GAYS AND LESBIANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON

The 1930s marked a particularly important moment for the transformation of sexuality within the United States. While the 1920s, with its economic and sexual exuberance, significantly rejected Victorian notions of sexuality, such changes were seen as much more threatening to the social order with the economic collapse that began in 1929. The prohibition era ushered in an increased visibility of homosexuality that peaked in the early years of the Depression. Indeed, on the theater and cabaret stages in large cities, in a number of Hollywood films, and in popular novels, implicit and explicit images of gay men and lesbians reached a wide audience. In speakeasies in New York City's Greenwich Village, nightclubs in Harlem, cabarets in Times Square, jazz clubs on Chicago's South Side, upper- and middle-class men and women enjoyed the spectacle of drag performers and mingled with overtly gay men, lesbians, and transvestites. During prohibition, these commercialized venues coupled sexual and legal transgressions that gave visibility and acceptability to homosexuality as an exotic feature of urban nightlife.

However, as the Depression deepened, homosexuality increasingly symbolized the prohibition era's excess and frivolity that undermined traditional values. Whereas homosexuality was seen as an entertaining diversion during the 1920s, by the late 1930s it was viewed much more as a threat to social and economic stability.

The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 ushered in new state agencies that regulated the sale of alcohol and set laws regarding the activities of bars, restaurants, and cabarets. Often these laws required owners to maintain an "orderly" environment or risk the loss of their liquor licenses. While the definition of orderly was often left vague, these laws had a severe impact on gay and lesbian sociability because the presence of overtly homosexual patrons was taken as indicative of a disorderly establishment. Police, with the backing of city officials and community leaders, raided such establishments and closed them down. Thus, these agencies became increasingly powerful in controlling the nature of social life in the 1930s, and served as vehicles in the larger campaigns to police homosexuality in the city.

In 1930, the Hayes Office, which was established as a self-monitoring agency set up by the film industry in 1922, instituted a strict Production Code that censored a range of behaviors on screen. Made even more stringent in 1934 under pressure from the Catholic organization the Legion of Decency, the Production Code censored any film that portrayed, among other things, cohabitation, seduction, violence, nudity, and, more specifically, any references to homosexuality. While homosexuality was expressed on screen through highly coded images, overt references were impossible until the 1960s. Lesbians were often coded as masculine through clothing, such as Greta Garbo's famous attire in Queen Christina (1933), in which the queen passionately kisses another woman on screen. More often, suggestions of lesbianism held tragic implications, where homosexuality was coupled with destructive and deadly power. Films such as Girls in Uniform (1931) and These Three (1936), based on the hugely successful 1934 Broadway play The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman, take place in all-girl boarding schools, and end with the tragic death of the lesbian character.

Films suggested the gay nature of male characters through effeminate behavior and the association of these characters with the seedy underworld of urban culture. Films such as The Warrior's Husband (1933), Sailor's Luck (1933), and Wonder Bar (1934), which showed two men dancing together, implied gay characters through feminine body language and gestures. Other films, such as Little Ceasar (1931) and Blood Money (1933), portrayed suggestive relationships between mobsters and their sidekicks. In these coded portrayals, gay men and lesbians were increasingly depicted as tragic victims set within the margins of society.

Unlike Hollywood producers, publishers were less constrained by censorship. Radcylff Hall's The Well of Loneliness was the most popular homosexual novel of the 1930s, a popularity promoted when its publisher was taken to court on obscenity charges in 1929 and ultimately won on appeal. Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) explicitly portray relationships between lesbians in the expatriate community of Paris. These works have become central to the modernist canon of American literature. Publishers of more popular literature produced a number of novels with lesbian themes. While novels such as Hellcat (1934), Scorpion (1933), Love Like a Shadow (1935), Queer Patterns (1935), and Pity for Women (1937) preached a moral disapproval of homosexuality, other works such as Gale Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting (1935), Sheila Donisthorpe's Loveliest of Friends (1931), and Elizabeth Craigin's Either Is Love (1937) presented less judgmental portrayals of lesbian relationships, even as most of these novels ended with the tragic death or suicide of the main character.

Publishers were also producing a number of gay male novels that promoted or proscribed homosexuality. Popular works such as Blair Niles's Strange Brother (1931), Andrew Tellier's Twilight Men (1931), Robert Scully's The Scarlet Pansy (1932), Kennilworth Bruce's Goldie (1933), Richard Meeker's Better Angel (1933), and Lew Levenson's Butterfly Man (1934) brought stories of gay male experience to a large audience. While these works portrayed the complexities of homosexual experience, they, like their lesbian counterparts, often concluded with the tragic demise of the protagonist. However, since these works were circulated in stores and rental libraries in many large cities, they conveyed a homosexual sensibility that promoted a shared identity for the men who read them. Indeed, many of these novels, as well as films, promoted the formation of a gay and lesbian subculture where such individuals began to see themselves as part of a larger group.

Research on sexuality grew significantly in the 1930s as a number of institutions conducted and published studies investigating the nature of sexuality and homosexuality in particular. La Forest Potter's Strange Loves: A Study of Sexual Abnormalities and James Segal's Sex Life in America, along with a number of other studies, represent the first wide-ranging, multi-institutional effort to study and analyze sexuality in the United States. While some of these studies were sympathetic to homosexuality, such as the exhaustive study Sex Variants, directed by George Henry and begun in 1935, most were efforts to cure sexual abnormalities that the researchers often explicitly interpreted as a social disease. Concerns for sexuality entered into many discussions about migrant labor and homelessness. For example, the writers of Twenty-Thousand Homeless Men: A Study of Unemployed Men in Chicago Shelters (1936) suggested that one cause for the men's unemployment was a lack of normal sexual experiences with women. These studies reflect the era's concern with gender and sexual abnormalities, which were increasingly viewed as a crucial social problem and a threat to the already fragile family and gender stability brought on by the Depression.

Eventually these studies began to circulate within legal and legislative venues, effecting the creation of a whole new set of crimes focused on sexual deviancy. The term sex crime emerged in newspapers and court rooms alike, encompassing a range of behaviors, including rape, child molestation, indecent exposure, and homosexuality. The sex crime laws set up the first extensive legislative efforts that criminalized homosexuality within a broader category of violent crimes. By the late 1930s, homosexuals were increasingly the target of violence and scapegoats for social campaigns meant to "clean up" the moral standards of the community.

GAYS AND LESBIANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON

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