Pansy Craze

During the Pansy Craze of 1930-1933, drag queens, known as "pansy performers", experienced a surge in underground popularity, especially in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

By the end of the 1920s much of the public image of gay people was still limited to the various drag balls in Greenwich Village and in Harlem, but the early 1930s saw a new development within a highly commercial context, bringing the gay subculture of the enclaves of Greenwich Village and Harlem onto the mainstream stages of midtown Manhattan in a veritable Pansy Craze from 1930 until the repeal of prohibition in 1933. After the repeal of prohibition, this tolerance waned. Any sympathetic portrayal of gay characters (termed sexual perverts) was prohibited by the Motion Picture Production Code (or Hays Code) from being included in Hollywood films. Performer Ray Bourbon was arrested many times for his act, considered tame by today's standards.

The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of notable and visible gay and lesbian presence and subculture in various cities in the USA. In many ways, New York City set the tone, particularly in its "bohemian artistic enclaves" of Greenwich Village and Harlem, as well as in the cabarets and speakeasies around the Broadway Theater District centered on Times Square. Whereas the late 19th century restricted gay male activity to the seedy red-light district under the elevated train of the Bowery, with an even less visible lesbian life largely restricted to private salons for upper class women and a quite limited dance hall life for the less well-off, Prohibition allowed the first emergence of a visible gay and lesbian life in a largely middle-class context. Prohibition forced a new mixing of all kinds of people—all in search of the same illicit drink, and economics made for a culture of at least mild tolerance if not outright "anything goes". As prohibition was quite bad for business in cosmopolitan cities, city officials and Madison Avenue conspired together to create the "Cult of the Urban Sophisticate" who was above the petty and outdated moralism of the Temperance movement. Not only did the 1920s see the emergence of visible, tolerated gay enclaves—but also the emergence of several gay-owned (or more often lesbian-owned) and operated speakeasies and clubs, precursors of the outright "gay" or "lesbian" bars. There was an increasing association of gay and lesbian people with a kind of cultural renaissance, with many artists and writers gay and lesbian, and many of the salons that nurtured this talent, whether in the Village, Harlem or in sister commentates in Paris, run by women, quite often lesbians.

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