GLR September-October 2025

“introduced to the wonders of Stewart’s marble palace” and “the smiles, and bows, and politeness of the perfumed and be whiskered young gentlemen who unfolded the muslins, and rolled up the ribbons, and sorted the gloves for you. Did it not strike you as an exceedingly noble and manly employment, so befitting masculine strength and energy?” Freeman Hunt, writ ing in his Merchants’ Magazine , was more pointedly dismis sive: “I almost lose my temper when I see a fellow standing six feet in his stockings, or a neat dapper-dandy of less dimensions, ‘dressed to kill,’ measuring out a yard of ribbon or tape, or des canting on the color or shade of a piece of silk, placing it in folds to hold in different lights, in order to show ‘how beauti fully it would make up.’” It was the satiric magazine Vanity Fair that subjected store clerks to the most demeaning treatment in the form of a vicious, yearlong assault of articles, poems, and cartoons, most written by Fitz-James O’Brien and illustrated by Frank Henry Temple Bellew. O’Brien and Bellew were the first American journalists to carry on a sustained, targeted attack on a profession perceived to be dominated by gay men. The issue for January 28, 1860, was savage in its denunciation. “These wretched effeminate, mostly uneducated, creatures, smirking and smiling all day long across a counter; these fellows whose highest ambition it is to be able to measure merino with grace, and sell sarsenet with suavity; these muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds are at the bot tom of one of the greatest social evils of the present time.” O’Brien let it be known that he would be publishing no gentle satire in the coming issues of Vanity Fair , and that he had no in tension of backing off his campaign. “The subject is one so im portant that we cannot, even if we would, be funny while treating it. But we do not intend to let it drop. We will, if we can, kill these heroes of the ell-wand [measuring stick] by inches.” Over the next months, O’Brien labeled retail clerks “the knights of simperdom,” and wondered: “Could they get their bread and butter, their lemon-soda and cinnamon cigars, by working as men, after having so long been something less than women?” His articles dripped with contempt for the men’s ap pearance. “They are curled and dyed and dressed and scented, regardless of all expense. ... Their hands are white and their nails oval. They all look as if each was the twin brother of the other.” (Evidently the clone look has a long history.) One particularly derisive poem announced: “I am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate/ … I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods;/ the damaged goods themselves I am,/ … For I am the creature of weak depravities.” The most revealing of Bellew’s illustrations for Vanity Fair was titled “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers” and was cap tioned with a quotation from Macbeth’s first encounter with the three Weird Sisters: “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.” The drawing shows the interior of a dry goods store in which customers are being waited on by five clerks, all of them men with beards, mustaches, or muttonchops, and all wearing billowing Victo rian dresses. The facial hair is significant. These are not O’Brien’s “muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds,” nor Whitman’s “wretched spindling forked radishes”; they are closer to Freeman Hunt’s “fellow standing six feet in his stock ings.” The counter jumpers in Bellew’s drawing are clearly not lacking in testosterone. They are just men doing something that

society tells them men shouldn’t do. The disconnect between text and image hints at the irony of O’Brien’s repeated attacks on the counter-jumpers. O’Brien was himself something of a parading peacock, known for his signature loud plaid suits, and he was a fixture at Pfaff’s beer cellar in Greenwich Village, the most popular hangout for New York’s artsy bohemian crowd. Historian Ruth L. Bohan sug gests there was a reason store clerks were singled out for so much unearned hostility: Despite their considerable animosity toward the counter jumper and the world he represented, the writers and artists at Vanity Fair saw in this much-maligned figure’s oppositional posture toward the dominant culture visceral reminders of their own precarious status as members of the city’s Bohemian com munity. Like counter jumpers, Bohemians operated on the mar gins of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. ... Like the counter jumper, the writers and artists at Pfaff’s continually flouted society’s norms, performed no hard physical work, and often attracted attention with their flamboyant attire. They were also journeymen in their fields who spent their evenings socializing in the saloons with their male friends while simul taneously striving to propel themselves up the next rung of the literary ladder. The close parallels with the lives of silk-and-ribbon clerks were unsettling for these men, so the public’s attention needed to be redirected, distinctions needed to be made. The men in New York’s bohemian crowd prided themselves on their blithe refusal to bow to societal norms, including those concerning sex—but there were limits. It was fine to vogue and camp and frighten the horses, so long as one didn’t actually have sex with another man. Whitman was called out for crossing that non-ne gotiable line. When O’Brien reviewed the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass , he praised its “manly vigor, its brawny health,” and yet denounced it also as “the coarsest indecency.” Whit man, he charged, “roots like a pig among a rotten garbage of li centious thoughts” and returns “with a seemingly exhaustless prurient pleasure to the same licentious phrases and ideas.” Whitman might insist to the public that he is merely being frank and natural “with all this muck of abomination soiling the pages,” but O’Brien was led to ask, “What Centaur have we here, half man, half beast?” In this early review O’Brien revealed the animus he would later unleash on retail clerks. Men who were perceived to be having sex with other men were not just unmanly, they were not even a “third sex.” In O’Brien’s view they were an entirely sep arate species. On the Origin of Species had recently been pub lished and its theories had begun to seep into New York’s intelligentsia. Perhaps the cruelest assault in Vanity Fair was published under the title “Natural History, the Counter-Jumper.” The debt to Darwin is clear. This truly singular and beautiful animal exists throughout the civilized world, but is only found in perfection in large cities. Its favorite haunts in this region are about the middle of the metropolis—in Broadway, Grand and Canal-streets, the Bow ery, and vicinity. It is generally about the size of the human species, and bears a resemblance to man, as well as to the ape tribe, with which it is often classified, I think erroneously. So far as my studies go, I consider the COUNTER - JUMPER nomore

TheG & LR

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