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  • Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem
  • Stephen Robertson (bio), Shane White (bio), Stephen Garton (bio), and Graham White (bio)

“White onlookers . . . must be made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the National Association for Coloured People’s magazine the Crisis in 1927. “It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.”1 In admonishing whites, Du Bois was assuming that homes presented a picture of black Americans different from that of public performances and that the residents of Harlem, New York City’s foremost African American neighborhood, had adopted the bourgeois domestic ideals promoted by the black middle class as a means of advancing the race toward equality. On other occasions, however, he was less certain of the propriety and order of black home life. Du Bois shared with reformers of both races a concern that many residences in growing urban neighborhoods were so overcrowded that their occupants lacked privacy, causing them to be corrupted by lodgers or pushed out into commercialized public spaces where men and women freely mixed. Such anxieties were rarely supported by evidence of what actually happened in homes.2 Instead, reformers followed [End Page 443] the logic spelled out by Lawrence Veiller, a leading advocate of housing reform who, while admitting “we are singularly without accurate information” about the effects of “the lodger evil,” insisted that “from the very nature of things the results must be of this kind”: “The introduction of strange men into the family life [leads] to the breaking up of homes, to the separation of husband and wife, to the going astray of young daughters, just emerging into womanhood.”3 To what extent black residences fulfilled Du Bois’s hopes and were a counterpoint to racist notions or whether they were the source of immorality that he feared has not been explored by historians examining sexuality in the world’s leading black city during the 1920s. They have instead followed the white visitors Du Bois admonished in giving their attention to the neighborhood’s streets, nightclubs, and drag balls and to prostitutes, blues singers, and literati of the Harlem Renaissance found there. Focusing on what happened in public in Harlem, on the sexualization of public spaces and commercialization of sex, has led scholars to portray the sexual geography of the neighborhood as that of a vice district.4

In this article we offer a picture of what happened inside the homes of Harlem that reveals neither the immorality focused on lodgers feared by reformers nor the bourgeois respectability for which they hoped. Privacy existed despite overcrowding, thanks to the regular, extended absence of residents at work, the willingness of those not bound by familial ties to look the other way, the ability to pass as married or as heterosexual, and the limited surveillance conducted by public and private authorities. Within that space apart could be found not only respectable reproductive sexuality but also a range of other sexualities. We know intuitively that privacy can produce sexualities other than the bourgeois ideal, but that knowledge is only reflected in scholarship about gay and lesbian life, not in broader accounts of modern American urban sexualities.5 This article shows that residents used their homes as sites for homosexual, extramarital, [End Page 444] and premarital sexual activity, ranging from casual relationships to informal unions, and as venues that commodified privacy and gave others space for the same kinds of sexual expression.

Focusing on residences rather than public spaces recasts the sexual geography of Harlem from a vice district to a furnished room district. A feature of most major turn-of-the-century American cities, such neighborhoods were marked by an abundance of rooming houses—in black Harlem, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s research showed, they constituted just over half of the residential structures—and cafeterias, cheap restaurants, tearooms, cabarets, and movie theaters catering to lodgers.6 Joanne Meyerowitz, in the only study to explore this sexual geography, showed that in Chicago both rooming houses and the places where residents spent their leisure offered numerous...

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