>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > from reading around, I suspect that the use of flowers to symbolize an
> > effeminate man may have simply been a way of associating something
> > considered feminine (flowers in general) with an effeminate man,
>
>
>I do not know nearly as much about the relevant cultural history here as
>I should, but query: Is there any necessary link (and was there in the
>past) between effeminacy and homosexuality? When someone in (say) 1650
>called a man a pansy, i.e. effeminate, was there any suggestion of his
>also being a sodomite? Someplace in his criticism Coleridge identifies
>some kind of writing as effeminate? Would his readers have thought,
>"sodomite"? Remember there was no word for homosexuality as a social
>category in the early 19th ce.
>
>Carrol
i don't know about that era. i'm assuming that there wasn't but i don't have any illustrative evidence on that score.
i think you've misread the above, unfortunately. I was going to tell yo uto read those links to get a really nuanced understanding of what I was getting at. but I just realized you can't because it's an image and you can't enlarge it enough. foo.
anyway, the Gay New York book illustrates that fairies and pansies certainly indicated their _gender_ identity - a third gender -- by behaving in effeminate ways. but as the author points out, it was a gender identity, not a sexual one. in other words, that they had sex with men was for fairies and pansies indicative of their deep down feminine nature. Indeed, when people used the term bisexual at the time didn't mean attraction to men and women but to the idea that you had both male and female gender affiliations as part of your personality.
And it's more subtle than just that they behaved and dressed in ways to indicate identification as women -- wearing bright feathers n their hats, "swishing," wearing gray suede shoes and/or high heels, etc. For example, the women they often admired and emulated at pansy clubs were aggressive, sexually assertive, get what they want kind of women like Mae West. At Pansy clubs, fairies and pansies took on women's names, and Mae West was a popular one in the 30s. She's hardly the epitome of a feminine ideal for _straight_ women at the time and, in fact, I read a great article awhile back on how horrified bourgeois audiences were.
Anyway, as the author also points out, the public sexual culture of fairies and pansies was one in which they went after "trade": trade was slang for a "normal" (author uses this term as it was the way people saw it back then with the distinction being between "invert" and "normal" -- which had nothing to do with sexual activity (who you had sex with). Rather, the distinction was based on gender affiliation.
trade, then, were masculine men who didn't indicate signs of effeminancy and were typically sailors, soldiers, transient laborers, construction workers, etc. they were men who embodied an "aggressively masculine ideal" who were "neither homosexually interested nor effeminately gendered but who would accept the advances" of pansies, fairies -- and queers (see more on queers below).
As the author writes, "the centrality of effeminancy to the definition of fairy in the dominant culture enabled trade to have sex with both queers and fairies without risking being labeled queers themselves, so long as they retained the masculine demeanor and sexual role."
His use of queer here is the terms used to self-identify among a subset of men who saw themselves as "a distinct category of men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest rather than their woman-like gender status."
The label, queer, "presupposed the statistical normalcy -- and normative character -- of men's sexual interest in women"
Although many queers rejected the effeminancy exhibited by fairies, they both shared a sense that the ideal partner was "trade" -- and trade were "normals" -- masculine men who just happened to have sex with other men.
shag