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2 / Degenerate Sex and the City: The Underworlds of New York and Paris in the Work of Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, 1910s–1930s In a remarkable but overlooked interview in 1918 with the top law enforcement officer in New York City, Commissioner Richard Enright, Djuna Barnes, writing for New York Sun Magazine, made this stunning admission: “some of the nicest people I know are either potential or real criminals,” and then noticing that Enright had not taken the bait, Barnes reiterated right before the interview was over, “I have a lot of friends, as I before said, who are either potential criminals or criminals.”1 Barnes’s unnamed “criminal” friends were the gays and lesbians who were part of her social milieu in Greenwich Village in the 1910s, where she resided and worked as a journalist before relocating in 1920 to a similar community of American expatriate sexual dissidents on Paris’s Left Bank, whose lives she memorialized in her novel Nightwood (1936). As would soon be reported in the New York Times, Commissioner Enright , it turns out, was on the cusp of leading a full-blown crackdown on the Village as part of a campaign to stamp out “depraved tastes” in what was termed the “new underworld” of New York.2 He promised to make the neighborhood “unattractive to the sightseer,” by driving out the slumming parties and tour operators, whom Enright labeled “parasites” for the way they profited from the scandalous nightlife that had become synonymous with the Village.”3 And he promised (or was it a threat?) to return the Village “to its previous status as a respectable residential and business neighborhood,” back to its mid to late nineteenth-century status as a genteel urban backwater before the likes of Barnes and her friends took up residence.4 Enright’s crackdown, of course, was not intended to 78 / degenerate sex and the city protect the district’s nascent gay and lesbian community from the prying eyes of unseemly voyeurs. It turns out, the police department was stepping up its prosecution of “parasites” and those they preyed upon, the short-haired women and long-haired men that slummers often came to gawk at. As upper-middle-class professionals began relocating to the Village en masse, Enright, through his clean-up campaign, was trying to make them feel at home. But these were not the topics of Barnes’s interview which, oddly enough, begins by discussing Enright’s reading habits and his possession of “the largest Voltairean library” (296). When it had clearly veered off subject and into more dangerous territory, the interview was cut off quickly, with Enright breaking out in a fit of uncomfortable and almost inexplicable laughter as Barnes, apparently, sat silently relishing her minor triumph. In the exchange between the police commissioner of America’s largest city and a young queer writer barely eking out a living by writing occasional pieces for the popular press, much more was being communicated than was spoken or acknowledged. To make sense of Barnes’s interview (and, it turns out, almost all of her journalism), one has to read between the lines and listen to the silences. Barnes, as she so often would, was playing a game of hide-and-seek that frustrated those who wanted to police or exploit the city’s “new underworld.” To understand how and why the ethnic underworld of the 1890s was replaced by a new sexual underworld in Greenwich Village in the 1910s, and then with a racial underworld in Harlem a decade later, requires that we back up a bit and set the scene for the city’s swiftly changing immoral geographies. As I illustrated in chapter 1, urban American literature and culture in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth actively constructed an American underworld among the immigrant poor—the lumpenproletariat of trash-pickers, tramps, prostitutes , and underemployed tenement dwellers—as a way of understanding ethnic difference, poverty, assimilation, and crime, the major issues of the time. Urban travelogues, reform-mined exposés, and governmentsponsored inquiries into the origins of crime spotlighted the social underworld in the densely built spaces of the Lower East Side’s Jewish and Chinese communities, the area just south and east of the Village. By the 1910s the Lower East Side seemed to be losing its grip on the urban imagination . Ernest Ingersoll’s 1891 claim that the “great business houses are rising year by year” in lower...

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