The transformation of gay life from the closet to liberation, 1948-1980: New York City’s gay markets as a study in late capitalism

This dissertation argues for the historical significance of markets, information, and the politics of queer consumption to the transformation of queer subjectivity and social life in the postwar era from the closet to Gay Liberation in New York City. My dissertation situates this history of transformation and mobilization within a period of broad shifts from a manufacturing, industrial-based economy to a service and information economy based on cultural production. In this context, I argue that the queer economy’s provision of social space, information (including new forms of cultural representation), and identities should be understood as an exemplary feature of late capitalism. Using the frameworks of institutional economics and economic history, urban history, and queer theory, this dissertation explores two distinct phases of the queer economy and the ways in which legal regulations and cultural norms convened and constrained queer markets, consumer culture, and the politics of identity. The first phase of the queer economy, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, was essentially organized as an illicit and stigmatized market, to which queer consumers responded with cultural patterns based on concealment and evasion, or what Jeffrey Escoffier refers to as the segregation of public and private information characteristic of the “double life.” The second phase of the queer economy, from the late 1960s until about 1980, was characterized by decriminalization and destigmatization of queer markets, consumer and entrepreneurial activism and direct engagement with local politics, and the dynamics of gentrification. Central to the transition from the closet economy to the economy of Gay Liberation was the cultural production of information, including pop psychology and sociology, pulp novels, gossip columns and tabloid literature, Homophile publications, gay guides, and records of gay businesses and gay business associations. This dissertation explores this archive in order to show both the quantitative increase in information (and therefore public knowledge) about homosexuality and queer social life, as well as the qualitative shift in information, much of it produced by queers themselves, that repudiated the logic of criminalization and stigmatization and anticipated the mass “coming out” and political demands of Gay Liberation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Christopher Adam Mitchel