The author maintains that men who sought other men as sexual partners were able to create a complex social life and subculture despite prejudice and hostility because many straight New Yorkers were either indifferent to or curious about gay life.

Chauncey scants upper-class homosexuals, but middle-class and working-class gay life are portrayed in rich detail. Perhaps because sources were lacking, Mr. Lesbians sometimes patronized the cafeterias, dance halls and nightclubs where gay men congregated yet the culture and institutions created by homosexual men were different enough from those created by lesbians to warrant independent treatment. Chauncey, who teaches American history at the University of Chicago, limits his study to the gay male world that existed in New York in the 50 years before the start of World War II. Chauncey re-creates a New York in which homosexuals 'forged a distinctive culture with its own language and customs, its own traditions and folk histories, its own heroes and heroines.' Until a crackdown against 'immorality' in the Roaring Twenties resulted in a backlash against them, the author argues, homosexuals successfully carved out public and private spaces for themselves, making New York a flourishing gay capital of America for decades. Drawing on oral histories, diaries, police records, newspaper accounts and other sources, Mr. GEORGE CHAUNCEY'S enormously informative 'Gay New York' goes far to shatter the idea that until the gay rights movement of the 1970's homosexuals lived furtive, isolated and self-hating lives. GAY NEW YORK Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.

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