All Chinese characters are rendered in their traditional or complex form. Simplified Chinese characters were not introduced until the 1950s and ’60s in the People’s Republic of China and would not have been in use in the United States at that time. For Cantonese romanizations, I followed The Student’s Cantonese-English Dictionary by B. Meyer and T. Wempe, published in 1935. For Mandarin terms, I followed the Wade-Giles romanization system, which was the standard for most of the twentieth century.
There are a few exceptions to these romanization choices. Place names (e.g., Kwangtung) and historical figures (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek) are rendered with their historical spellings. I also chose to use cheongsam to refer to the form-fitting dress with slits up both sides, first popularized in Shanghai in the 1920s. This word is a loose romanization of 長衫, which is literally the “long shirt” traditionally worn by men, not women. The term for a woman’s dress is 旗袍, which would be romanized as kei po in Cantonese, but because cheongsam has become generally understood in English to mean a woman’s Chinese dress, I decided to use cheongsam.
THE 1950S
Popular perceptions of the 1950s often center on conformity and social repression, but in reality the midcentury was a time of transition and thus a time of great cultural anxiety that was often expressed in efforts to suppress difference.
In 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb. The Soviet Union followed in 1953, setting off atomic-age fears of nuclear annihilation—and duck-and-cover drills in schools. The Korean War had ended, though it had not been won; and China, which had been an American ally during World War II, became a Communist enemy. Senator Joseph McCarthy began his paranoid crusade against Communist infiltration in 1950, and although he was censured by the Senate in 1954 and dead by 1957, McCarthyism pervaded the decade, resulting in the deportation of Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien, a Chinese scientist who cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and had aided the United States during World War II. Once he returned to China in 1955, Dr. Tsien became known as the father of Chinese rocketry. McCarthyism also led to the so-called Lavender Scare, in which queer people were forced out of their government jobs because homosexuality was believed to be linked with Communism.
Although many people identify the 1950s with rock ’n’ roll and artists like Elvis Presley, Elvis himself didn’t really arrive until 1956, when “Heartbreak Hotel” was released. The pop charts of the early ’50s were still topped by crooners such as Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney. Rock ’n’ roll was still rhythm and blues recorded by black artists—and increasingly discovered by teenagers, who were coming into their own as an age group to be courted by advertisers and feared by adults, who depicted them as juvenile delinquents in films such as The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Although The Wild One would later become known for its homoerotic subtext, same-sex relationships were largely verboten in mainstream popular media—except in pulp fiction, which were small, mass-produced paperbacks that sold like hotcakes.
The first lesbian pulp novel, Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres, was published in 1950 and sold a million copies. It was followed in 1952 by Spring Fire, which sold at least a million and a half copies. Spring Fire’s author, Vin Packer, was a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker, who would go on to write young adult novels as M. E. Kerr. Lesbian pulps were widely available in drugstores across the country, and although many were written with the male gaze in mind, plenty of lesbians also found them. Despite the publishers’ requirement, due to obscenity laws, that these books end in punishment for the homosexual characters, they still created a kind of imagined community for lesbians scattered across the nation, who could read these books and discover that people like them existed.
SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco has long been known as a magnet for queer people. In Wide-Open Town, Boyd explains that although San Francisco’s licentiousness was periodically quashed by anti-vice campaigns, those very efforts ironically drove attention to the city’s anything-goes reputation, and “a wide range of adventure-seekers, homosexuals among them, made their way through the Golden Gate” in search of that freedom.
World War II had a major impact on queer communities in San Francisco, due to the arrival of thousands of service members—many of them gay or lesbian—who moved through the port city and were looking for nightlife and community. Minority communities in San Francisco changed during the war too, with Japanese Americans forced out into internment camps, and African Americans migrating to San Francisco to work at military bases and in the defense industries.
By the early 1950s, Chinatown was a well-known stop on the tourist circuit, and business owners leveraged white fascination with the Far East to sell them chop suey and souvenirs. The North Beach district, a traditionally Italian neighborhood that would become the heart of Beat culture in the late 1950s, was already home to multiple clubs that catered to gay men and lesbians. Sexually adventurous tourists could visit famous spots like Finocchio’s (advertised as the place “Where Boys Will Be Girls”), or Mona’s (“Where Girls Will Be Boys”). The Telegraph Club is fictional, but it is inspired by bars like these. North Beach abuts Chinatown, sharing several blocks along Broadway and Columbus, so those who were interested in visiting Finocchio’s for a flamboyant queer-coded show could easily walk over to Chinatown afterward for late-night lo mein.
CHINATOWN AND CHINESE AMERICANS