Queer Men on the Move: Sex, Transit, and the Interwar Midwest

Queer Men on the Move contends that the Midwest was a center of queer activity during the 1920s and 30s whose possibilities were enabled over wide geographic spaces because of a greater degree of mobility than that found in large urban environments or other rural regions of the nation. This project intervenes in narratives of queer and Midwestern history by centering the rural Midwest as one of the primary sites in which American normalcy and queerness were constructed and then exported to national narratives of normalcy and deviance.
In the early decades of the twentieth century the Midwest was a region in transition. Rail lines had transformed the region from the frontier to the center of growth and population for the nation. The Midwest sported a sprawling inter-urban transit system that linked many small towns and every mid-sized city to the largest cities of the region, and provided access to the rest of the nation. Following the rail lines were also the telegraph wires, which connected every small town and cities of all sizes together. The notion that homosexuality was an identity rather than an act that anyone might perform had not yet achieved hegemonic status in the 1920s and 30s, and identity discourses were contested by local explanations of queer behavior rooted in a variety of traditions. Homosexuality might have been seen as a disease, but sex between ‘normal’ men was distasteful, but not yet pathological. For some men this meant sex while traveling for work, or traveling specifically to seek out sex. For others, it meant a more transient existence that emphasized personal fulfillment over the imperatives of capitalism and normative life.