An analysis of historical scholarship focused on gays and lesbians from 1983-2003.

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Haley Shoemaker
Prof. Clarke
Introduction to Historical Methods
Queers in History: a Work in Progress
The years from when John D’Emilio published his influential study of the history of gays
and lesbians Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities in 1983 to when Vicki Eaklor published her
thorough survey of the topic Queer America in 2008 has seen a significant growth in the number
of works published on the subject of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender history. In fact, the
subject has developed from being fully contained in a mere handful of works to becoming the
subject of hundreds of books covering different aspects of Queer Studies from different
academic perspectives. However, so far few of these newer works are written by historians to
engage in historiographical debate. Indeed, despite the strides the LGBT community has made in
those intervening twenty-five years, GLBT history seems to lack status as a subject for serious
historical study. The books that are written by historians, including the three I compare here,
draw upon the few works that came before, embracing them while adding more voices and more
details to the narrative, rather than focusing on where their historical opinions differ. While
Queer Studies have made progress overall, in the field of history significant work remains to be
done.
The gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1970s stressed the silence and isolation
of its members before said movement, but as John D’Emilio points out in his introduction, this
isolation seems unlikely given the short time in which large numbers of participants were
mobilized. Also, this movement minimized the importance of the reformers who came before.
D’Emilio proposes that, while the earlier movements between 1890 and 1970 were more

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cautious, they laid the groundwork for the more active movements that followed. D’Emilio also
poses the question: why did it take so long for gays and lesbians to begin fighting for their
rights? He points out that both women and African Americans had earlier movements. He
connects this lag to what he perceives as the transformation of same-sex relationships from an
act that was frowned up to an identity that was frowned upon. This transformation took place in
the 19th
century, and before that point, says D’Emilio, while those who were caught performing
homosexual acts were severely punished, they were not seen as intrinsically different from
others. 1
This change from an act to an identity was aided by the shift of population from the
country to the cities that took place in the late 19th
and early 20th
centuries, which brought larger
numbers of people together than ever before. Also, the medical profession’s classification of
homosexuality as a disorder until 1973 again placed the focus not on the act but on the actor.
These two factors brought large numbers of gays and lesbians into contact, created the idea that
they differed from others in very basic ways, and paved the way for some of them to reclaim that
identity and use it as a way to distinguish themselves. This happened again in World War II,
when sexual segregation combined with a desperate need for manpower to create a climate of
tolerance, if not acceptance. D’Emilio outlines this as a critical turning point in the movement for
equal rights, though its effects were dampened by the Red Scare of the 1950s.
Without the work of earlier reformers in creating a gay urban subculture, the 1970s
movements would not have been possible. D’Emilio’s work puts forth a number of ideas that
became conventional wisdom, though at the time they had gone unstated and unexamined. His
1
John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority In the United States,
1940-1970, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 35-54.

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sources include an array of newspapers and documents that recount the story first hand2
, as well
as drawing extensively from the book Gay History of America by Jonathan Katz.3
Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities marks a beginning of serious scholarship about the gay rights
movement, particularly the start of historical scholarship.
Between 1890 and 1940 a complex and vivid gay subculture developed in New York
City, and this subculture is exhaustively chronicled in George Chauncey’s Gay New York. This
subculture has been ignored by both historians and the public in favor of the conventional
wisdom that there was no gay subculture before World War II. Chauncey expands upon the
earlier work of D’Emilio here, pointing to the importance of earlier gay liberation movements
and questioning the popular notions of isolation.
In particular, Chauncey seeks to disprove three “myths” about prewar sexuality, at least
in regard to New York City: the myth of invisibility, the myth of isolation, and the myth of
internalization. The myth of isolation states that the hostility of a heterocentric society
successfully prevented the development of a gay subculture, and that gay men led solitary lives
prior to WWII. Chauncey again points to his evidence of a gay scene filled with vitality and
enthusiasm in New York well before WWII. The myth of invisibility holds that if there was a
gay subculture, it was hidden and therefore inaccessible. Chauncey counters this by pointing out
that the gay population of New York was extremely visible; they help public drag balls that
attracted hundreds of spectators, they frequented the same saloons and dance halls as the
bohemians, and flaunted the “red ties, bleached hair and the era’s other insignia of
2
Peter Filene, "Review: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 ," The Journal of American History , 70, no. 3 (1983): 735-36,
3
Katz, Jonathan. Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In the U.S.A. : a Documentary History. Rev. ed.
New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Meridian, 1992.

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homosexuality.”4
The myth of internalization says that gay men internalized society’s view of
themselves as evil, sick and sinful. Different writers postulated this to different extents, and
Chauncey himself seems cautious to say that this is untrue. He seems instead to hint that the case
for internalization has been overstated. He does say plainly that in New York, there was a culture
of pride and resistance to prejudice much earlier than in the rest of the United States. In fact,
Chaucey believed that there was more freedom in New York before the war than after it, at least
until Stonewall. He also believes that similar gay worlds existed in other American cities, and
that further research will uncover them.
One of the main foci of Gay New York is the interplay of class within the gay culture of
New York. In fact, the author attributes much of the prejudice of the time to class difference, one
of the more controversial views of the book.5
He also focuses intensely on gender roles in this
time period, and the interplay of the “normal” man and the effeminate “fairy.”6
Here again we
can see him building upon the work of D’Emilio, as his entire argument is built around the idea
that before the 19th
century, homosexuality did not exist. Instead, declares Chauncey, men who
were receptive to other men were viewed, essentially, as women, and the men who were sleeping
with them were seen as unremarkable, though the act itself was seen as evil. These gender roles
became intricately tied to the polar view of homosexual and heterosexual, which is why they can
still be seen today. The development of the concept of homosexuality as an inescapable identity
created opposition between the two, thus creating the spectrum view of sexuality that prevailed
to the present. Chauncey believes that this grew primarily in the 30s, 40s and 50s; here,
4
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, And the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940,
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), 3.
5
Clayton Koppes, "A Golden Age in Gay Gotham," Review in American History, 24, no. 2 (1996): 304-09.
6
Randalph Trumbach, "The Third Gender in Twentieth Century America," Journal of Social History, 30, no. 2
(1996): 497-501.

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Chauncey deviates from D’Emilio’s earlier work, expanding upon it considerably and placing
the development of said polarity much later.
Gay New York also examines the shifting meanings of various terms in the gay world,
and how language was used to create a space in which gay men could exist.7
Here Chauncey
draws from Michel Foucalt’s The History of Sexuality, another notably groundbreaking work.8
While D’Emilio made passing references to this, Chauncey goes in to considerably more detail.
Interestingly, he seems to break with his own argument against presentism, and uses modern
language to describe sexual acts in a way that seems to bypass the violence and control that were
often present in these encounters.9
Gay New York builds upon the ideas of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities while
stressing the importance of the culture before 1940 in the same way that D’Emilio stressed the
importance of the movements that took place before the 1970s. Chauncey draws upon an array of
primary sources to produce this wonderfully detailed work, including various archives and
personal journals. He makes his arguments very successfully in regards to New York City,
though at times he seems a little hasty to say that the rest of the country must have been the same
way. In Gay New York, the expansive of GLBT historical study can be seen, as this book was
part of proliferation of serious scholarly works on the topic, though this was one of the few
written by a historian.
Vicki Eaklor’s book Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th
Century bypasses
entirely the issue of the creation of the homosexual/heterosexual binary, choosing instead to
focus on the developments within the homosexual “community” that was created by that divide.
This volume, meant to be a comprehensive look at the topic more than to advance a theory about
7
Chauncey, Gay New York, 1-6.
8
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
9
Ramón Gutiérrez, "Mapping the Erotic Body: Gay New York," American Quarterly, 48, no. 3 (1996): 500-06.

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the nature of GLBT history, nevertheless strives to avoid being a progressive look at the civil
rights victories of the 20th
Century, and also to avoid a regressive view of the prejudices and
injustices GLBT people suffered during this time. This book reflects the widening of our
community, as the simple focus on the “homosexuals,” or gays and lesbians, shifts to include the
narratives of bisexuals and the transgendered. This is symptomatic of the movement for gay
rights as a whole. Indeed, over the last twenty years, “gay rights” has become “LGBT rights.”
Bisexuality and the various forms of gender expression that make up transgenderism were
gradually accepted into the larger equal rights movement, and they correspondingly became the
subject of academic study, though their study is very much still under development.
While both Chauncey and D’Emilio tried to “draw out” the gay history from the
surrounding American narrative in which it was hidden, Eaklor seeks to set that same history
back into its American context, to show how fully “GLBT history” and “American History” are
interconnected. She takes time to compare the study of GLBT people to other examples of both
social history and minority history, this putting the work firmly in an establish historiographical
context. While her focus differs from that of Chauncey and D’Emilio, she references and cites
each of them frequently, and puts forth no historiographical arguments that conflict with theirs,
instead adding their voices to the larger narrative she presents. She features an extensive
bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, and synthesizes what seems to be every
major work in the field into a good overview of a century of history.
Where D’Emilio claims that the gay liberation movement of the 1970s overlooks the
movements of the 1940s through the 1960s, Chauncey goes even further, claiming that historians
overlook a thriving world of gay men in New York from 1890 to 1940. Between the two works,
it seems that the only gay rights activists the 1970s leaders admired were each other! Chauncey’s

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Gay New York is a detailed study of the gay life of New York that contrasts nicely with the very
broad scope of both Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Queer America. Chauncey and
D’Emilio agree on the importance of the Cold War era in the history of American gay culture,
the “one step forward, two steps back” that took place between the relative freedom of wartime
and the subsequent oppression of the Red Scare. Eaklor draws on them both for her chapter on
the subject.
All three authors agree that one reason GLBT history as a whole went unexamined for so
long is that the stigma associated with homosexuality stretched to include its study; it was not
considered a “suitable” subject for serious research. To write a graduate thesis or a doctoral
dissertation in Queer Studies, like Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies before it, was thought a
quick way to end a career before it began. Another interesting congruence between Gay New
York and Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is their agreement that before the early 20th
century, there was no division of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.”
D’Emilio broke new ground in putting forth a serious historical work about gay and
lesbian social history. Chauncey, writing 11 years later, cites heavily from the work of D’Emilio,
and expands upon his ideas. Vicki Eaklor, writing her short survey of GLBT history in 2008,
cites extensively from both D’Emilio and Chauncey, as well as the wave of other books that
sprang up in the years following D’Emilio’s work in 1983. From this network of mutual citation
the scholar can gather that the historical study of the LGBT community is still extremely limited,
with a mere handful of solid, credible books written by historians so far. “However, The
Committee of Gay and Lesbian History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association…
reported that there are more than eighty dissertations completed or in progress in the field…”10
10
Vicki Eaklor, Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century, (Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Press,
2008), 3.

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Each writer drew extensively from the works that came before, but each was able to expand the
narrative to include more voices, more details, more connection to the human tragedies and
triumphs that have gone largely unexamined for so long.

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Works Cited
Brunetti, Korey. 2008. "Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century." Reference &
User Services Quarterly 48, no. 2: 201-202. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost
(accessed April 19, 2012).
Bullough, Vern. "Review: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual
Minority In the United States, 1940-1970." The Wisconsin Magazine of History. 67. no. 4
(1984): 298-99.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, And the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority In
the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Eaklor, Vicki. Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century. Westport, Conneticut:
Greenwood Press, 2008.
Evans, Betty S. 2008. "Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century." School Library
Journal 54, no. 8 (2008): 142. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed April
21, 2012).
Filene, Peter. "Review: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 ," The Journal of American History , vol. 70,
no. 3 (1983): 735-36.
Gutiérrez, Ramón. "Mapping the Erotic Body: Gay New York." American Quarterly. 48. no. 3
(1996): 500-06.
Katz, Jonathan. Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In the U.S.A. : a Documentary
History. Rev. ed. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Meridian, 1992.

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Koppes, Clayton. "A Golden Age in Gay Gotham." Review in American History. 24. no. 2
(1996): 304-09.
"Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century." Review in School Library Journal 55,
(2009): 42. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed April 19, 2012).
Trumbach, Randalph. "The Third Gender in Twentieth Century America." Journal of Social
History. 30. no. 2 (1996): 497-501.
Williams, Walter. "Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority
In the United States, 1940-1970." Review in The American Historical Review.vol. 88. no.
5 (1983): 1341-42.