ABSTRACT
American ideas about sexuality underwent a marked shift between 1880 and 1940 as sexual acts and desires became an important part of individual identity. With the development of industrial capitalism and the availability of wage labor, many people moved to cities for work and took advantage of urban freedoms cities to explore same-sex desires and gender-diverse lives. By the 1890s most large American cities had visible communities of queer men. Simultaneously, a sexual binary emerged when scientists began to argue that everyone could be classified as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual.” In defining heterosexuality as normal and healthy, and homosexuality or “sexual inversion” as perverse and dangerous, sexual science gave the growing American state new ways to support hierarchies of race, gender, and class. At the same time, queer people used these changes to their advantage and formed urban communities with others like themselves.
