Degenerate Sex and the City: Djuna Barnes’s Urban Underworld

Abstract

In a remarkable but largely overlooked 1918 interview with New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright, Djuna Barnes made this stunning admission: some of the nicest people know are either potential or real (Commissioner 301). Before the interview was over she reiterated: I have a lot of friends, as before said, who are either potential criminals or (304). Barnes's so-called criminal friends were the gays and lesbians who were part of her social milieu in Village in the 1910s, where she resided before relocating in 1920 a similar community of American expatriate sexual dissidents on Paris's Left Bank, whose lives she memorialized in Nightwood. Richard Enright was the commissioner who publicly pledged stamp out the depraved tastes of the in the Village, make it unattractive the sightseer and restore it to its previous status as a respectable residential and business (Enright), which it had been in the mid- late-nineteenth century, before the likes of Barnes took up residence there. The interview ends with Enright breaking out in uncomfortable laughter as Barnes, apparently, sits silently relishing her minor triumph, her brief disruption of the procedures that police the geographical borders of sexual difference. The Village's was a real and imagined territory of prostitutes, gay men and women, and bohemian artists and writers. The trope of a criminal, socially disruptive, and morally licentious sexual underworld in Village appears repeatedly in sociological, urban-planning, and popular discourse in the interwar period, when Barnes was writing articles for numerous New York newspapers. Though Village in the 1910s and 20s is remembered for its sexual, social, and aesthetic freedom and experimentation, a proper accounting of this period is not complete without understanding the geographic and discursive forces that constructed, regulated, and quarantined the spatially and socially marginalized populations whose liberation has been celebrated in many cultural histories. (1) These forces included the City Practical urban-planning movement of the 1910s, the emergence of a new nighttime leisure economy in the Village, the heated gentrification battles in the neighborhood between Italians, gays and lesbians, and a new class of urban corporate professionals, and the campaigns by civic reform societies and the New York Police Department prosecute queer subcultural sexual practices. Out of these forces emerged what writers and reformers labeled a sexual underworld. An investigation of the social meanings of this underworld in the 1910s illuminates how sexual identities and communities are geographically constructed and how the spaces of those identities and communities are contested in the midst of a cultural sex panic. Barnes's journalism (impressionistic sketches, interviews, and articles from 1913 1919, many of them collected by Alyce Barry in New York), and her novel Nightwood imagine urban space from the perspective of the marginalized neighborhoods that were targeted by municipal authorities, police, urban planners, and real estate developers. As will argue, urban planning initiated new methods of spatial and social control produce what Michel de Certeau calls a planned and readable (93). Against the panoptic, abstract, implicitly (and at times explicitly) heterosexual spatiality of urban planners--the City Practical architects in New York in the 1910s and Georges-Eugene Haussmann in Paris in the 1850s--Barnes's was a secretive city of queer desire and pleasure. Her work underscores the erotic possibilities of a territorial politics where the sexualized and gendered nature of urban space is foregrounded, and where the relays between bodies and architectures create frictions that rub the city's dominant powers the wrong way. Among Barnes's numerous articles, will consider four devoted Village--The Last Petit Souper, Greenwich Village As It Is, Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians, and How the Villagers Amuse Themselves--focusing on how they articulate from an insider's perspective a clandestine queer subculture. …