Public Faces / Private Lives

A number of historians have pointed to growing confusion in the early 17th-century over the meaning of "masculine" friendships. Custom allowed men to express love for one another openly - even to become "bedfellows" - without the accusation of sodomy. Questions were rarely raised unless such relationships subverted the social order through favoritism toward a servant or through undue influence over a social superior. Perhaps one of the best examples of this ambivalence over same-sex love comes from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the one hand, he felt comfortable declaring his love for Sir William Springe prior to his sailing to North America. Later, however, Winthrop supported the execution for sodomy of William Plaine of Guilford when approached by the leadership of New Haven Colony.

Letter from John Winthrop to William Springe, 8 February 1630:

"I loved you truly before I could think that you took any notice of me: but now I embrace you and rest in your love: and delight to solace my first thoughts in these sweet affections of so dear a friend. The apprehension of your love and worth together hath overcome my heart, and removed the veil of modesty, that I must needs tell you, my soul is knit to you, as the soul of Jonathan to David: were I now with you, I should bedew that sweet bosom with the tears of affection..."

In the late 1620s, Thomas Morton founded his own colony on a site he dubbed "Merrymount" at Wollaston in present-day Quincy. He sometimes called his colony "Mary-mount" or "Mare-mount," playing on connotations of sodomy, buggery, and, possibly, Catholicism, in order to shock the Puritans. To the displeasure of the authorities, Morton revived the "pagan " practice of Maypole dancing in 1637, and set himself up as the "Lord of Misrule," a comic Renaissance master of ceremonies. According to William Bradford, Morton also established a "School of Atheism," which was a word employed by other writers of the period to imply sodomy.

Bradford wrote in 1642: "Marvelous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickedness did grow and break forth here... But that which is worse, even sodomy and buggery (Things fearful to name) have broke forth in this land oftener than once."

Bradford on Morton's Merrymount: "They also set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was one of the most influential American thinkers of the nineteenth century; as an essayist, poet and lecturer, he philosophized about the relationship between man and God, and was a leader of the transcendental movement. As a student at Harvard, Emerson's attention was drawn to a young student, Martin Gay:

"There is a strange face in the Freshman class whom I should like to know very much. He has a great deal of character in his features & should [be] a fast friend or a bitter enemy. His name is Gay. I shall endeavor to become acquainted with him and wish if possible that I might be able to recall at a future period the singular sensations which his presence produced at this."

Though he later excised portions of the text, Emerson's 1821 journal is full of statements of affection for Gay, as well as a "memory sketch" portrait. Gay haunted Emerson's thoughts for over two years. In 1822 Emerson wrote, "It is with difficulty that I can now recall those sensations of vivid pleasure which his presence was wont to waken spontaneously."

The lesson of this special bond was clearly reflected in his mature writings:

Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the author of Walden, took Emerson's loft model of platonic love as his own. He used the model to explain the emotional attraction he felt for certain men who came into his life, like the Canadian woodcutter Alek Therian, whom Thoreau would encounter in his walks around Walden Pond. Whatever physical attraction Thoreau might have felt toward men could not be openly proclaimed.

In his poem "Friendship," he expressed the inexpressible:

Two sturdy oaks I mean,
which side by side,
Withstand the winter's storm,
And spite of wind and tide,
Grow up the meadow's pride,
For both are strong.
Above they barely touch, but undermined
Down to their deepest source,
Admiring you shall find
Their roots are intertwined
Insep'rably.

In the summer of 1839, Thoreau was smitten by the young brother of a family friend, Edmund Sewall, who was in Concord for a visit. The love poem - "Lately, Alas I Knew a Gentle Boy" - written to the object of his affection, is remarkable in its candor:

So was I taken unawares by this,
I quite forgot my homage to confess;
Yet now am forced to know, 
though hard it is,
I might have loved him,
had I loved him less.

One of the great literary friendships of the nineteenth century was that shared by New England writers Herman Melville (1819-1891) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). On 5 August 1850, the two met at a picnic in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. When a sudden thunderstorm came up, they were forced to seek shelter among the rocks of Monument Mountain; the two hours spent alone in conversation sealed their relationship. Melville, the younger man, immediately formed "a reckless emotional attachment" to the 46-year-old Hawthorne, a father figure but, "more than handsome, so darkly gorgeous."

Hawthorne was very reserved; indeed, his wife claimed that he hated to be touched. Naturally, the attentions paid by Hawthorne's ardent new friend were troubling, and the fifteen months they spent as neighbors in Pittsfield were psychologically intense for both men. Melville, who also had a wife, was devastated as Hawthorne grew distant from him. 

Most scholars agree that Melville's "Monody" is really an elegy to Hawthorne, summing up his grief over love rejected:

To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal-
Ease me, a little ease, my song!

Melville's tales of men at sea were based on actual experience. In Polynesia, he witnessed societies where homosexuality was an accepted part of life. In Moby Dick (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne, Melville describes the interaction between the South Seas islander Queequeg and the Yankee sailor Ishmael, who share a bed one night in a New Bedford inn:

"Upon waking the next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife."

Ishmael grows ever closer to the "pagan," and the following day they undergo a ritual bonding:

"When our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me 'round the waist, and said that henceforth were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would die for me, if need should be."

As one scholar has written, "Melville had an unfailing eye for handsome men."

Margaret Fuller's 1842 translation of the correspondence between Karoline Gunderode and Bettine von Arnim, two German writers who had loved each other at the beginning of the century, was the inspiration for many of the letters and poems written by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) of Amherst to her friend Sue Gilbert. After Gilbert's marriage to Austin (Dickinson's brother), Emily fell in love with Sue's school friend, Kate Scott. Their romance lasted for a number of years, culminating in the summer of 1860, when they spent a night together. 

Emily commemorated this event in one of her poems (c.1862) to Kate, describing it as a symbolic marriage:

Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie-
When, stirring, for Belief's delight,
My Bride had slipped away-

The poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) contained images linking emotional, spiritual and physical love between men, distinguishing it from the lofty platonic sentiments of earlier American writers. Bostonian Edward Everett Hale greeted Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) with words of praise in the North American Review, though others had reservations.

Emerson quoted Edwin Percy Whipple's remark that Leaves of Grass "had every leaf but the fig leaf" but he sent Whitman a complimentary letter upon its publication, writing, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Whitman had learned from Emerson that a man could accept and celebrate himself in cosmic language, but the masculine, affectionate, contemplative and sensual tone of Whitman's poetry shocked many. When Whitman appeared in Boston during March 1860, Emerson attempted to persuade him to tone down or delete from Leaves of Grass the passages involving sexuality. In fact, the Boston Brahmin elite were disgusted by Whitman and in 1882 had Leaves of Grass declared obscene.

Leverett Saltonstall (1825-1895, right) sitting next to his Harvard classmate Charles William Dabney, Jr. and an unidentified friend, c. 1850. Saltonstall traveled with Dabney after graduation and generally had a difficult time settling down; it was said that he was forced by his mother, against his will, to marry.

Expressions of love between men in uniform were common in the correspondence and literature of the Civil War period. In Bostonian Fred W. Loring's novel, Two College Friends (1871), his characters, Tom ("soft, curling brown hair, deep blue eyes and dazzling complexion") and Ned ("the complexion is olive, the eyes brown., the lips strongly cut"), fall in love in school and eventually go off to war together. In a torrid scene at the novel's end, Ned visits Tom, who is lying wounded in a military hospital:

"O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me... O Tom, my darling! don't forget it. If you knew how I love you, how I have loved you in all my jealous, morbid moods, in all my exacting selfishness, - 
O Tom, my darling, my darling!"

In 1866, the painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) sailed from Boston on the Africa for Europe. Homer spent a year in Paris, where he shared a studio in Montmartre with his friend from Belmont, Albert Warren Kelsey (1840-1921). Although Kelsey inscribed the back of this photograph "Damon and Pythias," alluding to the loving youths of Greek mythology, he seems in later years to have rejected his sojourn with Homer as a frivolous interlude.    

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a group of highly mobile, independent women began enjoying an international transatlantic lifestyle that now seems strikingly modern. These women were respected members of the art world, earned large incomes, and kept company with the intellectual and moneyed elites of the time. Actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876) was the most visible and influential of these women.

Cushman set up a feminist household in Rome in the 1850s. Born in Boston's North End, she debuted in New Orleans during 1836 as Lady Macbeth. A versatile actor, Cushman played comic as well as tragic parts, and appeared in more than 30 male roles - a fact that caused public comment. She maintained a house in London and wintered in Rome; her apartment on the Via Gregoriana became a mecca for theater people and aspiring artists. She died of breast cancer in 1876.

Photo: Charlotte Cushman (seated) and Matilda Hays.

Sculptor Emma Stebbins (1815-1882) left New York for Rome in 1857 and immediately fell in with a talented young artist, Harriet Hosmer, who had first come to Rome with Charlotte Cushman five years earlier. According to her most recent biographer, Cushman's tumultuous decade-long relationship with British writer and translator Matilda Hays suffered its final blow when Cushman became enamored with Stebbins. 

Once Cushman and Stebbins became involved, Cushman's loyalty to her partner led her to promote Stebbins's career over that of Hosmer, her former protegee. Stebbins eventually followed Cushman back to the United States, where they set up households in Newport and Boston.

Pictured: Sallie Mercer, Cushman's maid and longtime companion.

Born in Watertown, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908) was raised by a permissive father who gave her "horse, dog, gun, and boat," and encouraged her to lead an active life out-of-doors. She quickly developed into an "incorrigible tomboy."

She arrived in Rome in 1852 and lived for a time in Charlotte Cushman's household. William Wetmore Story, writing to his Boston friend James Russell Lowell, observed that Cushman, Hosmer, Matilda Hays, and writer Grace Greenwood formed "a Harem (Scarem) of emancipated females."

Pictured: Harriet Hosmer in her Rome studio, at work on a statue of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton (1865).

While many American visitors appreciated Hosmer's growing talent as a sculptor, others were shocked at her unfeminine appearance and manners, and by her flamboyant behavior - she was criticized for riding about the countryside on horseback, unescorted. Story wrote to his wife, after a visit to Hosmer's studio:

"Miss Hosmer's want of modesty is enough to disgust a dog. She has had casts for the entire [nude] model made and exhibited them in a shocking indecent manner to all the young artists who called upon her. This is going it rather strong."

Her success as an artist led to rumors by jealous male rivals that her work was not her own. She nonetheless made her own way through life as the first woman to support herself as a sculptor in the nineteenth century.

Pictured: Harriet Hosmer and her workshop assistants-at her Rome studio (1861).

Born of mixed West Indian and Native American (Chippewa) heritage, Edmonia Lewis (1844? - c.1911) attended Oberlin College, the first coeducational and interracial college in the United States. She went on to Boston, where she hired a room in the Studio Building on Tremont Street and took lessons in sculpting from Anne Whitney. Lewis soon garnered the support of influential abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. She went on to produce portraits of John Brown, Garrison, and other abolitionists, as well as a bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The sale of one hundred plaster copies of her portrait bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (the commanding officer of the black Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment) enabled Lewis to relocate to Rome in 1865; there she was welcomed by Charlotte Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, and their circle. Lewis emulated both the outward attributes of their unconventional, often masculine attire, as well as their aesthetic independence. In an interview in he New York Times, 29 December 1878, Lewis stated:

"I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art-culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor."

Using the struggles of peoples of color as her theme, she was the first African American sculptor to win an international reputation.

The relationship between Alice James (1848-1892) and Katharine Peabody Loring (1839-1943) was one of the most celebrated Boston marriages. Alice, the sister of Harvard psychologist William James and novelist Henry James, was of a "frail" constitution. She first met Katharine Loring in 1873; by 1879 the two were Inseparable. Katharine Loring was everything to Alice James, according to one of her biographers - "man and woman, father, and mother, nurse and protector, intellectual partner and friend."

Of his sister's relationship with Loring, Henry James, wrote, "A devotion so perfect and generous ... was a gift so rare ... that to brush it aside would be almost an act of impiety. In Alice and Katharine, James found a model for the feminist characters in The Bostonians. 

Pictured: Alice James (reclining) and Katharine Loring, taken at the Royal Leamington Spa (England), c. 1890.

Katharine Lee Bates was born in Falmouth in 1859 and attended Wellesley College. There she met Katharine Coman, commencing a twenty-five-year relationship that ended with Coman's death in 1915. Bates became a respected member of the English faculty and a published poet; the words for "America the Beautiful" were inspired by a trip she made to Pikes Peak, Colorado. Less well known was her collection of poems Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance (1922), dedicated to the memory of her partner, Katharine Coman. Publication of these poems inspired notes of appreciation to Bates for her having captured "a woman's love for a woman."

In a letter sent to Coman from London in 1891, Bates writes:

"For I am coming back to you, my Dearest, whether I come back to Wellesley or not. You are always in my heart and in my longings. I've been so homesick for you on this side of the ocean and yet so still and happy in the memory and consciousness of you."

The flamboyant, cigar-smoking Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was directly responsible for helping to modernize American poetry. Lowell first met the divorced actress Ada Dwyer Russell in 1909, and in 1912 the two began a successful courtship. Two years later, they were living together In Lowell's Brookline mansion. Much of Lowell's poetry alludes to their loving relationship.

This passage is from "The Wheel of the Sun": 

In the street,
You spread a brightness where you walk,
And I see your lifting silks
And rejoice;
But I cannot look up to your face.
You melt my strength,
And set my knees to trembling.
Shadow yourself that I may love you,
For it is too great a pain.

Part of Oscar Wilde's attraction for the Boston bohemians, who were centered around architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), was his passionate belief in "art for art's sake" and in the nobility of artistic production over all other activities.

Prominent Visionists included F. Holland Day (1864-1933) who, with his friend Herbert Copeland, started a publishing company that printed the first American edition of The Yellow Book (the avant-garde British arts journal), as well as Wilde's Salome and other sexually provocative texts from, England. Publication of Salome in 1894 completely shocked genteel society, and the book was immediately withdrawn from circulation from the Boston Public Library. Day was a highly regarded artistic innovator. In 1895, his Pinckney Street studio witnessed the first public exhibition in Boston of a photographic male nude - a study for the Crucifixion.

Pictured: Visionists Copeland, Guiney, Cram, and Brown on the veranda of the Day mansion in Norwood (1892).

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) was a legend in her own time. Starting with the untimely death of her husband, John Lowell Gardner, in 1898, his widow, called Mrs. Jack, embarked on an ambitious program of art acquisition which culminated in the transformation of her fabulous Venetian-style palazzo, Fenway Court, into a beloved cultural institution. She accomplished this feat largely by relying on the skills, experience, and companionship of the coterie of attractive and talented homosexual men - mostly artists, collectors and curators - that she gathered around her. 

Born in New York and always considered an outsider by the Brahmin elite, Mrs. Jack held extremely progressive social views, and supported the aspirations of Asians, Jews, African Americans, and Italian and Irish immigrants - groups that were beginning to challenge the Yankee hegemony in Boston.

Pictured: Isabella Stewart Gardner at Eastern Point with Henry Davis Sleeper (second from left) and A. Piatt Andrew Jr. (far right), c. 1909.

By 1908 Mrs. Jack's circle included the society painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Born in Italy to American parents, Sargent had first come to Boston in 1887. After a solo exhibition in 1888 at the St. Botolph Club, he was commissioned in 1890 to design murals for the new Boston Public Library in Copley Square. Along with other commissions - for the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard's Widener Library - Sargent was almost fully occupied in Boston for the next twenty-five years. While circumspect about his private life, an album of male nudes that Sargent, a bachelor, kept for his own enjoyment offers insight into his predilections.

Pictured: Isabella Stewart Gardner (covering her face) and John Singer Sargent.

A denizen of Beacon Street in the Back Bay, Charles Hammond Gibson (1874-1954) was a minor poet and author. A frequent guest at Henry Davis Sleeper's estate, Beauport, he also regarded himself as a designer. For a time, he served as Boston Parks commissioner and was responsible for the architecture of the Beaux Arts-style "comfort station" on the Boston Common. His own home has been preserved as a shrine to late-Victorian taste and style. Gibson, who employed a series of young working-class men as his live-in servants, was said to have upset his prudish neighbors by appearing about the neighborhood in silk pajamas.

Pictured: Charles Hammond Gibson (seated at the desk) with author John P. Marquand.

Born and raised in Boston, Julian Eltinge was the most celebrated female impersonator in vaudeville. He began his career with George M. Cohan's touring minstrel shows and eventually amassed a fortune performing as the ideal woman in the United States and Europe. He published his own magazine, in which he often gave advice to women about how to be more beautiful.

His personal life was closely scrutinized, and numerous assurances were printed that Eltinge was a "real man" offstage. One such article, which appeared in the Boston Traveler on May 18, 1912, was entitled "Eltinge Really a Manly Chap, In Fact His Name is Bill Dalton."

Female impersonator Francis Renault was the featured model in a number of women's fashion shows and burlesque performances.

One of his appearances was promoted in the Boston Traveler on July 23, 1931:

A special fashion show, sponsored by Francis Renault, "The Slave of Fashion," will be put on at Scollay Square Theatre, tomorrow afternoon. Renault's ability to display the latest and most beautiful feminine creations is well-known to Hub theatergoers, and tomorrow this versatile artist promises many new striking fashion delights.

This photograph was taken from Simmons College's Freshman-Junior Wedding, which was an annual event from about 1913 through the mid-1940s. The president of the junior class took the part of the groom; the freshman class president was her bride. The marriage ritual was followed to an exacting level of detail-from the stag party to the wedding cake.

Scollay Square, Boston's entertainment district until the early 1960s, was home to a number of bars frequented by gay men and lesbians. Three of those establishments are visible in this 1940s photo: The Half Dollar (under the "PM" sign); The Lighthouse, to the right of the Half Dollar; and the Crawford House, on the far right.

Boston resident Preston Claridge's reminiscences from just after World War II describe a number of get-togethers between gay men and servicemen. Here, he chronicles a "tea party" held in Wellesley in the mid-1940s, at the home of a professor who had his own darkroom:

One Sunday, Freddie took me along to a "new faces" party given by Bernard.... Since the beginning of the war, several years before, Bernard had been giving "tea dances" for his gay friends and servicemen. Tea was never served, but the scotch flowed and dancing did follow. It was there I danced with a beautiful blonde sailor nicknamed Veronica because of his Veronica Lake style hair falling over one eye. I thought his hair terribly long and feminine at the time but it couldn't have been because he was in the service.

Pictured: Veronica and a pilot dancing.

Boston resident Preston Claridge's reminiscences from just after World War II describe a number of get-togethers between gay men and servicemen. Here, he chronicles a "tea party" held in Wellesley in the mid-1940s, at the home of a professor who had his own darkroom:

One Sunday, Freddie took me along to a "new faces" party given by Bernard.... Since the beginning of the war, several years before, Bernard had been giving "tea dances" for his gay friends and servicemen. Tea was never served, but the scotch flowed and dancing did follow. It was there I danced with a beautiful blonde sailor nicknamed Veronica because of his Veronica Lake style hair falling over one eye. I thought his hair terribly long and feminine at the time but it couldn't have been because he was in the service.

Pictured: Veronica the morning after.

"Gay Times Square" was the name given to a span of lower Washington Street that was home to a number of gathering places. A coat and tie were required for entrance to the Chess Room at the Touraine Hotel; the Touraine Cafe was, according to one patron, an "upholstered sewer" where prostitutes, strippers and drunks mixed with gay men and a few lesbians. Lower Washington Street later became the Combat Zone, a center for strip clubs and porn theaters abutting Boston's Chinatown. The Zone was eventually cleaned up, leaving Playland as its sole survivor until its closing in 1999.

Jim McGrath worked as a bartender at Playland for 38 years. McGrath's contributions included elaborate decorating schemes for Independence Day, Halloween, and other holidays. McGrath also helped institute a Thanksgiving dinner for patrons and neighbors, a tradition that continued until Playland closed in 1999.

Pictured: Bartender Jim McGrath (center) with Ray Kennard (left) and a singer named Harold. Ray played piano at Playland in the 1950s and 1960s. Harold sang to Ray's accompaniment; his signature songs were "Always" and "The More I See You." He was murdered leaving Napoleon's in 1966.

Marie Cord was a lesbian singer and burlesque performer who frequented Playland. According to an interview with Robert G.:

Marie Cord had beautiful red hair. Her lover was mannish. [The lover] wore her hair in a man's haircut. She went to a barber shop and wore men's suits and ties. This is how many lesbians looked at the time. They would wear shirts and ties, and take on the stance of men. Marie was from Boston. She had gone to Hollywood, where she had a few bit parts. Whatever happened, she never made it. She was a singer. Everywhere she went, as soon as she walked in, everybody would request one of her songs, "Love Is Just a Game," and she would sing it."

Tex's first waitress job was at the Ritz. "Then she discovered the gay boys and she loved them." During her long career in gay bars, Tex worked at the Punch Bowl, Sporters, and several others. 

"Tex was the mother of us all," noted one patron. "If somebody was short before payday, she'd lend him the money he needed. She was a good soul."

Owner of Twelve Carver in Boston and Wuthering Heights in Provincetown, Phil Baione was a bar manager who also entertained, according to Robert G.:

He would come out in drag, only the drag was just in the front. It would be a gown, but it would be tied around him like an apron. From the back you could see the men's clothes. He would come down on a red velvet swing in a huge hat and a beaded bag. His hat was often two huge doves - when he pulled a string, the wings would open. He weighed over three hundred pounds. You'd be sitting there thinking, 'If that swing ever breaks, we'll all be goners.'

Sylvia Sidney, Boston's most (in)famous drag queen, described himself as "a fun-loving, outspoken homosexual who speaks his mind - and if people don't like it, the hell with them, my dear." He began his career as a drag performer in 1947, at the age of seventeen.

For his first performance, Sylvia (who preferred male pronouns) stepped out on stage wearing purple lounging pajamas with white polka dots. Patrons of the Rex, a straight club, booed him off the stage. As Sylvia tells it, local piano virtuoso Jerry Whiting found him backstage crying. Whiting told him to go back out, pick up the microphone, and say whatever was on his mind. Sylvia went back out for a second show and let loose with a string of expletives that wouldn't quit. The audience started throwing money and cheering. The manager offered him five dollars for three shows a night, and a career was born. 

"I'm not considered a drag queen, per se, trying to impersonate another woman. You've never seen a woman that looked like me! I look more like a hard-core madam, sort of a Mae West caricature. When I hit the stage, I'm coarse, loud and vulgar."

Sylvia received his stage name one day in the 1940s while walking through the Public Garden.

"I went down to what they call Queen's Row in the Public Garden. It was a dirt road. They had benches. Some older queens were there. They said, "Oh, hi honey! How are you? Aren't you cute?" I wasn't really cute at all. They said, "What's your name?" I said, 'My name is Sidney.' They said, 'We'll call you Sylvia.' They called everybody a name. There was a Bette Davis, there was a Helen Morgan. There was a queen who looked like Katharine Hepburn. She had a twin brother - the Hepburn sisters."

Provincetown's reputation as an art colony extended back to the turn of the century. In the years between World War II and Stonewall, increasing numbers of gay people began to view Provincetown as a destination for those seeking new faces and more anonymity, in a setting known for natural beauty of all kinds. Robert G. remembers:

"I remember going to Provincetown for the first time, probably around 1953. I can remember that when I appeared on the beach, people were getting up and applauding. I was looking behind me thinking, 'I wonder who they're applauding for?' When I asked the man I was with, he said, 'They're clapping at you, because they know you're a new face in town.'"

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Boston was a city in decline on the verge of bankruptcy. Attempts at urban renewal destroyed many working-class and ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Boston's first attempt at urban renewal took place in the West End, prior to architectural preservation regulations. The wholesale destruction of historic properties in this established neighborhood provoked a national scandal. Less is known about the extent to which urban renewal efforts were targeted toward Boston's lesbian and gay communities. What is certain is that by the late 1960s, Scollay Square, Bay Village, South Cove, and Park Square - all of which were widely frequented by gay men and lesbians - had been radically and irrevocably altered.

Pictured: The Crawford House (in Scollay Square) in its heyday during the 1920s.

At least one official, City Councillor Frederick "Freddy" Langone, was willing to endorse publicly the destruction of Boston's gay bars. What follows is an excerpt from Langone's remarks at a city council meeting on July 7, 1965:

"Either we lick it, we will stop it, or let them continue to exist. We are now concerned about the South Cove area. I count at least four or five places where [gay bars] exist now, and one outside the area on Carver Street.... I am wondering now if we eliminate a half dozen of those places within the South Cove area, perhaps the youth of America in this area would be served better....

"We will be better off without these incubators of homo-sexuality and indecency and a Bohemian way of life. I tell you right now, we will be better off without it and if we accomplish nothing else, at least we will uproot this cancer in one area of the city."

Pictured: Demolition of the Crawford House, Scollay Square, 1962.