In the late 1920s, urban nightclubs began to feature openly gay performers known as ‘pansy’s’, usually doing a song/dance/patter act, offering up wry, witty and sometimes self-deprecating humor;. The songs were suggestive and explored the double-nature of the pansy, a man who feels more feminine than masculine and prefers dressing and living openly as a woman (or at least a very effeminate man). In that sense, the Pansy world was one of the first visible LGBTQ communities and their acceptance by straight audiences–indeed, the straight world’s delight in them–makes one curious as to why gay culture seemed to go underground and become much less visible in society after the pansy craze wound down in the middle thirties. Above I’ve posted a very nice TCM mini-doc on the whole subject. The doc suggests that with the arrival of the production code, all stereotypes of gay men disappeared from movies–which is not strictly true but certainly the portrayals of gay men and women grew more infrequent and subtle. The Pansy craze disappeared from New York nightclubs more or less in conjunction with the scandalous end of the Jimmy Walker administration and the arrival of Fiorello LaGuardia, who was having none of that nonsense on his watch. The doc focuses largely on a remarkable performer named Jean Malin. I’ll let the the good folks at TCM do the rest of the talking…
April 24, 2025