A Queer Capital

A History of Gay Life in Washington D.C.

Genny Beemyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317819370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études LGBT

Rooted in extensive archival research and personal interviews, A Queer Capital is the first history of LGBT life in the nation's capital. Revealing a vibrant past that dates back more than 125 years, the book explores how lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals established spaces of their own before and after World War II, survived some of the harshest anti-gay campaigns in the U.S., and organized to demand equal treatment. Telling the stories of black and white gay communities and individuals, Genny Beemyn shows how race, gender, and class shaped the construction of gay social worlds in a racially segregated city.

From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1980s, Beemyn explores the experiences of gay people in Washington, showing how they created their own communities, fought for their rights, and, in the process, helped to change the country. Combining rich personal stories with keen historical analysis, A Queer Capital provides insights into LGBT life, the history of Washington, D.C., and African American life and culture in the twentieth century.

1
The Geography of Same-Sex Desire

Cruising Men in Washington in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

For years and years I have been this way—have loved and worshipped silently other boys and youths, some older, some younger than myself—sexual inversion, Havelock Ellis calls it… I never thought I should write anything like this down but here it is done.

—Carter Newman Bealer, diary entry, February 11, 1921¹

It occurred to me today with something of a shock how horrible it would be for this diary of mine to be pawed over and read unsympathetically by friends or relatives after I am dead, by those utterly incapable of understanding, who would be filled with disgust and astonishment and think of me as a poor perverted wretch, a neurotic or a madman who was better off dead. And then the thought of the one thing even more dreadful and terrible than that—for my diary never to be read by the one person who could or would understand. For I do want it to be read—there is no use concealing the fact—by somebody who is like me, who would understand absolutely and yet Havelock Ellis is about the only person known to me, that is known by name, to whom I could confidently entrust this record of my life, of my innermost soul at times.

—Bealer, diary entry, April 16, 1923

Men who documented their same-sex sexual experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced censure should their writing be discovered during their lifetimes, or the likelihood that they would be remembered with embarrassment and shame should it be found after their deaths—with surviving family members then either destroying their work or hiding it away. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that relatively few primary sources exist which describe how men in the United States pursued same-sex sexual relationships at the time, either in the nation’s capital or in other cities, and how they developed social spaces in which to do so.² It is this lack of first-hand material that makes the diaries of Carter Newman Bealer, a white, middle-class Washingtonian born at the turn of the twentieth century, so important. Recognizing that the silencing of his voice would be more detrimental than a hostile reaction, Bealer extensively documented his sexual experiences in the capital, including the different sites and techniques utilized for “cruising”—a term he used as early as 1923 to refer to his attempts to find sexual partners—and the harassment of the police and larger society.³ His diary is the only extensive first-person account of gay life in Washington, D.C. in the early twentieth century known to exist, and as such, is an invaluable resource. His work offers a unique window into the scope and parameters of white male same-sex sexuality in the capital at that time.

Drawing extensively from Bealer’s diaries, this chapter will explore how men who sought same-sex sexual relationships established and navigated the capital’s sexual landscape, focusing in particular on how the city’s racial dynamics affected the character and dimensions of male cruising. Because no first-hand accounts from black male Washingtonians who pursued same-sex sexual relationships in public spaces at that time are known to exist, I will bring in secondary sources that offer insights into the experiences of black men who were “in the life.” Evidence suggests that both black and white men often used the capital in different ways for cruising; not just in where, but also in how they pursued same-sex sexual relationships, and the possibilities and limits of these relationships.

Although Washington did not enact segregation laws like many southern states, racial discrimination in public facilities was a firmly entrenched practice in the capital by the turn of the twentieth century and limited interracial same-sex sexual relationships.⁴ White men largely did not go to black neighborhoods for cruising; instead, they appropriated institutions in and near downtown Washington—movie theaters, bars, restaurants, apartment and rooming houses, and the main branch of the YMCA—as locations to meet potential partners. All of these places severely restricted the access of African Americans or denied them admittance altogether. As a result, black men hoping to meet other men for sexual encounters created their own social sites within the city’s black neighborhoods. However, because they lived and often worked in these same neighborhoods, they developed more private gathering spaces that enabled them to socialize with less fear of discovery. Still, many of their families and neighbors knew and tolerated, if not accepted, them being “that way,” as bonds of family, community, and race outweighed the difference of sexuality. The importance of racial solidarity was also reflected in the nature of the social spaces established by African Americans who were attracted to others of the same sex in the early and mid twentieth century; unlike most of the spaces begun by their white counterparts, the sites within the black community often included people of all genders.

The extent to which same-sex sexuality and gender non-conformity could be accepted within the city’s black working-class neighborhoods was demonstrated by the popularity of drag shows at several clubs in the main black commercial section of the capital in the 1930s. While the community’s embrace of cross-dressing was tied to the context of entertaining a presumably heterosexual audience—local drag balls, in contrast, were prohibited—the appeal of such shows indicates that drag performers had a space in the community that they could claim as their own. That most of the performers were African Americans from Washington also reflected a level of support; they could be out to people they knew and even gain a certain celebrity status.

A number of well-researched community histories have examined male same-sex sexuality prior to World War II, including George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 – 1940, Peter Boag’s Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, and essays on Chicago by David K. Johnson and Allen Drexel in my anthology Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. But few works have considered the social and sexual lives of both black and white men in a thoroughly segregated society.⁵ One major study of men who desired men in a segregated community, John Howard’s Men Like That: A Southern Queer History, examines post-World War II Mississippi, a society much less urban and more racially polarized than Washington. According to Howard, in Mississippi, “black men and white men participated in markedly similar worlds of desire that rarely overlapped before the 1960s.”⁶ In the nation’s capital, the creation of these separate worlds did not preclude some racial mixing in the early twentieth century, particularly in the extensive parkland in downtown Washington, which, unlike some of the parks in southern states, did not deny or restrict admittance to African Americans, and in parts of the city’s “tenderloin” district, which enforced racial separation but not always rigidly.⁷

Washington thus represents something of a middle ground between communities in the Northeast, Northwest, and Midwest, where men, particularly white men, who desired same-sex partners could often readily cross racial lines, and communities further South, where interracial socializing, much less sexual relationships, were heavily proscribed. While racism excluded African Americans from many downtown-area Washington institutions and kept most white people from patronizing establishments in the city’s black neighborhoods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both white and black men attracted to others of the same sex created a number of spaces in which both groups could co-exist and where some men had relationships across racial lines. In Bealer’s case, racism led him to avoid black men whenever he could. But the fact that he had to make an effort, at times, to keep African Americans from his social world demonstrates the potential for racial mixing, as well as the extent of racial separation, in the nation’s capital.

Meet Me Across from the White House: “Adventures” in the City’s Parks

It was a lovely night to sit in the peaceful confines (outwardly peaceful, to those who don’t know the passion and intrigue and mystery sheltered in those dim shades) of Lafayette Square.

—Carter Newman Bealer, diary entry, September 14, 1922

As he recounts in his diaries, Bealer recognized his attraction to men by the time that he was a teenager. He was born on October 17, 1899 in Atlanta, Georgia, and when he was eight years old, his father, stepmother, and the rest of the family moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived first in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood and then in the Brightwood section of the city. Bealer attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and George Washington University before beginning a long career as an editor for the Department of Agriculture.⁸

Bealer started keeping a diary in 1912, when he was twelve years old, and four years later, he cataloged having his first sexual experience with another man. At Washington and Lee, his same-sex attractions were largely unrequited; returning to the capital brought far greater opportunities to meet potential partners. For Bealer, cruising in the city’s downtown parks, particularly in the “dim shades” of Lafayette Square across from the White House, was nearly a nightly ritual each spring and summer during the early 1920s, when he was twenty to twenty-three years old. He would go “as soon as darkness fell” and stay until “things had grown very quiet” between eleven and midnight, hoping to find the “lasting ideal friend… [he] had dreamed of so often.”⁹ Bealer became so obsessed with going to the park that he made a resolution to himself at one point to stay away for at least one night.¹⁰

Despite the frequency and duration of his visits, Bealer often failed in his attempts to pick up men, much less to develop a long-term relationship, because he frequently did not have the courage to approach others, even those who seemed interested in him. For example, he admitted in a 1922 diary entry that he could not bring himself to sit on a bench next to a youth he found attractive because of his “damnable timidity.” Ray Hare, another young white man whom Bealer came to know through cruising the capital’s parks, subsequently did approach the youth, leading Bealer to think of himself as a “cowardly fool.”¹¹ On another evening, Hare apparently succeeded in picking up two soldiers, while Bealer “let several lads that [he] wanted slip thru [his] fingers.” He went home alone, wishing that “only once [he] had [Hare’s] assurance, easy personality and persuasional ability.”¹²

Bealer’s inhibition, which he called his “curse,” regularly frustrated and depressed him. In one particularly despondent moment, when he was alone on New Year’s Eve in 1923, he despaired that he would always be “a miserable outcast” and would never find a “kindred soul” because he was attracted to other men and unable to act on his feelings: “Is it not bad enough that I must be what I am, without the additional horror, this perpetual nightmare of self-consciousness, shyness and silence that isolates me as effectively as the sky isolates the moon from all-else?”¹³ Bealer’s fear of being “doomed to eternal loneliness and solitude” led him to think briefly of suicide, rather than live an “existence that can find no happiness, no abiding joy in anything but only a ceaseless agonizing hunger, an ache, the pain of which is unutterable.”¹⁴

Cruising was far from entirely futile for Bealer, though. Despite his self-consciousness and shy nature, he had sex with dozens of men and, amazingly, detailed his experiences. At the back of his diaries from 1922 and 1923, he listed the men with whom he had what he referred to as “adventures” (using their real names or ones he made up for them) since he was sixteen years old, when and often where he met them, and the sex acts in which they engaged. For 1920, Bealer recorded seven adventures with three different men. In 1921, he had five adventures with four different men; the following year, he had sex once each with six different men; and in 1923—the last year that he regularly went cruising—he had forty-six adventures with thirty-one different men. For the 1923 encounters, Bealer indicated the types of sexual activities in which he and the other person engaged, which might include caressing, masturbation, fellatio, and anal sex. During the first half of the year, many of his adventures i...