by Vanda
(Book 2: 1945-1955)
Now
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/pz0oitc2jc
A Word from the Author
The Juliana Project
The Juliana Project is more than one novel. It is a series of novels and a performance. With new freedoms, gay history is in danger of being lost. There are some marvelous nonfiction books on gay history, and I have used them in my attempt to create an authentic story. Still, nonfiction can be impersonal while fiction is very personal, filled with character observations and reactions. Readers can get to know fictional characters as if they were friends; they can become involved in their struggles and triumphs. Gay history is a rich and extensive one. I feel compelled to be one of those who shares and preserves it through my characters’ lives.
Juliana (Books 1 & 2) is the first in a series of well-researched novels about a group of gay men and lesbians living hidden-in-plain-sight lives in 1940s New York. The second volume will follow the same characters into the 1950s. Future volumes will continue their lives beyond that.
Juliana has also been done as a performance piece. From December, 2014- April, 2017 once a month at the Duplex Cabaret and Piano Bar in New York City, a cast of very talented actors dressed in period costumes performed chapters from the novel to an enthusiastic audience who returned each month to find out what was going to happen next. Songs that are mentioned in the novel were performed in this staged miniseries version. Juliana as a performance piece became part novel, part old-time radio program, part play, and part cabaret entertainment.
Why the 1940s?
During the process of writing Juliana , I was often asked, “Why did you begin this series of novels with the 1940s?” This has not been a particularly easy question to answer. “Because it felt right?” was often my inadequate response. “Because the time period interests me?” But why did it interest me?
Lots of people are interested in the 1940s. Many folks tend to get mushy nostalgic over the World War II era. We see a country united against the evil force of Nazism. We see people sacrificing everything for a greater good. It would be hard not to fall in love with such an era. And the outfits. How could we not love seeing men in fedoras and women in hats and gloves? As long as we don’t have to wear them—don’t forget those girdles and bullet bras—it’s all pretty romantic. But I wasn’t writing about the war per se. World War II, of course, happens to my characters in Juliana , but that isn’t the main story I’m telling.
Juliana is not a story of just some ordinary men and women living in New York City in the 1940s; it is the story of gay men and women living in New York City in the 1940s. Knowing this should raise the stakes considerably in the minds of most readers, but I have found that there are too many who are not aware of just how tough being gay in those early days was .
So, is that why I needed to set my story in this time period? To remind people of how difficult it was for gays? I certainly didn’t want to write a story of dreary angst, and I don’t think Juliana is that.
Maybe my setting it in the ’40s was my attempt to understand the attitudes and prejudices I grew up with that greatly delayed my own coming out, the attitudes and prejudices my parents, my neighborhood, and my country sincerely held. Maybe I needed to know why these people hated us—me—so much.
My parents and their friends were just entering adulthood in the early 1940s. It was a time of idolization of American values: Mom, country, and apple pie. They, who were apparently on the outside of those values, caused too much confusion to be brought into the circle. These outsiders were probably more threatening to this wholesome world than the faraway Nazis. So threatening and beyond the pale that these wholesome Americans barely knew that “those kind” existed. Anyone they liked could not be one of “them.” My parents called Liberace sensitive and never entertained the idea that he could be one of “those.” Those types were spooky, far-off people you didn’t know. They were dangerous to children and certainly didn’t go to church or live next door to you.
In the 1940s, where there were actual good guys—Americans—fighting against actual bad guys—Nazis—there was little room for contradiction. This evil had to be conquered, or the world was pretty much doomed. Queers represented one, big, threatening contradiction. But why were they so threatening? Where did that fear come from? Well, I found I could not find the answer to that question in the 1940s. As with any popular idea of a particular time, the idea rarely begins in the time period where it is most popular. It begins in some earlier time before it takes root and flowers in the next age. To find the answer to why “they” hated gays so much, I had to look back to the 1920s and ’30s when my parents, and their generation, were impressionable kids trying to grow up.
The Late 1920s–1930s Greenwich Village
But to talk about the 1920s and ’30s you have to go even further back to an earlier time—to when my grandparents were trying to grow up. In the late nineteenth century, a new activity had become fashionable among white upper and upper middle class ladies and gentlemen called “slumming.” 1 Slummers would come into the neighborhoods of immigrants and African Americans for the purpose of observing “some of the lowest beer saloons in the city, dingy and dirty, frequented by the vilest characters of both sexes. 2 ” Some slummers even went so far as to walk right into the homes of these Italians, Chinese, Jews, African Americans, and others to “observe. 3 ” Can you imagine being in your bed one night and you turn over to stretch and discover a group of strangers dispassionately discussing you as if you were some form of lower species?
By the turn of the century the slummers stopped actually going into these people’s homes, but they continued to visit their neighborhoods to observe the “low life” there with an aura of racial and class superiority. My family, being working class, would not have participated in this activity or even known about it, but attitudes were developing, and attitudes have a way of permeating the air, influencing others in far-off regions, influencing even my grandparents out in the country.
This activity of slumming continued into the 1920s and early 1930s and was especially influenced by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, in January 1920. The onset of prohibition in which restaurants and clubs could no longer sell alcoholic beverages meant the demise of many old, well-respected eating establishments such as Delmonico’s, Maxim’s, and Churchill’s. At the same time, it brought into existence the speakeasy, a club that illegally sold alcohol to its customers. To enter a speakeasy, you needed a membership card or secret code. These were the clubs you’ve seen in old movies where some guy tells another guy to “knock three times and ask for Joe.” Clubs like 21 and the Stork Club began this way. 4 You’ve probably heard of the Roaring Twenties and bathtub gin. Well, during prohibition my law-abiding grandparents actually did make gin in their bathtub. And Grandpa, who rarely drank before prohibition, became an alcoholic during and after its repeal. Right into the late forties, my father, who was my mother’s fiancé at the time, had to drag Grandpa out of the local gin mill.
By the late 1920s early 1930s, slumming expanded to the observing of “bull daggers and faggots,” in speakeasy clubs. Greenwich Village was a prime spot to do this. 5
Some of you may have heard of the Pansy Craze. Well, actually, it was the Pansy and Lesbian Craze (the girls often get left out of history). “The representation of pansies as closely linked to lesbians underscored their shared state of queerness. 6 ” During prohibition in the speakeasies, gay men in flamboyant dresses, and gay girls 7 in tuxedos would entertain heterosexual audiences or “the jams” 8 by singing and dancing. Upper-middle and upper-class men and women would go into these clubs to be entertained by the homosexuals. They felt very sophisticated and superior to these “unnatural, freaks of nature.” Straight men could now feel exceptionally virile when compared to the pansies, and this was supposed to impress their girlfriends and wives. To flaunt their male superiority, the men would often bring a girlfriend into a club knowing that
the bull dagger, as part of her job, would frighten the girl by flirting with her. Often, the man’s girlfriend gave the expected reaction of fear and disgust. But sometimes the girl would surprise her beau by flirting back with the tuxedoed gal and genuinely enjoying herself. Sometimes the two women would dance. It was now the gentleman’s turn to be upset. 9
These clubs not only provided new adventures for women, but men, too, found opportunities to flirt and dance with the female impersonators without having their “normality” challenged. This was a time of sexual experimentation for well-to-do slummers, both male and female. Many white female slummers frequented the new lesbian-oriented cabarets because they said they had a “fascination with perversity. 10 ” Both men and women moved beyond dancing and flirting and began to experiment with same-sex sexuality.
Social critics showed concern about the great amount of female same-sex experimentation occurring in the 1930s and wrote that “these pseudolesbians” significantly outnumbered the “real lesbians” going into Village cabarets. 11
Concern over pseudolesbianism was a way of warning the public about the real lesbians who roamed about the Village clubs. These real lesbians were hypersexual white women who were dangerous to young, “normal” females and would lure innocents into all sorts of sexual depravity if they were not careful. 12
Broadway Brevities , a popular tabloid at the time, stated in 1932 that slumming had turned Greenwich Village “into a Lesbian’s Paradise where Lesbos, filthy with erotomania are on the make for sweet high school kiddies down for a thrill. 13 ” So this is probably where Grandma and Grandpa got their fears about dangerous, predatory lesbians long before I was born, and they started passing this stuff on to their only child, my mother.
We could go even further back to my great-grandmother’s time at the turn of the twentieth century when the sexologists began using the term “invert” to describe male homosexuals as women trapped in male bodies and female homosexuals as men trapped in women’s bodies, but it’s time to get back to the original intent of this essay: Why the 1940s?
In 1933, the Prohibition Amendment was repealed, and a more conservative time ensued. In New York City, Mayor LaGuardia began closing the strip joints in Times Square 14 and the Pansy-Lesbian clubs in Greenwich Village. 15 The slummers and other white upper and upper middle class curiosity seekers headed to Harlem to get their thrills, although some of the clubs remained in the Village and new ones were established (The Howdy Club, 181 Club, Moroccan Village).
The restrictions of prohibition may have been lifted, but in the latter half of the thirties a whole new set of regulations was put into place in New York. It had always been illegal for either gender to dress as the opposite sex in public, 16 but in the late thirties a new ordinance was passed making it illegal for male entertainers to dress in women’s clothes while performing in a club. 17 It also became illegal to serve alcohol to people of low moral character, such as homosexuals. 18 With this background we enter the 1940s.
1940s & Homosexuality
People coming from the country, as the four kids do in Juliana, didn’t really know what “gay” was. Back then, homosexuals were an extreme out-group. Much further out than Roman Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Irish, Italians, and other immigrants. People believed that homosexuals, both men and women, were dangerous in general and especially treacherous to children. The terms “homosexual” and “child molester” were often used in the same sentence as if they were the same thing .
Nice people did not know any homosexuals, or at least, they thought they didn’t. And you certainly never expected to find such a horror within yourself. At this time, there was no concept of the “closet,” whether a person was in or out. 19 Just about everyone was “in” and considered it appropriate to be so: first, of course, for self-protection, but secondly, for propriety. Sex was private. You didn’t talk about it in public.
The Experience of a “Normal” who Lived During that Time Period
I met Arlene Friedman Simone online through my research for this novel. She has been tremendously helpful in its development since she actually lived through some of these times. Arlene attended City College of New York (CCNY) from 1948-1952 and while there, acted and danced in some of the plays. She had the role of Miss Turnstiles in the musical On the Town . If you’ve seen the recent revival of that play on Broadway, then you know how demanding that role is. She also participated in an early sit-down strike at the college, protesting racial and religious injustice in 1949. I mention these details to show that this woman was no country bumpkin, and still she was not aware of “homosexuals” attending her college in the middle of New York City.
She said, “It wasn’t an open world then. Only later did I realize that Donald Madden, who was a close friend of mine and our best actor, was gay. He was my Gabey in On the Town , and there was no question for me that he was heterosexual. It never entered my mind that his relationship with Wilson Lehr, the director of our theater group, was extraordinarily close. Donald went on to become a highly respected stage and TV actor. He was acclaimed for doing a great Hamlet. It was either on Broadway or off, but they said it was a very effeminate Hamlet. We were all devastated when he died in 1983 at the age of 49. They claimed his death was from lung cancer, but this was 1983….”
I think this memory clearly shows the world my characters inhabit at the beginning of the novel when they arrive in Penn Station ready to start their adult lives. It also tells me about the internal world I must have walked in, a world that was peopled with 1940s adults and their misinformation, fear, and hatred. Some part of me must have needed to explore this world.
The Language of Homosexuals
in the 1940s (Words Important to Understanding the Novel)
Gay
People often think that the word gay, meaning homosexual, only appeared on the scene in the 1960s. But it’s important to remember that before Stonewall, gays lived in a hidden world and had their own ways of communicating.
“Gay,” meaning homosexual, was in use by the 1920s. According to some authorities, it was used in that way even further back. 20 As evidence of its use long before the 1960s, recall Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby , a 1938 movie with Katharine Hepburn in which Grant wears a frilly woman’s bathrobe and jumps up and down proclaiming, “I just went gay all of a sudden. ”
This was the first time the word gay was used in a film for the general public 21 and, believe it or not, most viewers probably did not get it. (Remember the “sensitive” Liberace above). I’m sure most thought Grant meant he’d just suddenly become happy. Hollywood often would sneak disguised—and sometimes not so disguised—gay content into their early films even after the censorship of the Hays Code was enacted in 1934. 22
Lesbian
Although the word gay was in use by gays in the 1940s and hidden from the outer world, the word “lesbian” was more likely to be used by the outer world and not gays. The word lesbian was considered derogatory, and was intended to be insulting or perhaps “clinical” when used by the tabloid press and psychiatrists writing questionable analyses on how to cure lesbians. (These MDs often based their case histories on stories in True Confessions magazine. See “Female Homosexuality” by Frank S. Caprio, M.D. 1954)
When I was growing up, the word lesbian tended to mean an ugly woman who no man would want. Being wanted by a man was very important in those days, especially in my working-class neighborhood. No matter what your achievements, if you didn’t have a man (husband) the world was quick to let you know you were pretty much a flop.
The word lesbian did not become a positive term until the 1970s when gay women claimed the word for themselves and reclaimed its original meaning in relation to Sappho, the Greek female poet, who lived on the Island of Lesbos.
“Gay girls” was the preferred term in homosexual circles prior to this time. 23
Queer
The word “queer” was one of the worst words you could call a gay boy or girl in the 1940s or �
��50s. Used as a pejorative against gays, it was the most insulting of words, and it was meant by the outer world to express their venom toward gays. On the other hand, the word queer, meaning odd, was in frequent use during the forties and fifties. Novels at the time were filled with this word.
State Department Murders by Edward S. Aarons is a mystery about a homosexual man (spoiler alert!) betraying his country by selling secrets to the Russians, and his lesbian friend who helps him at first and then redeems herself by lending a hand to the macho straight guy. The author never uses the word homosexual or lesbian, but he makes it pretty clear to the reader that Paul and Kari have the same problem. He also uses the word queer, meaning odd, so often—sometimes as much as three times on a page—that the man seems obsessed by the concept of queerness.
Today, queer has taken on a whole new meaning. It attempts to capture the expansiveness of sexuality and gender. It reminds us that there is more to us than the boy/girl categories and not everyone wants to be squeezed into that dichotomy. 24
How Gays Referred to Non Gays
The outer world may have had their names for homosexuals, but gays also had their own names for the outer world. The word “jam was a code word for straights” 25 and was in use in the forties and fifties. 26 The word “straight” has also been in use since the 1940s 27 . Prior to this time, the word “normal,” dating back to 1914 seemed to have been the preferred term 28 and was still in use well into the late forties (See Gore Vidal’s The City and The Pillar, 1948).
Sex
Up until the late 1990s, the word “sex” had two meanings, one relating to the act of having sex and the other related to what today we are more likely to term as one’s gender. Although the word “gender” was known, it was rarely used in the way that it is used today.
The Research
The early 1940s in Greenwich Village has been a very difficult time to research because nothing outstanding really happened. People tend to think of 1940s Greenwich Village as an artsy time, but here’s a quote from the New York City Market Analysis done in 1943: