QUEER CONEY ISLAND
In the early-twentieth century, Coney Island was a popular destination for all working-class New Yorkers, and gay men were no exception. Nightclubs regularly featured female impersonators, the beach and its nearby bath houses were popular cruising spots, and sex was also regularly purchased at Coney Island.
The Washington Baths was clearly one of these gay sites, for in 1929 a male beauty contest staged there took a very queer turn. As George Chauncey writes in Gay New York, “most of the people who gathered to watch the competition were men” and “most of the men participating in the contest wore paint and powder.” A journalist reported, one “pretty guy pranced before the camera and threw kisses to the audience,” and “one man came in dressed as a woman.” Others had mascara on their eyelashes. “The problem,” as the reporter put it tongue-in-cheek, “became that of picking a male beaut who wasn’t a floosie no matter how he looked.” In essence, "on a packed summer hot afternoon, gay men had taken over a male beauty contest, becoming its audience, its contestants, and its stars.”
Bert Savoy (see above image) was a popular female impersonator who starred for many years in a vaudeville show entitled Greenwich Village Follies. However, in 1923, according to Harpo Marx, Savoy "drowned off Coney Island after being struck by lightening, and the next day a New York columnist had written an obituary for him in the form of a love letter. Also on the following day, so the legend goes, all the pansies at Coney Island were wearing lightening rods.“
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