Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940

WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND

WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND

Queer Miami before 1940

JULIO CAPÓ JR.

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

© 2017 Julio Capó Jr.

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Set in Miller by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: John Singer Sargent, The Bathers. Courtesy Worcester Art Museum (MA), Sustaining Membership Fund, 1917.91.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Capó, Julio, Jr., author.

Title: Welcome to fairyland : queer Miami before 1940 / Julio Capó Jr.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017020580 | ISBN 9781469635194 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469635200 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469635217 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sexual minorities—Florida—Miami—History—19th century. | Sexual minorities—Florida—Miami—History—20th century. | Miami (Fla.)—History—19th century. | Miami (Fla.)—History—20th century. | Miami (Fla.)—Race relations. | Caribbean Area—Emigration and immigration.

Classification: LCC HQ76.3.U62 M5315 2017 | DDC 305.8009759/381—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020580

TO ANNETTE,

WHOSE EXAMPLE I ALWAYS SEEK TO FOLLOW.

I WILL ALWAYS DANCE

PIMPINELA’S HERMANOS WITH YOU.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Queer Frontier

2 Bahamians and Miami’s Queer Erotic

3 Making Fairyland Real

4 Miami as Stage

5 Passing through Miami’s Queer World

6 Women and the Making of Miami’s Heterosexual Culture

7 Queers during and after Prohibition

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures, Maps, and Table

FIGURES

I.1. Wealthy travelers waiting to enter Fairy-Land in Miami Beach, c. 1909

1.1. Early 1900s photograph of Miami’s Avenue D

1.2. Miami Metropolis cartoon on law enforcement’s role in boosterism, 1908

2.1. John Singer Sargent, The Bathers, 1917

2.2. John Singer Sargent, Man and Trees, Florida, 1917

2.3. John Singer Sargent, Bather, Florida, 1917

3.1. Paul Chalfin in Miami in the early 1910s

3.2. Portrait of a young Alden Freeman

3.3. Henry Salem Hubbell, Building of the House, 1930

3.4. Dewing Woodward, c. 1925

4.1. Sign in Miami advertising Miami Beach as America’s Winter Playground, 1921

4.2. Man posing at a tourist photo booth of a drink stand in Miami Beach during Prohibition, 1925

4.3. Tourists posing in front of a Miami Beach photo booth set in Havana during Prohibition, 1925

4.4. Man in blackface serves as a prop in Miami’s staged fairyland, 1934

4.5. Karl Denton as prima donna female impersonator with suitor, c. 1920s

5.1. John Singer Sargent, Basin with Sailor, Villa Vizcaya, Miami, Florida, 1917

6.1. El Paso Herald cartoon featuring women in Miami Beach wearing revealing bathing suits, 1923

6.2. Cover of travel guidebook for visiting southern Florida and Havana, 1929

6.3. Women in Miami Beach publicly defying signpost warning them to wear full bathing suits, 1934

7.1. Cartoon reprinted in Literary Digest showing how Florida’s lax enforcement of Prohibition laws weakened the United States, 1922

7.2. Bacardi postcard depicting an inebriated Uncle Sam gaily traveling to Cuba and moving away from Florida’s dry law, c. 1930

7.3. A queer club bouncer in Miami depicted in alternative newspaper Friday Night, 1933

7.4. Piggy bank of likeness of Miami Beach’s bartender and bar owner Mother Kelly, c. 1940

7.5. Posting from Dade County Juvenile Court on the need to protect children’s morals, c. late 1930s

E.1. Miami Daily News cartoon demonstrating local anxieties over the area’s long-standing policy of a lax moral code to attract tourists, 1951

E.2. Flyer imploring residents to vote in favor of clearing Miami’s slums, 1950

MAPS

I.1. Greater Miami area in 1940

2.1. Greater Antilles and the Bahamas in relation to southern Florida

TABLE

I.1. Population growth of Dade County, 1880–1950

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a lot of work. Despite warnings that it’s an exercise in solitude, I never felt alone. My heartfelt gratitude to Alex Lichtenstein, whose unmatched generosity, support, and sharp mind has taught me so much over the years. While this book is not a revision of my doctoral dissertation, which covered Miami’s post-1945 queer history, I owe my professors at Florida International University, especially Lichtenstein and Darden A. Pyron, much gratitude for their support and encouragement and for helping me first conceptualize Miami’s queer past. Sherry Johnson, Aurora Morcillo, and Alex Stepick also showered me with a perfect mix of care, tough love, feedback, and insight. Please know that I will forever pay it forward and that I do my very best to emulate your dedication and commitment now that I have students of my own.

This book greatly benefited from the insight of scholars who elevated my analysis of the material and made this a stronger work. I am especially grateful to Marc Stein for generously offering me extensive comments on this manuscript and an early draft of my second book project on Miami’s post–World War II period. Thank you for being so gracious and engaged, and for your ability to explain even the most difficult matters. Thank you, too, to the folks at UNC Press for their help seeing this work through. I especially would like to thank my editor Mark Simpson-Vos for his undying support of me and my work and his critical eye and mind. I owe a great deal of thanks to so many others who read either the whole draft or parts of this work: Mark Philip Bradley, Michael Bronski, Nathan Connolly, María Cristina García, Timothy Gilfoyle, Richard Godbeer, David K. Johnson, Laura Lovett, Ana Raquel Minian, Kevin Murphy, Melanie Shell-Weiss, and Naoko Shibusawa. Of course, any faults or limitations in this book are entirely on me.

Several others have forever shaped the way I think and my relationship to scholarship. I first made the decision to revisit the archives and write a new book that began with Miami in the 1890s during my postdoc in the American Studies and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration programs at Yale University. For their continued support, guidance, and warmth, I am especially grateful to Jafari Allen, P. Sean Brotherton, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, George Chauncey, Walter Foery, Joanne Meyerowitz, Stephen Pitti, and Birgit Brander Rasmussen. I also hold the short time I spent with the late Patricia Pessar dear to my heart.

I am incredibly fortunate to have so many generous and caring colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My history department chair, Joye Bowman, made my transition to faculty member seem seamless. Thank you for your open door, open mind, and open heart. Similarly, I can never express how much joy and inspiration Jessica Johnson, Jennifer Nye, Priyanka Srivastava, and Heidi Scott bring me on a daily basis. While there are simply too many people to mention (an embarrassment of riches, really), I would like to specifically express my gratitude to Audrey Altstadt, Laura Briggs, Brian Bunk, Richard Chu, Sarah Cornell, Tanisha Ford, Jennifer Fronc, David Glassberg, Dan Gordon, Jennifer Heuer, Barbara Krauthamer, Laura Lovett, Johan Mathew, Alice Nash, Brian Ogilvie, Sigrid Schmalzer, Libby Sharrow, Anna Taylor, Joel Wolfe, and Kevin Young. I am similarly grateful to my colleagues in the Commonwealth Honors College for their encouragement, support, and camaraderie. Thanks to Alex Deschamps, Gretchen Gerzina, and Tim Lang. I am also indebted to the late Priscilla M. Clarkson, whose warmth and positive outlook I will always carry with me. Others across campus, such as Sonia Alvarez, Genny Beemyn, Adeline Broussan, Gloria Bernabe-Ramos, Mari Castañeda, Julie Hayes, Anne Moore, Susan Shapiro, and Manisha Sinha also offered me support and collegiality.

This book would not have been possible without the assistance and guidance of many talented and knowledgeable librarians and archivists. Thank you to the incredibly warm and expedient folks at the UMass Interlibrary Loan office. I am indebted to the talented staff at the UMass Image Collection Library: Michael Foldy, Brian Shelburne, and Annie Sollinger. Miriam Spalding at the State Archives of Florida helped me countless times in Tallahassee and over the phone or e-mail. Thank you for that, and the many laughs we had along the way. The staff at the National Archives of the Bahamas was incredibly generous in assisting me with locating records and sources. Emily Gibson and Alex Privee, both formerly at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens Archives, shared their knowledge of the sources and depositories with me. HistoryMiami has always felt like a second home to me. I am indebted to Dawn Hugh and Ashley Trujillo for their continued support, assistance, and camaraderie over the years. Many thanks, too, to John Shipley at the Miami-Dade Public Library, whose knowledge of southern Florida’s history is unmatched. I am also grateful to Joe Clein for sharing with me his private collection of Miami Life, a source that would otherwise be lost to us.

Over the years, several organizations and institutions have generously offered me financial support to conduct research on Miami’s queer past more broadly and allowed me to conceive of this book and my other research projects. In addition to my position at Yale upon my graduation, I benefited greatly from a visiting fellow position at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney five years later. Earlier in my career, I was the recipient of two major financial awards as a graduate student at FIU, the Doctoral Evidence Acquisition and Dissertation Year fellowships. During that time, I also received the Joan Heller–Diane Bernard fellowship from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). More recently, the Department of History, Commonwealth Honors College, and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst offered me financial and professional support over the past five years. A Mellon Mutual Mentoring Team Grant on Transnational Feminisms and Sexualities I coreceived with Tanisha Ford, Laura Lovett, and Priyanka Srivastava similarly helped shape this work. Words cannot convey how grateful I am to these organizations and institutions for making this research possible and for their faith in me to conduct it and tell these long forgotten histories.

Whether we swapped stories, presented on panels together, or discussed and shared ideas, I would like to thank the many colleagues I have yet to mention who offered emotional support and brought me much joy in the profession. Thanks to Llana Barber, Katie Batza, Kathleen Belew, Jonathan Bell, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Jennifer Brier, Gerry Cadava, Margot Canaday, Chris Capozzola, Javier Corrales, Ben Cowan, LaToya Eaves, Erika Edwards, Kevin Fogg, Gill Frank, Marcia Gallo, James Green, Rachel Guberman, Ramón Gutiérrez, Kwame Holmes, Ryan Jones, Aaron Lecklider, Ian Lekus, Amanda Littauer, Víctor Macías-González, Jen Manion, April Merleaux, La Shonda Mims, Kym Morrison, Barbara Posadas, Dan Royles, Jason Ruiz, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Laurie Shrage, Megan Springate, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Hadassah St. Hubert, Amy Sueyoshi, Nick Syrett, and Chantalle Verna. A separate and heartfelt token of gratitude to John D’Emilio, who agreed to meet with and counsel a young journalist he had never met before at a Chicago coffee shop a decade ago. This book, and my choice in careers, wouldn’t exist without that meeting.

I also want to thank those who trained and shepherded me through the difficult work of broadcast news writing and producing before I entered academia. My time at WSVN and WPLG shaped me as a writer and thinker in most productive ways. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Benitez-Golfen, Jacey Birch, Hannah Jane Corsa, and Richard Lemus.

It’s hard to write acknowledgments knowing several people who shaped and influenced me over the years are no longer with us. Abuelo Nono, you helped raise me and taught me that nothing mattered more than family and those we let into our lives. You risked everything to give me the life I lead today. Thank you just doesn’t seem like enough. Yurena Rivero-Osorio, I feel your presence every day. Because of your example, prima, I learned to embrace every aspect of myself, especially those I was once ashamed or afraid of. Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, your confidence in me, jotería, and chispa helped me find my voice at a most critical time of my journey. Little did you know then, you forever changed me.

I think of family as an expansive concept that includes both my blood relatives and my queer kin; that is, the special bonds we form with others that extend well beyond sharing bloodlines. Ana Raquel Minian: you will always (read: alllwaaaays) be my media naranja. Thank you for your friendship, sharp wit, and brilliant mind. My work and life are no doubt better because of you. Thanks, too, to Sitela Alvarez, Victor Capó, Michael Chunyk, Stephanie Cramer, Liam Crowley, Luis X. Davila, Paul Evans, Ashley Mateiro, Harley Matthews, Orlando Moreno, Keith Paul, Michael Perry, Morgan Stone, Darryl Toppins, and Jen and Brad Turner for their undying support and friendship. My love and gratitude to Erin and Bob Edge, too, for so generously welcoming me into the family.

I have the most extraordinary blood family, too. My parents, Anna and Julio, have always encouraged me to pursue the advanced degrees they, because of life’s circumstances, did not. Along with my grandparents, Aida and Manolo, they constantly reminded me that alongside all the things one can lose in life, love and knowledge would always be permanent fixtures. Thank you for believing in me and giving me countless opportunities, often through your many sacrifices. My sister Annette first opened my eyes to questions of social justice and forged my early feminist consciousness, even though she didn’t necessarily know it. Nana, you are my everything and I love you more than I could ever explain. As I write this, you are pregnant with Hannah, whom I haven’t met yet, but already love oodles and oodles. Hannah, I know you’ll read this one day and not be at all surprised that your mother’s love was the source of constant inspiration, joy, and encouragement.

At the risk of sounding cliché, I truly can’t find the words to thank Eamonn Edge. When you came into my life several years ago you brought me a level of happiness I didn’t know existed. No one has ever made me feel the way you do. Thank you for always believing in me. It means more to me than you know. You shower me with love and joy every single day and remind me why I write and research, among other things, forbidden loves. Like the title of Lige and Clarke’s memoir, I have more fun with you than anybody.

WELCOME TO FAIRYLAND

INTRODUCTION

In 1941 gay socialite and national columnist Lucius Beebe attempted to put into words his view of Miami as a fairyland. He called it the last Gomorrah, the ultimate Babylon, the final Gnome-Rhone-Jupiter-Whirlwind, superdeluxe, extra-special, colossal, double-feature and Zombie-ridden madhouse of the world.¹ Beebe captured the national and transnational influences that had earned Miami its wide-open reputation. Like the fallen cities of Gomorrah and Babylon—and even Sodom—Miami had come to represent unrestrained carnal pleasure, vice, and sin. Just a few decades prior, white wealthy families constituted the vast majority of those able to indulge in the exclusive resort city’s fairyland. The area had since become much more accessible. Visitors boarded modern airplanes with the whirlwind engines of the Gnome-Rhone-Jupiter variety and mobile tourists drove superdeluxe trailers. Over the years, Miami had become a hub for pleasure, the unthinkable exhilarating magic beyond the exclusive grasp of an elite class.

Miami’s fairyland appeal had long drawn inspiration from the sorcery U.S. imperialists attributed to uncivilized lands in the Caribbean. In this way, Miami as fairyland had also become a Zombie-ridden madhouse of the world.² In fact, the zombie as a U.S. cultural phenomenon had entered the national imagination less than a decade prior to Beebe’s musings as a metaphorical representation that helped justify U.S. military forces’ regulating of backward Haiti.³ Much like the United States had tamed Haiti’s so-called savagery through occupation, capital, cultural dominance, and the subjugation of native and racialized communities, a mix of northern, midwestern, and southern investors had converted Miami into an exotic tropical fairyland linked to the Caribbean and available for purchase.

Beginning in the early 1900s, travelers and residents alike referred to Dade County (modern-day Miami-Dade County) as fairyland. While fairyland, a marketing strategy crafted by urban boosters, meant different things to a diverse group of people, its dominant sense was that of a place where leisure and entertainment were central to every aspect of life. A visit to fairyland could suspend reality and the rules of the real world. Miami became a veritable Fairyland where one could escape the busy life of the big industrialized city, indulge in paradise, and live out a fantasy.⁴ One man called Miami Beach a combination of Heaven, the Garden of Eden, and Fairyland all rolled into one shell.⁵ Like a siren’s song, the area’s lure made women and men do things that appeared unimaginable in their hometowns. In Miami, they could shuck the social graces and propriety that had long constrained them, even if only temporarily. As another early visitor noted, It is just as well we didn’t know beforehand just how like fairyland ‘Mecca, U.S.A.’ really is . . . or our impatience would surely have far surpassed the danger point, resorting to turning the fire extinguisher on each other to quell the flames of wrath.⁶

Not everyone enthusiastically accepted the wide-open reputation Beebe and others associated with Miami, nor did they experience fairyland in similarly fantastical ways. One journalist took Beebe to task, observing how very few people wrote about, read about or even talked about the other Florida that served as a haven of the sane which boasted none of their expensive fantasies.⁷ A Florida-based journalist concurred, adding that "columnists and magazine writers are most interested in the whirling night life of Miami. But . . . the real backbone of the Florida tourist business is the hundreds of thousands of substantial persons who come down here to fish and loaf in the sun and live quiet, happy, social lives.⁸ According to these perspectives, the majority of Miami’s residents understood and at times even accepted that their city had come to represent a site that permitted and encouraged multiple forms of transgression and vice. By no means did that marketing ploy reflect their moral values, however, and they maintained that the real" Miami was the opposite of the fairyland Beebe described.

For many of Miami’s racial and ethnic minorities and working-class residents, fairyland represented something else entirely. From Miami’s earliest days, urban planners designed the area by consolidating the city’s black neighborhoods with its red-light district. Miami’s sexual economy proved critical to the nascent city’s success. White slummers frequently sought sexual thrills in these racialized spaces. Urban designers were keen on physically quarantining—but not purging—this thriving sexual economy. In 1918, the Dade County Grand Jury recommended to a circuit court judge that the county and city authorities maintain a proper house of refuge for the care of prostitutes and unfortunate women and girls who may express a desire to reform and lead a proper life.⁹ It also maintained that it could not abate this evil entirely, for many women of lewd character would never be fully reformed and would continue their nefarious work against the good morals of the community. Its members recommended that women suspected of being irredeemable be segregated outside the barred zone prescribed by the government, and be kept under strict surveillance. They would be physically relocated to spaces where prostitution was made legal. In Miami, as elsewhere, such proposals had eugenicist origins wherein quarantining those who challenged the nineteenth-century ideal of female sexual purity would allow civilization to progress.¹⁰ While this plan was ultimately rejected, the sentiment was clear: Miami residents wanted easy access to a segregated and regulated sexual demimonde in which the exploitation of these laboring women would neither reproduce new unfit progeny or impede civilization. Sexually transgressive women made fairyland work.¹¹

So too did Fred Symonette, a black Bahamian who worked as a common laborer in Miami. Although conflicting accounts obfuscate whether he was born in Miami or the then-British colony of the Bahamas, it is certain he and his family made their way to and from both sites in the early 1900s. It seems they settled in Miami in 1922, shortly after U.S. immigration laws more stringently restricted such travel. Black Bahamians like Symonette built much of the early city and were the pillars of its urban growth. Despite his contributions to the fairyland, as both a black and migrant man living in the Jim Crow South, Symonette soon found himself in trouble with the law.¹²

In assessing Symonette’s perceived criminality, Miami police and state medical officials fixated on his relationships with other men. Police arrested him for unknown reasons in 1927. Given his limited financial means and perceived deviant and criminal personality, law enforcement sought to purge him from the city. As with others before him, police made the case before a judge that Symonette should be transferred to the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee in the northwest part of the state. His medical file reveals he suffered from syphilis, which caused a sore on the foreskin of his penis that swelled and [he] was immediately circumcised and put in jail. Perhaps the pain or mental anguish of the disease caused him to act erratically. Or perhaps police noticed him because he was an unemployed loafer or vagrant, or maybe he was cruising the streets for sex. It is certain police viewed him as suspect and had him committed; his circumcision was thought to alleviate his pain, but also possibly to dampen his sexual urges. In their medical diagnosis and assessment, examiners observed that Symonette likes men better than women. They elaborated on his unnatural preference: Patient talks incessantly; seems impossible for him to talk on any subject without referring to men. The fact that he was an unmarried, black migrant further led to his uncontested commitment in the state asylum.¹³

Symonette’s Bahamian family in Miami, which also had limited resources, had no idea what happened to him after his commitment. Symonette died in that asylum in 1944, seventeen years after being committed. In 1952, the institution received a letter from a man identified as Symonette’s friend who wrote on behalf of the deceased’s mother in Miami. They wanted to know how Symonette was doing and if they could retrieve him, completely unaware that he had died nearly a decade prior. Regrettably, only the county judge who adjudicated him mentally deficient had been alerted of his passing.¹⁴ Although men like Symonette found willing sex partners—both women and men—in the fairyland, their black, migrant, and working-class statuses often rendered Miami much more a nightmare than a recreational playground.

Meanwhile, for their part, many conservative residents and transplants resisted Miami’s wide-open reputation. In 1926, Bertie Charles Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine, wrote about an ex-sailor who wouldn’t be licked and who established the ideal city. Forbes profiled Joseph W. Young Jr., credited with founding Hollywood, Florida—roughly twenty miles north of Miami. In his story, Forbes noted how Florida’s nearness to Cuba [made] it easy for Florida to continue wet and to maintain its access to alcohol during Prohibition (1920–33). The area had become the playground of the rich who gamble . . . heavily. In this way, Florida seemed modern, rather than Puritan. This was an important distinction, as the latter critiqued the antiquated in an era of significant cultural and social change. Forbes suggested that Hollywood, incorporated in 1925, represented a healthy balance of modernity and morality. Young built a progressive city with no gambling clubs, no speakeasies, no entertainments featuring nudity, and no drinking dens. It was instead clean, decent, the kind of place one would like to have his children grow up in. Hollywood stood in stark contrast to Miami, which had earned a national and international reputation as a fairyland run amok. In fact, Miami’s reputation as a wide-open tourist resort only escalated in the mid- and late-1930s.¹⁵

In defending Young’s wholesome vision for the city of Hollywood, especially as juxtaposed to Miami, Forbes clarified that the founder was not of the feminine, goody-goody type. . . . He is very much of a he-man. By no means was he a mollycoddle, a term used to mark those read as feminine or politically soft. Measured against red-blooded masculinity, the mollycoddle gained currency just as contemporaries came to identify an emerging homosexual prototype.¹⁶ Forbes went to great lengths to describe Young’s physical and mental force to explain his perceived rejection of the vices associated with cities like Miami. The writer knew his readers might now question Young’s masculinity because he favored the wholesome over vice, pleasures of the flesh, and crass entertainment, which were standard in Miami.¹⁷

While not necessarily the dominant understanding of the playful moniker, many of Miami’s visitors and settlers joined Beebe in viewing fairyland as a site where one could transgress gender and sexual norms. Many came to know the area as a place where such acts were permitted, encouraged, and expected. In this way, an expansive understanding of fairyland’s dominant meaning—at least as crafted by urban boosters and marketing campaigns—resonated with fairies and other queers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable gender and sexual norms. As one journalist lamented in 1935, During the rapid growth of a city such as Miami whose primary fame is that of a pleasure center, it is inevitable that many sordid chapters must be written in its history. In this case, he specifically referred to the existence of nightspots that catered to gender and sexual transgressives seen as degenerates and perverts. He conceded, however, Some offerings are liked, some disliked, others merely tolerated.¹⁸ Indeed, at different times in Miami’s relatively short urban history—it was only incorporated as a city in 1896—residents and boosters fought hard to both combat and capitalize on the capricious image that facilitated numerous acts of transgression, including same-sex intimacies, interracial encounters, commercialized sex, and gender-bending expressions.

This book reveals the many textured meanings and origins of Miami as fairyland and chronicles the complex ways queer women and men negotiated their own space, role, and understanding of themselves in this budding international city from the 1890s to 1940. While Welcome to Fairyland contextualizes the city’s place in the larger narrative of U.S. history, it also encourages a break from the geopolitical restrictions placed by national barriers. It reinterprets queer history by maintaining a transnational perspective and by providing an intersectional analysis that factors in how gender and sexuality influenced constructions of class, race, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability. As such, it highlights the influence of migrants and immigrants who proved critical to shaping this fairyland. Beginning with the migration of Bahamian laborers in the 1890s, both temporary and permanent settlers from the nearby Caribbean proved instrumental to shaping gender norms and sexual desires, as well as who constituted an outsider in the city. This book interprets tourism, trade, and manifestations of U.S. imperialism as central to these processes in Miami.

Welcome to Fairyland unearths the forgotten history of how competing visions for the early city paved particular spaces for queer women and men from throughout the United States and abroad, especially the Caribbean. In viewing queer as an analytic tool, it expands the scope of the urban space’s own understanding of who subverted and defined what constituted normative expressions of gender and sexuality, as well as concepts of normalcy and deviancy more generally. Miami’s early designers and politicians negotiated civic, conservative values with the profitability of the land. Unlike the popular narrative of the U.S. urban frontier, Miami was not a mining town fueled by a gold rush. Instead, its source of gold proved to be its sun-kissed climate and its reputation for excess and unmatched leisure. Miami’s fairyland, however, was not necessarily made available to all who wished to play there. Some who found themselves in Miami were deemed undesirable or unfit for the area and were encouraged to leave, forcefully relocated, or made to live in the city’s margins.

The Parameters and Many Faces of Fairyland

Miami has several sources of distinction that challenge existing narratives of the years 1890 to 1940, including the fact that it existed at the intersection of several contested colonial spaces: borderland, frontier, and city. This book queers these phenomena, noting how the uneven power structures produced by these statuses have imposed, shattered, and renegotiated understandings of gender and sexuality. Some scholars have observed how conquest narratives mandated a particular set of gender and sexual structures that demarcated the physical and figurative depths of the borderlands.¹⁹ Scholars have increasingly started to explore how gender and sexual transgression was not only possible but constituted a significant component of life on the frontier, particularly in the U.S. West.²⁰ While this study takes these leads as formative to Miami’s development as a fairyland, it also notes how Miami’s distinct establishment, demography, and geopolitical realities reveal different historical trajectories.

In particular, Welcome to Fairyland expands the scope—in its geography, methodology, and investigation of race and power structures—of the community study that has, since the early 1990s, proven instrumental to shaping our understanding of queer history. This book builds on past queer urban histories that have revealed the textured formations of communities, identities, and later, social movements.²¹ This study joins a handful of studies that center the lives and experiences of smaller or less amply populated cities prior to World War II.²² The U.S. South, however, remains a seriously understudied and poorly misunderstood region in the field of queer history. Although a few scholars, such as John Howard, have greatly enriched our understanding of queer experiences in the U.S. South, this history remains largely reduced to provocations of a conservative bastion and cultural backwater that sought to oppress, disassociate itself, and eliminate queer expressions and individuals, a narrative Miami’s history certainly disrupts.²³

Indeed, while this study contextualizes Miami’s southern influences and identity, the city’s relative youth and social makeup also separate it from most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. South. Adopted southerners also learned and exploited the sociopolitical customs of the day, particularly Jim Crow racial segregation. One Miami resident noted the need to curb the city’s racial and ethnic ambiguities, which found negroes taking more and more liberties in this county. While he believed this was a product of northern influence and sentiment for this equality, these southern transplants from the North largely shared his view. Despite that, he believed, Miami and the Beach are not wholly Northern as yet and I am a Southerner and do not believe in social equality with negroes.²⁴

More forcefully, this book answers historians’ persistent call to employ a transnational lens in the recovery of queer voices, lives, and experiences.²⁵ In this way, Welcome to Fairyland is representative of the next urban history that expands the scope of the urban center by employing a transnational methodology and approach.²⁶ Scholars such as Daniel Rodgers paved the path to recover the transnational origins and influences of urban spaces, although surprisingly few scholars have taken his lead.²⁷ As a contested colonial space shaped by uneven regional and transnational forces, it is important to remember that Miami is geographically situated in the U.S. South and tucked in the northern section of the Caribbean Basin. Its labor and service sector was largely made up of blacks from the U.S. South and migrants and immigrants from the British, Spanish, and French Caribbean. As this suggests, the transnational turn is further complicated in this study in part because so much of the Caribbean remained under colonial and neocolonial dominion. This book destabilizes both the nation-state and the empire-state and draws on the works of scholars who have explored the nuances of the transnational colonial state that is bound by the metropole and yet frequently operates independent of it. It also distinguishes the sense of belonging and community attributed to the nation despite the multiple forms of exclusion from the nation-state.²⁸ Altogether, this book shifts urban history’s focus outward and away from the insular.

This book also pushes the field of transnational history—queer or otherwise—to broaden the scope of what we stand to learn from this methodology by challenging the nation-state and empire-state and the power relations embedded in other modes of exchange, including tourism, capital, trade, empire, subjectivities, and knowledge production.²⁹ With a particular focus on recovering the gendered and sexualized nature of migration flows, scholars have helped decenter modes of power and privilege generally ascribed to particular nation-states or ideologies.³⁰ Welcome to Fairyland similarly uncovers the major implications inherent in migratory politics for states of belonging, citizenship (political and cultural), and the permeability and mobility of bodies, ideas, and modes of exchange. This book uncovers some of the queer routes and roots brought on or disrupted by imperialist forces.³¹ Following the lead of other scholars, this book is mindful of the ways empire has historically informed and regulated everyday people’s most intimate and personal matters and experiences.³²

This book stresses how, as a resort city dependent on satiating tourist demands and desires, Miami’s urban space regularly permitted and encouraged gender and sexual difference, if only temporarily. Welcome to Fairyland injects a queer analysis into the growing, but still rather limited, work on Miami. In recent years, N. D. B. Connolly complicated meanings of liberalism through Miami’s real estate markets and Chanelle N. Rose explored the city’s distinct brand of Jim Crow tourism. While Connolly urges readers to think beyond one-dimensional images of racist capitalists in juxtaposition to radical reformers, Rose blurs the lines between blackness and whiteness in this southern and Caribbean setting.³³ Although this book positions itself in this scholarly milieu by interpreting their works as fighting against established binaries, it stresses the centrality of gender and sexuality in such interpretations. It also highlights the queer as a critical lens in which to understand contested meanings of nation, race, belonging, and citizenship.

Just the same, Welcome to Fairyland positions tourism to and from Miami as both a domestic and a transnational experience. As the field of tourism studies continues to grow, scholars have increasingly paid notice to the peculiar economic, cultural, and social settings of resort towns. Several works have turned their attention to the distinct economies of resort towns and cities from coastal Europe, Winnipeg Beach, and Atlantic City.³⁴ Their tourist-dependent economies required powerbrokers to live up to their advertised amenities. In Miami, boosters promised outsiders a fairyland that operated on the provisional allowance to transgress racial, gender, and sexual norms. One contemporary recalled, for instance, that in Miami, owners of hotels, motels, night clubs, restaurants and other places open to the public do not consider themselves censors of their customers’ morality.³⁵ As such, this book is particularly informed by the literature that illuminates these queer expression and interactions.³⁶

Scholars have similarly uncovered the queer histories of slumming and racialized sex tourism in urban settings. In large part because of its reliance on molding fairyland as a tropical extension of the Caribbean, this form of urban tourism took shape on a much wider scale in Miami. In many ways, visiting Miami was a form of slumming. Welcome to Fairyland interprets such occurrences through the lens of imperialism, which heavily informed normative expressions of gender and sexuality in large part due to the racialized nature of such exploits.³⁷ Miami’s fairyland tourism operated on the premise of marketing several forms of colonial conquest. As one woman’s letter to the governor stated, In my estimation, Miami is at present a veritable hotbed of vice, hell’s hole, and a devil’s caldron where missions and missionaries are more needed than in the wilds of Africa, or the South Sea Islands.³⁸

Welcome to Fairyland begins with the decade that saw Miami proper’s municipal incorporation as well as the greater expansion of the United States into the Caribbean with the Spanish-American War, a nomenclature that all but erased the plights of the colonized peoples who had been fighting for independence for decades.³⁹ By positioning Miami’s autonomous incorporation within the narrative of heightened U.S. imperialism, this book demonstrates how the conquering of the city’s frontier developed alongside imperial machinations articulated through the language of gender and sexual difference.⁴⁰

By the early 1900s, a strong white, male, and Protestant establishment—particularly within the Baptist and Methodist traditions, as with much of the U.S. South—had taken root in all forms of local power in Miami. This included urban politics, law enforcement, newspapers, schools, and trade boards. As Thomas Tweed has argued, within a few years of its municipal incorporation, a firmly entrenched Protestant establishment dominated Miami. The area’s initial frontier egalitarianism—or the limited power afforded to some women, Jews, and Catholics during Miami’s nascent days—receded through the consolidation and exertion of power and influence in the urban center. Most of Miami’s Native American and black communities were never afforded a space in the city’s power equation.⁴¹ It is true that a limited number of blacks made significant social and economic gains in the early years, but that was largely a product of the needs of the white male Protestant-capitalists who relied on black labor and bodies to maintain power. John Sewell, a Baptist from Georgia who served as Miami’s third mayor, joked that he called on his black artillery whenever he needed to influence or manipulate a local election. That included having one hundred . . . negroes registered and qualified to vote. He maintained he held them in reserve for emergencies, or when he needed to squash any threat to his vision for the city.⁴² This white, male, and Protestant establishment dominated urban politics for decades.

This does not mean, however, that this power went uncontested or that marginalized communities did not resist these structures. Blacks, migrants and immigrants, laborers, sex workers, and other queers took claim of their lives and self-expressions despite the urban authorities’ insistence that their primary function and tolerability in the fairyland was connected to their ability to provide labor and entertain tourists and residents. Their stories are told through the reconstruction of the saloons, beaches, immigration inspection sites, bars, nightclubs, streets, parks, apartments, and brothels, and by their transit in cars, planes, and sea vessels. Instant cities like Miami were, by definition, made up of transplants with diverse views, cultures, expectations, and visions. They lacked traditions of their own and learned to adapt to their immediate needs the customs and components of the disparate life styles brought by the first settlers with them from distant lands. Thus the cities pieced together a mosaic of practices, largely borrowed from the past, but reflecting in their immediacy and usefulness the creativity of the new cities.⁴³ While this traditionlessness did, in fact, consolidate white civic control, its less cohesive identity allowed marginalized communities to carve out spaces for themselves and create rich subcultures and counterpublics.⁴⁴

Early urban promoters and designers initially marketed this fairyland to a white, moneyed, and modern clientele that wished to take pleasure in the area’s balmy temperatures (fig. I.1). One contemporary joked, The way they coddle the rich and the famous in Miami is enough to make a socialist weep!⁴⁵ This strategy initially proved effective and lucrative, increasing Miami’s profile as a desirable place for wealthy women and men from the Midwest and Northeast to visit, build a seasonal residence, or permanently settle. These early snowbirds often articulated Miami’s so-called enchantment as an expansion or mirror of the Caribbean. While this added greatly to its appeal, it also, by association, helped promote Miami as a respectable site for wealthy travelers and residents to safely experience the vice culture in the Caribbean, one largely made available through U.S. empire.

This book’s use of the terms promoter and booster is expansive. It includes those who were paid to market Miami as a tourist destination and a desirable place for permanent settlement. It also includes those who sought to increase and protect their investments in the early city by promoting this attractive image. This analysis also takes seriously, however, the effects of inadvertent promoters and boosters who may not have directly capitalized on such an enterprise but nonetheless wrote about their experiences—both good and bad—in visiting the area. In that capacity, they too helped direct attention and traffic to southern Florida. Boosters staged Miami as a fairyland through spectacular attractions, intense promotional activity, a land boom, and what was seen as a feverish pace of life accentuated [by] a uniquely modern style of urban engagement.⁴⁶

As this book argues, such imagery was textured with gender and sexual meanings. These professional and unofficial promoters and boosters represented a powerful force that marketed Miami as a fairyland where those who could afford the trip could sow their oats. Boosters used monikers such as fairyland and magic city to promote the city as special, unique, and ephemeral. These terms also nodded to Miami’s status as an instant city that had appeared as if by magic. They also held social and cultural currency, designating a space where women and men could transgress social norms, including gender and sexuality.

FIGURE I.1. A group of wealthy travelers on the pier waiting to enter Fairy-Land in Miami Beach, c. 1909. Image no. RC03719, courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.

In addition to its moneyed visitors and investors, from its earliest years, Miami attracted migrants, workers, and visitors from the nearby Caribbean whose presence in the city further complicated existing racial categories. If these Caribbean people represented a sort of crack in the color line, Miami’s white settlers were sure to keep them in check and re-cement their own position on top of the sociopolitical hierarchy. Some scholars have noted Miami’s distinct urban transformation and origins, emphasizing the city’s ethnic and racial demographics and power structure.⁴⁷ As Miami has received more attention, some scholars have urged us to interpret the city’s Caribbean origins as central to its nascent character and identity.⁴⁸ Like Welcome to Fairyland, these works push back against the idea that Miami’s checkered relationship to the Caribbean greatly began with the influx of Cubans fleeing the 1959 revolution. In following this lead, this book complicates the narrative of Cuban exceptionalism that heavily informs fields in Latina/o/x, immigration, and Latin American and Caribbean history. While this book certainly acknowledges the significance of Cuba in creating Miami’s fairyland, the evidence shows that the Bahamas were equally influential on the city—if not more so—during this earlier period, as was a greater imperial ethos that helped market the city as exotic to white visitors and slummers.

As this reveals, Miami’s queer past raises significant insights that provide a window through which to consider how Progressivism took shape through delayed and fragmented urbanization and in the absence of industrialization. Rooted in the Protestant notion of conversion, Miami’s early powerbrokers were imbued with a vision of both a figurative and literal rebirth, starting anew in this urban frontier. By the turn of the century, fueled by a form of social Christianity, privileged Progressives tasked themselves with serving and reforming their symbolic wards. During this era, most Protestants regarded the urban center as a problem, associating it with moral and physical decline. Protestantism survived and thrived in the spiritually fearful urban setting.⁴⁹ In part, this was because Protestant powerbrokers employed the basic tenets of their faith to society’s ills. As T. J. Jackson Lears has argued, American seekers merged Protestant dreams of spiritual rebirth with secular projects of purification. This included reasserting elite power against restive farmers, taming capital in the name of the public good, reviving individual and national vitality by banning the use of alcohol, granting women the right to vote, disenfranchising African-Americans, restricting the flow of immigrants and acquiring an overseas empire.⁵⁰ In this Progressive vision, Miami provided white settler-pioneers a terrestrial tabula rasa on which to start anew.

Unlike well-established, populated, and industrialized cities like New York or Chicago, Miami appeared overnight. As John B. Reilly, the city’s first mayor, recalled in 1917, We were never a town, you know, but were incorporated first as a city.⁵¹ Surely, Miami shared some characteristics with other instant cities in the United States, such as San Francisco and Denver—even though they were incorporated as autonomous municipalities and populated several decades earlier. These urban spaces transformed from wilderness to metropolis, their populations increasing exponentially with each passing year, rather than reaching formal maturation and development from settlement to town over the span of several decades. As Gunther Paul Barth has demonstrated, technological advancements made these built environments habitable and manageable to man’s will.⁵²

Miami was also an urban frontier molded by transience, speculation, boosterism, and the conquering of the wilderness.⁵³ While these features were central to Miami’s identity, this book’s employment of a queer and transnational lens also reveals how transgressive gender and sex threaded these phenomena. Miami’s 1896 incorporation occurred three years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner bemoaned, The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.⁵⁴ While the windfall promises that helped populate the U.S. West proved disappointing for most and dried up, it turned out the frontier was still alive just south of the [U.S.] South.⁵⁵ As a minister remarked in 1912, This lusty young city of Miami may be called the newest and most extreme frontier town in the United States, for even San Diego in California and Port Townsend in Washington are old in comparison.⁵⁶ Miami’s later urbanization, its nonindustrial economy, and its entrenched relationship to the Caribbean separated it from most of the nation’s urban spaces.

Even into the late 1930s, despite boosters’ efforts to shake off the image of the urban frontier in favor of a sophisticated and modern city, parts of Miami remained undeveloped and uninhabitable. In many respects, this checkered urban maturity could be attributed to Miami’s exponential growth, which municipal and county governments could not keep up with.⁵⁷ While only 1,681 people resided in Miami proper in 1900 (four years after it was incorporated), the city boasted 29,571 residents by 1920. Its population further expanded with the land and real estate boom of the 1920s, growing 274 percent by 1930, when 110,637 people called the city home. Similarly, while Miami Beach had fewer than 650 residents in 1920, its population grew a whopping 980 percent by 1930, when its population was 6,494.⁵⁸ The figures for all of Dade County are similarly