Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem

Abstract

“W h i t e o n l o o k e r s . . . m u s t b e made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human,” W. e. B. Du Bois wrote in the National Association for Coloured People’s magazine the Crisis in 1927. “It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.” In admonishing whites, Du Bois was assuming that homes presented a picture of black Americans different from that of public performances and that the residents of Harlem, New York City’s foremost African American neighborhood, had adopted the bourgeois domestic ideals promoted by the black middle class as a means of advancing the race toward equality. On other occasions, however, he was less certain of the propriety and order of black home life. Du Bois shared with reformers of both races a concern that many residences in growing urban neighborhoods were so overcrowded that their occupants lacked privacy, causing them to be corrupted by lodgers or pushed out into commercialized public spaces where men and women freely mixed. Such anxieties were rarely supported by evidence of what actually happened in homes. Instead, reformers followed