Week Four Responses

George Chauncey Response

Analyzing the pre-World War II community of gay males New York City as a microcosm of the gay culture throughout the United States, Chauncey challenges the popular narratives and assumptions about gay identity in the early to mid twentieth century. He asserts that the homosexual “closet” as we conceive it today, severely limits our ability to understand the dynamics of era’s gay communities. He asserts that the notion of gay men as invisible within society was little more than a myth, noting that they utilized outwardly visible markers and behaviors to display their identities. Indeed, rather than existing in an isolated, invisible or internalized manner, Chauncey strongly contends that the “gay male world” prior to the Second World War was a vibrant, visible community.

I found Chauncey’s intersectional approach to the topic to be a refreshing and enriching aspect of his writing. Incorporating the experiences of African-American gay communities and the role of socioeconomics within the differing experiences fleshed out and, positively, complicated his story. While seemingly considering his work to be aligned with the increasingly prolific scholarship of modern historians concentrated on sexuality, he acknowledges their groundbreaking nature of reinterpreting the histories of hidden communities as a new but needed direction of the field.

His sources of memoirs, contemporary newspaper headings and articles, and interview quotes give Chauncey’s account an aura of authenticity and genuineness that interlaced neatly with his own assertions and interpretations of the era. As Rose noted, I found his outlining of which aspects of his topic that he would and would not focus on to be enlightening and useful in understanding the intended purpose of his writing—a tactic I will perhaps consider incorporating into my own writing. I also enjoyed observing the ways in which Chauncey was able to incorporate primary and secondary sources that seemed only tangentially related and meld them with his own perspectives in order to create a strong, engaging work of history.

David Waldstreicher Response

Much as Chauncey challenges the popular conceptions of the pre-war gay community, so too does David Waldstreicher attempt to reinterpret the typical understandings of a “unitary and coherent Black historical experience” as it pertained to runaway slaves. In his article “Reading to the Runaways,” Waldstreicher argues that greater White American society demonstrated an awareness of the individuality of Black slaves, but suppressed the manifestation of these individual identities in order to perpetuate notions of their inferiority and dehumanization. Indeed, he argues that White society did so at the risk of runaway slaves’ utilizing this fluidity as a means benefitting from their own recreated identities, to the detriment of White slaveowners’ profit.

In emphasizing advertisements as his chief type of source, Waldstreicher attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Black Americans played their roles as resistant “actors” on the grander stage on the stage of oppressive, supremacist, capitalism. He examines the slaves’ profession, age and clothing to present a compelling narrative of how slaves were able to recreate and market their own identities to gain freedom.

Perhaps due to the deeply historicized timeframe about which Waldstreicher writes, many of his primary sources originated and were extracted from already extant secondary sources, such as Hodges’ and Brown’s 1994 work, Pretends to Be Free. Although it would likely have been difficult given the timeframe, it may have added another layer of complexity to have original primary sources in his paper as well.

As such, I found his strategy of relying on a single type of source to be simultaneously confining and defining. Obviously all of these advertisements were written from the slave-owners rather than material composed by the slaves themselves, making the information gleaned from them removed from their actual perspectives. However, the advertisements also focused his analytic approach. Overall, appreciated his creative approach to giving a voice and a sense of agency to the traditionally unvoiced slaves who toiled in the capitalist system of commoditized labor.