The Great Depression, Emasculation, and the Crackdown on Queer Culture

I recently found some notes I had taken two years ago while reading George Chauncey’s “Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Marriage Equality”.  In a future post, I hope to revisit that book and tell that history in a two-page article, accessible to middle-school students, clearly describing the historical contexts of shifting understandings of marriage since the 1850's.  For now, here is some interesting history that shows, among other things, that history is not always a story of progress, but simply of continuous change; that understandings of gender are sometimes intimately connected to politics and propaganda; and that hard times often lead to fear, which often leads to prejudice.   

The first time I encountered the thriving world of 1920’s LGBT culture was as an 18-year old completely obsessed with the European avant-garde.  However, I didn’t stop and wonder, “wait a second, these public displays of homosexuality were accepted?”  I had to wait to wonder this until I was 27 and spent a summer immersed in Hemingway, who described in homophobic terms the gay men he ran into in 1920’s Europe.  (Hemingway remains one of my favorite authors: while a misogynist and homophobe in many ways, he also loved Gertrude Stein, who wrote that during their many conversations they often talked about homosexuality.  He was a complicated man). 

A year later I was reading the incredible literature of the Harlem Renaissance, which is filled with gay characters.  It was clear that not only the European night life but urban American life in the 1920’s was far more accepting of queer culture than what I had been led to believe by my knowledge of how gays were treated during the postwar years.  During the Jazz Age Americans from many walks of life had openly enjoyed the fruits of queer cosmopolitan culture: not only were some of the most popular entertainers of the day quite flamboyant, there was a general acceptance in some cities of drag queens and kings.  What had happened?

In 1927, a year in which a wildly popular lesbian drama was on Broadway, New York banned all portrayals of homosexuality on the stage.  The law was part of a wider crackdown on homosexuality stimulated by a crisis of masculinity experienced during the Great Depression.  Across the country, men who were no longer able to support their families fled in shame.  It was not rare for men in this position to take their own lives.  When the New Deal was implemented in 1933, it entered the emasculation crisis by firing working women who were married in order to open up spaces for men.  The first major New Deal program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), was a direct attempt by the government to offer men their masculinity back: the propaganda for the CCC showed tough, determined men engaged in physical labor, and it's slogan was "We can take it!"  Over 9 years, 2.5 million men participated, receiving 30$ a month, as well as the psychological benefit of feeling masculine once again. 

On the surface, such a program seems to have nothing to do with demonizing gay men.  But from the notes I took on Chauncey, it appears that the masculinization projects of the Great Depression had this effect, either purposefully or as a by-product of looking down on effeminate men..  During the Jazz Age, the effeminate man and the gay man were not publicly perceived as posing a threat to masculinity or to straightness: straight men mingling with queer men was not considered unusual or problematic.    

I would like to know more about how that perceived threat to masculinity arose, as well as more about the psychology of that threat, especially considering that I see it all the time in the homophobia in the communities and classrooms I work in.  I find it fascinating that historical shifts can so easily throw society into fits of fear and prejudice... or into openness.  I sometimes feel that there is a proliferation of lessons examining the contexts in which fear and oppression arise.  It would invaluable for students to analyze moments where great openness occurs as well.  The history of how gay marriage came to be conceivable, and then possible, would be an analysis of both moments. 

"We can take it!" A photo from the CCC propaganda campaign by Wilfred J. Mead.