GLR January-February 2025

tured Gladys Bentley, whom Langston Hughes described as “an amazing exhi bition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady” decked out in a signa ture white top hat, tuxedo, and tails. Karyl Norman, the self-styled Creole Fashion Plate, headlined at the Pansy Club on the corner of Broadway and 48th Street, which opened its doors in 1930. Even the Odd Fellows, a venera ble charitable fraternity, got in on the action, sponsoring the Hamilton Lodge Masquerade and Civic Ball, one of Manhattan’s most celebrated queer ex travaganzas. Here’s how I described it in Craze (note that “slummers” were well-heeled pleasure seekers who went to these clubs to “slum it”): Ethel Waters was there, next to Tallulah Bankhead and Nora Holt. A’Lelia Walker’s loge was like a miniature salon, a who’s who of the Harlem Ren aissance. Langston Hughes was seated to her left, Countee Cullen on her right, flanked by Alain Locke and several other literary luminaries. They affected an air of dignified detachment, distin guishing themselves from slummers in the general seating section. Across the balcony, several Astors and a Vanderbilt followed suit, acting like Roman patri cians perched high above the drag equivalent of gladiatorial games at the Colosseum. The boundary separating us from them was notoriously permeable.

up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, with a womb as big as the king’s ket tle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner? [From Nightwood ] I don’t mean to say Crystal identified as a woman per se. Crystal wasn’t so much a woman as a queen, a body on the spectrum of femininity without feeding into prescribed gender roles. By the same token, I wasn’t mannish any more than I was womanish. I was androgynous, a whole new species of being—or should I say becoming—a gender in motion. [From Craze ] There’s a lot to unpack here, be ginning with Virginia Woolf’s use of “their identity” to describe Orlando’s future life. Throughout the novel, Or lando is more “they ” than “he” or “she,” regardless of how they’re per ceived. The idea that their “change of sex ... did nothing whatever to alter their identity” makes the point that gender is derivative, not determina tive of who you are. Similarly, Night wood ’s Matthew O’Connor is a consummate gender shapeshifter who still experiences themself as “a girl in Marseille,” despite having “turned up this time” as a so-called man in Paris. As for Crystal in Craze , they are “a gender in motion,” an embodiment of what we call “nonbinary” and what

they called “androgyny” during the heyday of the Craze. A lot is at stake here, no matter how you parse gender flu idity in Orlando , Nightwood , and Craze . Then as now, gender tends to get caught up in society’s culture wars. Apropos the title of Judith Butler’s recently published book Who’s Afraid of Gender? , bigots and neo-fascists are afraid of gender fluidity, which flies in the face of their authoritarian dichotomies. Ac cordingly, drag queens and drag kings are dehumanized; the trans community is attacked. We need to understand how this has happened historically. The brutal Depression-era crack downs were followed by four decades of persecution, until the Stonewall Riots ushered in the Gay Liberation movement. Counterintuitively, these crackdowns were catalyzed by the normalization of alternative identities. In other words, they were a response to how not strange nonbinary gender identities were becoming in some cities (Chicago, San Francisco, and Los An geles, in addition to New York) in the 1920s. (I’m using the word “strange” advisedly, in keeping with the theme of this issue of TheG&LR , though the word may not line up perfectly with our word “queer.”) The Queer Craze didn’t just infiltrate sleazy speakeasies like Frank’s Place near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but gave rise to a “new normal” that seemed less and less shocking over time. The Cotton Club, a Harlem venue catering exclusively to white, nominally heterosexual customers, fea

Staging back-alley drag balls was one thing; performing for Astors and Vanderbilts was quite another. What’s more, slum mers didn’t just indulge in voyeuristic pleasures; they sampled the seafood, so to speak—a metaphor on full display in period icals like Broadway Brevities , one of several mainstream publi cations covering the Pansy Craze. Most of slummers were more titillated than scandalized by the porous boundary between “us” and “them.” But it’s also the case that our concept of homosex uality as the opposite of heterosexuality wasn’t invented until after the demise of the Queer Craze. What had once been an an archy of genders and desires came to be reduced to the strict bi nary of subsequent decades with the onset of the Depression and World War II and the postwar years. In retrospect, the Roaring Twenties are a cautionary tale of what can happen when puritanical prigs find it convenient to scapegoat queer people for their guilty pleasures. What was at stake was more than just the right of stage performers to defy certain boundaries. Gender fluidity tends to destabilize binary power structures—the same ones that privilege men over women and heterosexuals over every other conceivable orien tation and identity. When strictly enforced laws governing nor mality are threatened, fascists crawl out of the woodwork. Virginia Woolf’s clear-eyed assessment of this dynamic in A Room of One’s Own (1929) pits androgyny against the rise of

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