While writing Boston Proper I needed to grasp the turn of the century gay world that Mason Bon Vive would have inhabited. In the book we don’t actually see him in this world. But I felt that it important to have a keen understanding of that world in hopes that it would help me color the character as I wrote.
With almost everything I read, there seemed to be an innate fear of being caught. In many instances, “offenders” were beaten, hanged, shot, and, in one account, tarred and feathered. So, the fear was real. And, if that wasn’t enough, no one really understood homosexuality, even the homosexual. As mentioned in the book when Victoria visits with a librarian, the word homosexual had barely been coined by a German doctor in Europe. So, for most of the world, the very notion of man-on-man action was, in many cases, completely incomprehensible. Yet, there it was – in large numbers, particularly in large cities like New York, London, or Paris.
I was very surprised when I found that men who dressed up as women were frowned upon by non-dress-wearing gay men. Drag queens, as they were called, were an embarrassment. And when the secret bars were raided, and all were taken to jail, it gave straight society the impression that all men liked to wear dresses. That prejudice, curiously, still exists.
What struck me the most in my research was the profound loneliness and fear a homosexual person must have felt living in rural communities. They would not have the slightest idea that there were other people in the whole world who felt as they did. And, this is during a time when most people never travel further than twenty miles from their home. So, the likelihood of ever meeting another gay man or woman was practically impossible. Can anyone imagine how deeply sad and frightening that must have been?