Series Notes For Gay Chicago
Huh, my Series Notes for Gay Chicago grew like Topsy (love those 1930s references! ;) ) so I'm making a separate entry for it and linking back here.
I read George Chauncey’s Gay New York years ago about a brief period in American history in which it was chic for straights to patronize gay nightclubs as whites went to black clubs during the Harlem Vogue, and the city let drag balls take place openly. Even movies had their nods to gay life before the Hays Code was enforced in 1934.
Well, the other hub of openly gay nightlife was Chicago, and the period was from the late 1920s to around 1934 before the moralists cracked down and closed down the clubs and halted the balls. How serendipitious is that? ;)
So I decided that this planned one-shot had to be expanded into a series. It’s just too good with the timeline fitting! Note: the name given to the fad was the ‘Pansy Craze’, and other terms used for homosexuals were ‘fairy’ and ‘queer’, sometimes used by gays themselves. The term ‘gay’ was used by homosexuals but was not public knowledge at the time.
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I read George Chauncey’s Gay New York years ago about a brief period in American history in which it was chic for straights to patronize gay nightclubs as whites went to black clubs during the Harlem Vogue, and the city let drag balls take place openly. Even movies had their nods to gay life before the Hays Code was enforced in 1934.
Well, the other hub of openly gay nightlife was Chicago, and the period was from the late 1920s to around 1934 before the moralists cracked down and closed down the clubs and halted the balls. How serendipitious is that? ;)
So I decided that this planned one-shot had to be expanded into a series. It’s just too good with the timeline fitting! Note: the name given to the fad was the ‘Pansy Craze’, and other terms used for homosexuals were ‘fairy’ and ‘queer’, sometimes used by gays themselves. The term ‘gay’ was used by homosexuals but was not public knowledge at the time.
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