Walking the Queer City

Kevin Murphy

In June 1994, hundreds of thousands of queer people gathered in City to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an event commonly held to have sparked the modern les- bian 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 per- spectives, 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 "main- stream" 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 under- standing of history informs current debates on sexual politics and identities. In fact, as Lisa Duggan and others have argued, queer his- tory, often neglected by mainstream historians and rendered invisible in public discourse, has enjoyed a strong tradition of community sup- port 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, includ- ing the comprehensive and extraordinarily well-attended "Becoming Visible" at the New York Public Library, to historical drama and pub- lic lectures, queer public history projects were ubiquitous, at least for

RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 62:195-201 1995

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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 , 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 neigh- borhood? 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 his- torical 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.

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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 les- bian history as well. The tour is organized both chronologically and geographically: the Lower East Side in 1890s and 1900s; Harlem and in the 1920s and 1930s; and Midtown and Chelsea (with special attention to ) 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 audi- ence 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 , “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 and Fifth Street) exemplifies some of the tour‘s contextual and methodological

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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. This tour, which shares the same regional organization as "Queer Old New York" but covers a broader historical period (1890s-l980s), takes the walker not only to sites of social life, but also to the residences of famous queer and queer-friendly city dwellers, as well as to a few "landmarks" created by gay and lesbian designers. This tour, although it suggests the rich historical tapestry of queer New York City and points to the activities of some of its famous denizens, lacks thematic focus and in-depth interpretation. Unfortunately, the tour creators do not take advantage of their knowledge of architecture and design. They show us where queer things happened, but provide little insight into what sites and structures can tell us. Moreover, the creators of A Guide to Lesbian & Gay New York Historical Landmarks point to the contributions of lesbians and gay men in designing and shaping the urban landscape, but neglect to

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explore the meaning of such contributions. Is the walker to assume the existence of a relationship between sexual identity and aesthet- ics, or that queers carved out an occupational niche in architecture and design, or is the point simply that certain structures in New York City were designed by queers? Instead of explicit consideration of such questions, the walker is offered only anecdote, as evidenced by the following excerpt from this guide: "This elegant 1950 town- house, among the earliest International Style dwellings in New York, was designed by the controversial architect Philip Johnson." The use of boldface here, according to the guide, "indicates an indi- vidual's being lesbian or gay": a connection between Johnson's sexu- al identity and the structure he designed is invoked, but the mean- ing of this connection remains unexamined. "Walk on the Wild Side," journalist Daniel Hurewitz's Stonewall- era tour of Greenwich Village, is in some ways the most successful tour among the three. Culled from Hurewitz's larger work, in Their Footsteps: Six Walks Through New York's Gay t3 Lesbian History (New York Footsteps Publishing, 19941, this tour draws generally on recent historical work on queer political, social, and cultural life of late 1960s and early 1970s New York. Although it too frequently relies on anec- dotes about the famous (several of whom, including Emma Goldman and Frank O'Hara, predate the tours stated time frame), "Walk on the Wild Side" does present a compelling, if limited, portrait of queer urban neighborhood at a critical historical juncture. Hurewitz succeeds in illuminating some of the ways in which the personal/political liber- ationist activism that followed the Stonewall uprising manifested itself spatially: from the assertion of sexual identity and resistance in public spaces, the streets, parks, and piers of the Village; to sites of political organization such as the Gay Activist Alliance firehouse, the Women's Liberation House, and the Headquarters; to the post-Stonewall boom in the opening of overtly queer establishments on Christopher Street and along the Hudson River. Although "Walk on the Wild Side" illustrates some of the poten- tial of queer walking tours, it is limited by its primarily celebratory approach; the intense gendered, racial, and ideological conflicts that characterized the post-Stonewall queer movement, for example, are glossed over or ignored. Moreover, Hurewitz does not adequately address the role that nonfamous people played in forming Greenwich Village as a queer community, an urban environment that fostered the development of a major political movement. The limited success of "Walk on the Wild Side" is directly related to its methodology. Unlike the other tours under review, this one

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was conceived and developed as a tour to be walked. Its narrower spatial and temporal focus not only provides it with thematic coher- ence, but also makes it more manageable for the walker. Hurewitz’s attention to audience concerns is evident elsewhere. He includes fewer sites but more extensive interpretation. He addresses his audi- ence directly and often provides a spatial orientation to sites: for example, he identifies Washington Square as a ”gay space ... lay- ered with gay history” and, to support this assertion, situates the walker at the center of the park and leads her/him on a clockwise tour of the queer historical sites on the park’s perimeter. On occa- sion, Hurewitz even asks his audience to examine material culture. In his interpretation of the West Village gay male bar ’, for example, he calls attention to the peephole on the side door and explains its meaning in relation to discriminatory laws prohibiting serving liquor to homosexuals: by looking through this peephole, the bar’s proprietors determined whether or not a prospective cus- tomer was deemed butch enough to avoid unwanted police inter- vention. “Walk on the Wild Side” would have benefited from even more of this kind of attention to audience.

Undoubtedly, the limitations of these tours stem in part from the con- straints of format: all three were designed to be brief, easily accessible and to require little expense on the part of the audience-important goals for works of public history. Yet, as “Walk on the Wild Side” begins to illustrate, a successful tour need not require pages of maps and text. In fact, the walking tour format lends itself to brevity; it seems unreasonable to expect participants to spend more than a few hours, or to canvas an entire city, on any given tour. Given such prac- tical constraints, creators of walking tours would be well advised to provide insightful, substantive, and materially oriented interpretation of a limited number of sites, thereby minimizing the physical demands placed on the audience and maximizing the interpretive potential of each site visited. In organizing walking tours, public his- torians must keep in mind that they are asking their audience to explore the queer city firsthand and should pay attention to the unique qualities of this type of experience. Each stop on a tour, there fore, should fully exploit the audience’s engagement with the urban landscape and should examine the sites and structures of the city as primary evidence, evidence that conveys important information about the development of sexual identities and sexual communities. The most successful walking tours, then, would make focused, his- torical arguments rooted in the physical environment, as opposed to

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simply bringing the audience to places associated with queer events or lives. The walking tour format, rather than imposing constraints on the public historian, offers a unique opportunity for the exploration of important issues central to gay and lesbian history and provides an effective vehicle for bringing these issues to a broad audience. Successful walking tours could be organized around any number of compelling themes. The following are but a few suggestions. A tour might focus on the dynamic process of creating queer urban neighbor- hoods, with particular attention to spatial differentiation along class, race, and gender lines. Another tour might trace changes in the use of public and private space by lesbians and gay men, examining the ways in which queer people created and recreated sites of queer social life within the larger city. Such a tour might deal explicitly with gender, comparing and contrasting the different ways that queer women and men have occupied the city over time and taking into consideration the unequal access to public space granted to men and women. Yet another tour could examine the edges of the city, making connections between marginalized sites of and illicit entertainment and the formation of queer identities and communities. Finally, public historians who create walking tours might find ways to further involve the audience in the process of historical interpreta- tion. An ideal tour might ask walkers to draw their own conclusions from the queer landscape and provide some mechanism for incorpe rating audience insights into a constantly evolving tour. In addition, this tour could integrate the process of walking the queer city into the substance of the tour by encouraging walkers to consider their own experience of traversing the city, their own identities as both insiders and outsiders in contemporary urban culture, allowing them to locate themselves within the context of the historical city. By framing walk- ing tours in these kinds of ways, historians would further the rich tra- dition of a broad engagement in queer history and invigorate produc- tive discourses between academic historians and queer publics.

Notes The author wishes to thank the RHR editors and Jane McNamara for their helpful comments and editorial assistance. 1. Lisa Duggan, "History'sGay Ghetto: The Contradictions of Growth in Lesbian and Gay History" in Presenting the Past, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 281-90. 2. 'Windows on Gay Life" was presented 1-30 June 1994. See Windows on Gay Life Exhibition Guide, Joe E. Jeffreys,Exhibition Curator. Published by the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center's National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History. 3. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-2940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994),43. 4. Ibid., 42-45.

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