Jan gay
On May 18, 1939, Barnard College received a printed questionnaire from a researcher named Jan Gay, asking about homosexuality in its student body.[1]
For the past fourteen years, Gay had been compiling research for a book about gender non-conforming women, and she wanted to bring her statistics on homosexuality “up to date,” she wrote.
Included in Gay’s letter was a series of questions that must have sounded peculiar to a school administrator in the 1930s: what was, Gay asked, the faculty’s attitude toward crushes or “passionate friendships” among same-gender students? Were psychiatrists available for those students? Were “the instances of sexual contact between girls numerous?” she asked.
Barnard College’s physician, Gulielma Alsop, wrote back the next sunlight. “Homosexuality among students of Barnard College is not a problem of any magnitude,” Alsop said.[2]
When Same-sex attracted sent the same questionnaire to other schools, only some expressed more openness to the idea that they might have lgbtq+ students in their ranks.
Vermont’s Bennington College admitted to Gay that it had discovered “two or three” relationships between female students [3], and a medic at Mount Holyoke said that three girls ha
The Lesbian Sex Researcher that History Forgot
Decades before a formalized queer activist movement popped up, a researcher named Jan Gay decided to seek liberation in a different way. Starting in the 1920s, with only a literature degree to her name, she interviewed queer women in cities across the society about their lives and identities.
For Gay, the research was a sort of Trojan horse. Other types of organizing in the queer community hadn’t worked: In 1924, just months after a tiny queer organization called the Society for Human Rights formed in Chicago, police raided it and seal it down. Gay saw her study as a subtler type of activism—a way to document the many shades of gender non-conforming identity, but also to show the world that queer people were far more like the linger of society than they had been given credit. What made her study all the more drastic is that Gay herself was openly a queer woman . Yet right when she was to the gesture of publishing, other academics stepped in and co-opted her work.
Today, we have many ways to remember Gay: as a picture-book author, a nudist leader, and the one-time roommate of Andy Warhol. But her most vital work is largely disoriented to history. Her
The Revenge of Miss Jan Gay
After enjoying an autumn of reader buzz and positive reviews, Justin Torres’ acclaimed new novel, Blackouts, won the National Novel Award for Fiction last week. I’d like to imagine that somewhere in the glitzy New York venue where the awards were announced, alongside Torres and LeVar Burton and Oprah Winfrey, you could scan the shadows and spot the ghost of Jan Gay, observing the proceedings with a gimlet eye. You’d hope she was at least a little pleased. Torres’ much-deserved win acts as a kind of revenge for Gay—a pioneering lesbian news writer who sought to document her community’s diversity and experience in the 1930s—along with the dozens of queers who trusted her with their life stories. Back then, she and her sources were betrayed and misrepresented by prejudiced “scientific collaborators.” But today, in the work of Torres, the literary historian Saidiya Hartman, and a growing number of others, their major contribution to our understanding of queerness is finally being appreciated and honored on its own terms.
If Gay’s call is not yet familiar to you, that’s because her full role in a groundbreaking medical chat of 1941 titled Sex Variants: From the publisher: Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay—playful raconteur, child lost and establish and lost, guardian of the institutionalized—has a plan to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories unhurried in the early 20th century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his conclude, he and the narrator trade stories—moments of bliss and oblivion—and resurrect disoriented loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its possess center and the lady who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres’s Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary function of .
Blackouts