Gay Insights

I read this book over a matter of 6 days. I’ve had the book for about a year before I finally read it because I was into so many other books. Anyway, it’s much to wordy and quite redundant in parts. It was extremely informational in a historical sense…I grant you that! It’s worth reading for someone who wants to know ‘what was’ in the Gay New York world in the early part of the 20th Century. It’s clear that homosexuality and heterosexuality are modern terms of the times and the idea that any ‘one’ person should be labeled one or the other is WRONG…everyone falls somewhere within the two opposite sides of the spectrum. I’d still recommend this book to any guy that has any bit of attraction for men…like I do. Some of my favorite lines: …having two names emblematized their participation in a double life.—– At the turn of the century…a bisexual was not attracted to both males and females; a bisexual WAS both male and female.—– …as one Italian teenager described the attitude of men at his neighborhood pool hall in 1930, the body to enter did not necessarily have to be a woman’s.—– The fairy and the queer, not the medical profession, forced middle-class men to consider the possibilty of a sexual element in their relations with other men.—– GAY itself referred to female prostitutes before it referred to gay men;—– In the course of establishing a place for themselves in the city, gay men constantly had to struggle with the public and private agencies of social control, as well as with popular hostility.
Rating: 3 / 5

This book is an informative resource for gay history, or in the case of how this book presents it, gay discrimination and punishments. The book does not go into much detail about happy or positive things, and maybe that is how it was like in the past, but I can’t believe that there were no positive relationships, activities, or events that went on despite the legal issues going on at the time. The book is slow reading and get’s quite boring in some parts. Its a okay to good book, but its a lot to read.
Rating: 3 / 5

This book provides excellent resource material on gay culture from the late 1800s until the 1940s. If you’ve ever been curious about gay life in New York City way back when, this is the book for you. It’s filled with lots of historical info. I found the information about Chauncey covers in Chapter 9 book “Building Gay Neighborhood Enclaves:the Village and Harlem,” useful as reference points when I wrote one of my lesbian romance novels set in the 1920s in Harlem.
Rating: 4 / 5