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Tramps and Vagabonds Historical Note
Apr. 15th, 2022 01:56 pmAfter MUCH TRAVAIL I finally have a draft of the historical note for Tramps and Vagabonds! I finally realized that I probably didn't need to explain about the differences between "wolf" and "fairy" and "queer" when James already explains that to Timothy in the book itself, which made the amount of information for the historical note slightly more manageable, although it may have been a mistake not to include a refresher course.
***
It’s rare to be able to pinpoint the exact moment that spawned a book, but the present volume can be be traced directly to a footnote in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890-1940: “homosexual relationships appear to have been so widespread among seamen and hoboes that historians need to recognize the desire to live in a social milieu in which such relationships were relatively common and accepted… as one of the motives that sent men on the road or to sea.”
Timothy grew from this footnote. If a young gay man hit the road during the Great Depression in search of a more accepting milieu, what would he find there?
Fortunately, there are some wonderful memoirs about life on the road, like Jack London’s The Road and Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life. Both of these books include beautiful, lyrical passages about the joys of life on the road: the thrill of living a life of freedom and adventure, where every day is different than the last. This is the side of tramp life often captured in folksongs, like “Tramps and Hawkers,” of which James sings a snatch in Chapter 16:
And if the weather does permit
I’m happy every day!
These memoirs inspired many of the more picturesque incidents in this book. The fireflies in the hayloft, for instance, come directly from Tully (although the end result is entirely my own).
But although these writers remember their years on the road with great fondness, they are very clear that they are glad those years are over. The road offered them a life of unparalleled adventure and freedom, but also great hardship. Tully mentions multiple deaths that he witnessed on the rails; London dwells on the horrors of the month that he spent in prison for vagrancy.
Sociological studies like Thomas Minehan’s Boy and Girl Tramps of America echo this duality, although their focus tends to fall on the hardship: Minehan documents many instances of tramps maimed or killed by the hazards on the road, as well as the daily struggle for survival, and ends his book with a plea for more extensive government intervention to help vulnerable young people. (William Wellman's wonderful 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road - the title is an ironic reference to scare newspaper headlines demonizing young tramps - similarly presses society to offer more help to young people forced on the road.)
The book is a fascinating read for its own sake (without any of the sociological dryness of Nels Anderson’s useful Of Hobos and Homelessness) and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Great Depression. Minehan based this book on extensive fieldwork from 1932 and 1934, when he rode the rails dressed as a tramp, chatting with the young tramps (by boy and girl, he means young people up to the age of 21) and occasionally performing more extensive interviews. I drew extensively on Minehan’s lists of tips that he gathered from the road kids: how to find food, how to beg, how to take care of clothes on the road. Almost all of the advice that James passes on to Timothy comes directly from this book. In homage I borrowed Minehan’s own road name, Shorty, for James.
Aside from Jack London, every single one of these authors comments extensively on the prevalence of homosexuality on the road, a fact corroborated in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. As he chats with Gertrude Stein about his youthful experiences with tramps in Kansas City and Michigan, Hemingway recalls, “I knew why it was you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women.”
The acceptance of homosexual relationships on the road went hand in hand with a widespread toleration of sexual violence. This is not to say that all relationships on the road were violent: Minehan notes that in certain instances, the relationship between a wolf and his punk “seemed to be one of mutual satisfaction. The man and boy were pals.” But the possibility of sexual violence was omnipresent for girl tramps, and it loomed large for boy tramps, as well. Minehan is blunt: “One of the first lessons that a boy learns on the road is to beware of certain older men.”
Why were same-sex relations so common on the road? Part of it arose simply from an absence of women: even during the Great Depression, when female tramps became common for the first time, they comprised only a small part of the tramps population. But it also arose from the understanding of same-sex activity that remained common in rough working class milieu like the road, which stigmatized only the penetrated partner in the interaction. The active, penetrating partner was still considered a normal, conventionally masculine man, even if, like a wolf traveling with his punk, he was having sex with another man quite regularly. In this context, “normal” was emphatically not a synonym for “heterosexual.”
“Normal” and “heterosexual” were, however, already synonymous among the educated and professional classes, and by the middle of the twentieth century this understanding of human sexuality had more or less pervaded all social classes of American society. However, as Elizabeth Jane Ward chronicles in her fascinating book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, even in the twenty-first century straight men frequently find loopholes in this definition that allow for considerable sexual horseplay with other men. As Ward muses, “The long history of straight men’s sex with men, and the varied places where it occurs and the varied forms it takes, requires an expansive view, one that illuminates the all-too-often ignored probability that straight men, as a rule, want to have sex with men.”
***
It’s rare to be able to pinpoint the exact moment that spawned a book, but the present volume can be be traced directly to a footnote in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890-1940: “homosexual relationships appear to have been so widespread among seamen and hoboes that historians need to recognize the desire to live in a social milieu in which such relationships were relatively common and accepted… as one of the motives that sent men on the road or to sea.”
Timothy grew from this footnote. If a young gay man hit the road during the Great Depression in search of a more accepting milieu, what would he find there?
Fortunately, there are some wonderful memoirs about life on the road, like Jack London’s The Road and Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life. Both of these books include beautiful, lyrical passages about the joys of life on the road: the thrill of living a life of freedom and adventure, where every day is different than the last. This is the side of tramp life often captured in folksongs, like “Tramps and Hawkers,” of which James sings a snatch in Chapter 16:
And if the weather does permit
I’m happy every day!
These memoirs inspired many of the more picturesque incidents in this book. The fireflies in the hayloft, for instance, come directly from Tully (although the end result is entirely my own).
But although these writers remember their years on the road with great fondness, they are very clear that they are glad those years are over. The road offered them a life of unparalleled adventure and freedom, but also great hardship. Tully mentions multiple deaths that he witnessed on the rails; London dwells on the horrors of the month that he spent in prison for vagrancy.
Sociological studies like Thomas Minehan’s Boy and Girl Tramps of America echo this duality, although their focus tends to fall on the hardship: Minehan documents many instances of tramps maimed or killed by the hazards on the road, as well as the daily struggle for survival, and ends his book with a plea for more extensive government intervention to help vulnerable young people. (William Wellman's wonderful 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road - the title is an ironic reference to scare newspaper headlines demonizing young tramps - similarly presses society to offer more help to young people forced on the road.)
The book is a fascinating read for its own sake (without any of the sociological dryness of Nels Anderson’s useful Of Hobos and Homelessness) and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Great Depression. Minehan based this book on extensive fieldwork from 1932 and 1934, when he rode the rails dressed as a tramp, chatting with the young tramps (by boy and girl, he means young people up to the age of 21) and occasionally performing more extensive interviews. I drew extensively on Minehan’s lists of tips that he gathered from the road kids: how to find food, how to beg, how to take care of clothes on the road. Almost all of the advice that James passes on to Timothy comes directly from this book. In homage I borrowed Minehan’s own road name, Shorty, for James.
Aside from Jack London, every single one of these authors comments extensively on the prevalence of homosexuality on the road, a fact corroborated in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. As he chats with Gertrude Stein about his youthful experiences with tramps in Kansas City and Michigan, Hemingway recalls, “I knew why it was you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women.”
The acceptance of homosexual relationships on the road went hand in hand with a widespread toleration of sexual violence. This is not to say that all relationships on the road were violent: Minehan notes that in certain instances, the relationship between a wolf and his punk “seemed to be one of mutual satisfaction. The man and boy were pals.” But the possibility of sexual violence was omnipresent for girl tramps, and it loomed large for boy tramps, as well. Minehan is blunt: “One of the first lessons that a boy learns on the road is to beware of certain older men.”
Why were same-sex relations so common on the road? Part of it arose simply from an absence of women: even during the Great Depression, when female tramps became common for the first time, they comprised only a small part of the tramps population. But it also arose from the understanding of same-sex activity that remained common in rough working class milieu like the road, which stigmatized only the penetrated partner in the interaction. The active, penetrating partner was still considered a normal, conventionally masculine man, even if, like a wolf traveling with his punk, he was having sex with another man quite regularly. In this context, “normal” was emphatically not a synonym for “heterosexual.”
“Normal” and “heterosexual” were, however, already synonymous among the educated and professional classes, and by the middle of the twentieth century this understanding of human sexuality had more or less pervaded all social classes of American society. However, as Elizabeth Jane Ward chronicles in her fascinating book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, even in the twenty-first century straight men frequently find loopholes in this definition that allow for considerable sexual horseplay with other men. As Ward muses, “The long history of straight men’s sex with men, and the varied places where it occurs and the varied forms it takes, requires an expansive view, one that illuminates the all-too-often ignored probability that straight men, as a rule, want to have sex with men.”
