Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [906]
There were several such nightspots downtown. Charles Nesbitt, a medical student from North Carolina who visited the city around 1890, went on a slummer’s tour and stopped in at beer gardens along the Bowery where, he later recalled, “male perverts, dressed in elaborate feminine evening costumes, ‘sat for company’” and were compensated, as were waiter-girls, with commissions on the drinks clients bought them. The Slide, where waiters with rouged necks sang filthy ditties in falsetto voices, was often recommended by city-smart types to tourists in search of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Headline and drawing from the New York Herald, January 5, 1892. Wrote a reporter for the paper: “Let a detective be opportuned by people from a distance to show them something outre in the way of fast life, the first place he thinks of is the Slide, if he believes the out-of-towner can stand it.” (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation)
The Slide was also, however, a place where fairies felt free to socialize with one another as well as tourists. By the 1890s they had established a community in the interstices of the working-class neighborhood. Nesbitt attended a ball at Walhalla Hall, a Lower East Side establishment popular with local ethnic social clubs. There he found some five hundred male couples waltzing sedately and quite a few “masculine looking women in male evening dress” dancing with other women. So many seemed of “good” background, Nesbitt marveled, that he could almost imagine himself “among respectable people.”
Ralph Werther reported at least one instance in which solidarity went beyond mere socializing. In 1895 he was invited to join a little club called Cercle Hermaphrododitos, open only to those who “like to doll themselves up in feminine finery.” Its goal was to unite for defense “against the world’s bitter persecution”—making it conceivably the first homosexual rights organization in the United States. Persecution was less prevalent in the working-class neighborhoods than in uptown quarters, the fairies found; Werther enjoyed good relations with Irish and Italian youths. But while Bowery males tolerated these sexual newcomers, they did not respect them, and gang members brutalized them from time to time, as they did the Chinese, well aware their victims would not complain to police.
PASTORIZED VARIETY
Traveling up the Bowery or Broadway brought amusement seekers to the Union Square Rialto, center of a very different kind of cultural production. Union Square remained the hub of the nation’s theatrical industry, and managers and actors lived by the hundreds in area apartments and theatrical boardinghouses. The stock company system completed its collapse in this era. Lester Wallack’s group disbanded in 1887, leaving just Augustin Daly’s old troupe and one newcomer, Charles Frohman’s Empire Theater Stock Company. The stage was now completely given over to combination companies, the assembled-to-order groups that went out on prearranged tours. In the 1881—82 season 138 companies took to the road. In 1894-95 234 groups were hoofing their way across the country, and variety artists and minstrel performers were also assembling troupes and traveling. As the combination system grew ever more reliant on big-name attractions, duly certified success on the New York stage grew ever more critical.
Actors did not leave such crucial notices to chance. Thespians led vivid lives, fashioned personal legends and glamorous personas, and employed dramatic agents to publicize their reputations across the country. Richard d’Oyly Carte, the entrepreneur who produced Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience at the Standard,