Cross-dressing ball
Gay balls, cross-dressing balls, pansy balls, or drag balls were public or private balls that were celebrated mainly in the first third of the 20th century, where cross-dressing and ballroom dancing with same-sex partners was allowed. By the 1900s, the balls had become important cultural events for gays and lesbians, even attracting tourists. Their Golden Age was during the interwar period, mainly in Berlin and Paris, even though they could be found in many big cities in Europe and the Americas, such as Mexico City and New York City.
Precedents
By the end of the 17th century, a gay subculture is documented in Europe, with cruising areas, bars, parties and balls, cross-dressers, and slang. Scholars like Randolph Trumbach consider it as the moment when gay subculture appeared in Europe. On the contrary, historian Rictor Norton considers unlikely that such a subculture would appear fully formed, and thinks that it was actually the increase in surveillance and police procedures that brought to the surface an underground culture that had not been visible up to that moment.The archives of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon preserve information of the so-called "danças dos fanchonos" from the beginning of the 17 century. About 1620, the "fachonos", the baroque equivalent of modern drag queens, organized big parties in the Gaia Lisboa, the gay Lisbon. These itinerant celebrations, called "escarramão", or "esparramão", used to include pantomimes with racy scenes, where some of the participants were dressed as women, and other as men. His Majesty's High Court in Mexico City discovered in 1656 a similar case, when Juan Correa, an old man, over 70 years old, confessed that he had been committing the unspeakable vice since his childhood. Correa's house, in the outskirts of the city, had been used as a meeting point to celebrate balls, where many men dressed as women.
Several studies have not found similar phenomena in the judicial cases in Aragon, Catalonia, the Basque Country or Valencia, even though in the Valencian case there are evidences of a subculture and a possible gay ghetto. In Spain, cross-dressing was socially only allowed for carnival, when even those closest to the king could dress as women. On the other hand, in France, during Louis XIV's reign, no ball was complete without cross-dressers.
By the end of the 17th century, there was a completely developed gay subculture in London, with the molly houses used as clubs, where gays met regularly to drink, dance and have fun. These taverns are well known thanks to the Mother Clap's molly house scandal from 1726, when a police raid discovered that her molly house was a gay brothel.
Cross-dressing balls
Germany
The Empire
Berlin's clandestine gay underground can be followed up to the 18th century, in spite of the persecution gays were suffering. In Prussia, Paragraph 143 of the penal code, and later the introduction of Paragraph 175 in the German penal code, with other laws for public scandal, and child protection, made the life of gays extremely difficult. In fact, the activities of Magnus Hirschfeld or the first homosexual movement could not avoid the regular police raids and closing of premises in the 1900s. And not just the premises were being watched by the police, in 1883, the moral police had 4799 "transvestite" and transgender woman under vigilance, even though "permits" could be handed out to cross-dressers in cases considered "medical".It is thus surprising that, beginning mid 19th century, the Urningsball or Tuntenball came to be, balls of uranians, or queens, tolerated, but watched by the police. By the 1900s, these balls had achieved such a fame in Germany, that people from all around the country, and even foreign tourists, would travel to Berlin to participate. These balls were celebrated in large ballrooms, as the Deutscher Kaiser, in the Lothringer Straße, or the Filarmonía, in the Bernburgstraße, the Dresdner Kasino, in the Dresdner Straße, or the Orpheum, in the Alter Jakobstraße 32.
For example, the Berliner Morgenpost described extensively on October 17, 1899, a gay ball that had taken place in the hotel König von Portugal, where balls were still being celebrated in 1918. The ball season used to begin in October and go until Easter, with a frequency of several balls a week, sometimes two the same day. Hirschfeld, in his book Berlins drittes Geschlecht, described the balls in following fashion:
As a consequence of the Harden–Eulenburg affair, and the subsequent social upheaval, the balls where prohibited; in 1910 they were allowed again, but they never achieved the splendor of this golden age.
The Weimar Republic
After World War I the first mass movements for homosexuals appeared. The Freundschaftsbund, popular associations of gays and lesbians, dedicated an important part of their effort to socialization and diverse activities for their members such as excursions, visits, sports, and balls. For example, the club Kameradschaft organized on November 1, 1929, celebrating their anniversary, a Böser-Buben-Ball ; the club reached 100 members, and survived until 1933. Kameradschaft tried to offer some support and activities for gays from lower extraction; so their balls were celebrated on weekends, Saturdays or Sundays, and gathered about 70 men, many without a job, who could pay the low entry price.In 1922 the association Gesellschaftsklub Aleksander e.V. celebrated balls every day, beginning 7 o'clock p.m., with a quality orchestra. In 1927 the Bund für Menschenrecht bought the Alexander-Palast, but that same year they changed to the Florida and the Tanz-Palast salon of the Zauberflöte, in the Kommandantenstraße 72, in Berlin. The BfM balls took place from Tuesdays to Sundays; the entry was free, but you had to pay 50 Pfennig for a dance card that allowed you to actually dance. In the 1920s gay balls reached enormous sizes, with premises filling several ballrooms with some thousands of men. And not just in Berlin, several other cities in Germany organized smaller balls for gays.
In the 1920s and 30s, there were uncountable bars, cafés, and dance halls in Berlin. The most elegant could be found in West Berlin, near the area formed by the Bülowstraße, the Potsdamer Straße, and the Nollendorfplatz, reaching up to the Kurfürstendamm.
No doubt, the most famous was Eldorado, that really was two, one on the Lutherstraße, and a second one in the Motzstraße. Curt Moreck described it in 1931, in his Führer durch das „lasterhafte" Berlin, as "an establishment of transvestites staged for the morbid fascination of the world metropolis." The program at the Eldorado included loud and racy shows by drag queens, addressed mostly to a heterosexual audience, that, now as then, wanted to "satisfy their curiosity, and dared to visit the mysterious and infamous Berlin". Moreck continues, even though he himself was encouraging, and was part of this kind of voyeuristic tourism with his travel guide:
Eldorado became one of the nocturnal cultural centers in Europe. The establishment hosted from bank managers to members of parliament, as well as theater actors and movie stars. Among them, divas like Marlene Dietrich, often with her husband Rudolf Sieber, and Anita Berber, singers like Claire Waldoff, and writers, like Wolfgang Cordan, Egon Erwin Kisch, or Josef Hora. Magnus Hirschfeld was well known there.
The co-founder and commander of the SA, Ernst Röhm, was also a patron, and Karl Ernst, later a nazi politician and Gruppenführer SA, tried to survive for a time working —depending on the source— as a waiter, an employee, or a rent boy in the Eldorado of the Lutherstraße. The ballroom cum cabaret has been mentioned, directly or indirectly, serving as inspiration, in many literary works, as in Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, or the memories of Erika, and Klaus Mann. The atmosphere has been captured in paintings by Otto Dix, and Ernst Fritsch.
By the end of the 1920s, the German society had taken their image of homosexuals from this kind of establishment: decadent, refined, depraved, degenerate, tightly linked to drugs, wild sex, and prostitution. The Bund für Menschenrecht tried to distance gays of this kind of milieu in 1927, but to no avail. In 1932 the chancellor Franz von Papen started a campaign against the "depraved night of Berlin", and in October of that same year all balls for homosexuals were prohibited.
On January 30, 1933, the nazi party came to power, and on February 23, 1933, the Prussian Interior Minister ordered that all bars "that have abused to promote immorality" be closed. He was referring specially to those "that are frequented by those who pay homage to the anti-natural immorality". On March 4, 1933, the Berliner Tagblatt informed about the closing of some establishments the day before. Of the over 100 establishments catering to homosexuals in Berlin very few survived, and those would be used to help watch and control the homosexual population.
France
In France, until the end of the 19th century, gays and lesbians met usually in private homes and literary salons, hidden from the public, with the Opera Ball in Paris one of the few exceptions. The Opera Ball, celebrated yearly for carnival, allowed some small leeway. The first big public ball that allowed cross-dressing was the Bal Bullier in 1880, in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, followed by the Bal Wagram in 1910.After World War I, Paris became one of the nightlife centers in Europe, with focal points in Montmartre, Pigalle, and Montparnasse, and numerous short-lived bars catering to gays and lesbians, surviving between police raids, ruinous scandals, and the public's insatiable thirst for new thrills. Many establishments were also known for drug trafficking. Journalist Willy described the atmosphere in the bar "The Petite Chaumière", catering to foreigners looking for strong sensations:
In the 1920s, there were several balls in the Bastille area; these occurred mainly in the Rue de Lappe, where workers, drunken sailors, and colonial soldiers gathered to dance. It was not strictly a homosexual milieu, but men could dance together, and one could find a partner for the night. Daniel Guérin described one of the dens as a place where " workmen, prostitutes, society women, johns, and aunties all danced. In those relaxed and natural days, before the cops took over France, a chevalier could go out in public with a mate of the same sex, without being considered crazy.» On the other hand, Willy presents a completely different aspect of the milieu, "What you see are little delinquents, not too carefully washed but heavily made up, with caps on their heads and sporting brightly colored foulards; these are the guys who, when they fail to make a buck here, will certainly be found hauling coal or other cargo."
The so-called bal de folles, and later bal de invertis, flourished in Paris after the I World War, and even in other French cities as Toulon. In Paris, homosexuals were attracted mainly to the Bal Musette de la Montaigne de Sainte-Geneviève, in the number 46 of the Rue Montaigne de Sainte-Geneviève, where you could find gays and lesbians. Later, the big balls for carnival attracted a gay public, as the one celebrated yearly in the Magic-City, in the rue de l'Université, 180, inaugurated in 1920, and active until the prohibition on February 6, 1934.
In time, the "Carnaval interlope" in Magic-City became a big event, visited by prominent vedette from the varietés, like Mistinguett, or Joséphine Baker, that handed over awards to the best drag queens. The Bal Wagram offered the opportunity to cross-dress twice a year; at 1 am, the drag queens did the pont aux travestis, a costume competition, doing the catwalk in front of the most selected people of Paris, that came to walk on the wild side for a night.
The drag queens participating came from all walks of life, and ages, and presented a savage satire of the society, its values, and its traditional hierarchies, with images of exaggerated femininity, and masculinity: countesses dressed in crinoline, crazy virgins, oriental dancers, sailors, ruffians, or soldiers; theirs names were correspondingly colorful: Duchess of the Bubble, the Infante Eudoxie, the Mauve Mouse; the Dark One, Sweetie Pie, Fréda, the Englishwoman, Mad Maria, the Muse, the Teapot, the She-wolf, Sappho, Wet Cat, Little Piano, Princess of the Marshes, Marguerite if Burgundy, etc. Charles Étienne, in his novel Notre-Dame-de-Lesbos, describes "Didine" in following fashion:
Many of the onlookers just went to insult and harass the gay people participating, as Charles Étienne describes in his novel Le Bal des folles: