1/3/2017 Gale Virtual Reference Library - Document - Gay Men's Leisure Lifestyles http://0-go.galegroup.com.iii.sonoma.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T003&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=SingleTab&searchType=AdvancedSearch… 1/4 Gay Men's Leisure Lifestyles Don Romesburg Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America. Ed. Gary S. Cross. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. p388391. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: Page 388 GAY MEN'S LEISURE LIFESTYLES The importance of leisure to the development of gay male identities and networks throughout the past century cannot be overstated. Men have come together in parks, bars, bathhouses, and bookstores to have sex, make friends, and build communities. Leisure, manhood, and homosexuality have coalesced through intersections with capitalism, urbanization, technology, and law. Page 389 | Top of Article Capitalism: Production, Reproduction, and "Excessive" Recreation In "Capitalism and Gay Identity," John D'Emilio observes that the rise of wage labor and commodity production made possible the emergence of modern homosexual identity. Wage labor disassociated an individual's income from its dependency on the family. The growth of commoditybased economies shifted production from households to the market, and consumption from families to individuals. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men found new opportunities for expressions of homosexuality, and gender transgression as production and reproduction became less strictly intertwined. On the other hand, American capitalism largely developed within a moral system of malecentered, familyoriented property ownership. The need for financial security that familial dependency places on the breadwinner(s) assists capitalism by ensuring a degree of workforce stability. D'Emilio suggests this contradiction of capitalism—both destabilizing the family and insisting on its centrality—fuels hostility toward gay men, who appear to live on the spoils of production without embracing the societal duties of marriage and reproduction. Moreover, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medical juridical professions and popular culture came to view male homosexuality and gender inversion, in part, as excesses of leisure and metropolitan modernity. Modern male homosexuality as it developed throughout the first half of the twentieth century might be understood as a disruption of the supposedly natural binding of production to reproduction. Instead of the duties of procreation, gay men seemed to be chiefly concerned with what American capitalism relegated to recreation Urbanization: Commercialized Leisure, Public Space, and Private Parties Through urbanization, the recreational sites of the city became the terrain of what George Chauncey calls the "gay world." In the first half of the twentieth century, this world was largely one of leisure, accessed through commercialized, public, and private spaces. The development of commercialized urban leisure shaped gay male culture in venues devoted to entertainment, health, and socializing. Entertainment spaces, such as vaudeville theaters, burlesque halls, and cabarets provided female impersonators with performance venues that, in turn, attracted audiences of gay men. Huge drag balls were the biggest gay events in the early twentieth century, attracting hundreds of participants and onlookers. The back rows of darkened movie houses provided cover for anonymous sex between men. Moreover, the movies themselves, like opera, theater, and dance, were a source of archetypal models for shared queer camp sensibilities of gender subversion and irony. The health movement, intending to uplift men by building muscular and moral fiber, provided other sites. The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) provided an ideal space for men to gather for sex and socializing. As John GustavWrathall explains, these maleonly spaces had little supervision and, because of their Christian mission, were mostly free from police surveillance. Bathhouses also provided healthoriented commercial spaces for male sex and camaraderie. Particularly as the popularity of bathhouses decreased among the general population in the 1930s and 1940s, owners cultivated gay clientele. Regular visits helped gay men build social networks they may not have been free to embrace outside the baths. Commercialized leisure venues geared mostly toward socializing—namely, bars and cafeterias—gained prominence in the gay world by the second third of the twentieth century. Before World War II, gay bars existed in large cities. War migration of young, single men to cities brought many into gay subcultures. Gay bars opened in midsize towns such as Denver, Cleveland, and Kansas City. By the mid1960s, many cities began to have gay bars that appealed to specific crowds, from the wellgroomed and understated sweater set to the rougher, more masculine, motorcycle clubinspired leather men, to the commercialized sex trade of hustlers and johns. In some cafeterias, particularly after the dinner crowd had gone home,