George Chauncey Quotes

By holding an annual drag ball on Thanksgiving, gay men both built on the day's tradition of masquerade and expanded the inversion it implied. On a day that celebrated the family, they assembled to celebrate their membership in a gay family.

God made them, wrote one man who said his son was homosexual. They did not choose their status. ... It is not a medical matter. ... You know there are quite as many people among them as among your so called 'normal.' ... Let your campagin remove the penal laws which make these 'diseased' people a prey for mackmailers. Give them recognition and let them live their lives.'

Henry Gerber, writing in 1932 under the pseudonym Parisex, responded to an article in The Modern Thinker that condemned homosexuality. "Is not the psychiatrist again putting the cart before the horse in saying that homosexuality is a symptom of the neurotic style of life?" he insisted. "Would it not sound more natural to say that the homosexual is made neurotic because his style of life is beset by thousands of dangers?

As Rotundo, Donald Yacovone, and other historians have argued, the men involved in such same-sex relationships should not retrospectively be classified as homosexual, since no concept of the homosexual existed in their culture and they did not organize their emotional lives as homosexuals; many of them were also on intimate terms with women and went on to marry. Nonetheless, the same historians persist in calling such men heterosexual, as if that concept did exist in the early nineteenth century.

As striking as the existence of a male beauty contest is the humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone with which Variety reported it. It gently ridicules the contestants, but it ridicules even more the "Coney Island dowagers" serving on the jury who hadn't a clue about what the sophisticated reporter saw transpiring, and seems to take glee in the exasperation of the chief judge, who did know what was going on.