Cultural Politics In The City Of Night

How powerful is the principle of consistency as an underlying code in American culture? The principle shapes everyday social interactions in the form of the heterosexual assumption —the way most people presume everyone is heterosexual. Although the assumption has been weakened in certain cities with large homosexual populations and in certain occupational or cultural milieus, it still governs most social interactions. In the years before the gay movement was reborn in 1969, the social stigma attached to homosexuality reinforced this heterosexual assumption. Together, the heterosexual assumption and the stigma of homosexuality forced most lesbians and gay men to keep their homosexual feelings or activities secret. The stigma and the heterosexual assumption established the political horizon for all homosexual acts—they became both physical and symbolic.

In the period after World War II, most homosexuals were in the

closet. Most of them sought to "pass" as heterosexual in public settings such as the workplace or even within their families. Nevertheless, a vigorous underground culture emerged in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. As women and men sought sexual partners, they created this urban, homosexual subculture. Unlike with ethnic or racial subcultures, families did not pass on and share the homosexual subculture. Most people had been reared in heterosexual families with the expectation that they would be heterosexual in adult life. Homosexuals often adopted those heterosexual expectations and social values for many years. But outside of lucky accidents (which often help people crystallize their sexual desires), most homosexual women and men had to go outside their social circles to find partners who shared their sexual desires. How was this possible when there were no public or explicit avowals of homosexuality? When there were no publicly acknowledged social spaces where lesbians or gay men could meet each other? When the heterosexual assumption and the stigma of homosexuality enforced silence, invisibility, and hostility?

Lesbians and gay men devised special tactics in order to identify sexual partners without much explicit discussion. In a study of oppositional social practices in everyday life, Michel de Certeau has emphasized that "tactics" are ways of using imposed cultural systems to achieve one's own desires. They introduce alternative or heterogeneous meanings into the dominant cultural system. Like wit, tactics require one to seize opportunities or time.^[53] Communication with a desired partner of unknown sexual preference requires great "tact." One must use the language of innuendo, well-placed pauses, carefully worded jokes, or ambiguous expression. For example, in John Rechy's 1963 novel City of Night , the narrator is propositioned on his first night at a New York City YMCA by another resident:

"They dont call this Y the French Embassy for nothing," the merchant marine laughs. He has sized me up slyly: broke and green in the big city—and he said: "You wouldnt believe if youd been at Mary's last night—thats a place in the Village and everything goes." He watches me evenly for some reaction, determining, Im sure, how far he can go how quickly. "So I spot this cute kid there—" Hes still studying me

carefully, and when I dont say anything, he continues with more assurance: "So I spot him and I want him—yeah sure Im queer—whatya expect?" he challenges. He pauses longer this time, watching me still calculatingly. He goes on: "And the kid's looking for maybe a pad to flop in and breakfast—hes not queer himself. I don't like em queer: If I did Id go with a woman—why fuck around with substitutes? … So this kid goes with me—Im feeling Good, just off the ship flush—I lay 50 bucks on him."^[54]

Rechy's account captures the ambiguities: "a place in the Village and everything goes" and the well-placed pauses and innuendoes, such as "So I spot this cute kid. …" The merchant marine doesn't say anything about the kid's gender; somehow it's understood, but not yet explicit. After the pause, he makes it clear when he continues, "So I spot him and I want him. …" After another pause, he adds, "Yeah, sure Im queer—whatya expect?"

The tactical uses of language were central to the lesbian and gay experience of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Making sexual contacts, however, often required "tactical" elaborations on a large scale. Sacha Lewis quotes from an account of such maneuvering:

When I was in high school I didn't even know the word lesbian , much less how to be one. I just knew I wanted to be with women. I wanted to go steady, date and have a woman to share intimate sexual feelings with. So I looked very carefully at how the boys in school got girls to date, go steady, neck and the rest. What I saw was that boys had short hair. What I saw was that boys wore shirts and pants. And what I saw at the time was that the most desirable boys were into leather jackets and chains and these huge silver rings that were kind of like brass knuckles—a real 40s thing. "Okay," I said, "that must be how you get girls." So that's what I did. … I must have looked pretty funny, but it [was a] very serious thing with me at the time because it worked. There were other girls who were gay and I guess I was so obvious that they had an easy time following me.^[55]

This woman's solution to the problem of satisfying her homosexual desires was to reinterpret the principle of consistency. She wanted to attract women, so she modeled herself on males. Thus, she created a

code that communicated a desire to establish sexual relations with women. By adopting a male role behavior, she became "obvious" to other women with homosexual preferences. Butch/femme roles were common (though certainly not universal) in the lesbian culture of the 1950s.^[56]

Because butch and femme roles appeared to be imitations of heterosexual roles, they were later denigrated in the early days of lesbian feminism. Butch/femme roles, however, actually reinterpreted male/female roles. Because women adopted both roles, they were in fact different from traditional heterosexual roles. Butch/femme dynamics became what William Simon and John Gagnon have called a sexual script.^[57] Butch and femme lesbians elaborated a mutual interpretative scheme that orchestrated their desires and integrated their biological capacities for arousal, climax, and resolution into sexually significant events. Joan Nestle saw her butch/femme relationships as "complex erotic statements." Butch lesbians were "tabooed women who were willing to identify their passion for other women by wearing clothes that symbolized the taking of responsibility. Part of this responsibility was sexual expertise. In the 1950s, this courage to feel comfortable with arousing another woman became a political act."^[58]

Butch and femme lesbian roles involved neither a repudiation of gender roles nor an exaltation of them. For example, whereas the lesbian butch may have adopted masculine behavior for its initiatory or managerial qualities, her primary preoccupation in sex was to forgo the macho behavior of pleasing herself first, instead pleasing the femme. Both roles allowed women to play with and to extend the range of possible behavior within a firm sense of female gender identity.^[59]

There was similar playfulness among gay men on the gender inversion theme, which in gay slang was called "camping it up." When "camping," men adopted feminine mannerisms, emphasizing through humor the apparent incongruity of a man's having sex with another man. Camp rested on the assumption that gender behavior is a role , something that can be adopted, changed, or dropped. It was a style of humor that allowed homosexuals to react to their situation with wry laughter rather than despair.^[60]

Camp as an aesthetic philosophy received public recognition in Susan Sontag's famous essay "Notes on Camp," published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Sontag acknowledged its roots in the homosexual community: "The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and most articulate audience—of Camp."^[61] Sontag ignored that camp grew out of the gay culture's process of recoding the sexual significance of gender and the principle of consistency. Although the camp sensibility, like butch/femme, cannot be attributed to all gay men and lesbians, it offered a counterhegemonic challenge to the sex/gender system.^[62] Both butch/femme role-playing and the camp sensibility reinterpreted sexual preference and sexual behavior as they related to gender. With wit and role-playing, homosexuals thereby drove a wedge between gender and sexuality. Homosexuals' everyday sexual practices, their butch/femme role-playing, and their camp sensibility significantly modified the dominant culture's notions of gender and sex for lesbians and gay men. In the 1950s, camp was the ideology of the homosexual subculture, which treated gender roles as performances with a sense of bitter irony. Gay cultural expressions such as camp became a fundamental challenge to the prevalent notions that gender, sexual preference, and sexual identity were natural.

In a predominantly hostile world, homosexuals limited their vulnerability by keeping their social and sexual transactions as invisible as possible. Many homosexuals joined highly closeted social circles in hopes of meeting other homosexuals in a relatively safe social setting. The homosexual stigma kept gay social spaces in "back regions" hidden from public view. These spaces were therefore vulnerable to illegal intrusions, such as criminal activity (many cities had Mafia-controlled gay bars) and police brutality and corruption (gay sexual activity often "hides" in red-light districts).^[63] Nevertheless, homosexuals (more often male, because public space has been traditionally dominated by men) established physical and social spaces within urban areas—bars, hotel lobbies, YMCAs, bathhouses, street corners, men's rooms, and gyms.

They appropriated space from the dominant culture (gay bars often evolved from bohemian or artists' bars) by introducing anomalous and coded practices, which often remained invisible to heterosexuals passing through (e.g., certain men's rooms become sites of sexual activity).^[64]

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, urban police departments all over the United States attempted to close gay bars and other homosexual meeting places. Although these drives severely disrupted the lives of homosexuals, they provoked political responses over and over again.^[65] These developments in gay life since the end of World War II—the increasingly elaborate cultural expressions; the proliferation of gay spaces; and the numerous, if minor, political mobilizations—created a sense of social identity.