Page 460 - ILIAS ATHANASIADIS AKA RO1

“Pansy Craze” Comes to an End

With the end of Prohibition, the onset of the Depression and the coming of
World War II, LGBTQ culture and community began to fall out of favor.

As Chauncey writes, a backlash began in the 1930s, as “part of a wider
Depression-era condemnation of the cultural experimentation of the 20's, which
many blamed for the economic collapse.”

The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations
prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay
patrons.

In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes
“provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often—in the mind of the
public and in the mind of authorities—equated with gay men.”

This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also

“made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.”

By the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and
suburban living.

The advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph

McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the
Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.

Drag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never

went away entirely—but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish
so publicly again.

Then and now is a big change we are come a very long way to where we are

now, enjoy the freedom of the 21 Century and remember every second it goes it
st
is not coming back, do the most and best out of this second.