MALE (HOMO)SEXUAL PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Chapter Three

TRADE, WOLVES, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF NORMAL MANHOOD

THE MOST STRIKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DOMINANT SEXUAL CULTURE of the early twentieth century and that of our own era is the degree to which the earlier culture permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves-or to be regarded by others-as gay. If sexual abnormality was defined in different terms in prewar culture, then so, too, necessarily, was sexual normality. The centrality of the fairy to the popular representation of sexual abnormality allowed other men to engage in casual sexual relations with other men, with boys, and, above all, with the fairies themselves without imagining that they themselves were abnormal. Many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other, or that their occasional recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, indicated an abnormal, "homosexual," or even "bisexual" disposition, for they neither understood nor organized their sexual practices along a hetero-homosexual axis.

This sexual ideology, far more than the other erotic systems with which it coexisted, predominated in working-class culture. It had particular efficacy in organizing the sexual practices of men in the social milieu in which it might be least expected: in the highly aggressive and quintessentially "masculine" subculture of young and usually unmarried sailors, common laborers, hoboes, and other transient workers, who were a ubiquitous presence in early-twentieth-century American cities. After demonstrating how widely it was assumed that "normal" men could engage in sexual relations with other men and the role of this sexual ide-

MALE (HOMO)SEXUAL PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

ology in organizing the sexual world of "rough" working-class men, this chapter explores the basis of that ideology in working-class gender ideology and in the deeper logic of the association of fairies with prostitutes. For the complex conventions governing the social interactions of fairies and normal workingmen established the terms of their sexual relations as well, and reveal much about the organization of gender, sex, and sexuality in working-class culture.