The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [69]
In the light of retrospection, of course, the dreadful depths of 42nd Street circa 1960 sound fairly innocuous. And in fact Bracken was at pains to distinguish between the street’s increasingly noxious reputation and its daily reality. The youthful “deviates,” he writes, may have been material for the psychiatrist, but not for the policeman. The drifters in the arcades could be counted on to comply when the officer on the beat shooed them away. The knives on display in the stores were for show rather than for battle. The jukebox in the IRT arcade was wholly devoted to opera. The police made relatively few arrests on an average night. Forty-second Street was an “enigma” in an otherwise healthy city; indeed, Bracken observed, “places that attract deviates and persons looking for trouble are interspersed with places of high standards of food, drink and service.” And yet precisely because New Yorkers were accustomed to clean and orderly streets, 42nd Street’s anarchy was shocking. “Respectable elements,” Bracken noted, were “deeply offended and, in some cases, outraged.”
The Times Square that the Beats had frequented, which is to say, 42nd Street as well as Eighth Avenue from the upper Thirties to the lower Fifties, had grown more scrofulous in recent years. The dirty bookstores had begun to proliferate in the 1950s. The merchandise, which in the past had run to joke books, war stories, westerns, and horoscopes, increasingly shifted to such standards of soft-core erotica as the “French deck”—playing cards with pictures of naked girls—calendars, paperbacks like Sex Life of a Cop, and those secondhand magazines. Prostitutes had patrolled the area since the late nineteenth century, but the opening of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, at the southeast corner of 42nd and Eighth, in late 1950, had vastly increased the numbers of both teenage boys and girls available to be conscripted into the trade, and probably increased the supply of customers as well. And by the early sixties, Times Square had become New York’s capital of male prostitution, known as hustling.
The Times Square area had long been congenial to homosexuals, thanks both to its general air of laissez-faire and to the relatively high concentration of gay men in theater and the theater’s ancillary professions, like costume and set design. Places like the bar of the Astor Hotel—or at least one designated side of the bar—were well-known gay hangouts as early as the 1910s, and then increasingly so with the influx of servicemen during World War II. Tourists often poked their heads into 42nd Street coffee shops like Bickford’s, where they were likely to spot the flamboyant “fairies” who had made the street such an exotic slice of American life. Timothy Gilfoyle, the leading scholar of this subject, cites a tabloid in the early thirties to the effect that “The latest gag about 2 A.M. is to have your picture taken with one or two pansies on Times Square.”
With the onset of the Depression, the hustling scene, according to Gilfoyle, became less theatrical and more grimly commercial. Forty-second Street became the center of “rough trade,” forcing overtly effeminate gay men to Bryant Park, one block to the east. The unnamed main character of John Rechy’s City of Night, published in 1963, arrives in New York determined to make a living with his body, and is immediately directed by a wiser hand to Times Square—“always good for a score.” And indeed it is. Standing at the corner of 42nd and Broadway, he says, “I can see the young masculine men milling idly. Sometimes they walk up to older men and stand talking in soft tones