and
people working behind the
scenes. How did they enforce
any anti-queer laws and
how do they get around it?
>> George Chauncey:
So there are always a lot of gay
men and lesbians involved in
Hollywood as directors, actors,
screenwriters, tech people.
And in the 20s and early 30s
and the silent film era, there
were a lot of queer characters
on screen.
It's really remarkable to see
the kind of issues that
Hollywood films took on and in
the early talkie era, they took
on very serious issues around
sexual harassment at work,
abortion, and included films
with homosexual characters.
And as a result, there was a
mass censorship movement which
basically forced Hollywood upon
threat of a federal censorship
code or mass boycotts of their
films to institute their own
censorship code, which
prohibited the inclusion of gay
or lesbian characters in films
along with other so-called
immoral scenes.
In 1932, you've got a film
called "Call Her Savage,"
in which Clara Bow is taken
 to a big
flapper star, is taken to a
Greenwich Village dive where
there are gay waiters prancing
around singing songs about
chasing sailors.
And there are a lot of same sex
couples at the tables.
That was the last gay bar cafe
to appear in a film until 1962,
when "Advise and Consent" was
filmed, which included
a gay bar scene in Washington.
In between then,
so that's in the early 60s when
the censorship code was
collapsing under a variety of
pressures.
Between then you couldn't have
explicit representation of
homosexuality, but there were
still all sorts of codes that
people used.
And it's actually not just on
homosexual matters.
The studios were constantly
dancing around with the
production code and trying to
include references to sexual
relations, sexual innuendo that
the code would have prohibited,
you know. Ernst Lubitsch was a
famous German film maker who had
what they call the Lubitsch
Touch. So you'd see a man and a
woman get together,
the man lights a cigarette,
suddenly scene goes black.
Then he's putting on his hat
and leaving her apartment.
Well, we know what's happened
in that scene, but it's not
shown. So the production code
would allow it to happen.
Likewise, there are some
incredible moments, queer
moments in Hollywood films that
are often,
the words aren't used.
But if you look at the images
on screen, it's kind of
inescapable what's going on.
>> Roswell Encina:
Because everything's so
subjective. So how do they
distinguish what they were
calling sex perverts to
something that they could
really stretch into something
that could be censored?
>> George Chauncey:
Well, again, it's all about the
sophistication of the codes.
And I find that in many ways,
moviegoers in the 1950s were
more sophisticated in the way
they looked at films than most
people are today. Today, we 
live in the world of the word.
Things need to be said.
And if you don't say it, I
don't believe it or I don't
think it's really there.
Whereas in the 1950s, any
sophisticated person who went to
a movie theater knew that the
director was trying to
communicate all sorts of things
to them that they couldn't say.
And whether we're talking about
the banter between Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren Bacall and
The Big Sleep, where they're
basically talking about are
they going to have a sexual
relationship, but it's all
about talking about horse races.
>> Roswell Encina: Let's go 
back to New York and Broadway.
And you wrote in "Gay New York,"
aside from the village, many
the queer community also grew
around Times Square because of
the, you know, the theater
community. How did Broadway
theaters and producers prohibit
the portrayal of queer men and
women back then?
>> George Chauncey:
So there were plays in the 1920s
that dealt with homosexual
themes ranging from very
serious dramas like a French
play performed in translation
called "The Captive," about a
married woman who was
captivated by the charms of a
lesbian and seduced into
lesbianism. 1927, the same year
that Mae West, of all people,
decided to bring two plays to
the Broadway stage.
One just called "Sex,"
the other called "The Drag,"
where she had recruited gay
chorus boys in Greenwich
Village to basically put on a
drag show in the entire second
act.
And this so outraged the press
and the moral guardians of the
city and state that the state
legislature in 1927 passed a
bill called the Padlock Bill,
which threatened to padlock a
theater to shut it down for a
year if it allowed a play to be
staged that included lesbian or
gay characters.
And because Broadway...
even more than today was the
central engine of theatre across
the country. And so many shows
were produced on Broadway that
then traveled around the
country.
This law had the effect of
censoring the representation of
gay people or any discussion of
homosexuality for a 
couple of decades.
>> Roswell Encina:
How about the balls in Harlem
that we were discussing earlier?
Did the same laws apply to
them, the Padlock Law, or was it
a different type of
enforcement?
>> George Chauncey:
The origin of the laws
against cross-dressing is really
unexpected. I have to do with
struggles over land tenancy in
the early 19th century in
upstate New York, where land was
being consolidated and there
were a lot of small farmers
attacking the bigger farmers
and landlords, and they were
often going in masquerade to
protect themselves, sometimes
dressing as Native Americans,
other kinds of masquerade.
So an anti-masquerade law was
passed.
Fast forward to the early 20th
century,
this law was used to prohibit
cross-dressing.
And so someone could be
arrested for walking down the
street and clothes assigned to
the other sex and the one they
were assigned to.
Drag balls got around this
because an exception was made
for costume balls.
And so what are the remarkable
things about the huge drag balls
in Harlem in the 1920s is that
they often had police protection
because they had applied for
and secured a license to throw a
costume ball.
And it just happened that
everyone in costume was a
lesbian or gay man or a gender
queer who was there masquerading
as the other sex, so-called.
But as soon as the ball ended
midnight when that license
disappeared, people had to
worry on the way home, they
could actually be arrested on
the way home.
>> Roswell Encina: You touched 
about this a little bit earlier.
So with all these laws between
from Hollywood to Broadway to
bars, was this the start of the
proverbial closet that we're all
got accustomed to saying?
Was it the building 
of the closet?
>> George Chauncey:
Collectively, all of these laws
were really designed to render
LGBTQ life invisible, to keep
lesbians and gay men and gender
queers out of public spaces in
the city, bars, cafes,
restaurants, nightclubs to keep
them off the stage, to keep them
off the silver screen, and, in
effect, to render homosexuality
invisible and unthinkable.
And there was such a risk of
being identified as gay,
the threat of losing your job,
being caught in a bar raid on a
gay bar, so forth, that people
were very careful to
hide their involvement in gay
life from their straight friends
and associates. But that 
doesn't mean that they were
hidden from each other.
They developed an elaborate
system of codes so they could
talk with one another, even in
potentially dangerous spaces.
Gay is actually a good example
of those codes.
Before the 1970s, most straight
people had no idea that gays had
given gay distinctly homosexual
meaning.
So in the 1950s, a woman who
worked at a company could talk
with another woman at the water
cooler about how she'd had a gay
time the night before,
she'd gone to a gay place and
someone overhearing the
conversation would just say, I
went to a fun place, a joyful
place, a maybe slightly outre
place, but no idea that she was
talking about her gay lesbian
life.
And there were many, many terms
like that.
And people were also just more
sensitive to the possibility of
double entendre that anything
said with the
right intonation could have a
second meaning, a queer meaning
that wasn't obvious in what was
actually said.
And this is what allowed people
to communicate with each other
in risky settings and public
settings.
But they also created a very
extensively
segregated, but all gay world
in which they did feel free to
drop the hairpins, as they used
to say, to be openly gay and
find support from other gay
people.
And so even people who were
very deeply involved in this
world had to keep it secret
from outsiders.
So I don't think the closet is
the right term for the world
they live. I think their term
is more appropriate,
the double life.
>> Roswell Encina:
When and how did these laws
start to get dismantled?
Was there a tipping point when
this started, or was it a
crescendo of different events?
>> George Chauncey:
So one of the remarkable things
about many of the anti-gay laws
is that although we think of
them as being very ancient and
timeless, in fact, most of them
were products of the early 20th
century and most of them were
dismantled in the late 20th
century. So take the bar
regulations, repeal of
Prohibition, mid 30s.
A lot of states enacted rules
prohibiting gays from
being openly served at bars,
restaurants.
Immediately, bar owners started
challenging those rules in the
courts. The courts first upheld
those laws, and then in the 50s
and 60s, both in New York and
California and possibly in other
states, the state's highest
courts began to rule that, no,
you actually couldn't shut down
a bar just because gay or
lesbian people were there.
So the police and the liquor
authorities found ways around
that and they continue to shut
down those bars and they 
continue to be a legal struggle.
It's really only in the 60s in
California and New York and then
in the 70s and even later in
many other states that gay bars
were in effectively
decriminalized.
But in fact, there have been
occasionally raids on gay bars
and just the last decade or
two, it's not like it's
completely disappeared.
The civil service rules were
ended over in... say one more
thing.
The regulations against
gay bars were dismantled, both
as a result of determined
activism by gay activists who
challenged their
criminalization, but also by the
general liberalization of the
courts and their growing respect
for individual liberty and
determination to protect
people's liberty to have their
own personal lives.
The civil service regulations
were partly dismantled in 1975
by the Civil Service
Commission, but it was only in
the 1990s that in the Clinton
administration that
discrimination against gay
people was prohibited by the
federal government.
So there's sort of that queasy
in-between period when you
weren't required to be fired if
you were gay, but you had no
protection if you were gay.
And it's also only in the 90s
that gays were allowed to work
openly in the most sensitive
national security jobs.
>> Roswell Encina:
What most people may find hard
to wrap their heads around. This
all happened in a period of 50
years.
How do you think we could learn
from that period?
>> George Chauncey:
I think there are several things
we can learn from this history.
One is that we shouldn't take
anti-gay animus as natural as an
intrinsic response to the
openness of gay people.
That's sort of the
psychological theory that
underlies our idea of
homophobia.
And the trouble is that can't
account for change over time.
So we need to look at broader
social historical processes to
understand why in the early
20th century gay life could be
more open and then why it was
suppressed in the mid 20th
century, and then why it became
more open again in the late 20th
century. Those were historical
processes, not individual
psychological processes that
can account for that.
And I think one of the lessons
that we can take from this is
that we shouldn't imagine that
progress on gay issues is
unilinear constantly progressive
it's very counterintuitive
if things were more open in the
early 20th century than they
would be in the mid 20th
century, and of course, today
it's really unclear where we're
going to go.
There's much more cultural
embrace of gay people, much more
openness, certainly among young
people.
And yet there's still very
powerful forces that still want
to render homosexuality
invisible, want to ban books and
libraries and in schools and
the teaching of these issues.
And so I think another lesson
that we can take from this is
that nothing is static,
history does not happen of its
own accord,
history shapes the
possibilities of what can happen
in any particular moment.
It makes some things possible
and other things just
unthinkable and impossible.
But what we do in those moments
is up to us is history is always
shaped by human action.
And so history both limits what
any group can do at any
particular moment.
But history is shaped by what
they decide to do in collective
social action.
>> Roswell Encina:
We started this conversation
about talking about how history,
LGBTQ history was forgotten.
Now that as one of the first
LGBTQ historians, how do you
feel now that there's more
queer historians coming out
researching and documenting
this forgotten history?
>> George Chauncey:
Well, certainly one of the most
rewarding things I've seen in my
career is just the growth of
this field.
It was so tiny when I began.
I wrote my dissertation in the
1980s, and in the 80s there was
literally one other person,
graduate student in the entire
country writing a dissertation
on lesbian or gay history.
Now there are multiple numbers
of graduate students starting
programs around the country
every year.
People are doing this work.
It's hard to grasp just how
little we knew about the LGBTQ
past 40 years ago, how much
we've learned, but also how much
more we have to learn about
this past.
But it is being taught more
widely.
People are hearing about it
more on social media.
There are more books available
to them.
And so I think it's an exciting
time for the field to see its
growth and diversification.