Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.

It is part of my job, as someone who teaches media studies, to keep up with the recent work on the history of popular entertainments and the rise of the mass media in America. This year, the task has been a real pleasure, and I want to recommend three truly wonderful books that are a delight to read, and compel us to rethink our cultural history.

Ann Douglas's tour de force, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar Straus Giroux), provides a pulsing, detailed, and vivid portrait of New York City's ascendance as cultural capital of America during this era, and explores how achieving this position depended absolutely on the tangled and troubled interconnections between African-American culture and mainstream white culture. Neal Gabler's dazzling biography, Winchell. Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (Alfred A. Knopf), sees Walter Winchell's rise to stardom as emblematic of the shift in America to a new mass culture obsessed with fame, and with both building up and tearing down celebrities through the weapon of gossip.

George Chauncey's Gay New York. Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books) takes a topic deeply closeted by historians and argues that gay life in New York was actually more tolerated, more visible, and less segregated in the early decades of the century than in the later ones. These are all big, fat books, and worth every single page.

Ann Douglas argues in Terrible Honesty that the often unspoken but nonetheless avowed project of many writers, musicians, and architects in the 1920s was cultural matricide: the overthrow of Victorian, bourgeois codes of decorum, propriety, and restraint too often associated with a stereotype of the proper, overly judgmental, upper-middle-class matriarch. It was this image (at odds, Douglas notes, with the reality of most women's power) that male artists cast themselves against. Thus she sees the rise of modernism--in literature, music, and architecture--as a self-consciously masculine enterprise.

But she also insists that the confident emergence of American music and letters in the 1920s from the shadow of European cultural authority could not have happened without African-American culture, especially its music, which was the first authentically American music the nation produced. American culture became envied and exportable abroad especially because of jazz and the blues, and Douglas is masterful at analyzing whites' love-hate relationship with black culture, and at delineating the ways whites censored blacks and discriminated against them while also avidly embracing their music, their dances, and aspects of their language. Anecdotes about Irving Berlin, James Thurber, Bessie Smith, Al Jolson, and Ethel Waters, to name just a few of the dozens and dozens of individuals we meet in these pages, are deftly used to illustrate Douglas's larger arguments.

Neal Gabler's Winchell combines riveting biography with first-rate cultural history as he chronicles the overthrow of more genteel Nineteenth Century standards that insisted that culture and leisure time should be uplifting, educational, and thought-provoking. Winchell, who started out as a gossip columnist for the New York Graphic, brought his style of in-your-face celebrity journalism to radio, and by the late 1930s, according to one estimate, fifty million Americans either listened to his broadcasts or read his daily column. Gabler's account of Winchell's crass, spotlight-hogging, reporter-as-participant behavior during the Lindbergh trial makes or especially eye-opening reading in the aftermath of the Simpson trial. The spectacular rise of the vulgar, egocentric, and vindictive Winchell and then his fall after his promotion of McCarthyism do indeed reveal much about major transformations in American culture and our ambivalence toward the cult of celebrity.

George Chauncey's Gay New York masterfully recovers the lost history of gay social centers, neighborhoods, dances, and drag balls that constituted a distinct and complex subculture in the city. Chauncey's goal is to challenge the myths about gay life before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. Because historians have neglected this history, it is easy to assume that, prior to Stonewall, gay men were isolated and compelled to live solitary lives, that hostility from the straight majority forced the gay world to remain invisible, and that because of such marginalization, gay men internalized the dominant culture's view of them as perverted.

In the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, argues Chauncey, nothing could be further from the truth, and he provides a vibrant portrait of gay street life, bathhouses, speakeasies, and the spectacular gay balls of the 1920s that attracted thousands of participants to prove his point.

All three of these books are social and cultural history at their very finest, combining fluent writing with new ideas and information that enrich our understanding of how public entertainments and the mass media can simultaneously liberate marginalized groups and mainstream imagination, while also coarsening public taste and thwarting true liberation in the name of ratings, profits, and the preservation of the cultural status quo.