Miami as Stage

This chapter builds on chapter three in taking seriously boosters’ framing of Miami as a fairyland. It pays particular attention to the ways the city was “staged,” both literally and figuratively, in the American imagination. It notes how theatricality, spectacle, and publicity collided in the urban center to help sell the fairyland to outsiders. It explores some of the powerful metaphors used to market the city’s transgressive identity. Race and empire in particular played key roles in marketing the city for tourist consumption, as Miami boosters measured their city’s success against developments in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba. The chapter also explores the ways the literal stage—in both theater and film—located Miami as a site for white leisure and recreation. Underpinned as it was by racist and colonial practices and ideologies, the idea of Miami as a site for pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality entered the U.S. imagination.

Queer Frontier

In tracing the social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances that led to Miami’s municipal incorporation in 1896, this chapter unearths the queer origins of the city’s urban frontier. It argues that Miami’s identity and traditions were constantly in flux, imbued by numerous effects from the city’s colonial past, its roots in the U.S. South and North, and a multitude of Caribbean influences. The chapter shows how the establishment of Miami’s segregated and racialized sex and vice district was a product of conscientious, albeit uneven, urban design. An examination of criminal records, municipal documents, and newspaper reports reveals how Miami’s queer frontier took shape through a prism of competing colonial exchanges, transgressive sex acts, interracial encounters, and working-class vices. Urban boosters promoted the instant city of Miami through several countervailing visions: the natural environment and the urban landscape, the traditional and the modern, and the respectable and subversive.

Queers during and after Prohibition

Despite the visibility of a commoditized heterosexuality in the fairyland traced in the previous chapter, transnational and local forces further allowed queer folk to carve out spaces for themselves in Miami. By the 1920s, U.S. imperialism ensured that racialized sex tourism in Cuba and the Bahamas—particularly the former—became central to Miami’s own economic success. This chapter reveals two key phenomena in the development of queer cultures and networks: Miami’s entrenched relationship to the Caribbean during Prohibition, and the uneasy urban battles that ensued upon Prohibition’s repeal. Additional transnational tensions—including the rise of the aviation industry, Miami’s real estate bust and devastating hurricane, and the 1933 Cuban Revolution—nudged Miami toward becoming a “wide-open” city. This status allowed queers to carve out distinct spaces in the city, particularly during peak tourist season. Indeed, queers made the tourist economy work, staffing the service industry and functioning as physical representations of the fantasy and transgression urban boosters marketed, keenly designed as alternatives or supplements to what the Caribbean offered.

Women and the Making of Miami’s Heterosexual Culture

This chapter unearths the queer origins of what became normative heterosexuality by locating fairyland’s distinct promotion of transgressive, white, and predominantly middle-class women’s bodies in the 1920s and 1930s. Urban promoters aggressively marketed a fairyland that touted the arrival of a new modern woman who was simultaneously white, moneyed, attractive, and available. The modern and scantily clad “Miami mermaid” became a commodity that permitted urban boosters to continue promoting the area as a fairyland for gender and sexual renegades. While sexual liberation became normative through processes that emphasized women’s ultimate submission to a man and their collective whiteness, the chapter makes clear that these women laid claims to their own bodies and sexualities in significant and extraordinarily queer ways that abandoned the feminine propriety of the past. Middle-class men responded to these changes with a recharged hetero-masculine sense of self undergirded by an articulation of white superiority. Indeed, the marketing of Miami as a site for heterosexual romance and tourism also depended on the city’s proximity to the Caribbean, particularly Cuba.

Passing through Miami’s Queer World

While urban boosters crafted Miami’s fairyland for a white and moneyed clientele, the city’s working-class, transient gender and sexual renegades similarly asserted their own spaces in the developing landscape. This chapter uncovers how queers, primarily those listed in the historical record as men, traversed Miami’s public and semipublic spaces. It focuses on the ways mostly working-class, transient men transgressed gender and sexual norms in Miami. In addition to noting how the city’s queer archetypes challenged the very categories that differentiated “women” from “men,” this chapter also notes some of the institutions that surveilled, regulated, and criminalized the bodies of women whose sexual appetites were read as “unnatural.” In tracing arrest, medical, and commitment records, along with other contemporary sources—such as newspapers, state and local laws, and judicial testimonies and hearings—this chapter reconstructs the urban presence of gender and sexual transgression outside the theatrical stage. It demonstrates how state and local laws criminalized gender transgression and homosexual acts, as well as the uneven prosecution of such activities based on judicial interpretations of class, race, ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability.

Bahamians and Miami’s Queer Erotic

This chapter explores Bahamian migration to Miami during the first few decades of Miami’s municipal history. Analyses of Bahamian migrant experiences at the border, in Miami, and throughout the archipelago show how gendered migration patterns created “bachelor” societies in Miami’s urban frontiers and female-dominated and homosocial spaces in the then-British colony of the Bahamas. While Miami’s white powerbrokers struggled with inadequate infrastructure, a growing population, and ill-defined local economy, they came to rely on the cheap, experienced labor that male Bahamian migrants offered. The chapter argues that the desirability of the black male body and laborer was constructed alongside a distinct queer erotic and white male gaze. The chapter also introduces the economic challenges Bahamians faced back on the archipelago and how these migration patterns broke down household economies and traditional family models. U.S. immigration officials heavily policed single and unaccompanied Bahamian women at the Miami-Caribbean borders, while the borders proved mostly porous for Bahamian men before 1924. Law enforcement, however, heavily policed Bahamian men once they entered Miami. Criminal records indicate, for instance, that they were disproportionately represented in sodomy and crime against nature charges.

Making Fairyland Real

This chapter traces the lives of some of the queer women and men who helped tailor Miami’s fairyland image as a site of nonconformity that lacked the rigidity ascribed to larger, industrial urban spaces. It unearths the significance of the area’s artists, investors, settlers, and imperial architects in fashioning a modern fairyland that proved desirable to outsiders. It demonstrates how wealth, status, and whiteness permitted the queer elite to promote Miami as a space where gender and sexuality could be challenged, renegotiated, and subverted. As influential powerbrokers living with an “open secret” in the city, several of these queers crafted Miami’s lucrative image as a fairyland through the tentacles of U.S. imperialism, casting the city’s offering as an extension of the vice and pleasure available in the nearby Caribbean.

Epilogue

The epilogue introduces some of the major changes that came about after World War II and their effects on Miami’s queer individuals and communities. Miami’s liberal policy remained in place—albeit with some post-tourist-season or arbitrary crackdowns and raids—until the late 1940s. The early Cold War era, however, brought about massive changes that radically altered the lives and experiences of the city’s gender and sexual renegades. This included an effort to diversify Miami’s economy and reduce dependency on tourism, a local and national “lavender scare,” the national crackdown on gangsterism, corruption, and graft, changing zoning laws and municipal incorporation policies, urban renewal programs that decimated and displaced black communities and cultures, and the advent of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The epilogue also introduces some of the limitations of homophile organizing in Miami and the U.S. South more generally, while emphasizing other modes of resistance that took place outside of traditional political organizing and those guided by an emerging sexual identity politics.

Introduction

This introduction lays out the major themes and parameters of the book. It delineates the multi-textured meanings of “fairyland”—a term crafted by white urban boosters by the early twentieth century—to a diverse group of people who traveled to and settled in the Greater Miami area from 1890 to 1940. The introduction stresses how migration and immigration, tourism, and trade to and from the Caribbean proved central to shaping the image of Miami as fairyland, a moniker that allowed gender and sexual transgressives to carve out a space for themselves in the nascent city. It emphasizes the significance of Miami’s queer past by situating this research in the existing literature, particularly in the fields of queer, transnational, Caribbean, tourism, and immigration and migration history. This introduction also offers an overview of each chapter and the book’s research methods, methodology, and use of archives.