Making History
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“It’s a breakthrough for the field as a whole,” says Chauncey of the new program, “because the University of Chicago is regarded as anything but a trendy school. This sends a message that gay and lesbian studies is a serious discipline.” According to Chauncey, he’s only the second person in the U.S. to get a tenure-track job in a history department after writing a dissertation in gay history, but that situation might change with the program, which awards grants to worthy students. “For someone trying to live on a few thousand dollars a year and write a dissertation, a grant of $1,000 can mean a lot,” he says. In addition to teaching classes and administering and raising funds for the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project, Chauncey is writing a sequel to Gay New York, tentatively called The Strange Career of the Closet. The book opens in postwar New York, a period that Chauncey says was much more treacherous for gay men than the climate of 20 years earlier. Undercover policemen lurked in bars across the city, trying to entice gay men to make passes at them so they could be arrested and warning bar owners that they’d lose their licenses if they served openly gay men. The situation began to improve slowly in 1967, says Chauncey, after gay bars were decriminalized and entrapment was no longer tolerated. If all goes according to plan, Basic Books will publish the new work in 2001.
According to a source on the Auditorium Theatre Council, as of April 14 the theater had sold only about 15 percent of the available tickets for its upcoming production of The Who’s Tommy. The show opens its one-week engagement this Tuesday, and unless a last-minute storm of advertising, publicity, and rave reviews moves a large number of tickets, the Auditorium could lose tens of thousands of dollars. Dan McMahon, director of marketing for the theater, says, “We’re counting on a lot of last-minute walk-up business.”
