GLR September-October 2025

Forgotten Histories GLR k September–October 2025 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN The Rise of the Retail Queen in 19th-century America

A NDREW H OLLERAN The Attraction of Confederate Gentlemen D ENISE N OE Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sexual Adventurer H ARLAN G REENE The Zionist & the Anti-Semite A Love Story V ERNON R OSARIO

The French Evolution of Sexual Identities D ENNY N IVENS The First LGBT Riot Happened in 1953

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Edmund White

Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . Managing Editor WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 GLR k

The Gay & Lesbian Review September–October 2025 • VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 5 WORLDWIDE

C ONTENTS

Forgotten Histories

F EATURES

J EREMY C. F OX Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors

The Ascension of the Retail Queen 10 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

“Counter jumpers” were 19th-c. sales clerks, and so much more

The Attraction of Confederate Gents 14 A NDREW H OLLERAN

Civil War-era letters and photos hint at soldiers’ intimate relations

A Romance Almost Lost to History 17 H ARLAN G REENE

S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

A famous Zionist and an anti-Semitic poet shared a youthful secret

The French Evolution of Identities 19 V ERNON R OSARIO

Following WWI, lesbians emerged as a recognizable social type

First to Riot: The Girls of Los Guilucos 21 D ENNY N IVENS

Lesbians led the revolt at the California institution in 1953

Tech v. Hate: Can AI Make Us Safer? 26 S HAHEENA S HEIKH

It can block hate speech, but it can also isolate our online spaces

Léon Delafosse of the Belle Époque 29 C HARLES T IMBRELL

The celebrated pianist ran with Proust, Sargent, and the smart set

R EVIEWS

Nicholas Boggs — Baldwin: A Love Story 31 R EGINALD H ARRIS Robert W. Fieseler — American Scare 32 F RED F EJES

Nathan Kernan — A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 34 A LAN C ONTRERAS Frank Pizzoli – Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work 35 H ANK T ROUT Don Romesburg – Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School 36 J OHN D’E MILIO B OOK B RIEFS 38 David Medina — Shakespeare’s Greatest Love 40 C HARLES G REEN Olivia Wolfgang-Smith — Mutual Interest 41 A NNE C HARLES Brian McNaught — A Prince of a Boy 44 D ANIEL A. B URR Ria Brodell — More Butch Heroes 44 J OAN I LACQUA Eli Clare— Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming 45 J OHN R. K ILLACKY Michael Koresky — Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age ... 46 R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK A RTS B RIEFS 48 Looking for Love in Mostly Wrong Places (film roundup) 49 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

A NDREW L EAR J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS

A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) R OBERT H ARDMAN S TEPHEN H EMRICK H ILARY H OLLADAY D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR

I N M EMORIAM — Remembrances of Edmund White 5 D IMITRIS Y EROS D AVID B ERGMAN L EO R ACICOT BTW 8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

A RT M EMO — Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sexual Adventurer 24 D ENISE N OE P OEM — “Argentina” 28 T REBOR H EALEY P OEM —“MRI” 37 B ILLY C LEM A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — Martin Sherman on Bent and Its Relevance 42 T IM M ILLER P OEM — “Meditation” 46 A MY S PADE C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD ( CHAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2025 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org

September–October 2025

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Early Fall: ‘Forgotten Histories’ FROM THE EDITOR

N OTWITHSTANDING this issue’s theme, the cover features Charles Hefling’s gentle caricature of writer Edmund White, who passed away in June and is re membered here by three friends. It could be said that “forgotten histories” are the stock-in trade of this magazine: the discovery of people or places whose history has been neglected or actively suppressed. Many of these articles take this excavation a step further, bringing out activities that were deliberately hidden or disguised: under ground worlds that didn’t leave a record by design, or episodes whose participants actively covered their tracks. The cases are presented in roughly chronological order. The earliest comes from our resident sleuth, William Bene mann, who reports on a curious phenomenon of mid-19th-cen tury America: a growing sales force of men who worked the counters in the new department stores and were often available for a variety of services, including sexual ones. After a promis ing start, their obvious queerness brought the “counter jumpers” into ill repute by the time of the Civil War. Speaking of which, an article by Andrew Holleran takes us to the Civil War era and a discourse on the homoerotic char acter of public posters and private photos and letters, especially in the South. Here the issue is that much of this is operating at the level of subtext or innuendo; but the author of Confederate Sympathies offers many intriguing facts to make his case.

Moving to early 20th-century America, Harlan Greene writes of an improbable love affair between two young men who would both go on to become prominent writers and edu cators. George Sylvester Viereck was a widely published poet and journalist who was later convicted of being a Nazi provo cateur, while Ludwig Lewisohn was a popular novelist and possibly the most famous Zionist of his generation. Edna St. Vincent Millay is the subject of an Art Memo by Denise Noe, who brings out a side of the poet that the an thologies tend to ignore. Many of her poems express a fasci nation with women and even a sexual attraction to their beauty, while her private life reveals an exuberant history of relations with both men and women. Staying in this time frame but moving to France, Vernon Rosario explores an underground culture that long predates the arrival of a lesbian movement as such. New sexual identities for women emerged after World War I, but the subculture they formed, however rich and durable, kept a mostly low profile. Back in the U.S., an incident in 1953 gets Denny Nivens’ vote as the first LGBT riot in history. It happened at a northern California “school” for girls too young for adult incarceration at a time when just being homosexual could land you in prison or an asylum. Los Guilucos was a little of both, and its lesbian inmates played a key role in the fracas. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

T W

BY JOHN LOUGHERY, AUTHOR O

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IN MEMORIAM Remembrances of Edmund White (1940–2025)

me, sadly—perhaps unaware of the rather heavy atmosphere he was creating. To shift the mood, I asked how his latest book, The Loves of My Life , was doing. “You know,” he said, “some readers love my books, and others don’t. Do you remember the guy who tore into Hotel de Dream ?” Of course I did—the book had moved me deeply, and I’d sent Edmund a warm and admiring email. He replied immediately, saying how much it meant to him—how comforting and encouraging my message had been, a balm for his soul. He’d just read a scathing review that had shaken him. “It was the most cruel and devastating review of my life,” he wrote. “What else are you working on?” I asked. “I have a new book coming out in January,” he said. “Right now I’m working on a bi ography of the brother of King Louis XIV of France.” In a low, mischievous voice full of innuendo, he began to explain teasingly what I already knew: “You know, he dressed as a woman—with all the accessories. He was married twice, had children, had lovers and a mistress!” He especially emphasized “and a mis tress!” laughing uproariously—and of course I joined him. “Are you still a Lesbian?” was his favorite joke—a ques tion he’d ask me every year, just to see if I was still going to the island of Lesbos for the summer. Then he began reminiscing about his summers in Chania, Crete, where he’d stayed in what had been a beautiful governor’s mansion (our mutual friend Charles Henri Ford had bought a house in the same town): “The mansion was lovely, and had a courtyard. A nice Englishwoman

E DMUND WHITE, a dear friend, died suddenly in his New York apartment on June 3rd after suffering from a gastroenteritis infection. He was 85. He’d written more than a dozen works of fiction, four plays, numerous essays, and biographies of Arthur Rimbaud and Mar cel Proust. His “magnificent” biography of Jean Genet, as crit ics called it, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. He received many other honors as well, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, at least two Lambda Literary Awards, and the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. A devoted philhellene, he visited my country several times and spent three or four summers in Crete. I met him in New York in 2002 and we became friends im mediately—unsurprisingly, since we shared many acquain tances. He was charming, soft-spoken, modest, kind, and often quietly ironic, with a sharp wit. A true cosmopolitan, he was a leading citizen of the gay community, which saw him as an icon. With his novel A Boy’s Own Story in 1982, he launched a trilogy that would become the iconic coming out story for a generation. He lived on 22nd Street in Chelsea—an area I often visited because the gallery I worked with was nearby. His apartment was small, fairly tidy, and, like most writers’ homes, crammed with books. The walls were covered with small paintings and photographs. During my stays in New York, we would mostly meet at the local Greek restaurants, which had the best food. Over time, Edmund, who was never the athletic type, began gaining weight, and in 2012 he suffered two strokes. Not long after, in 2014, he had a heart attack. Not having seen him since before the pandemic, I visited Ed on May 21st—a gray, chilly day with a light drizzle. His hus band, Michael Carroll, opened the door. Edmund was sitting right by the entrance in the dining room, which he used as a study. The living room now looked less orderly, filled with even more books, photos, and all kinds of objects. Despite his health problems, he was in good spirits—cheerful and welcoming. He could no longer walk and relied on Michael’s help. Before I could sit down, he said: “Go inside, straight down the hall. In the bedroom you’ll see your photograph— TheBoy with the Fishes .” Out of modesty, I hesitated, but he insisted on showing me how much he appreciated me. So I went, thanking him. When I returned, he was on the phone. He explained to the caller that he had a visitor and promised to call back later. After he hung up, he said to me: “He’s a student of mine from the Philippines. He wanted to kill himself—he’s heartbroken, and now he’s all alone, without friends. I’ll talk to him later.” Before I left, the young man had called back three or four times. Then Edmund showed me the latest book by the great Chi nese writer Yiyun Li, who had stopped by earlier and given it to him as a gift. “Two of her sons have committed suicide,” he told D IMITRIS Y EROS Last Meeting with a Friend

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M Y FAVORITE ED WHITE STORY took place in Yale’s beautiful Beinecke Library, where I was doing research for a book on the Violet Quill. Yale had pur chased Ed’s papers, and I was the first person to open the boxes in which he had unceremoniously dumped the contents of his drawers; the cartons were filled with kibble and dog treats, nap kins, matchbooks with phone numbers hurriedly scribbled in side, and other detritus of a busy life. When I lifted one stack of papers, a photograph of Ed—not just naked but with a full erec tion—floated off the top and across the reading room. I tried to grab it, but the glossy sailed above the heads of the academics and toward the window. When I finally got hold of the photo, I expected to see everyone looking up at me angry and shocked, but no one noticed the frenzied pirouette to reclaim the porno graphic image. The tale says more about scholars than it does about the 9x12 glossy of Ed’s attractive naked body. Still, it seems only proper that he should appear improperly undressed in so hallowed a place. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that Ed and I had wonderful sex on multiple occasions. Nothing special given his estimated 3,000 partners.) It has always been the louche parts of Ed’s work that I’ve thought deserved notice—his willingness not just to reveal what others would deem abject, but to thrust the abject their way. The last book White published during his life, The Loves of My Life, is subtitled A Sex Memoir , not a subject that an eminent man of letters in his eighties is supposed to write about: the book is filled with explicit sex. One notable example occurs after a sex ual escapade with Stan Redfern, a friend from college who vis ited White days before his death. While still young, they vacationed in Puerto Rico, where they picked up two locals who “fucked us in the same room on twin beds without sheets while laughing and chatting”: “I shit out my partner’s semen (which we call his ‘babies’). I was pleased to see how copious it/they were. It wasn’t part of our intimacy repertoire for me to ask Stan how much sperm he’d harvested.” The brief passage plays with the notion of what is said and left unsaid in their “intimacy repertoire.” As a result of the lan guage rules, White can speak of the copiousness of his partner’s ejaculation, while he cannot question Redfern about the con sistency of his bowel movement. The delicacy of the language is mirrored in White’s uncertainty whether he should refer to jism in the singular or plural. Sex is not at the center of this pas sage; it is semen and shit , which regresses to the childlike ref erence to sperm as “babies.” The passage ends with harvested , a turn toward the pastoral. So, what begins as lines out of William Burroughs or John Rechy turns into child’s play that ends with a suave gesture toward The Shepheardes Calender of that other Edmund, Edmund Spenser. Or perhaps we are meant to picture that very American scene—two innocents being corn holed in a hayloft above an International Harvester. What other American writer can in the space of three sen tences evoke four very different cultural settings through the magic of his diction or can make us so fully aware of language as anthropological artifact that causes both wincing and laugh D AVID B ERGMAN Ed’s ‘Intimacy Repertoire’

Edmund White in 2002. Photo by Dimitris Yeros.

lived there, married to an American soldier. Charles Henri Ford visited us regularly because the wife used to type up his manu scripts. One day, while he was talking to the American soldier, the man said: ‘Well, I threw out all my old letters.’And Charles said: ‘You must never throw them out—you could sell them to Harvard for millions of dollars!’” And Edmund burst out laugh ing at our friend’s ironic advice. The poet James Merrill and the painter John Craxton also lived in Chania. They were all close. “Craxton used to ride back and forth from London on his motorcycle,” Edmund said, both impressed and slightly alarmed. And then, dropping his voice conspiratorially again: “You know, my friend James Merrill, he knew many of those Athens palace guards.” As time went on, I asked if I could take his picture to capture a few more cherished memories. He gladly agreed. But when I picked up my camera for our final meeting, a kind of melan choly came over me. I didn’t feel capable of capturing anything truly evocative. Still, I took a few photos—ones that may some day have value, but only as documents. A week later, when Michael told me of Edmund’s sudden death, I was overwhelmed by shock and grief. He was one of the last of a remarkable era—one that had everything: love, free dom, revolution, companionship, endless parties, romance, pleasure ... and many deaths too, which made some people stronger. It was also an age of great writers, artists, and thinkers. I count myself among the lucky ones who lived through that time—and had the chance to know people such as Edmund. ______________________________________________________________________________ Dimitris Yeros is an Athens-based artist and photographer whose works have been shown at dozens of solo exhibitions around the world. &BOOKLOVERS READERS ATTENTION Tim’s Used Books 242 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA timsusedfilms@gmail.com | 508-487-0005 | Open year-round. Are TIM’S USED BOOKS of Provincetown has been traveling throughout the Northeast since 1991, buying book collections, large and small. Scholarly, gay interest, the arts—all genres. Immediate payment and removal.

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I FIRST CAME TO KNOW Edmund White through his work, of course, which was de rigueur reading for gay guys coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s. Years later, we met through social media exchanges, after which he invited me to West 22nd Street to act as a fill-in caregiver-typist-companion. Ed was recovering from a series of small strokes in 2012 and didn’t want to be left alone. His boyfriend (later husband) Michael Car roll was leaving for Chapel Hill to help his friend Phil move from there up to Boston. In Michael’s absence, I was hired to give Ed a hand with his new book manuscript, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris . Through our correspondence, he learned that I was a French major and devoted Francophile. He and Michael got a kick out of the fact that I’d been friends with writer M. F. K. Fisher and had had dealings with Lowell native Bette Davis. Ed’s daily regimen was this: up early, breakfast, usually con sisting of cereal, strong coffee, a sweet roll, perhaps while check ing his email, catching up on correspondence. This was followed by work, dictating what he’d written the night before. He wrote longhand in black ink. Right away, he asked me how a sentence or two could be improved. But this was the renowned Edmund White, and I said, “I wouldn’t presume—,” to which he purred: “Please do.” Ed had a habit of quite suddenly running the palm of his hand over his face, from forehead to chin, in one, rapid movement. Before I realized this was a nervous tic, I took it to mean he was exasperated with my work performance. Work would wrap up around noon for lunch, usually restau rant sushi or a sandwich (always Ed’s treat). This would often be followed “for fun” by Ed giving a lecture at one or another prestigious venue around town before coming home to get ready One’s “intimacy repertoire” doesn’t stifle expression but al lows people and things the space to grow, to develop, to change before language freezes them. As the author of three biographies, he allowed even the dead the dignity of remaining unsettled. White would want an unquiet grave and to resist anyone who thought he (or she) was getting the last laugh. ______________________________________________________________________________ David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine. L EO R ACICOT Vignettes from Memory ter? What made the gay culture of White’s time so rich was its ability to combine high and low cultural registers seamlessly— from La Traviata to The Anvil and back again. But there were limits to this exposure, things that because of the “intimacy repertoire” must remain unsaid. In The Loves of My Life , White wrote: “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off. ... My husband is Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with since 1995. I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me.” In our last email exchange, I asked Ed about the expression “kiss-off,” which sounds rather noir. He wrote back: “I meant that we factor into our feelings about lovers, their own ambitions and hopes and goals, whereas a por trait in words freezes someone in a moment in time and, finally, is dismissive. It is about someone’s being, not their becoming. Most people live a bit or a lot in the future, whereas a portrait freezes them in this moment. That’s why people resent writers, who seem to be getting the last laugh.”

for his guests. Ed loved to entertain; he would arrange the most delightful gatherings in the manner of what his lifelong friend, artist Marilyn Schaefer, called “dumpling evenings,” intimate get-togethers and dinners (never more than six guests). Ed had an almost psychic knack for bringing people together who would get along famously. A string of literary lights passed through that lovely room: John Rechy, Benjamin Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry McCrea, Gabe Hudson, J. D. McClatchy, Chip Kidd, Christopher Bram, Alfred Corn. Ed knew every body . He kept a heady schedule (I had a hard time keeping up). There was an Auntie Mame aspect to Ed’s character; in the middle of work or business, he’d be seized with an idea: “Let’s go to the theater!” “Let’s go try this new restaurant!” He’d grab his coat (he was fond of an old Miyake frock) and head us out the door. He loved squiring me and others around Manhattan and was a kid on Christmas over the latest Broadway play—he disdained musicals—or restaurant. In Ed’s company, there was never a dull moment. After a performance of Balanchine’s Jew els at Lincoln Center, we spied Peter Martins in the lobby and went over for a chat. During my work visits, we ran into Alan Cumming strolling the Garment District; Charles Blow in the men’s room at Babbo; Thomas Mallon in City Hall Park; Mark Doty, Sarah Schulman, and a rising Ocean Vuong in the East Village’s Phoenix Bar. Ed was inordinately generous; he liked handing out wads of cash. One time, in payment for what didn’t amount to more than a morning’s work, he slipped $500 into my hand. He was pos sessed of a voracious appetite—for food, for people, for sex. There’s no describing what a brilliant, fertile mind he had, or what delightful company he could be. He was capable of ex pounding on Balzac and Proust one minute and be collapsed on the floor in laughter the next, possibly over a joke about ac tresses with serial husbands (like Liz Taylor and Hedy Lamarr) and what a nightmare they must have been to live with. He got a charge out of seeing how a guy my age could be so gullible, and once had me convinced that he’d composed the national an them of Burma. When I was back home, he had the disarming habit of ringing me up, saying not “hello” but chiming excit edly “Write this down!” and would dictate an anecdote he’d re membered and wanted preserved. Ed would retire early to his bedroom, but I don’t think he ever slept; he’d be up all night writing, listening to the radio, or read ing. He read at an almost extraterrestrial speed, and one bedtime I remember he began Lanny Hammer’s thousand-page biography of James Merrill, and by morning had finished it. Ed usually played opera while he wrote; he said music facilitated his writing. Michael Carroll was the opposite, needing complete silence. When he wrote, he wore ear plugs. Both he and Ed were thoughtful hosts. Remembering that Miloš Forman’s Amadeus was one of my fa vorite films, Michael went out and rented it, and they ran a private screening in Ed’s bedroom. A very special Christmas Eve. I’ve kept thousands of emails that Ed sent me through the years. Whenever I need a lift and a laugh, I pull one up and feel much better. Ed’s company, whether in person or on the page, made of life something sparkling, something special. The thought that this reservoir of creativity has left us forever is shocking. _____________________________________________________________________________ Leo Racicot, a poet, essayist, and food writer, is the author of Alone in the Yard and See You Again in the Spring: Remembering M. F. K. Fisher and Her Circle of Friends.

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BTW

return any borrowed books after the arrest, is it safe to assume that any outstanding fines for late books were forgiven? Those Best Laid Plans “Nobody represents anything,” pro nounced Nan Goldin in these pages many years ago; everyone is an individual. In that spirit, kudos to Vivian Jenna Wilson

Paradise Regained Of all the indignities suffered by Oscar Wilde after his 1895 arrest—the public humiliation, the two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol, exile in France after his re lease—we haven’t talked about the heartache of losing his li brary card. It turns out his reading card for the British Museum Reading Room was revoked when his legal troubles erupted. Thus it is heartening to know that the British Library has rein stated his library card after 130 years. In a ceremony that only the Brits could pull off without looking hokey, the reinstated pass was presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, a Wilde scholar and biographer. Describing the symbolic restitu tion as “a lovely gesture of forgiveness” by which his grandfa ther would have been touched, he hastened to add that Oscar would probably not have accepted the blanket pardon enacted in 2017 for the 50,000 to 100,000 men convicted of “gross in decency” over many decades: “Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love,” so there was nothing to par don! One final question: given that Wilde was in no position to

on her debut performance at L.A.’s “Save Her” fundraiser in June, where @Vivllainous crushed it with her dramatic dancing and song. But the fact that Vivian is the progeny of Elon Musk makes it impossible not to read a little something into it. We won’t rehash Elon’s politics, but matters of paternity are more inter esting. The best guess is that he has fourteen children, most or all of whom were conceived artificially to ensure that they’d be male. This army of sons appears to be part of his ultimate mission (world domi nation?), so the arrival of Vivian as a trans woman could carry any number of lessons. Vivian’s per

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2012 to a mere 7.1 in 2022), a statistic that probably has noth ing to do with same-sex marriage. Haters Gonna Hate A story widely reported in the UK con cerned the felling of a very old, solitary, almost sacred tree near Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, the site of marriages and memorial services and countless photo ops. Two men were caught after clever sleuthing and have fessed up, offering no explanation beyond that they did it for the fun of it. The judge sentenced Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers to an unusu ally harsh 51 months in prison for the sheer cruelty of their deed. In due course it was learned that only nine days earlier they’d been arrested for a hate crime—a physical assault on a gay man accompanied by anti-gay slurs at a rest stop—but the Cumbria Police had declined to bring charges due to “insuffi cient evidence.” Two unrelated crimes, but why doesn’t it sur prise us that the same two guys who got off on killing a beloved tree also enjoy attacking the occasional gay person?

formance was on behalf of a legal defense fund for immigrants facing deportation, a cause that’s right down there with trans gender rights in Elon’s priorities. News Flash: Marriage Equality Lowers Divorce Rates! Aswe mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, LGBTQ Nation.com reminds us that ten years ago a key argument against marriage equality was that it would cause heterosexual divorce rates to surge. The logic was convoluted, but they needed to show that gay marriage actively harmed marriage as an institution. Same-sex marriage, they claimed, “will entrench an understanding of marriage that elevates adult fulfillment over children’s needs.” But since parents often stay together solely for the kids, the de motion of “children’s needs” will release parents (i.e., fathers) from any such concern, and off they’ll go. So, here we are ten years later and—wait for it—divorce rates for straight couples are significantly lower than before (from 9.8 per thousand in

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Edward E. Eliot

ESSAY The Ascension of the Retail Queen W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

E VERYONE FROM THE ASTORS to the gutter sweepers called it the Marble Palace, though that wasn’t its name. A. T. Stewart & Co. graced the east side of Broadway, the unfashionable side, the side where the merciless afternoon sun turned the sidewalks to griddles and sent New Yorkers scurrying to the shaded shops on the better side. De spite the store’s déclassé location, when the Marble Palace opened its doors in 1846, The New York Herald gushed at its elegance: “The walls and ceiling are painted in fresco, and the tinting and design are exquisitely chaste, classic, and tasteful— There is one large chandelier in the main hall, that is not sur passed in beauty by anything we have ever seen.” The ceiling was supported by fluted columns of glistening Italian marble, topped with ornate capitals carved into an intricate design of a cornucopia and a caduceus of Mercury, the god of commerce. This was no garish display of mercantile ostentation. “Its dec orations, in general and in detail, are of the most chaste and clas sic description. There is no gaudy gilding or tinsel show to disgust refined taste, but everything is ornate and elegant.” The focal point of the new emporium—one soon to be these balustrades, and looking up or down, the sight is brilliant and attractive,” wrote one critic. “Thousands of persons are scattered about the floors making purchases. Hundreds of clerks, salesmen, and cash boys are busy serving them, and the buz [ sic ] and hum of human voices under the vast roof sounds like the droning of a hive of bees.” That buzz could have been much louder. It was the custom in New York stores at the time for clerks and patrons to wran gle over the price of the items for sale, turning every hat shop in Manhattan into the souk of Algiers. Stewart found the prac tice gauche and unrefined, and in his Marble Palace he initiated a policy of fixed pricing. He knew what each item in his inven tory had cost him to acquire and how much the current market would bear, and he set his prices accordingly. But having banned vulgar haggling from his store, Stewart needed to find another way for his sales clerks to nudge reluctant purchasers. He decided to use sex. A contemporary business writer de William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail , and the forthcoming When We Found Each Other: Gay Men in 19th-Century America . copied by stores in Boston, San Francisco, and London—was an elegant central dome soaring ninety feet above a circular sales floor. When Stewart built a new store a few blocks away, near Astor Place, his signature dome was replaced by an even larger atrium, with five mezzanine levels enclosed by mas sive iron balustrades. “Leaning over one of

scribed it in more elegant terms: “He had noticed that the ladies, in ‘shopping,’ were given to the habit of gossiping, and even flirting with the clerks, and he adopted the expedient of em ploying as his salesmen the handsomest men he could procure, a practice which has since become common. The plan was suc cessful from the first. Women came to his store in greater num bers than before, and ‘Stewart’s nice young men’ were the talk of the town.” Fortunately for Stewart, it was easy in New York to procure handsome young men who liked to gossip and flirt. In the 19th century, the city’s population exploded, increas ing from 200,000 in 1830 to more than half a million in 1850. By 1870 that number had almost doubled. Clerks were the third largest occupational group in New York, drawn primarily from the ranks of newly arrived immigrants and strapping country boys fresh off the farm. They were young: In a sample taken from records covering the period 1850 to 1855, between sixty and seventy percent of the clerks were under the age of 25, al most all of them unmarried and living unsupervised in ram shackle boardinghouses. In the past, clerks had been primarily apprentices, starting at the bottom rung with a dream of even tually climbing to the top. But now there were not enough lad young man plunges into trouble and danger the hour he sets foot in the city,” one book warned. Perhaps the gravest danger lurked in the young man’s own boardinghouse: Evil company is often elegant, delightful, and fascinating; and inexperience cannot escape the coils of the gilded serpent. What is greatly to be deplored is, that associates of this sort do not wait to be sought out, but make the first advances, and not unfrequently lie in wait for the new arrival. Unless the novice is on his guard against these seducers, he will certainly fall. Most deadly is the poison, when evil companions are under the same roof, perhaps at the same table, or even, by a wretched custom, in the same bed. Better to be chained to yel low fever or small-pox, than joined to a vicious room-mate. Clerks who managed to fend off their bedmate’s gilded ser pent might still become enmeshed in New York’s rampant sex culture, and for heterosexual men working in department stores, being familiar with the city’s brothels and sex workers could actually improve one’s chances of advancement. Stewart’s strat egy of employing handsome clerks to flirt with his customers was only one nod to the adage that “sex sells.” There were also ders to climb, and any young man hired as a clerk faced the prospect that he might not as cend much higher in his profession. The sudden influx of young single men living without parental control set off alarms and triggered a barrage of conduct books aimed at alerting young men to the dangers of city life. “The newly-arrived boy or

By the 1830s, male store clerks had become a recog nized subcategory of the labor market: they were the “counter jumpers.”

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cruder applications of the principle. Buyers from Chicago and St. Louis and Cincinnati would travel to New York twice a year to order inventory for their local stores. These men were far from home, well aware of New York’s “sporting” culture of gambling dens, saloons, and brothels, and eager to sample the sins of the big city during their brief visits. Store owners often turned to their young clerks to act as sex guides to the back alleys and elegant bordellos of Manhattan. Clerks would trade tips with one another about the best places to engage sex workers, both for themselves and for their out of-town clients, frequently sharing unnecessarily detailed de scriptions of their encounters. Historian Patricia Cline Cohen writes: “the intense curiosity about each other’s performance suggests that for these young men, heterosexuality had a ho mosocial dimension.” It was, Cohen maintains, as though the clerks were saying to one another: “Look at the prized woman I sleep with, have sex with her, and thus learn something of how I experience sex. Their eagerness to imagine friends having sex … suggest[s] the culture of sexuality in this circle of young men had homoerotic dimensions.”

When store owners like Stewart encouraged their clerks to charm their female customers through smiles and banter, counter jumpers began to be viewed as dangerous seducers. Fe male customers tended to shop in the fancy department stores without male companions, and handsome young men shower ing them with attention could, it was feared, turn the heads of impressionable girls and neglected wives. Particularly fraught were encounters involving the sale of perfumes or intimate ap parel. At the end of a day of flirting with respectable women, a stereotypical clerk decked himself out in the latest garish fash ions—much of which he could barely afford on his salary of five dollars a week—and strutted the streets of Manhattan, a raffish dandy who sported with his pals in taverns, gambling “hells,” and brothels. Counter jumpers were maligned as preda tory rakes and foppish seducers. They were unmanly and un ambitious parasites, afraid of hard work and motivated only by the pursuit of pleasure. On the eve of the Civil War, the public’s disdain for depart ment store clerks had fallen far below gentle ridicule and taken on toxic—though utterly confused—gender implications. Ex

plains historian Brian Luskey: “Male clerks were at once heterosexually rapacious as well as ef feminate, deviant dandies who lingered on the margins of Victorian America’s sexual cate gories. The sporting press responded to their am biguous sexual identities by coupling them with sodomites whose ‘unnatural sexuality’ also trou bled contemporaries.” A reputation for seducing female customers and for riotous carousing in brothels was no protection against the suspicion of secret sodomy. Some even suggested the op posite: that clerks who “spent their leisure hours curling each other’s hair” used their effeminacy as a clever ruse “to get otherwise respectable young ladies to spend the evening in their board inghouse rooms.” In a society obsessed with fer reting out fakes and confidence men, store clerks were seen as masters of deception, men adept at hiding their true selves, effeminate wraiths only pretending to be real men—or dangerous seduc ers hiding behind a pansy façade.

§ I N THE CITIES OF 19 TH - CENTURY A MERICA , store clerks were so numerous that they became a recognized subcategory of the labor market, one with its own amusing stereotype. By at least the mid-1830s, many were being referred to as “counter jumpers.” It began as a term of mild mockery, but as the decades passed and the phalanx of retail clerks grew and developed dis tinctive traits in the public imagination, the epithet became more aggressively dismissive, slowly curdling like sour milk. At first it made gentle fun of the obsequious young men so eager to serve customers that they scurried from counter to counter, smil ing and bobbing, abasing themselves to make a sale. As the workforce expanded to include more farm boys and aspiring immigrants posing stiffly behind the counters of elegant de partment stores, the term was used to deride the hayseed rubes and striving foreigners who ludicrously aped their betters— counterfeit gentry whose thin veneer of sophistication could so easily and humorously crack. From Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860. The caption reads: “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers. ‘You should be women./ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.’ — Macbeth , Act 1, Scene 3.”

Even Walt Whitman disparaged store clerks as milksops who fell far from his ideal of the brawny blue-collar worker. In an 1856 article in the magazine Life Illustrated , Whitman de picted them as “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest—but trig and prim in [the] great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts ... [and] startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils. Creatures of smart appearance, when dressed up; but what wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!” Of all the many critics of New York’s retail clerks, perhaps only Whitman would picture them with their clothes off. § C OMMENTS ON THE EFFEMINACY of store clerks were common in the popular press. Alice B. Neal in Godey’s Lady’s Book wrote sardonically of an imagined visitor to New York who had been

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