By the 1890s, however, New York already had what we’d call gay bars or, more precisely, drag bars. There is less evidence of gay life in New York in the decades after the 1850s, perhaps because the Civil War retarded the development of alternative lifestyles in the US. Whitman read his most clearly homo-erotic works, the ‘Calamus’ poems, aloud to the circle of his friends who gathered at Pfaff’s beer cellar, at Broadway and Bleecker Street, which suggests that they were at least what today we call ‘allies’. Two key New York writers of the time referenced same-sex desire in their work: novelist Herman Melville did so subtly, while poet Walt Whitman did so explicitly.
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