La Forest Potter (1855-1951), an early 1930s witness to queer New York

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  La Forest Potter. Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities. Robert Dodsley Company/ National Library Press, 1933.
  

Trigger warning: Some of the quotations from Dr Potter include words and opinions relating to sex and/or race that are today considered objectionable.

1933 was not a good year for being queer. The ending of alcohol prohibition in the US (good in itself) unfortunately led to the end of the Panzy Craze, and increased police raids on queer bars and nightclubs. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi Party took control of the government. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s OGPU started a reversal of the decriminalization of homosexuality that had resulted from the Revolution by arresting 198 gay men, and claiming that there was a link between homosexuality and fascism.  In England and France trans men and masculine women had been shaken after Victor Barker, John Radclyffe-Hall and Violette Morris had each lost in their very different law trials.

The New York that La Forest Potter describes falls in between that found in the earlier publications, Mowry Saben/Jennie June’s three books and the psychological study of five transvestites by Bernard Talmey, and the later study Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) attributed to George Henry but based on the research of Jan Gay. 

George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, published 1994 mentions Potter in its notes as a source for details, but he is not in the book’s index, and there is no mention of him or his book in the text. 

The term ‘fairy’ was commonly used in this period for effeminate gays, trans feminine persons and drag performers. Chauncey’s book goes into a lot of detail on this.

Two anecdotes referring to the book’s influence

David K Johnson’s “The Kids of Fairytown: Gay Male Culture on Chicago's Near North Side in the 1930s” in Brett Beemyn’s Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, p111 tells us:

“Although most Chicagoans had never read a medical text on homosexuality, Harold's list of the books that introduced him to gay life did include one work by a medical expert. La Forest Potter's Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities was an attempt to bring medical expertise on the nature, causes, and curability of homosexuality to a general audience to help eradicate ‘the problem.’ But by outlining the prevalence of homosexuality — how America had ‘Gone Pansy;' as he titled one of his chapters — he inadvertently suggested that it was normal. Potter asserted that ‘homosexuality ... is diffused not only through all the anthropological forms of mankind — savage and civilized life — but also throughout every strata of society, and among every class of population.’ ” ... “To Harold and undoubtedly many others, Potter's line of argumentation intrigued more than it dissuaded.”

Robert Darby. “The Censor as Literary Critic”. Westerly, 31,4, December 1986: 37 tells us:

“Genuine scientific texts on sexual abnormality might be allowed in serious libraries for research use by approved scholars, but popular works were a different matter. Garran read Strange Loves, by La Forest Potter MD, as professing to be "a serious study of homosexuality", but he found its general style suggesting that it was, rather, "a book to excite curiosity". American authors, he remarked, "show no squeamishness in an open discussion of this subject; but I think its discussion in this way offends against present standards of decency in Australia." Allen agreed: ‘This book is not desirable for public bookshelves, and I should not regard it as in any way a serious contribution to medical science. It is a popularisation of information regarding sexual abnormality ... It is not well written: and in places is incorrect. For instance, it repeats mere garbled gossip about Socrates; and I do not believe that the author has read a word of the Symposium.’ ” 

Who was La Forest Potter?

La Forest Potter graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1884 and contributed articles to Physical Culture, the food faddist magazine run by Bernard MacFadden. He was apparently interested in 'cancer cures'; at one time he was associated with a proponent of the so-called 'grape juice cure' for cancer. Strange Loves was banned in Australia in 1936. He also wrote The psychology of health and happiness, 1897; A new treatment of cancer and chronic diseases, 1929 and various other popular medical texts. He lists membership in the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society, Boston Gynecological Society, Associate Professor of Rhinology, Laryngology, and Otology, New York School of Clinical Medicine, and Surgeon, Malden Hospital.

Potter's other books as listed on page opposite title page

The Advertisement

This is the advertisement that ran several times in the magazine Broadway and Hollywood Movies.

The chapters of interest:

Chapter IV THE “INTERMEDIATE SEX"

“For while admittedly there are mental hermaphrodites and mental deviates in uncounted numbers, the true “third sex, if we are to be really accurate in our description, consists only of individuals who are anatomically bisexual. … These individuals are unquestionably atavistic or retrogressive in their biological status. Nevertheless, true hermaphrodism is an extremely rare phenomenon. I stress the anatomical basis of this condition at this time in order to differentiate true hermaphrodism from pseudo -hermaphrodism -- or what I might term " mental " hermaphrodism.” 

So far, not too bad. 

However, Potter then has a sub-heading, REAL WORLD PROGRESS MADE BY HETEROSEXUALS where he proclaims that the “[homosexual] abnormality should be considered anti-social, anti-racial, and anti-biologic”.

Then still in the same chapter WHEN MEN DON WOMEN'S CLOTHES, where he writes: “To the average person it would seem that all this bother is ‘much ado about nothing’. For it would be rather difficult to see what particular harm can come to the police force, or to society in general. … However, it may be because these transvestites, as they are called, suggest abnormality (whether they are abnormal or not) that they are arrested, hailed into court and fined.” 

In his next sub-heading, IS INVERSION COMMON AMONG TRANSVESTITES? Potter contrasts William Stekel who regarded trans persons as homosexuals with Magnus Hirschfeld who from a much larger sample knew otherwise. Potter attempts to reconcile this difference with the opinion of the psychoanalyst Andre Tridon who claimed that transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals. 

His final sub-heading in the chapter is THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE GERMAN URNING. He writes:

 “While it may not react greatly to the prestige and glory of Berlin in the minds of many people, it is nevertheless true that this highly cultured city boasts perhaps a greater number of homosexuals than any other city in the world -- not excluding Paris, which, for several centuries, has been notorious for its sexual profligacy. Of course, it may be that this seeming preponderance of abnormals arises merely from the fact that, in Berlin, and in Germany and Austria, the urning comes out into the open, so to speak. He does not find it necessary to skulk and slink in the hinterlands of society, as he does in European and American centers generally. However, we may attribute this apparent epidemic of homosexuality to the fact that there is less hypocrisy in Germany and more real science than is to be found anywhere else on the face of the earth.” 

This of course had been previously true, but it is ironic, sad and frightening that by the time Potter’s book was published, the Nazis had become the German government, and the purge of queer culture and persons was ongoing.

Chapter VII FEMALE MEN AND MALE WOMEN

This is a rather nasty chapter where the question is should his readers 

“place these individuals either in the same category with burglars, swindlers, and automobile thieves, or else it would permit them to be recognized as men and women who are mentally and morally sick — neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum”. 

Potter quotes Dr. W. Beran Wolfe, Director of the New York Community Church Mental Hygiene Clinic who blames the second opinion almost exclusively on Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), 1903. However he goes on to discuss opposite sex characteristics such as male gynecomastia and women with beards. He misleadingly connects this to homosexuals, whom he regards as having a female psyche. He has a brief discussion of the work of Eugene Steinach and his transplanting of gonads to animals of the other sex.

Chapter XI “The Drag”

I have previously written of the Hamilton Lodge Balls, the premier drag event in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which attracted thousands each year. Potter does not mention them by name. He writes of the Philadelphia Mummers parade, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, The Rose Pageant in Pasadena, California. He quotes from Blair Niles’ 1931 novel, Strange Brother, but he wrote too early to include The Young and Evil, 1933 by Charles Ford and Parker Tyler. Both novels include scenes at the Hamilton Lodge Balls. 

He then comes to “THE DRAG BALL”. 

“These are the famous ‘Drag Balls’, held in many of our principal cities, on the average of once a year. The men, dressed in the clothes of women, are called ‘drags’. In New York City there are at least two outstanding Drag Balls yearly - one held at Webster Hall, in Greenwich Village, the other in the Manhattan Casino, up in Harlem. Of late years this place has had ‘the run’."

 And in a purple passage using terms, that no modern writer would, he refers to 

“the motley throng that surges and sways to the blood-boiling rhythm of a Negro band. Hundreds and hundreds of Negroes also- of every shade of black and brown— from the octoroon, hardly to be distinguished from a strikingly lovely brunette Caucasian girl, to the burly blackamoor, of pure Ethiopian type are crowded, cheek by jowl, into sense -maddening proximity. For the Harlem Drag Ball is a ‘mixed’ affair, attended by whites and blacks alike.” 

THE PARADE OF THE FAIRIES. 

“Finally the dancing floor is cleared by the police for the chief event of the evening. It is the big ‘kick’ for which most of the spectators have come -the ‘parade of the fairies’, with a prize of two hundred dollars to be awarded to the ‘fairy’ who displays the loveliest and most artistic costume.” 

$200 in 1932 = $4,700 today.

Reviews and comments

In December 1934, the pioneer gay activist Henry Gerber reviewed Potter’s book in his Chanticleer newsletter (as summarized by Jonathan Katz):

... I think the history of psychology is . . . damning evidence of man’s credulity and outright stupidity. The volume under review by Dr. La Forest Potter, who boasts of being a “late member of the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society,” etc., etc. . . . proves to me two significant facts: 1) that the medical authorities in America, of which Dr. Potter is a shining example, are about 100 years behind the times, and 2) that most psychologists in this country are mere yes-men who blindly and obediently follow the current authorized moral code without any regard to common sense or the results of modern scientific research ….

While the title of the book would indicate that the author had in view all phenomena of sex which seem strange to him and to the ignorant public alike, Dr. Potter deals mainly with homosexuality. . . . such a title is a profitable device for the sale of books, for the morons are always looking for something new and “strange” in sex matters. In other words, the book of Dr. Potter is just another instance of the morbid sex racket, a lurid description of sex abnormalities under the moral guise of condemnation of the queer sinners dealing in such “strange” loves in order to get the filthy details by the post office censors of “obscene” literature. Krafft-Ebing was perhaps the first author to start this racket and the volume in review is evidence of the sad fact that the end of it is not yet.

In the accepted fashion of Krafft-Ebing’s pot-boiler, Dr. Potter goes through the various artificial classifications of homosexuals. He has Chapters on the Riddle of Homosexuality . . . a chapter on the history of . . . the various unsuccessful attempts of “scientists” to solve the “riddle,” .. . special chapters on Lesbians (female homosexuals), in which the author makes the sensational statement that “there isn’t a man on earth who has a Chinaman’s chance against a Lesbian, once she has thoroughly seduced a woman to her wiles” (any doctor having knowledge of gynecology ought to know the reason to be due to the fact that males are very deficient in the fine art of satisfying a woman’s sexual needs.) [etc.] ….

.. . Dr. Potter views the psychoanalytical method of dealing with homosexuals and cites cases in which homosexuals have been “cured” by psychoanalysts. . .

But the author does evidently not think so much of this “cure” of homosexuals, for he cautiously warns that homosexuals can be cured only if they want to be cured. The only way to cure a [male] homosexual of his foible is to make him love women, a very simple process indeed, but Dr. Potter does not seem to realize that heterosexual men can be cured exactly in the same fashion from their love for women, by getting them to like men. By the same method, Pop-eye, the sailor cures children who do not like spinach by making them believe that spinach is really good for them and that every normal citizen must eat it.

Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall, 1969:

“Dr. Potter’s cliches resonate against the common currency of homophobic texts of the period and centuries before. He deploys the familiar accusations and links homosexuality not only with the destruction of what he suggests are virtually nationally encoded gender roles but clearly implies that homosexuality and homosexuals are effectively un-American. Because of the ‘infestation’ of homosexuality, however, the pioneer and heterosexual American virtues have been weakened and now the danger is clear and increasingly present: ‘Today there are homosexual ‘joints,’ ‘queer’ clubs, pervert ‘drags’ or homosexual plays in practically every considerable American city.’ Not only general society but American youth has been tainted by homosexuals, for ‘today there is scarcely a schoolboy who doesn’t know what a ‘pansy’ is’ ”. (p233-4)

Andrea Ens, Pain, Pleasure, Punishment, 2024:

“The book’s ad promised sophisticated adult readers clinical findings that would ‘tear away the veil of mystery that hides the facts behind homosexuality’ by demonstrating ‘the abnormal ties and the unnatural desires and erotic reactions of these twilight men and women’. But while Strange Loves’ marketers emphasized its titillating narratives of perverse sexual trysts hidden in darkness, the text itself repeatedly insisted ‘abnormals’ were often not malicious, intentional criminals, but ‘neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum’. This blamelessness – revealed by contemporary medical and scientific advances into the origins and impacts of ‘sexual abnormality’ – meant that American medical, social, and legal treatment of non-heteronormative Americans might allow their re-entry into ‘normal’ heterosexual society’. (p26)

• Henry Gerber, “More Nonsense about Homosexuals,” Chanticleer, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Dec. 1934), 2-3. Partially reprinted in Jonathan Katz (ed) Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay men in the USA: 595-6, and in Tracy Baim’s Out and Proud in Chicago: 38-9.
• Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969. Twayne Publishers, 1995: 233-4.
• Byrne Fone (ed). The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. Columbia University Press, 1998: 669.
• Byrne Fone. Homophobia: A History. Henry Holt and Company, 2000: 386-8.
• "More Hilarious Zeitgeistiness". Autist's Corner, February 28 2009. Online. 
• Anna Lvovsky. Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920–1970. PhD thesis, Harvard. May 2015: 34, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 53, 54, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92.
• Alysha Maree Crossan. Liberals, Ground Breakers, and Graduate Students: Reinvestigating US Sex Surveys and Research Before Kinsey, 1900-1953. PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2022: 46, 154, 155, 156, 157.
• Andrea Ens. Pain, Pleasure, Punishment: The Affective Experience of Conversion Therapy In Twentieth-Century North America. PhD Thesis, Purdue University, May 2024: 26-7, 47-8, 50-2, 55-6,

Potter's Bibliography