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This story is the fairly historically accurate bio of a comic book superhero, so you know, caveat emptor.
What I *can* vouch for is that the description of “the gay way” of the 1930s is accurate to what little we know about it in that era. This includes language that we find derogatory today, and was often meant derogatorily back then too. However, keep in mind that Steve Rogers was born in 1918; he is not a child of the 1940s but the 1920s and 1930s. The story begins in 1933 when he is 15 and just graduating high school, about eight years before the start of the Captain America movie. Mostly I want to get across the idea that if you judge Steve and Bucky’s behavior by today’s standards (especially in regards to language use — you have been warned!), you are going to hate this story with a fiery passion.
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I’m explaining all of this here because the crux of this story is Steve’s own concepts of what “gay” is, and how he expresses that. He is a product of his era and the early chapters of this story are set during his youth, therefore he uses the only language he knows to talk about it.
Let me explain what that means. Back then, “homosexual” was not really an identity as such. In fact “homosexuality” as a concept was basically invented by the Victorians, as was “heterosexuality.” There was no need for definitions prior to that; one could not “be” a homosexual until the Victorians decided to try and box up and classify sexuality for the sake of eradicating deviancy. Even so, by the 1920s there was a lot of mixing and matching within the medical community about what “a homosexual” was, and a lot of confusion between the concepts of sexuality and gender as we know them. Men could perform homosexual acts as long as they were the penetrative partner (the “male”) without losing his gendered identity as a man, although he would gain a reputation as a filthy pervert. But it is worth noting that how society reacted to such things also depended on class; the middle class was far, far more restrictive about gender identities, and far more concerned about deviancy. The lower working classes, such as what Steve was born into, were far more lax about things like gay sex and prostitutes.
There was no Kinsey scale to rate oneself against, and the primary social thought about a homosexual sex act was that it was a deviancy. That is, a man could be “normal” while still sometimes acting in a deviant way; it was perfectly acceptable in “gay culture” for a man to have a wife and kids while every once in a while have sex with another man. If a man received a blow job from another man, it did not affect his label as “normal” much at all, as long as he didn’t act effeminate or take the receptive (passive, feminine) role. In mainstream culture, the thought was that if a married man had sex with another man, he was either A) desperate and trapped on an island with no other recourse, or B) a pervert. He wouldn’t be seen as “a gay man trying to act straight by marrying a woman.” ALL men were thought to be, by default, “normal” so anything they did that was outside of “normal” was not an expression of identity but a deviancy.
So, the defining feature of identity was not who you actually had sex with (your sexuality) so much as how you acted (your gender), and the language of the era reflects that. Keep in mind that ALL deviant acts were illegal, not just homosexual ones. The men who openly made an issue about only liking other men sexually were the exception (Quintin Crisp) and paid the price in social stigma, if not jail time. They were considered true deviants (or “inverts”, as they were inverting the natural order), and mentally unstable. Men who acted like men and were — often — married but occasionally had sex with other men were just “perverts”, but that was only as long as they took the masculine/penetrative role. Still, men arrested for “degenerate disorderly conduct” - the usual charge for men hauled in from a raid on a gay club - could serve up to ten days in jail and be heavily fined, even if they weren’t caught doing anything other than having a drink in public with some friends. Men who were arrested in flagrante could get years in prison no matter which role they were claiming. Serious business, sure, but what it is important to keep in mind is that these men were not necessarily arrested for being gay, they were arrested for being perverts. A subtle but important distinction: it was more about what they were doing than who/what they were.
Despite all of that, there was a robust homosexual community even back then, with clubs and bars and bath houses and drag balls. Homosexual activity was illegal, but so was prostitution and pornography, and all of that thrived despite constant police raids and arrests. Much of the language we associate with homosexuality today originated in the early 20th century, if not earlier; Steve would be very familiar with the words “fag,” “fairy,” “queer,” “camp,” and of course “gay.” For some of them,he would mean something a little different from what we do when he says them (see glossary) but in general not so much. There were huge, renown drag balls during the 20s and 30s in Manhattan clubs, some recorded to be of 5000 people or more, and late-night cafeterias served as stomping ground for underground gay society to the point where some were even listed in tourist guides (often with euphemisms such as “you can see a touch of lavender in the crowd”). If this sounds very similar to the club culture we know today, that’s because it is. The only difference is that back then, if the club was raided and you were kissing the wrong gender, you would go to jail.
Steve grew up during the tail end of a huge transformation in how society — culturally and scientifically — understood and defined what we call homosexuality, so a lot of things were overlapping but change was not instantaneous. A boy like Steve growing up poor in a working-class neighborhood during the 20s and 30s would naturally absorb the mainstream ideas about homosexuality that were around him, not the avant-garde theories about sexuality being put forth in the medical community. World War II was to be the watershed that drove old ideas of “inverts and perverts, fairies and real men” into the ground under the weight of new ideas like the Kinsey scale, homosexuality, and heterosexuality; but until then, old ideas still held sway.
It may seem profoundly weird that Steve would consider himself a normal (straight) guy who sometimes likes to have sex with men, but in the era he lived in it was not unusual for a man we would label as queer (homosexual or bisexual) to do just that fairly openly, at least among the working classes (class made a huge difference here, and is a much more involved topic than I will go into; suffice to say, Steve, as a member of the working class, would see and experience a much different world than the much more regimented and restrictive culture of the middle class). As long as he presented a very masculine gender, which pre-serum Steve did despite his naturally delicate looks and small stature, then he was playing by the rules of society at large even if he was also playing fast and loose on the edges. The larger issue, for Steve as a person, was the matter of being a top or a bottom (modern terms, FYI) which could be used to identify him as effeminate. In his mind, he wasn’t “gay” so much as he was a normal guy who liked to have very, very deviant sex that could, if revealed to others, mark him as a “fairy” which was one step down from being a girl in the social standards of the era (not to mention get him arrested). There were many men in Steve’s shoes, but because they were fighting against roles assigned by gender rather than sexuality, it often led to a conflict of identity. If you don’t think of yourself as a girl and don’t act like a girl but you enjoy having sex “like a girl” (i.e. being penetrated), then what are you? It is not a question Steve would have found peace with easily, even in the queer community.
As a final note, the appearance of the YMCA as a bastion of homosexual liaisons and culture was not something that happened in the free-love 1960s; it started happening after the 1st World War, and by the 20s and 30s everyone-in-the-know knew that “the Y” was where gay boys took a room if they wanted to get laid. So Steve and Bucky making off-color jokes about the YMCA is totally historically accurate.
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GLOSSARY (In general, the following holds true (with a lot of exceptions) to the story):
Gay: catch-all term (much as it is today) for homosexuals, but mostly used by the homosexual community to describe themselves. It served as a code word for identifying venues or other people (”A very gay cafe!” would be a totally acceptable advert, because gays would know it meant they were welcome there, while “normals” who were not in-the-know would not see the double meaning at all).
Fairy: This was the go-to word for very effeminate men, who were assumed to be bottoms and inverts. This was often the trans (transsexual, transgendered, transvestite) group who were easy to single out as being “abnormal.” This was the insult no straight man wanted thrown at him.
Pansy: Pansy seems to have been the go-to term for men in the middle of the spectrum between normal and fairy; they dressed in suits and were what we could call cisgendered men, but were effeminate in personality, the stereotypical “light on his feet” guy who could almost pass for normal but not quite.
Queer: flexible but often used to mean masculine men who looked “normal” but were gay. That is, the contingent of gay men who were not necessarily trying to pass for normal but whose gender identity was very masculine. But that’s not a sharp definition, and sometimes “queer” was used to just mean all homosexual men (police reports of the 1920s, for instance, refer to “queer clubs”).
Invert: A man who preferred sex with men. This is as close as the era got to what we would call “a homosexual” but as a word it refers to the idea that these men were inverting the natural order. Steve would never call himself an invert; any man who did was basically divorcing himself from all social norms. It was a very radical step.
Normal: A guy who, by our modern definitions, would be called “straight.”
Trade: A normal (straight) guy who was willing to accept homosexual sex overtures. The assumption here was that trade would use a queer or fairy the same they would a woman and be the top in the assignation. Scoring trade for the night was considered quite a coup.
Fag: pretty much the same insult we all know and hate, but used quite casually in coarse conversation of the era.
Flaming: Yes, “flaming queer” is a very old phrase and means exactly the same now as it did then. Like now, it is a term of either abuse or one of affection, depending on context.
RESOURCES: For interesting perspectives on sexuality and how different they used to be as well as how and why they changed, I recommend the following resources:
[VID] Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization - documentary on how and why the concept of “pornography” was created. http://youtu.be/BZ7aVneGeqo
[BOOK] The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England by Steven Marcus - a dated but interesting in-depth look at Victorian sexuality and pornography; important as the Victorian mentality was still very influential pre-WWII.
[BOOK] Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey - a fascinating and important study of gender and sexuality during the critical years of Steve Roger’s youth. This was my go-to book for most of the descriptions of the gay culture Steve sees and participates in. Highly recommended.