While researching the queer history of 1920s New York, I happened to stumble upon a video by the YouTuber Kaz Rowe. In the video, Rowe mentions a brief era that I had never heard of called “The Pansy Craze”.
Kaz describes that, while objectively a marginally freer time for queer people to exist out in the open, the majority of straight folks viewed them as “salacious entertainment” for the time. In the late 20s, mainstream drag performances began to pop up. Julian Eltinge, arguably the most famous “female impersonator” of the time, can be seen here performing on The Voice of Hollywood in 1929:
The thing that struck me the most was Rowe’s assertion that the greater public didn’t actually distinguish between “straight” and “gay” the way we do now; instead, the term “fairy” was used as a distinguisher between masculine and feminine men. It doesn’t seem like it mattered as much if you were participating in homosexual activities–as long as you were acting in the role of the man. As a 1994 publication on the topic put it: the feminine man, regardless of his outward characteristics, was not a man at all. Fairies were the “intermediate sex” between men and women. One of the best historical examples I could find to demonstrate this concept comes from another famous drag performer named Jean Malin:
Don’t get me wrong, there was most definitely still discrimination for all sides. But there was a justification that if you were enjoying the company of a fairy, was it really even that gay? Honestly, in some ways, they were ahead of their time
