ABSTRACT
The most striking difference between the dominant sexual culture of the early twentieth century and that of our own era Is the degree to which the earlier culture permitted men to engage in sexual relations with other men, often on a regular basis, without requiring them to regard themselves—or to be regarded by others—as gay if sexual abnormality was defined in different terms in prewar culture, then so, too, necessarily, was sexual normality the centrality of the fairy to the popular representation of sexual abnormality allowed other men to engage in casual sexual relations with other men, with boys, and, above all, with the fairies themselves without Imagining that they themselves were abnormal. Many men alternated between male and female sexual partners without believing that interest in one precluded interest in the other, or that their occasional recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, indicated an abnormal, “homosexual,” or even “bisexual” disposition, for they neither understood nor organized their sexual practices along a hetero-homosexual axis.
