This Remarkable 1930s Lesbian Journalist Was Snubbed in Her Lifetime. Now a Novel Based on Her Work Has Won the National Book Award.
After enjoying an autumn of reader buzz and positive reviews, Justin Torres’ acclaimed new novel, Blackouts, won the National Book Award for Fiction last week. I’d like to imagine that somewhere in the glitzy New York venue where the awards were announced, alongside Torres and LeVar Burton and Oprah Winfrey, you could scan the shadows and spot the ghost of Jan Gay, observing the proceedings with a gimlet eye. You’d hope she was at least a little pleased. Torres’ much-deserved win acts as a kind of revenge for Gay—a pioneering lesbian journalist who sought to document her community’s diversity and experience in the 1930s—along with the dozens of queers who trusted her with their life stories. Back then, she and her sources were betrayed and misrepresented by prejudiced “scientific collaborators.” But today, in the work of Torres, the literary historian Saidiya Hartman, and a growing number of others, their major contribution to our understanding of queerness is finally being appreciated and honored on its own terms.
If Gay’s name is not yet familiar to you, that’s because her full role in a groundbreaking medical text of 1941 titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns was largely hidden. Sex Variants contains 80 in-depth, first-person case studies of queers born as far back as the 19th century, and from several countries, but mostly the U.S. Each case study is accompanied by a family tree, a standardized test of masculinity and femininity, medical reports, even naked pictures (at least in the two-volume first edition). They’re anonymized, with just a fake first name and last initial, but they were real people—and their testimonies make for one of the best portraits of queer life in the early-20th-century U.S. we have.
It’s a portrait, however, that unfairly obscures the true author: In the introduction, a “Miss Jan Gay” is credited as essentially an assistant, when in fact she was responsible for both the idea and much of what we know of the execution of Sex Variants. Gay learned how to do “controlled interviews” of homosexuals from the king of the sex researchers himself, Magnus Hirschfeld, in Berlin in 1931, two years before the infamous Nazi burning of his library and institute. She threw herself into collecting the case histories of the Sapphic ladies in her personal and professional networks, asking women about their families, whether they felt wanted, and every nook and cranny of their sex lives. But no reputable publisher would touch the project without the sponsorship of institutional science.
Finally, she managed to get the attention of Robert Latou Dickinson, a renowned gynecologist known for his enthusiastic views on sexual pleasure (and eugenics), who hooked her up with a whole steering committee and a prolific New York City psychiatrist named George W. Henry. They directed her to expand the work to include men, assisted by a gay male researcher (and former hustler). It seems Henry took over the bulk of the interviewing and writing of the final report, with Gay acting as a kind of ambassador between the community and the committee. Henry claimed to have been no more than a stenographer for the first-person portions of the case studies, but it’s hard not to feel his editorial hand in some instances.
There’s evidence that some of the case study subjects in Sex Variants complained to Gay and to her gay colleague about being misunderstood and misrepresented in the final work. Henry’s judginess runs right through Sex Variants, as he diagnoses several people as “narcissistic cases,” for example, or dismisses the truth of their identity as a smokescreen for psychological torment.
Thankfully, we now have far-less-filtered access to some of Gay’s subjects through the work of queer historians, and their lives are remarkable. Henry Minton identified some of the Sex Variants informants in his book Departing From Deviance. “Pearl M.” was the Black bisexual actress Edna Thomas, who moved to New York in 1915 to pursue stage ambitions. She starred in the Federal Theatre Project’s all-Black production of Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles in 1936, around the time she would’ve spoken with Gay. Thomas’ partner, the English-born socialite and photographer Olivia Wyndham, is also in Sex Variants, as “Pamela D.”
“I was the illegitimate daughter of a twelve-year-old mulatto nursemaid,” Thomas’ case study begins. “Mother didn’t know she was pregnant with me. Old people said she had been poisoned and that there were snakes in her belly.” It was the 1880s in Virginia, and Thomas’ community included people who were born enslaved. At 16, she married the son of a rich man. About nine years later, with her estranged husband almost dead from alcoholism and tuberculosis, she went to New York to study theater. “I had a strong feeling for the betterment of the negroes,” she said. “I frequented high society, both white and colored. I never felt any social discrimination.” Thomas became a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance, and in 1930 she met Olivia Wyndham.
“Six years ago I came to the United States and promptly fell very much in love with a negro singer,” Wyndham said in her own interview. (The psychiatrist altered Thomas’ acting profession to disguise her identity.) “From the first afternoon that I met her I pursued her unremittingly. She gave me no encouragement and mistrusted my ardor and extravagant protestations.” Wyndham decided to marry a man to spite Thomas. Just hours before setting sail on her honeymoon, though, she paid a visit to Thomas, who “then confessed that she was not as indifferent toward me as she had appeared to be and the consummation of my desire for her spoiled any chance that I might have had with my husband.” Ooooh.
Thomas’ version of the meet cute is similar. “I had avoided her because white women are unfaithful,” she said. “She was persistent, to the point of annoyance. She finally came to my house and I had the most exciting sex experience of my life.” Thomas, already married, let Wyndham move in, and the three set up a household together. “She has shared with me my [theatrical] success and she was with me while I passed through the menopause,” Thomas said.
Unfortunately, in the text of Sex Variants, the words of people like Thomas and Wyndham don’t get to stand on their own; they’re made to reflect the agenda of George Henry through his framing and follow-up commentary. “Under more favorable circumstances than were afforded to [Thomas] by heritage or in her personal career she probably would not have become involved with homosexual liaisons,” he wrote, finding that her bisexuality was “in large part acquired” as “an acceptable compromise only after disillusionment with heterosexual relations.”
Henry believed “sex variants” were to be pitied as sick, not punished as criminals, because they couldn’t change. Still, they’d made a poor “adjustment” to society. The way for them to fix themselves was by abstaining from sex as much as possible, not being swishy or butch in public, and not identifying as a member of a minority group entitled to rights and protections. This, as the queer historian Hugh Ryan writes, was “a hodgepodge of tolerance and homophobia.” Clearly, getting Henry involved as a strategic conduit between the gayborhood and Normietown was a mistake, but by then, the project had long slipped from Jan Gay’s control. She faded into the shadows and wound up in Mexico as an expert on Latin American relations before moving back to New York (where she and her partner hosted a young and penniless Andy Warhol for a spell). She died in California in 1960, having continued her career as a children’s book author and publicist. Her New York Times obituary makes no mention of her role in the Sex Variants research—or, naturally, the fact that she was queer.
The plight of Jan Gay and the project that became Sex Variants, historians say, is an example of how modern queers have attempted to form alliances with medical authorities as a bridge to full civil rights. (Just this month, in fact, a group of trans Tennessee youth and their families joined their doctor in asking the Supreme Court to overturn their state’s ban on gender-affirming care.) Gay wasn’t the first or last person to think that because science and medicine claimed to be objective and free from religious bias, they might promote acceptance. Her story shows that making alliances with experts, while necessary for inclusion, has historically not always been the successful liberatory project queers have hoped for.
Despite its problematic backstory, Justin Torres successfully mined Sex Variants for inspiration in Blackouts. He’s created “erasure poems” by taking a dark marker to several of its pages of words and pictures, blotting out lines of text in case studies to get to the essence of the life within. Most of the novel takes place in dialogue, perhaps imitating the format of an interview session between Jan Gay and one of her informants. One of Torres’ two main characters, an older Puerto Rican gay man who’s dying at a psychiatric hospital, is named Juan Gay, and as Blackouts unfolds, his fictional relationship to Jan Gay becomes clearer.
It’s hard not to cheer for her now. Today, you have to read Sex Variants “against the grain,” or contrary to the original purpose of George Henry and the scientific committee, to really get to the heart of what she was trying to do and to understand the fervent hopes of her queer sources. I’m not sure there’s anything useful about it medically anymore—if there ever was—but Torres’ win shows that it’s a blockbuster as a source of artistic inspiration. Dish out homophobia and twist our words back on us all you want, we’ll reinvent our beauty every time.
