In the final years of Prohibition in the United States, the glittering world of the roaring ‘20s stumbled at the edge of an economic chasm it could scarcely imagine much the same as the Fool. Driven to the underground by their desire to drink, mainstream whites found themselves delight in mixing with all sort of riffraff, ne’er-do-wells, and other racially and sexually coded subcultures. There was a certain thrill for whites - not too different from the same today - in consuming Black music, dance, and clothing styles derived from both the bucking of conventions and the simultaneous revelling in the sense of danger racial integration inspired in the broader white public.
While the voluptuous panic of Berlin’s sexual underworld has become widely known over the past twenty years, the gay underground in North America has largely been conceptualized around the famous Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. Overlooked in this version of gay history is the vibrant moment during the social mixing of the 1920s that led to straights ‘discovering’ and consuming gay culture at the same time they so drunkenly consumed Blackness.
It’s little mistake that these two things would happen concurrently. Drag balls, popularized by the scandal over Mae West’s ‘obscene’ 1927 play The Drag, happened in two places: Greenwich Village and Harlem. The same Harlem that was in the midst of a Black cultural revolution which would set the intellectual and artistic stage for decades to come.
The Pansy Craze swept the major cities. Gay and gender non-conforming performers swept the stages of America, often performing music that openly referenced their sexuality and gender performance. Pre-Code films, obsessed with sex and criminality, even gestured toward this popular fascination with queerness, most notably with Marlene Dietrich’s onscreen cross-dressed lesbian kiss in Josef Von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) and in Clara Bow’s trip to a gay bar in John Francis Dillon’s Call Her Savage (1932).
You could perhaps be forgiven for thinking, in 1932, that based on this popular fascination homosexual liberation must’ve been right around the corner. Of course, the great tragedy and miracle of life is that things don’t always work out how you might imagine.
In one of his typically searing essays, James Baldwin wrote in the pages of Ebony magazine,
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this." (1965)
This dizzying sense of historical consciousness - the knowledge that most of our lives have been predetermined for us by a set of historical circumstances that vastly predate us - is a large driver for my work as a popular historian. Queer and trans people have until recently had our histories violently purged from collective memory. We have been cut off from our past, from our ancestors, and - much like the Fool - set to wander perilously close to the edge of oblivion. We can hardly conceptualize this oblivion, it being ever-present but also, without history, its contours being impossible to map. What is a map if not a history of space?
Giving history back to a people not only restores their dignity - rejoining them to the spirits, both metaphorical and very literal, of their ancestors - but also illuminates the path ahead. The Fool looks down and sees what lies before them.
Baldwin, again,
“In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history.” (1965)
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, allowing straight whites to move into legal drinking environments that no longer thrived on the thrill of breaking the law and mixing with society’s most marginal. When you are no longer criminalized, how easy it is to forget those who remain so. And not just to forget, but to come to power, to enjoy more comfortably the privileges into which you have become fully enfranchised. White straights segregated their drinking, racially and sexually.
This wave of conservatism was ushered in, in the broadest cultural sense, by the Great Depression. As it dragged on through the 1930s, increasing economic insecurity led to social conservatism. In Berlin, this ultimately led to the Nazi’s rise to power. But the same, too, in North America. The same people who five years ago might have enjoyed watching Rae Bourbon in drag sing about getting off with men, now sent in ‘morality squads’ to raid gay bars to clean up the most vulnerable vestiges of 1920s decadence that seemed painfully gaudy in leaner times.
Here in the pandemic, we stand now on at the rapidly crumbling edge of an economic downturn that could potentially reshape the world as we know it. The world has stopped moving, all at once. And it’s to this history of the Pansy Craze that I feel beholden now, as some economists forecast that this could be as deep as the Great Depression.
It’s no mistake that queer and trans people face our most acute state and social repression during times of economic anxiety. The same is true for people of colour, people living with disabilities. The sense that the world has spun wrong, that divine punishment fills the air with the taste of copper, that plague and hardship are upon us, it eats at all of us. Those in power, and those fools whose pale skin deludes their empty pockets into thinking they could ever be in the same proximity to power as, like, Jeff Bezos, feel the out of control-ness gnaw at them and will do anything to make it stop. They will purge the unclean to restore order, sanity.
These are my great fears, here, at the brink of the world.
The Fool is the first card of the Book of the Tarot. It speaks at first glance to the danger of foolishness - the Fool looks not where they step, ignores the barks of their faithful dog, has their head in the cloudless sky. But it also speaks of great possibility. It is the card of total possibility, anything could happen.
Reconnected to our historical consciousness, perhaps we could find a different road. Mutual aid could teach us a way out of the capitalist death cult that pushed us here. We carry a history within us, but we do not have to let it determine our future if we, as Baldwin wrote, “re-create [ourselves] according to a principle more humane and more liberating.”
Anyway, give some hookers your money.
xo
M