A Queer History of the United States (18 page)

Ten years later Allan became an overtly political scandal when she instigated an internationally publicized British libel trial by suing conservative politician Noel Pemberton-Billing. He had claimed, in an article titled “The Cult of the Clitoris,” that a legion of lesbian spies were hurting England’s war effort: “In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed.” He then suggested that Allan’s
Salome
was connected to the “systematic seduction of your British soldiers by the German urnings.” Allan lost the case after Pemberton-Billing stated out loud what everyone suspected—that Allan was a “pervert”—and even linked her romantically with Margot Asquith, the wife of the former prime minister. The revelation may have contained some truth, as Asquith was sexually involved with other women at the time. The trial, with its sensational claims, was widely covered in the U.S. press, which agreed with the verdict.

Despite Allan’s intentions, the popular press portrayed her theatrics, on and off stage, as representative of a pathological type. This newly defined pathologized identity, despite what some progressive sexologists intended, was a social and political threat that caused the public moralists to react. The immediate effect of this moral backlash was the enforcement of laws that censored productions on the stage. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice lobbied aggressively to clean up the Broadway stage and was particularly vigilant against homosexual themes and characters. In 1922 it urged the city to close Sholem Asch’s classic 1907 Yiddish drama
The God of Vengeance
because of its setting in a brothel and its lesbian content. In February 1927, the society instigated the shutting down of Arthur Hornblow Jr.’s drama
The Captive,
which had been running since the previous September, because of its overt lesbian theme. The society, a private organization, worked closely with the district attorney, who had the New York City police raid the theater and serve arrest warrants to the actors. Two months later, the Republican-run state assembly passed a law that prohibited theatrical performances “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion.” It also instituted the Wales Padlock law, which allowed police to close a theater for a year if the owners were convicted of presenting a play that violated obscenity laws. (The Wales Padlock law remained on the books, largely unenforced, until 1967.)

The society’s power came from the support of organized religion and the legal system. New York’s governor, Al Smith, as well as the mayor, district attorney, and police chief, all had close ties to Roman Catholic clergy. Protestant clergy were also supportive. Before
The Captive
was raided, the
New York Morning Telegraph
reported that “one thousand Protestant clergymen of the Great New York Federation of churches yesterday passed a resolution to back up the District Attorney in his drive against objectionable plays.”
27
Later that year, Mae West’s play
Sex
was closed by the authorities and she was sentenced to jail. Her play
The Drag,
featured homosexual characters and an onstage drag ball, played in New Jersey and Connecticut but did not open on Broadway under direct threat of being immediately closed. While relatively few plays were closed or producers prosecuted, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, politicians, and clergy had a chilling effect in preventing homosexual images or themes from reaching the stage.

The questions about gender and sexuality that were raised on the New York stage were also being posed in Hollywood. Throughout the 1920s, the film industry was known for its culture of sexual permissiveness. One reason was the interplay between the new film industry and the established theater; many performers came to Hollywood from vaudeville, burlesque, and the legitimate stage. Another was that Los Angeles, like San Francisco, had social and cultural roots that embraced personal freedoms and a healthy respect for individual differences.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, although there were few restrictions on Hollywood films, overt representations of lesbians or gay men were rare. Occasionally a star such as Marlene Dietrich, known for her affairs with both women and men, would cross-dress in a film such as the 1930
Morocco
, and in the 1930s performers such as Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore consistently played pansy characters. Performers’ personal lives, however, were not particularly private. Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons document that in the 1920s “the lesbian cavortings of silent film stars such as Evelyn Brent, Nita Naldi, Pola Negri, and Lilyan Tashman” were an open secret. The homosexuality of Ramon Novarro, William Haines, and directors James Whale and George Cukor were known within the industry and rumored among the general public.
28

The taint of Hollywood’s gender and sexual nonconformity is clear in the attacks on extravagantly emotional heterosexual heartthrob Rudolph Valentino. An editorial in the
Chicago Tribune
in 1926 railed against a powder dispenser in a men’s room at a public ballroom and traced its genesis to Hollywood:

A powder vending machine! In a men’s washroom! Homo Americanus! Why didn’t some one quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmo [
sic
], alias Valentino, years ago? . . .

Do women like the type of “man” who pats pink powder on his face in a public washroom and arranges his coiffure in a public elevator? Do woman at heart belong to the Wilsonian era of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”? What has become of the old “caveman” line?
29

The editorial makes clear that American masculinity is a political issue when it compares the powder puff to the threat of radical movements, in particular communism: “Is this degeneration into effeminacy a cognate reaction with pacifism to the virilities and the realities of the war? Are pink powder and parlor pinks in any way related?” The connection, clearly articulated here, between gender or sexual nonconformity and political nonconformity was often lurking behind censorship campaigns.

Alarmed by the increasing sexual content of films and the industry’s “immorality,” public moralists took a stand in the late 1920s. Threatening to invoke government censorship, mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups allowed the industry to set up a system of self-regulation, the template of which was generated by a group of Catholic laymen and clergy. Adhering to conservative Catholic theology, this group presented William Hayes, the head of the industry’s trade association, with a highly restrictive code of subjects and themes to be avoided. The censorship process would occur during film production, ensuring that there was little chance of questionable material even being filmed.

The regulations stipulated that “pictures shall not imply that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing,” thus mandating that adultery and nonmarital sex could never be presented in a neutral or positive manner. They also stated that all references to “sexual perversion” were forbidden. This new set of restrictions, the Production Code (often referred to as the Hayes Code), was formally adopted by the industry in March 1930. Starting in July 1934, all films were required to have a certificate stating that they adhered to the standards of the code before they were released. For almost two full decades, until individual film directors challenged the code in the mid-1950s, there could be no mention of homosexuality or many other taboo topics in a Hollywood film.

The censors won in Hollywood, but the gender and sexual subversions that outraged them were appearing elsewhere as well. This is seen most clearly on the vaudeville stage. Vaudeville was an important social space where the concept of the new American woman—economically independent, sexually free, not necessarily heterosexual, and refusing to conform to social standards of beauty—was visible. As threatening as these images were, they were also enormously popular. Eva Tanguay was the most popular entertainer in the first decade of the century, earning more than $3,500 a week. Her elaborate production numbers glorified her as she eschewed all traditional femininity: she displayed manic energy, did not shape her body with rigid corsets, and had a mop of hair that she would shampoo with champagne on stage. She was nicknamed the “I Don’t Care Girl” after her theme song:

They say I’m crazy, got no sense,

But I don’t care . . .

You see I’m sort of independent,

Of a clever race descendent,

My star is on the ascendant,

That’s why I don’t care.

I don’t care! I don’t care!

What they may think of me.

I’m happy-go-lucky,

Men say I’m plucky,

So jolly and carefree.
30

Tanguay’s stage presence was innately political in its depiction of women, and women involved in fighting for suffrage were avid fans. Other extremely popular female vaudeville performers, such as Trixie Friganza, the “queen of fat comedy,” ridiculed contemporary ideas of beauty. Friganza was herself an ardent proponent of suffrage, routinely giving speeches on the topic at rallies.
31

There was an increasingly evident overlap between female performers who embodied the “new woman” and the emerging subcultures of lesbian and gay men. Marie Dressler, who started in vaudeville and by the early 1920s began making films in Hollywood, was known for her fat, sympathetically comic characters, almost always working-class and Irish, who gloried in their physical and cultural distinctiveness. Dressler did not particularly hide the fact that she had female lovers. She was part of a friendship network of women who loved women, including Bessie Marbury, a powerful theatrical agent who reshaped theater in the United States, and her lover Elsie DeWolf, a noted decorator and social leader. Dressler was politically active; she worked with socially prominent heiresses Anne Morgan and Anne Vanderbilt to establish the American Women’s Association, an organization that provided a home and support for professional women in New York City. (Morgan and Vanderbilt were intimate friends and frequently lived with de Wolf and Marbury in the latter’s villa in France.)
32

Lillian Faderman notes that many women prominent in New York theater, such as Beatrice Lillie, Jeanne Eagels, Tallulah Bankhead, and Libby Holman, established public reputations as sexually adventurous women with both female and male partners. Their association with respectable Broadway theater gave them economic security as well as the social freedom to live their lives outside the cultural and sexual mainstream.
33

This freedom was enticing to many homosexuals and heterosexuals who fantasized about living alternative sexual lives and frequented places to experience what that might be like. Post-Prohibition San Francisco hosted a wide range of gender-transgressive nightclubs—often featuring vaudeville performers as well as female impersonators—and a highly visible sexual culture that included lesbians and homosexual men.
34
The prevalence of theatrical female impersonation and drag in San Francisco led growing numbers of ostensibly heterosexual tourists to visit the bars and nightclubs usually frequented by homosexuals.

On the East Coast, Harlem clubs were frequently visited by white heterosexuals who were looking for sexual and social excitement not found in predominantly white, “respectable” neighborhoods. This semi-institutionalized crossing over of individuals from the dominant culture into a “strange” subculture (often located in a racially or sexually segregated ghetto) was called “slumming,” and it both excited and disconcerted the slummer. It allowed someone who was usually an “insider” to become, for a period of time, the “outsider” in another culture. It was also a conduit through which lesbian and gay male culture interacted with, and was introduced into, mainstream culture.

Slumming facilitated physical and emotional relationships between people in these two cultures. Historian Chad Heap recounts that in 1933, “a queer girl” at Chicago’s Ballyhoo Café hostilely informed a heterosexual patron that “queer people despise jam people,” the latter phrase being homosexual jargon for heterosexuals.
35
Yet despite the resentment that some homosexual patrons might have felt, slumming provided the outsiders with a bracing look at difference. One of the most popular singers on Sunset Strip was Bruz Fletcher, who sang his own songs at the fashionable Bali nightclub. The lyrics of “The Simple Things” told outsiders that they were guests in a way that was charming enough to make them feel comfortable:

I want a cozy little nest, somewhere in the West

Where the best of all the worst will always be.

I want an extensive, expensive excursion

To the realms of “in,” “per,” and “di”-version.

It’s the simple things in life for me.
36

While most of these clubs were predicated on entertainment, they also served other community functions. Heap notes that in 1931, Chicago’s Dil Pickle Club, which had roots as a bohemian club frequented by labor activists and anarchists, hosted a talk by Magnus Hirschfeld, a noted German sexologist who was openly homosexual and lectured on the topic.
37

A Private/Public Culture Emerges

Cities, providing anonymity as well as diversity, promoted a new blurring of traditional ideas about privacy. George Chauncey charts the vital, public “fairy” culture that thrived in New York’s Bowery and Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s. As ideas of public space changed, homosexuals found public streets and parks useful for meeting one another. These public places became a space to enact formerly private aspects of life. Earl Lind, in his 1919
Autobiography of an Androgyne,
describes at length an active homosexual culture, often centered around the role of fairy or pansy, in New York City earlier in the century. Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent wrote about public homosexuality in his 1932 novel
Gentleman Jigger: