Working to establish “norms” for human behavior, they increasingly treated such gathering places as a danger.
At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. In the 1920s, due in part to Prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became even more open.
Inventing Homosexuality: Chicago Vice Crusaders Confront Sexual “Perversion” in the Theaterįrom the Civil War through the 1920s, there were numerous clubs, saloons, and dance halls, in New York and other American cities, known for transvestism (men or women dressing as the opposite sex), for male prostitution, or as places that catered to a “gay crowd”-meaning men and women interested in a less conventional evening’s entertainment.
