Page 454 - ILIAS ATHANASIADIS AKA RO1

How Gay Culture Blossomed During the Roaring

Twenties

On a Friday night in February 1926, a crowd of some 1,500 packed the

Renaissance Casino in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood for the 58th
masquerade and civil ball of Hamilton Lodge.

Nearly half of those attending the event, reported the New York Age, appeared

to be “men of the class generally known as ‘fairies,’ and many Bohemians from
the Greenwich Village section who...in their gorgeous evening gowns, wigs and

powdered faces were hard to distinguish from many of the women.”

The tradition of masquerade and civil balls, more commonly known as drag
balls, had begun back in 1869 within Hamilton Lodge, a black fraternal

organization in Harlem.

By the mid-1920s, at the height of the Prohibition era, they were attracting as
many as 7,000 people of various races and social classes—gay, lesbian,

bisexual, transgender and straight alike.

Stonewall (1969) is often considered the beginning of forward progress in the

gay rights movement.

But more than 50 years earlier, Harlem’s famous drag balls were part of a
flourishing, highly visible LGBTQ nightlife and culture that would be integrated

into mainstream American life in a way that became unthinkable in later

decades.

The Beginnings of a New Gay World

“In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-

non-conforming men .

who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American
cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington

University