Walking the Queer City

Walking the Queer City Kevin Murphy In June 1994, hundreds of thousands of queer people gathered in New York City to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an event commonly held to have sparked the modern lesbian and gay rights movement. Conceived as a massive show of unity, Stonewall 25-the name given to the celebration by its organiz- ers-actually gave rise to a series of vigorous debates concerning both the meaning of the queer past and the direction of the queer future. Queers of all kinds, representing a diverse array of interests and perspectives, staked their claim to the Stonewall legacy and argued about the political usefulness of a memory of that event to support a num- ber of diverse, and of ten conflicting, agendas: many assimilationist activists, for example, saw Stonewall as the beginning of their move ment and embedded its legacy in a campaign for "human rights"; other activists from the left remembered the Stonewall uprising as an act of violent opposition to sexual hegemony, emphasizing a tradition of queer difference and advocating strategies of resistance to "mainstream" American values. Stonewall proved to be a remarkably muta- ble symbol, a potent queer public memory whose meaning and use fulness remained open to interpretation. The contestation of the Stonewall legacy suggests that queer public history has vital importance beyond the academy, and that an understanding of history informs current debates on sexual politics and identities. In fact, as Lisa Duggan and others have argued, queer history, often neglected by mainstream historians and rendered invisible in public discourse, has enjoyed a strong tradition of community support and engagement.' This tradition certainly extended to the Stonewall 25 celebrations, where historians of queer life (including those who do not work within academia) presented their work in a variety of public venues. In formats ranging from exhibitions, including the comprehensive and extraordinarily well-attended "Becoming Visible" at the New York Public Library, to historical drama and public lectures, queer public history projects were ubiquitous, at least for RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 62:195-201 1995 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/1995/62/195/465277/ddrhr_1995_62_195.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 22 January 2018 I96 / RADICAL HISTORY R WIEW a moment in June 1994. These projects not only dealt with Stonewall, but also encompassed a broader perspective. Many historians used this opportunity to challenge the reification of Stonewall as the pivotal event in queer American history and to render visible the richness and diversity of queer life in prestonewall America. As a means of promoting a broader understanding of the queer past, some historians literally took to the streets, presenting their work in public and nontraditional places. "Windows on Gay Life," a project organized by the National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay Culture, presented a series of storefront exhibitions on Christopher Street, many of which addressed, 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgen- der" history. The "Windows" exhibits asked passers-by to look at a queer neighborhood in new ways by linking familiar sites of contem- porary commerce and social life to the cultural and historical richness of gay and lesbian experience. Some of these linkages were explicit: George Chauncey's "The Life Cafeteria: A 1930s Gay Rendevouz" and Robert Sember's "queer sexual history" of the Hudson River piers, for example, were linked to specific sites in the Christopher Street neighborhood? Similarly accessible public exhibitions on queer history were organized by historians working independently: proprietors of a gay- owned hardware store in Chelsea, for example, mounted a small photo exhibit on Stonewall in its display window. For a brief while, queer history seemed to be omnipresent in lower Manhattan. Some public history projects, in the form of self-guided walking touls, explored the urban landscape itself as a site of queer history, essentially appropriating the city of New York as museum. At least three such tours were produced to coincide with Stonewall 25: A Guide to Lesbian & Gay New York Historical Landmarks (Organization of Lesbian + Gay Architects and Designers, 1994); "Queer Old New York: A Historic Walking Tour Based on the Book Gay New York" by George Chauncey, Village Voice 39:29 (21 June 1994); and Daniel Hurewitz's "Walk on the Wild Side," Out (July/August 1994). Although the tours differ in terms of authorial perspectives and historical periods, all explicitly confront the Stonewall legacy and make claims about the present usefulness of a public engagement with queer history, in general, and queer New York, in particular. But how successfully do these tours support such claims? What is to be gained by walking the queer historical city (as opposed to reading about it)? How effectively do tours interpret the urban landscape? None of the tours grapples fully with such questions of content and methodology, but they all point to the enormous potential of the walking tour format for engaging public audiences in queer history. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/1995/62/195/465277/ddrhr_1995_62_195.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 22 January 2018 WALKING THE QUEER CITY/197 George Chauncey’s ”Queer Old New York,” like the book on which it is based, concerns itself primarily with the history of gay male social life in Manhattan, although some attention is paid to lesbian history as well. The tour is organized both chronologically and geographically: the Lower East Side in 1890s and 1900s; Harlem and Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s; and Midtown and Chelsea (with special attention to Times Square) in the 1930s. The tour centers almost exclusively on sites of social life such as bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and bathhouses. As published in the Village Voice, the tour makes for a compelling document. Chauncey’s introductory text succinctly addresses several of the important arguments made in his book and the extensive map and accompanying captions point to the richness and variety of gay social life before Stonewall. For an audience little familiar with queer history, this map might well have reve- latory power, something Chauncey clearly desires when he exhorts his audience to “[ulse this map to reclaim the gay past-and to defeat the silence that kept it from you for so long.” Yet although ”Queer Old New YoW-as a published document- argues powerfully against the invisibility of queer history, it functions less well as a guide to a substantive walking tour. The fundamental problem here is not the quality or nature of the scholarship on which the tour draws; Chauncey’s extensively researched and deftly argued book would certainly support several tours. On the contrary, the problem is that much of thematic complexity and theoretical sophisti- cation of Chauncey’s written academic history is missing from the experiential walking tour. Whereas Gay New York effectively chal- lenges the myth of the “historical closet,” provides an insightful and complicated analysis of changing gay identities over time, and argues persuasively that (homo)sexual identities and communities were forged in relationship to the larger economic and cultural develop ment of New York City, “Queer Old New York” provides little room for such context or nuance. The walker encounters the thirty-six sites on the tour with minimal interpretation and no strong conceptual framework for linking individual sites together. Moreover, the tour does not take full advantage of its unique format: historical informa- tion is imposed onto the map of the city with almost no analysis of material culture or attention to the experience of the walker. Because the tour does not ask its audience to look for evidence embedded in the physical city, the benefit of this kind of experienceas opposed to reading history, for exampleremains unclear. Chauncey’s treatment of Columbia Hall (at Bowery and Fifth Street) exemplifies some of the tour‘s contextual and methodological Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-pdf/1995/62/195/465277/ddrhr_1995_62_195.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 22 January 2018 198/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW problems. The caption for this site reads simply, "New York's best- known 'resort for degenerates' in the 1890s, this dance hall was nick- named 'Paresis Hall' (paresis is a medical term for insanity), Gay clubs rented its private rooms to socialize." In Gay New York, Chauncey examines Columbia Hall-as well as other gay Bowery resorts-in relation to working-class saloon culture on the Lower East Side and argues that immigrant men's use of this space "was emblematic of the way gay men appropriated and transformed the practices and institutions of their natal cultures as they forged their The tour, however, fails to enlighten its audience about this process of cultural appropriation and transformation, in that it does not interpret the Bowery as historical immigrant neighborhood. This lack of contextualization is compounded by the fact that Columbia Hall no longer exists. With no primary site to interpret, the tour might have directed attention to surrounding structures to situate Columbia Hall within the framework of working-class social life on the Bowery. The tour could have utilized extant structures to make other points as well. For example, the proximity of Cooper-Union, an institution associated with New York's elite, to Columbia Hall points to a spatial overlap, and related social interaction, between working-class immigrants and upper- and middle-class native-born New Yorkers. Such connections are integral to an interpretation of gay Bowery resorts that were frequented by gay men of all classes, a point Chauncey makes in his Substantive analysis of the built environment is also missing, curi- ously enough, from A Guide to Lesbian and Gay N;ao York Historical Landmarks, put together by Preservation + History Committee of the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers.

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