ABSTRACT
The above assessment by Jeffrey Escoffi er remains relevant today. Early social science analyses of lesbian and gay people tended to isolate and abstract them from the various social worlds they inhabited, including the world of work. Little effort was made to investigate the marginal, often criminalized labor practices which enabled not only the fashioning of a homosexual community, but also the survival of individual homosexuals in the mid-twentieth-century United States, a time and place which witnessed both an intensifi cation of social stigma surrounding homosexuality as well as an increasing number of social science investigations into the lives of homosexuals. These labor practices included work in a growing number of specifi cally lesbian-and gay-oriented institutions, notably bars and bathhouses, which had existed prior to the Second World War but which proliferated and became increasingly diversifi ed throughout the postwar period (Bérubé 1990: 271; Escoffi er 1997), carrying tremendous symbolic weight within these communities.
