The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Sally R. Munt
colonies, and therefore assimilable to other local narratives, but work has yet
to be done on discovering an indigenous equivalent.
The most visible gay culture of the early-twentieth-century United
States was largely male, working-class, and assembled around immigrant
neighborhoods of New York City. George Chauncey’s fifty-year history of
gay New York makes the point that gay sexuality was very much in and of
the streets, in part, like working-class culture in general, because of the economic
and spatial limitations of the tenements. Enclaves of lesbians interacted
with their gay male counterparts, congregating in the speakeasies,
tearooms, and drag balls of Harlem and Greenwich Village during the
1920s. These were different worlds of homosexual identification, divided by
race and class. Greenwich bohemian life tolerated a degree of sexual experimentation
that conferred on the area an embryonic stature as erotica unbound
(a construction much enhanced during the 1950s and 1960s with the
Beat homosexuals Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs). Lesbian and
gay clubs in the Village were founded on the “Personality Clubs” of the bohemian
intelligentsia. Chauncey describes the sexual “free zone” of this apparently
utopian space: “The gay history of Greenwich Village suggests the
extent to which the Village in the teens and twenties came to represent to
the rest of the city what New York as a whole represented to the rest of the
nation: a peculiar social territory in which the normal social constraints on
behavior seemed to be suspended.” 4
As Harlem had functioned as the mecca for black people, now
Greenwich Village became the Promised Land for (mainly) white homosexuals.
Chauncey makes the point: “In the 1920s Harlem became to black
America what Greenwich Village became to bohemian white America: the
symbolic—and in many respects, practical—center of a vast social experiment.”
5 These new gay and lesbian identities were predominantly urban,
emanating from the social geographies of the streets, built out of this moment
of mutable space. In Harlem, black lesbian culture centered around
the clubs, mainly those featuring powerful blues singers such as Ma Rainey,
Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley. Harlem represented the potential dissolution
of a strictly regulated ideal of chaste black bourgeois female sexuality,
imported from the South to working-class lesbians. Many of these
African American women had friendship networks that held house parties
where lesbians would pay a small entrance fee for food. 6 But during this period
some working-class black and white lesbians would come together and
meet in the clubs. Greenwich Village and Harlem had their own specific internal
social fracturings around class, gender, and race.
The Second World War created unprecedented mobility for lesbians
and gay men, 7 who relocated to military centers in cities in their tens