Lost Gay New York: Lost Lingo, Park Queens and Department Store Queens

By Perry Brass

“The rent is $69,” my roommate on Central Park West, Bob Schwiller told me. “A lotta people make something of that. It’s actually $16.80 a week, but to make it easy, I’ll ask you for $69.”

I asked him what he meant by “people make something out of it,” and he told me that “69” was code for gay sex. “So if your rent was $69, people just put two-and-two together, and that’s what they get,” he added. “Their minds are always in the gutter. Sometimes I don’t mind being there myself.”

After I moved in, I met many of Bob’s friends. They were all older guys who’d been in New York for a while, remembering queer New York during World War II, when the city was “wide open, not like now when everything’s closed up still because of the Fair.”

This was 1966, remember.

One thing I got out of meeting his friends were that gays were often “specialized,” and had a lingo of their own. They needed the lingo, because you had to be able to talk about something very forbidden, queer sex and its devotees, in a way that straights could not decode.
You were known, very much by where you cruised. And a lot of gay New York never went to bars. Bars were still being raided all the time, and many gay bars were stacked with hustlers, johns (guys who “rented” rentboys), screaming queens who were too obvious for daytime tastes, and rip-off artists who felt gays were a good mark. Unlike the bars in San Francisco, often either gay-owned or at least managed, New York bars were still in the pocket of the Mob.

So I learned about specialized guys. Besides Central Park West queens, there were park queens, who cruised Central Park; street queens who did their cruising on certain routes in the city, like Third Avenue, or parts of Broadway in the West 70s (known to be cruisy); restaurant queens who knew half the menus in New York and liked to socialize and sexualize in them (some restaurants were notoriously cruisy: especially cafeterias, a now extinct form of eating in New York, left over from the Depression); and my favorite: department store queens.

I met fussy but funny Ralph Wilson, a cunningly bleached blond, through Bob. He was a prima-faciedepartment store queen. He hung out at Lord and Taylor and Saks, and a raft of stores now only memories: Stern’s on 42nd Street; Arnold Constable, tres preppy on Fifth; swanky De Pina’s further uptown; stately old B. Altman’s; and elegant, refined Bonwit Teller, now a raucous Niketown, and then the haunt of the very chic. When Ralph stopped by Bob’s on Central Park West, he could recite what sales were going on where. Since I was too broke even for sales, I could still enjoy the news that this week chino slacks were a great buy at Altman’s.

Later I became interested in the phenomenon of department store queens as I learned more about the lore of New York stores.

Queens (a generic word for gays pre-Stonewall) went to department stores to cruise because most of the men employed there were also gay. So the sales queens winked while customers “worked” the aisles.

This tradition of gay men in department stores went back to the nineteenth century when the stores employed armies of young unmarried girls as low-paid clerks. They often slept in dormitories above the store (Saks’ upper floor once housed them; Stern’s, on 42nd Street, was one of the last of these stores to still have dormitory rooms on its top level: it’s now part of the State University of New York) and the stores were supposed to be their protective “foster parents,” keeping lecherous dirty old men away.

You can of course guess what went down from there: most of the men who worked as salesmen were either flaming Franklin Pangborn types, or a bit deeper into the closet but still able to find the door. Also department stores were frequented mostly by women shoppers, and rarely by the kind of hyper-butch men who’d take most unkindly to a friendly advance. Butch men, in fact, prided themselves on never going into department stores. They let their wives do that.

Few department store queens cruised the bigger stores like Macy’s or Gimbels. From what I gathered, they had larger forces of plainclothesmen who might arrest you for “loitering,” and they did not have the refined charm of Fifth Avenue establishments where, as in the old B. Altman’s, you could dash into a real tea room, called Charleston Gardens, for refreshment between cruising the aisles and going from one department to another.

The story of park queens in New York is also fascinating. I learned that Central Park has been a cruising paradise ever since the time of Walt Whitman, and the area around the lake was considered especially noteworthy for its cruising value. I'll talk more about the Park and cruising in it, as well as other New York parks in other parts of this series.

You can learn more about Perry Brass at his website, www.perrybrass.com. On April 29, he and Jerry Kajpust will be leading a workshop on The Manly Art of Seduction, based on his book, at the LGBT Center on West 13th Street. You can learn more about this at http://manlyartworkshop2.eventbrite.com