Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 by Julio Capó Jr. (review)

Every city deserves to have its LGBTQ history recorded and preserved, but the challenge for historians has become how to undertake this important task without falling into the creeping historiographical doldrums. We have a well-established metanarrative of queer urban history, so what is new beyond the specific details?

With Welcome to Fairyland, Julio Capó breathes refreshing new life into the genre. His carefully researched account gives Miami the vivid first chapter (to 1940) of the local queer history it merits, but more importantly for scholars of sexuality, his analytical lenses toggle effortlessly among Miami’s various overlapping contexts, situating Miami as a tourist resort town, part of the Jim Crow South, and the central hub of a Caribbean nexus all at once. It’s the transnational focus, in which Miami participates in a non–US-centered American flow of labor, capital, and sexuality, that most marks Welcome to Fairyland as a needed intervention and corrective to the sometimes overly nationalistic reading of “American” cities.

Incorporated in 1896, Miami was an “instant city” born of the dominant ideas of its era and thus existing “at the intersection of several contested colonial spaces: borderland, frontier, and city” (12, 6). Intended by its developers to allure affluent white US vacationers, it based much of its appeal on imperialist notions of an “uncivilized” Caribbean, against which it offered proximity but presumed safety (1). The broad contours of its queer history follow some familiar arcs. From the start, elite white men were afforded unique freedoms, such that wealthy radical philanthropist Alden Freeman could dress in flamboyantly flashy style, adopt the much younger man with whom he lived (for legal/inheritance purposes, a frequent tactic through which queer kinship was formalized before marriage was plausible), and suffer no consequences. Meanwhile, reminiscent of Chicago or New York, the geographical distribution of queer spaces such as bars and nightclubs was largely pushed into what was then known as Colored Town, on the north side of the city, where working-class people of color bore the brunt of police raids and violence. The policing of queerness was delicately calibrated, suppressing overt sexual transgression but allowing just enough to maintain the city’s tempting allure for prurient tourists—much the same tightrope San Francisco walked during the same era.

Capó tells this story well, paying particularly close heed to police tactics, such as the reliance on a 1917 Florida law against “unnatural and lascivious acts” designed to target oral sex and easier to enforce, as a misdemeanor, than the existing felony sodomy law (161). He recovers the histories of such establishments as La Paloma, a queer nightclub violently raided by the Ku Klux Klan in 1937, and Mother Kelly’s, a Miami Beach venue with female impersonators that even sold such strikingly suggestive merchandise as a Mother Kelly piggy bank in which coins were inserted through the buttocks. Capó brings numerous individuals to life through legal archives, memoirs, and other sources and very usefully delves into the labor relations of female impersonators, some of whom traveled a glamorous circuit from New York’s Broadway to South Florida, while others were caught in more exploitive and vulnerable situations.

His greatest contribution, however, is his regional focus, which challenges a “Cuban exceptionalism” framework to foreground the role of Bahamians in building both the physical infrastructure and the queer sexuality of Miami (12). As Capó writes, migrant Bahamian workers “proved fundamental to the articulation of queer erotic desire in Miami,” partly through their commodification by the white bourgeois gaze, partly through their own same-sex desires and activities (61). On the latter front, he shows in revealing detail how seasonal labor patterns informed the sexuality of Philemon Roberts, arrested for a crime against nature in 1917 while working in Miami but later married to a woman back home in the Bahamas. Regarding the white gaze, he offers a sensitive and convincing account of painter John Singer Sargent...