Not only could they easily move out if trouble developed, the tenants at most houses compensated for the lack of physical privacy by maintaining a degree of respectful social distance. Rooming houses also offered tenants a remarkable amount of privacy. The rooms were cheap, they were minimally supervised, and the fact that they were usually furnished and were rented by the week made them easy to leave if a lodger got a job elsewhere-or needed to disappear because of legal troubles. Such housing had qualities that made it particularly useful to gay men as well as to transient workers of various sorts. Usually situated in rowhouses previously occupied by single families, rooming houses provided tenants with a small room, a bed, minimal furniture, and no kitchen facilities residents were expected to take their meals elsewhere. Such information most frequently came to the attention of the police when a man who had been brought home assaulted or tried to blackmail his host, when parents discovered that a man had invited their son home, when the police followed men to a furnished room from some other, more public locale, or when one of the tenants sharing a room with his lover was arrested on another charge. Some landladies doubtless tolerated known homosexual lodgers for the same economic reasons they tolerated lodgers who engaged in heterosexual affairs, and others simply did not care.Ĭourt records from the first three decades of the century provide relatively few accounts of men apprehended for sexual encounters in rooming houses (itself indirect evidence of the relative security of such encounters), but they do abound in anecdotal evidence of men who lived together in rooming houses or took other men to their rooms, and whose relationships or rendezvous came to the attention of the police only because of a mishap. Sixty-one percent of the men investigated in 1940 lived in rooming houses, three-quarters of them alone and another quarter with a lover or other roommates only a third lived in tenement houses with their own families or boarded with others. No census data exist that could firmly establish the residential patterns of gay men, but two studies of gay men incarcerated in the New York City Jail, conducted in 19, are suggestive. For many, this meant joining the large number of unmarried workers living in the furnished-room houses (also called lodging or rooming houses) clustered in certain neighborhoods of the city. In the 1950s a major apartment house at Number 405 in a street in the East 50s was so heavily gay that gay men nicknamed it the “Four out of Five.”Īlthough living with one’s family, even in a crowded tenement, did not prevent a man from participating in the gay world that was taking shape in the city’s streets, many gay men, like Willy, sought to secure housing that would maximize their freedom from supervision. This was not the only predominantly gay apartment building Willy remembered. Within a few years, Willy remembered, “we took over.” Gay men occupied 14 of the 16 apartments in the building. The building’s narrow railroad flats, if not luxurious, were adequate and cheap the location, near the gay bar circuit on Third Avenue in the East 50s, was convenient and most important, the other inhabitants were friendly and supportive. Several friends did, and some of the newcomers encouraged their own friends to join them. Willy was happy to do so, and as other apartments opened up in the building he invited other friends to move in.
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When they moved out he wanted to make sure that someone more understanding would take their place.
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An elderly couple had occupied it for years, and, since the walls were rather thin, the friend had never stopped worrying that they heard him late at night with gay friends and had grown suspicious of the company he kept. The friend had an apartment in the building and wanted Willy to take the apartment next to his. He moved there at the invitation of a friend he had met at Red’s, a popular bar on Third Avenue at 50th street that had attracted gay men since its days as a speakeasy in the 1920s. George, it seemed to him, was “almost entirely gay,” and the friends he met there introduced him to yet other parts of the gay world.Īfter living briefly in a rooming house on 50th Street near Second Avenue, he finally took a small apartment of his own, a railroad flat on East 49th Street near First Avenue, where he stayed for years. George Hotel in Brooklyn, which offered more substantial accommodations. Most of those friends were gay, and the gay world was a significant part of what they showed him.
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As was true for many other young men, the friends he made at the Y remained important to him for years and helped him find his way through the city. arrived in New York City in the 1940s, he did what many newcomers did: he took a room at the 63rd Street YMCA.