GLR January-February 2025

ESSAY

Rise and Fall of the ‘Pansy Craze’ M ARGARET V ANDENBURG

O NE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, New York City was one of several U.S. cities that was in the midst of what has come to be known as the “Pansy Craze”—George Chauncey’s coinage in Gay New York —or what I prefer to call the “Queer Craze.” To be sure, as a cul tural phenomenon, the Craze was short-lived. After the Roar ing Twenties there followed a backlash not unlike the one that MAGA and alt-right conservatives are mounting against today’s LGBT communities. It’s a familiar pattern of progress in civil rights giving rise to a reactionary response. If past is prelude, revisiting the Pansy Craze era might help us to navigate the current culture wars. In this spirit, I wrote a historical novel titled Craze that was recently published by Jaded Ibis Press. The narrative is written from the point of view of Henri Adams, a lesbian whose best friend Crystal is a renowned drag performer known as the Queen of Tarts. The following brief synopsis sets the stage for a deeper dive into the Pansy Craze and a look at the historical par allels between then and now. Fresh off the boat from Paris, Henri Adams (née Hen rietta) assumes that New York’s nightlife will pale in comparison with her escapades in the sapphic salons of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney. Little does she know that New York is on the verge of a cultural eruption that would catalyze the raucous eroticism of the Roaring Twenties. An American art critic armed with letters of in troduction from Pablo Picasso and Romaine Brooks, Adams lands a job with New World Art , a magazine cater ing to patrons of the nascent avant-garde art scene on this side of the Pond. But notwithstanding this professional success, her love life is virtually nonexistent—that is, until a queen named Crystal offers to show her around the clandestine world of speakeasies and drag balls. Par adoxically, Prohibition fuels the Craze, funneling jams (heterosexuals) and queers alike into the mob-run realm of illegal nightspots and their pleasures. Eventually, as the Jazz Age reaches a fever pitch of revelry, the Craze al most goes mainstream. But the party can’t last forever. Faced with Depression-era crackdowns, Henri and Crys tal calculate the risk of fighting back, a historically fraught and distressingly familiar calculation. One of the most remarkable things about the Queer Craze is the extent to which its performance of gender flu idity prefigures our own. From a contemporary perspec tive, for example, it’s not clear whether Crystal experiences Margaret Vandenburg’s novels include Craze , a Jazz Age por trait of queer New York, and An American in Paris , a romp through the sapphic salons of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney.

themself as transvestite or transsexual, a distinction that troubles contemporary gender discourse. The same might be said of Djuna Barnes’ depiction of Matthew O’Connor in the classic lesbian novel Nightwood (1936) and, ten years earlier, Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Orlando in 1928’s Orlando: A Biography . The fol lowing series of quotations from Orlando , Nightwood , and Craze provide some historical context for nonbinary gender discourse, whose roots date back to the Craze era: Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. [From Orlando ] In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor and perhaps it’s that memory that haunts me. The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I’ve turned

January–February 2025

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