Slumming
Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940

- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
The Spatial Dynamics of Slumming and the Emergence of Commercial Leisure
Chapter 1
Into the Slums
The Spatial Organization, Cultural Geography and Regulation of a New Urban Pastime
Chapter 2
Beyond the Slums
Commercial Leisure and the Reorganization and Policing of Urban Space
Part II
The Changing Conceptualization of Sexuality and Race in the Slumming Vogues of Chicago and New York
Chapter 3
Adventures in the Slums and Red-Light Districts
Chapter 4
The Search for Bohemian “Thrillage”
Chapter 5
The Negro Vogue
Excursions into a “Mysterious Dark World”
Chapter 6
The Pansy and Lesbian Craze in White and Black
Epilogue
List of Abbreviations
Notes
“Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Chad Heap’s investigation of slumming as an urban mass phenomenon gives us a vivid and astonishingly detailed account of the black and tans, bohemian tearooms, and pansy and lesbian nightclubs where the cultural boundaries of race and sexuality were crossed, tested, and recast in the early twentieth century.”
"’Slumming’ is the concept of people seeing ’how the other half lives.’ People went slumming either as an academic pursuit or with prurient interests, or both. Beginning in the 1880s with white males visiting prostitutes or gamblers in the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods in New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville, slumming extended to middle-class whites visiting these areas, usually in the company of a police officer, as a new form of recreation spurred by curiosity and desire. Heap sees four phases of slumming in this fascinating, readable, but hardly titillating history. The red light phase ran from the 1880s to WW I, which overlapped the bohemian phase during the 1910s and 1920s. The Negro phase, perhaps the best known in popular imagery, ran through the 1920s and 1930s, overlapping and succeeded by the pansy/lesbian phase, which continued through the 1940s. Throughout, Heap highlights his monograph with detailed accounts of black and tan cabarets, tearooms, and rent parties that broadened the perspectives of both visitors and residents. . . . Recommended. All levels/libraries."
“[An] enthralling history. . . . assiduously parsed, perhaps to mitigate the inherent titillation of the material.”
The Publishing Triangle: Publishing Triangle: Shilts/Grahn Award for Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist
History: American History | Urban History
Sociology: Race, Ethnic, and Minority Relations | Urban and Rural Sociology
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