History of Gay Bars in New York City

The Sopranos Take

1900 - 1920: NYC Finocchio

In Gay New York:  Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994), George Chauncey writes:

The contrast between Italians and Jews, the two newest and largest groups of immigrants in New York at the turn of the century, is particularly striking.  A 1921 study of men arrested for homosexual “disorderly conduct,” for instance, reported that “the Italians lead” in the number of arrests; at a time when the numbers of Italians and Jews in New York were roughly equal, almost twice as many Italians were arrested on homosexual charges.  More significant is that turn-of-the-century investigators found a more institutionalized fairy subculture in Italian neighborhoods than in Jewish ones.  The Italian neighborhood of the Lower East Side had numerous saloons where fairies gathered interspersed among the saloons where female prostitutes worked.  In 1908, Vito Lorenzo’s saloon, located at 207 Canal Street (near Baxter), was charged by the police with being a “fairy place.”  In 1901, agents conducting a systematic survey of “vice conditions” on the Lower East Side found male prostitutes working at two Italian saloons on the block of Elizabeth Street between Hester and Grand, the same block where the Hotel Zaza’s manager hired rooms to female prostitutes who stood at the windows in “loose dresses and call[ed] the men upstairs.”  One investigator noted that the Union Hall saloon was crowded with old Italian men and several young fairies on the night of March 5; a few doors up the street, at 97 Elizabeth, stood a saloon where the fairies, aged fourteen to sixteen, could “do their business right in [the] backroom.”  A month later the same saloon was said to have “5 boys known as [finocchio, or fairies] about 17 to 25 years of age.  * * *  The patterns of homosexual behavior noted in Sicily appear to have persisted in modified form in the Italian enclaves on the Lower East Side, in Greenwich Village, and in East Harlem.  * * *  [I]t seems likely that an important part of the homosexual culture of fairies and their sex partners visible in turn-of-the-century New York represented the flowering in this country of a transplanted Mediterranean sexual culture.

In An Offer We Can’t Refuse:  The Mafia in the Mind of America, George De Stefano writes:

Although homosexuality was rarely spoken about, same-sex attractions were not rare in the Mezzogiorno, at least among men.  Male prostitution was common in southern cities, particularly Naples.  In the nineteenth century, northern European homosexuals sought refuge from the harsh Protestant morality of their home countries in what they saw as the more tolerant culture of the Italian South, which retained to some extent the pansexual attitudes of classical Greece and Rome.  The Sicilian town of Taormina was especially popular with foreign same-sexers, the most famous being the German nobleman Wilhelm Von Gloeden, who somehow managed to persuade dozens of Sicilian youths and men to strip naked for his camera during the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Baron Von Gloeden managed to avoid scandal, maybe because of his hundreds of photos, only a very few were overtly sexual.  He tended to shoot his models, sons of fishermen and peasants, in kitschy tableaux meant to evoke classical Greece and Rome and North Africa.  (The naked young Sicilians displayed their uncircumcised and generally large penises for the baron’s camera, but the laurel wreaths and Arabic headdresses they wore connoted Art, not porn.)  Von Gloeden adopted the classical Mediterranean model of homosexuality, of erotic and financial mentorship between an older man and a younger, generally heterosexual male.  Today one can purchase his photographs, as postcards and in expensive coffee table books, in shops all over Sicily.

"the Mafia . . . began running bars catering to homosexuals"

In Lives of Lesbian Elders (Haworth Press: 2004), the authors write:

The Volstead Act (prohibition), originally passed in 1919 and generally ignored until the 1930s, actually opened the door for a more entrenched payoff system that allowed speakeasies to flourish and furthered East Coast expansion by the Mafia who began running bars catering to homosexuals.  A similar non-Mafia payoff system on the West Coast also allowed such bars to operate

Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men: Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, But Misjudged One Person By Clothing

A February 5, 1923 article (“Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men:  Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, but Misjudged One Person by Clothing”) from the New York Times states:

The police continue to pay special attention to Greenwich Village.  Every tearoom and cabaret in the village was visited yesterday morning by Deputy Inspector Joseph A. Howard and Captain Edward J. Dempsey of the Charles Street Station, and a party of ten detectives.  * * *  Detectives Joseph Massie and Dewey Hughes of the Special Service Squad were at the Black Parrot Tea Shoppe Hobo-Hemia, 46 Charles Street, to witness what they had been informed would be a “circus.”  They arrested what they thought were five women and eight men.  It developed later, however, that one of the “women” was a man, Harry Bernhammer, 21 years old, living at 36 Hackensack Avenue, West Hoboken, N.J.  He is familiaryly known in the Village as “Ruby,” according to the police.  The charge against him is disorderly conduct for giving what the police termed an indecent dance.  The other prisoners, all of whom were bailed out at the station house, were Lucy Smith, 22 years old, of 46 Charles Street, and Patricia Rogers, 24 years old, of 16 Charles Street, alleged proprietors of the establishment, charged with violating the Mullan-Gage law; . . .  Arthur C. Budd, 21 years old, of 25 West Fifty-second Street; . . . Paul Warring, 21 years old, of 75 West Seventy-second Street; . . . . The real name of the Smith woman, according to the police, is Vera Black, and the real name of the Rogers woman is Nan Paddock.  Budd, according to the police, is known as “Rosebud,” and claimed when arrested that he is a female impersonator in “The Lady in Ermine” at The Century Theater.  Warring, the police say, is pianist at the Black Parrot and was formerly employed at a Broadway cabaret.  Reilly is accused of doing “a suggestive dance.”  The detectives allege that before the raid early yesterday morning they bought eight drinks of whiskey at $1 a drink.  The “circus” did not actually take place, the detectives said, for just before the time for it to beging Patricia Rogers stepped out on the floor and announced:  “There are two policemen here and I am afraid to put on the circus."

Whalen Warns All To Shun Night Clubs

A July 29, 1929 article (“Whalen Warns All to Shun Night Clubs”) from the New York Times states:

Gangdom is in control of the night clubs and “decent people” will shun them of they want to avoid “police attention,” Commissioner Whalen declared yesterday, revealing that John (Legs) Diamond, notorious gunman and racketeer, had been indicted for Saturday’s double murder in the Hotsy Totsy Club, 1721 Broadway, of which he was part owner.  * * *  “This indictment brings to the fore the fact that gangdom is in control of the night clubs.  It would be well for decent people to keep away from such places for they’re going to get lots of police attention from now on.”  * * *  More recently, according to Mr. Whalen, Diamond had been discovered there was bigger money to be made, and with greater safety too, in the night club racket.  For a gangster with his reputation it wasn’t always necessary to put up any cash to be declared in on a well-paying club.

The Big Business of the Racketeers

An April 27, 1930 article (“The Big Business of the Racketeers”) by F. Raymond Daniel from the New York Times states:

[M]odern gangdom simply has followed the trend of business, perfecting its organization, merging when necessary.  It seized upon prohibition and bootlegging as its golden opportunity and made the most of it.  The liquor traffic, however, is not the only source of income for the modern outlaw bands.  It is, according to many authorities, the backbone of the racketeering industry, but there are many sidelines.  * * *  Frank Marlow, one of the lesser lights of gangdom, who about a year ago was found dying in a lonely section of Queens, had managed to “declare himself in” on half a dozen night clubs without putting up a cent.  Threats and terrorism were the currency he used.  Recently, a Harlem night club which showed signs of offering dangerous competition to other resorts in the neighborhood was raided and wrecked by gangsters, presumably because its owners shortsightedly had failed to comprehend the wisdom of taking a certain man into partnership without his contributing any capital.  Police Commissioner Whalen, after a murder last spring in the Hotsy Totsy Club, on Broadway, said that gangsters had “a piece” of nearly all the night clubs, and law-abiding folk who wished to stay out of trouble would do well to avoid all but the most fastidious dining and dancing resorts.

The 1930s

In Gay New York:  Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994), George Chauncey writes:

The precise locus of the hustlers’ and gay men’s activity on Forty-second Street shifted several times over the course of the 1930s.  The details of the moves are unimportant in themselves, but they reveal something of the social organization of the streets in general, for they resulted largely from the changing geography of the gay bars and other commercial sites where men met.  The corner of Broadway and Forty-second near the Times Building was popular in the late 1920s, when the building’s basement arcade and the Liggett’s drugstore upstairs functioned as meeting places.  Men gathered in the middle of the northern side of the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the mid-1930s, when it was the site of the Barrel House, the most famous sailor-prostitute-homosexual bar of the era.  It was “wholly uninhibited . . . as to ‘accosting,” recalled one patron.  “You could count a dozen [hustlers] lined up on the curb outside the Barrel House, in addition to the number inside who had the price of a beer to get in.”  They moved to the south side of the street after the police closed the Barrel House and the Marine Bar & Grill took its place.  During the war they settled near Sixth Avenue, where several cheap luncheonettes and sailor and hustler bars, such as the Pink Elephant, stood under the Elevated.

Carlo Gambino Buys Into Gay Bars

A biographical summary of Carlo Gambino states:

In 1933, with Prohibition lifted, Gambino moved contraband liquor, selling alcohol without paying government taxes. He was arrested and charged with tax evasion, but he was able to beat the rap, released with a suspended sentence. Gambino invested his profits in a business that was low-key and taboo, running "Gay Bars" for homosexuals.

An additional biographical summary of Carlo Gambino by the Crime and Investigation network states:

During World War II, Carlo [Gambino] made his first million dollars selling stolen and counterfeit ration stamps. By age 45, Carlo invested in a broad range of businesses, legal and illegal, with the money that he made throughout his criminal career. Carlo owned everything from meat markets, fat rendering plants, and trucking companies, to restaurants, pizza parlours, and even gay bars.

Gambino Crime Family

Vito Genovese Buys Into Gay Bars In Greenwich Village

A January 2002 article by John William Tuohy from Rick Porrello’s AmericanMafia.com states:

During the early 1930s, [Vito] Genovese took over New York's massive Italian lottery, and grew rich from it, using his wealth to buy into gay bars in the Greenwich Village area, which struck police as an oddchoice of investments until 1954 when they learned from a cashier at one of the clubs that Genovese’s wife, Anna Petillo Vernotico, who was also his distant cousin, was a regular at these clubs and for many years, was involved in a lesbian relationship which Genovese knew of, and approved. It had always been an oddball union anyway.  Genovese had married Anna a year after the death of his first wife in 1931. When he met her, Anna was locked in a loveless marriage and couldn't get a divorce. On March 16, 1932, Genovese had her husband murdered and twelve days later they were married.

And in An Offer We Can’t Refuse:  The Mafia in the Mind of America, George De Stefano writes:

In the social mythology of the mob, there is an unbreachable barrier between the world of the “men of honor” and homosexuals who dishonor masculinity by being like women.  But both the actual history of organized crime and its pop-culture representations belie the myth. Mobsters thrived on illicit enterprises such as gambling and prostitution, and in the pre-gay liberation days, they owned gay bars and bathhouses.  Nick Tosches, in his biography of Dean Martin, reports that mobster Vito Genovese, “the most violent, most grasping, and most treacherous of his breed,” owned drag queen bars and was married to a lesbian.  Gay folklore has long held that Mafiosi put their sons and other male kin who were homosexual in charge of the gay bars they owned.

Genovese Crime Family

"[W]e had the best protection in the world from the Mafia. They ran everything."

A March 1, 2006 article (“Back in Buddy’s Day:  Drag’s Original Lesbians Reflect on Their Heyday”) by Lisa E. Davis from Xtra West states

Buddy Kent was still gorgeous at age 70.  She was even cuter in the 1940s, when she played the Club 181, located at 181 Second Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the Moroccan Village, on 8^th Street in Greenwich Village.  Back the, downtown nightclubs like these, under the protection of the New York mob, featured shows with gay girls and boys performing in drag.  * * *  “It was home,” Buddy replied, “and we had the best protection in the world from the Mafia.  They ran everything.”

The NYPD, Organized Crime and Gay Bars: 1930s Through The 1960s

In Money, Myths, and Change:  The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men (University of Chicago Press: 2003), Mary Virginia Lee Badgett writes:

In response to a perceived subversion of legal authority in New York City during the Prohibition era . . . the state began its own stringent regulation of bars following the repeal of Prohibition.  The new State Liquor Authority (SLA) was authorized to issue liquor licenses and was expected to revoke the licenses of establishments that served homosexuals and other groups considered disreputable, such as prostitutes and gamblers.  The SLA used its authority to target gay bars systematically, and gay bars opening in New York from the 1930s through the 1960s had to resort to police payoffs and protection from organized crime to avoid the common fate of license revocation.

The Gambino Crime Family Plants Its Beachhead Flag On 42nd Street: 1945 into the 1960s

In Down 42^nd Street (Grand Central Publishing:  2001), Marc Eliot writes:

In the years immediately following World War II, a far more explicit, rough-trade pornographic sexual subculture had surfaced west of Seventh Avenue. Much of it had sprung from two sources. The first was the American enlisted man's wartime experiences abroad. Having been exposed to a less puritanical, more aggressive sexuality in Europe and a highly ritualistic eroticism in Asia, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who left as callow boys returned as sexually experienced men, accustomed to the easily available pleasures they found in the young girls overseas eager to give their American saviors something to savor in return.  The second was the limited options available anywhere outside of the city for its still dead-bolt-closeted gays. The two groups gradually coalesced in the early fifties in a street-savvy proliferation of straight and gay bars and male prostitution rings on West 42nd Street. Wagner treated that situation and the entire street as the outbreak of a morally perverse epidemic and, to save the rest of the city, in effect quarantined it.   * * *  It was a decision that,  while the complete opposite of La Guardia's hands-on one-man war, was just as damaging to the street. By 1960 the Wagner administration's policy of isolated toleration was seen as an opportunity by the organized crime families of New York to plant their beachhead flags on West 42nd. The Gambinos, especially, would develop a hugely profitable market for the production and sale of totally explicit, industrial-strength pornography, the ultimate come-on that helped turn the street into the sleaze capital of the world. Left alone by a timid mayor, the mob expanded into all of porn's peripherals, including male and female prostitution rings, the deliverance of child runaways to middle-aged male pedophiles, and the distribution of yet one more favorite of World War II veterans: heroin (derived during the war from battlefield morphine), which induced extreme-and extremely addictive-euphoria.

Our Sister J. Edgar Hoover

In FBI Secrets:  An Agent’s Expose, M. Wesley Swearingen writes:

One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois.  I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI’s famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago’s newspaper headlines that gansters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area.  * * *  But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago.  According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky’s organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.  I laughed, thinking Coll was joking.  I said he should be careful to whom he tells such stories.  Coll insisted he was not joking.  He made me promise never to tell anyone as long as he lived. I noted that it was true that FBI training school had taught nothing about organized crime.  The thought of Hoover and his associate Clyde Tolson being homosexual shocked me.  There were jokes in training school about Hoover and Tolson being homosexual, but I had passed off the jokes as being in bad taste.  * * *  Rumors of Hoover’s and Tolson’s homosexuality continued to permeate the field offices for years, but no agent seemed to have any personal knowledge of an affair.  Still, Hoover did nothing about organized crime for thirty-seven years, until pressured to do so by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy in 1961.  * * *  Today it’s clear that Hoover disliked Bobby Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy because Hoover feared the Kennedys would prosecute Meyer Lansky as a gangster, and prompt Lansky to expose Hoover and Tolson as closet homosexuals.

Anthony Summers documents the basis for Hoover’s fear in his 1993 book Official and Confidential, the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover.  The book’s dust cover states, “J. Edgar Hoover . . . was a closet homosexual and transvestite.  Mafia bosses obtained information about Hoover’s sex life and used it for decades to keep the FBI at bay.  Without this, the Mafia as we know it might never have gained its hold in America."  A review of Anthony Summers’ book from the February 22, 1993 issue of Time magazine states:

The motto of the FBI is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity." How well did William Sessions' all-powerful predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, uphold these words? Not very, according to a just published biography of the late FBI chief. Anthony Summers' Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover is sure to disturb the old crime fighter's final rest.  Even as he railed against gays as "sexual deviants," Hoover apparently struggled with his own homosexuality. Summers offers fresh details of Hoover's 40-year friendship with Clyde Tolson, a handsome young agent he plucked out of the rank and file and quickly promoted to assistant director. The pair ate dinner together almost every night and vacationed together every year; Summers contends that Luisa Stuart, a former fashion model, once saw them holding hands in the back seat of a limo. According to Summers, the Mafia claimed to have the goods on Edgar and Clyde, including compromising photographs of the two men engaging in oral sex. That knowledge provided the mob with rich blackmail material. It protected gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello from FBI scrutiny for more than 20 years and forced Hoover to insist that syndicated crime was not a national problem. Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"  Hoover's presidential snooping included efforts to pin an illicit liaison on Eleanor Roosevelt and culminated, most famously, with eavesdropping on J.F.K. frolicking with Mafia moll Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe.  "We had to be not only as straight as an arrow," recalled a former agent last week on PBS's Frontline. "We had to give every perception that we were straight as arrows." In 1972, at age 77, the omnipotent FBI chief became the first civil servant to be granted a state funeral, at which he was eulogized by Richard Nixon in the Rotunda of the Capitol as "one of the giants . . . a national symbol of courage, patriotism and granite-like honesty and integrity." But the year before, bedeviled by fallout from his efforts to tap the phones of journalists, the President had confided to John Ehrlichman, "We may have on our hands here a man who will pull the temple down with him, including me." It is not surprising that not one of the eight Presidents he served dared fire him.

In Stonewall:  The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, [New York:  2004] David Carter writes:

Ginsberg, a man who loved both to gather and pass on gossip, had known since the late forties that J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual.  * * *  That Hoover was homosexual, and Clyde Tolson his lover is currently generally accepted.  The history of The Homosexual Handbook, published in 1968, shows, however, that by the late 1960s, not only was Hoover’s homosexuality whispered widely in the homosexual world but also that Hoover was, understandably, extremely sensitive about any public suggestion of this information.  The book’s last chapter, titled “Uncle Fudge’s List of Practical Homosexuals Past and Present with Very Short Biographical Notes—A Hearsay Reference Work,” includes Hoover’s name:

J. Edgar Hoover:  Celibataire, the director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence [sic], he has for several decades remained the eminence froide of our national great society.

After the book appeared, pressure from the FBI caused it to be withdrawn.  The publisher soon reissued the book, but with Uncle Fudge’s list one name shorter.

*     *     *

From information published in the 1993 book Official and Confidential:  The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Anthony Summers, Ginsberg’s intuition has been proved correct.  Not only did Summers discover that the Mafia had photographic evidence implicating Hoover in homosexual activities, but it also came to light that Hoover at times dressed in female attire.  Research conducted for this book strongly suggests that Ed Murphy had one or more of these photographs, which allowed him to avoid serving time in prison for leading an extensive national blackmail ring.

John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy’s criminal enterprises for gay history.  Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob’s control.  He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover.  The mob’s order, according to Ranieri, was strictly “Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut.”

Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover’s name was never mentioned.  Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him.  Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.

How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover?  The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover’s homosexuality and transvestism became public.  When Summer’s book was published, a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject.  Without mentioning Murphy’s name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover “posing amiably” with the racket’s ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s lover, had himself “fallen victim to the extortion ring.”  After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared.  * * *  Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover “was one of my sisters."

New York Confidential