CRAZE
by Margaret Vandenburg
Jaded Ibis Press. 248 pages, $17.99
THE PREFACE to Margaret Vandenburg’s latest novel, Craze, is the opening paragraphs of a 1933 article in the weekly tabloid Broadway Brevities under the headline: “6,000 Crowd Huge Hall as Queer Men and Women Dance at 64th Annual Masquerade.” The article goes on: “Queer people … are increasing. Dances are their big social events. … Most of the ‘women’ in attendance at the orgies are men in disguise. The majority of the people in tuxedoes are female.”
This introductory material promises a rollicking, rowdy, colorful tour of speakeasys and balls crowded with queer people living through the Prohibition and Depression eras in New York City—a promise that the novel mostly fulfills. The “Craze” referenced in the title is, the narrator explains, the “queer craze” that coincided with the “Jazz Age,” known for speakeasys, the Harlem Renaissance, clandestine mob-owned gay bars, and huge balls where drag kings and queens rubbed shoulders with the hoi polloi and “slummers,” i.e., New York’s rich movers and shakers out sampling forbidden pleasures. “We accommodated ourselves,” Henri says, “to a world that largely left us alone.”
Hank Trout, a frequent contributor to these pages, is the former editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.
