The End of the Yellow Brick Road, Greenwich Village

One of New York City's most famous gay residents, the poet WH Auden called New York "The Great Rome of all who lost or hated home." The destination for so many of the uprooted from around the USA and around the world was the neighborhood known as Greenwich Village. It was originally founded as a genteel refuge from the cholera and yellow fever epidemics that struck New York between 1791 and 1805 (the indigent plague dead, about 10,000 of them, were buried in the city's first potter's field which is now Washington Square park; they are still there under the playgrounds, the trees, and the Washington Square Arch pictured above). Greenwich Village was the only neighborhood north of Wall Street that successfully resisted the street grid imposed by the Commission Plan of 1817 on Manhattan. It has always had a reputation for independence.
In most of the USA, Greenwich Village was long an object of scorn; a ghetto of rootless woolly headed idealists, free thinkers, and sex perverts. Every Presidential candidate from New York, starting with Al Smith, had the Village hung around their necks. It was the embodiment of the Decadent City -- Sodom by the Hudson -- used as a foil to enhance the virtue of the rural Heart Land.
And yet, the Village played a central role in the creation of modern American culture. It was where the New World met and clashed with the Old World. Beginning with the First World War, Greenwich Village was the home of exiled European intellectuals as well as American artists and writers. Until the 1960s, those 2 groups met in bars, studio lofts, and bookstores to talk, argue, fight, and frequently to collaborate in the creation of a new American modern culture that would dominate the world in the last half of the 20th century.

The Village became a major destination for gays and lesbians at about the beginning of the 20th century, and possibly even earlier. This omni-tolerant place, home to so many unconventional types, would surely be a safe home for members of sexual minorities. The earliest recorded gay bar is The Slide which once stood on Bleecker street in the Village in the 1890s. The only reason we know about it is because the New York Herald led a campaign to pressure the District Attorney into shutting it down. There were surely other earlier gathering places.

Charles Demuth, Turkish Bath, watercolor, 1918

The pioneering American modernist Charles Demuth haunted the bars, cruising grounds, and bath houses of the early 20th century Village recording his experiences in a series of watercolors that have only come to light recently. These provided him with a certain measure of consolation in his later life when misfortunes affecting his family's business forced him to return to his native Pennsylvania and back into The Closet.

Drag Ball in Webster Hall, 1920s

There was a brief springtime of openness for gays and lesbians in the Village during the Jazz Age of the 1920s with the "Pansy Craze," a brief fashion for all things gay and gender-bending. The drag balls at Webster Hall were huge spectacular events drawing thousands of people to watch and to participate. The drag balls in Harlem were even bigger and more spectacular. The competition was ferocious.

Prohibition criminalized the city's nightlife. People who in another time simply wanted to go out for a drink and a dance found themselves in illegal speakeasies together with all sorts of underworld types, including crowds of gays and lesbians. It was probably during these years that the gay reputation for spectacular partying began.
There was a blossoming of gay culture in literature. Gay men played a large role in the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the first literature to treat homosexuality sympathetically (eg The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall) was written at this time. One of the first people to take on the authorities over the question of homosexuality in New York was, of all people, Mae West. She wrote a play called The Drag which treated homosexuality in a positive light. It played with some success in New Jersey and Connecticut, but morality activists successfully prevented it from opening in New York. For going up against the authorities so frequently and so boldly, Mae West was prosecuted for corrupting morals and spent time in the City's prison then on Roosevelt Island.

With the end of Prohibition came state regulation of the sale of liquor, and a series of crackdowns on gay life in the Village into the 1960s. New York state prohibited the sale of liquor to "sexual deviants." Connecticut went further banning "sexual deviants" from getting driver's licenses. To be a regular patron of gay bars, to be a sexually active gay man or lesbian meant having an arrest record. Gay bars (and private parties) were regularly raided and shut down by the police. Owners, employees, and patrons were all arrested and prosecuted. Names and addresses would always be published resulting in unemployment, eviction, divorce, and loss of credit. The Village became quite literally a gay ghetto since landlords around the city were free (even encouraged) to evict "deviants." The Village was the only neighborhood in New York where landlords would rent to known gays and lesbians. Because of their underground status, gays and lesbians were sitting ducks for crime; everythng from extortion to assault to murder.
That Jazz Age spring froze over and was largely forgotten. Perhaps its ghost was at work continuing to attract hundreds of gays and lesbians to the Village to try to create something like a real life under the conditions of constant threat and harassment. There was a huge wave of gays and lesbians into the Village at the end of World War II. Soldiers discharged for homosexuality (numbered in the thousands because of crackdowns toward the end of the war) who couldn't and wouldn't go home settled in port cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. They dramatically expanded the gay populations of those cities. Their experiences, their proximity, and the expectations raised by the war would play a decisive role in creating a new gay lesbian political movement. Their friendships and mutual support networks would lay the foundation for the movement that would emerge after the Stonewall riots.

There continued to be a lively underground gay culture in New York, that would appear in the press every once in awhile with news photographs of arrests in bar raids. Then as now, drag queens and trannies were the easiest targets and a press favorite. New York, like a lot of American cities, criminalized cross-dressing after the end of Prohibition.

Arrested After a Village Bar Raid, 1962

Sources for this post are David Carter's Stonewall, and George Chauncey's Gay New York.