... having been breathed out

The [gang of] inverts [within the US Navy in 1919 Newport, Rhode Island] grouped themselves together as “queers” on the basis of their effeminate gender behavior, and they all played roles culturally defined as feminine in sexual contacts [sic]. But they distinguished among themselves on the basis of the “feminine” sexual behavior they preferred, categorizing themselves as “fairies” (also called cocksuckers), “pogues” (men who liked to be “browned,” or anally penetrated), and “two-way artists” (who enjoyed both). The ubiquity of these distinctions and their importance to personal self-identification cannot be overemphasized. Witnesses at the naval inquiries explicitly drew the distinctions as a matter of course and incorporated them into their descriptions of the gay subculture. One “pogue” who cooperated with the investigation, for instance, used such categories to label his friends in the gang with no prompting from the court: “Hughes said he was a pogue; Richard said he was a cocksucker; Fred Hoage said he was a two-way artist…” While there were some men about whom he “had to draw my own conclusions; they never said directly what they was or wasn’t,” his remarks make it clear he was sure they fit into one category or another.

A second group of sailors who engaged in homosexual relations and participated in the group life of the gang occupied a more ambiguous sexual category because they, unlike the queers, conformed to masculine gender norms. Some of them were heterosexually married. None of them behaved effeminately or took the “woman’s part” in sexual relations, they took no feminine nicknames, and they did not label themselves–nor were they labelled by others–as queer. Instead, gang members, who reproduced the highly gendered sexual relations of their culture, described the second group of men as playing the “husbands” to the “ladies” of the “inverted set.” Some husbands entered into steady, loving relationships with individual men known as queer; witnesses spoke of couples who took trips together and maintained monogamous relationships. […]

[T]he gang … helped men depart from the social roles ascribed to them as biological males by th[e] larger culture. Many of the “queers” interrogated by the navy recalled having felt effeminate or otherwise “different” most of their lives. But it was the existence of sexual subcultures–of which the gang was one–that provided them a means of structuring their vague feelings of sexual and gender difference into distinctive personal identities. Such groups facilitated people’s exploration and organization of their homosexuality by offering them support in the face of social opprobrium and providing them with guidelines for how to organize their feelings of difference into a particular social form of homosexuality, a coherent identity and way of life. The gang offered men a means of assuming social roles which they perceived to be more congruent with their inner natures than those prescribed by the dominant culture, and sometimes gave them remarkable strength to publicly defy social convention.

At the same time, the weight of social disapprobation led people within the gang to insist on a form of solidarity which required conformity to its own standards. To be accepted by the gang, for instance, one had to assume the role of pogue, fairy, two-way artist, or husband, and present oneself publicly in a manner consistent with that labelling. But some men appear to have maintained a critical perspective on the significance of the role for their personal identities. Even while assuming one role for the purpose of interaction with the gang, at least some continued to explore their sexual interests when the full range of those interests was not expressed in the norms of that role. Frederick Hoage, for instance, was known as a “brilliant woman” and a “French artist” (or “fairy”), but he was also reported surreptitiously to have tried to “brown” another member of the gang–behavior inappropriate to a “queer” as defined by the gang.

Gang members, who believed they could identify men as pogues or fairies even if the men themselves had not yet recognized their true natures, sometimes intervened to accelerate the process of self-discovery. The gang scrutinized newly arrived recruits at the Y.M.C.A. for likely sexual partners and “queers,” and at least one case is recorded of their approaching an effeminate but “straight”-identified man named Rogers in order to bring him out as a pogue. While he recalled always having been somewhat effeminate, after he joined the gang Rogers began using makeup “because the others did,” assumed the name “Kitty Gordon,” and developed a steady relationship with another man (his “husband”). What is striking to the contemporary reader is not only that gang members were so confident of their ability to detect Rogers’s homosexual interests that they were willing to intervene in the normal pattern of his life, but that they believed they could identify him so precisely as a “latent” (not their word) pogue.

—George Chauncey, Jr, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion?: Homosexual Identities and the Construction of the Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era” (from Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past). Bolding mine.

I was reminded the other day of the amazing 1919 US Navy sting operation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which then-secretary of the navy FDR, dismayed at his branch’s growing reputation as a bastion of male-on-male perversion, decided that the best way to clean things up and convince the US people of the eminent respectability of their armed forces was by recruiting a bunch of straight-identified servicemen to volunteer to go have sex with their fellow (queer-identified) sailors, and then testify in court about all the dirty details of what had happened.

What. Could possibly. Go wrong.

Putting aside how this whole boondoggle is one of my favorite episodes in the whole of US history, and that I kind of want to write a novel set during it, I find many of Chauncey’s points above independently fascinating. The bolded bit plays to my perpetual Achilles’ heel: the places where (sub)cultural identity categories, however useful they might be, break down. But Chauncey also points out how legitimately self-evident their own identity categories seemed to the Newport queers—and how socially useful they proved. Note, too, the early date of using the word “queer” as an apparently value-neutral term of self-identification. And what ISN’T fascinating about that last story, wherein Rogers the latent pogue is outed—apparently wildly successfully—and started on a new path by a group of total strangers?? How would Rogers’s life have gone differently, one wonders, if the gang had left him alone?