Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 by Julio Capó Jr.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 by Julio Capó Jr. Albert Sergio Laguna Julio Capó Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 383 pp. In Julio Capó Jr.'s fantastic account of Miami before 1940, we are treated to a queer history that puts the popular understanding of Miami as a site for fun, sun, and sex into a fascinating and much-needed context. Early twentieth-century boosters came up with the idea to market Miami as a "fairyland," where paradise and the pleasures therein could be had in a warm, accessible climate. The fairyland of Miami meant different things to different people, and in this book, Capó privileges "the complex ways queer women and men negotiated their own space, role, and understanding of themselves in this budding international city from the 1890s to 1940 (5). The result is a simply riveting read that takes us through the complex gender and sexual politics that made Miami, well, Miami. Although the book's primary focus is on gender and sexuality, Capó provides a master class on intersectional analysis and its critical potential. For [End Page 308] example, the first chapter explains how the growth and shifting borders of Miami in the early years of its incorporation must be understood through an analysis of the relationship of space, sex, race, and labor—particularly in the context of red-light districts in black neighborhoods. In chapter 2, the labor migrations of Bahamians to Miami are detailed to tell a story about the queering of gender and sex roles in both the Bahamas and Miami. In the chapters that follow, Capó adds another layer of complexity by examining the lives of the white, queer elite men and women who helped to fashion the city as a space where gender and sexual norms could be transgressed through financial investments and by exploring the staging of Miami in both tourist marketing and public entertainment. Of course, this queer fairyland did not go unchallenged, and the book captures the pushback that occurred at various moments to deftly sketch the uneven policing of queerness (a burden that often fell along racial and class lines) in a city that relied on its transgressive image to attract tourist dollars. To do this work, Capó brings together a diverse collection of primary source materials: newspapers, tourism ad campaigns, court cases, migration statistics, arrest records, minstrel performances, literary works, and more. In one of my favorite moments in the book, Capó analyzes watercolors featuring nude black Bahamian laborers by the famed American painter John Singer Sargent. Through these watercolors, Capó further details his history of "the homosocial world of early Miami and the elite's gaze and fetishization of the black laborer's body" (74). This expansive collection of sources makes possible a multilayered, thorough historical rendering of this time period that also acknowledges the archival silences around sex and sexuality. Capó's patient and insightful readings make these silences a key part of the overall analysis. Cuba's role in the book builds on the work of other scholars like Louis Pérez who have highlighted the relationship between Miami and the island as essential for their respective growth and development. The emphasis here is on the sexual and gender politics of this relationship through an examination of the ways in which Miami was cast as an exotic locale in the spirit of Havana with a lax moral code to compete for visitors. There are many other moments when Cuba factors into this history: improvements in infrastructure as a product of military mobilization in Miami during the Spanish-American-Cuban War, the visual culture of Miami and Havana, sexual politics and empire, and even Machado-era Cuban migration to the city during and after the dictator's rule. Cuba's role in the book goes beyond what I have outlined, but it is crucial to note how Cuba is not at the center of this study—a major strength, in my estimation. Instead, Capó develops the transnational scope of the book by acknowledging the role of Cuba but also insisting on the crucial part played by other Caribbean influences...