America's First Gay Bar

This is episode 249 - America’s First Gay Bar

While the word gay certainly wasn’t used to connote same sex attraction during Walt Whitman’s lifetime, Whitman DID patronize an establishment at 647 Broadway that today might be considered a gay bar.  And that drinking establishment was known as Pfaff’s - spelled PFAFFs.   I have even heard a Whitman scholar compare Pfaff’s to the disco bar Studio 54.

In fact, Whitman even wrote a brief poem about the bar in his 1861 poem, The Two Vaults:

The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway
As the dead in their graves are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, recking not of them,
Laugh on laughers!
Drink on drinkers!
Bandy the jest!
Toss the theme from one to another!
Beam up—Brighten up, bright eyes of beautiful young men!

The important thing is that Pfaff's provided a welcoming and encouraging place where Whitman could grow in a creative manner when he needed it the most.

Transcript

Hello - this is George Bartley. The episodes of Celebrate Poe for Pride month are about Walt Whitman, and on July 4th, I will begin an additional podcast by the name of Celebrate Whitman - sort of a spin off of Celebrate Poe.  Not surprisingly, that podcast will deal with Walt Whitman in much greater detail - a deep dive into Whitman’s cosmic perspective and how he captured the spirit of democracy through his groundbreaking verse. Join, me, George Bartley as we  explore Whitman’s impact on our culture.”  So, starting in July of 2024, Celebrate Poe is scheduled for every Monday, and Celebrate Whitman is scheduled for every Thursday.  

But for now - Welcome to Celebrate Poe - this is episode 249 - America’s First Gay Bar

While the word gay certainly wasn’t used to connote same sex attraction during Walt Whitman’s lifetime, Whitman DID patronize an establishment at 647 Broadway that today might be considered a gay bar.  And that drinking establishment was known as Pfaff’s - spelled PFAFFs.   I have even heard a Whitman scholar compare Pfaff’s to the disco bar Studio 54.

In fact, Whitman even wrote a brief poem about the bar in his 1861 poem, The Two Vaults:

The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway
As the dead in their graves are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, recking not of them,
Laugh on laughers!
Drink on drinkers!
Bandy the jest!
Toss the theme from one to another!
Beam up—Brighten up, bright eyes of beautiful young men!

I just finished reading an excellent book called Rebel Souls by Justin Martin - The book is not specifically about Whitman, tho his picture is on the cover.

The book is about Pfaff’s and its Bohemian clientele, and deals a great deal with Whitman because he frequently the establishment so much.

  Actually, Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859.  And the support that Whitman received from the regulars at Pfaff’s were especially important to the writer when he was down on his luck.

Under the low-hanging ceiling of Charles Pfaff’s Manhattan beer cellar, Whitman drew inspiration from what one contemporary called “the trysting-place of the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York,—journalists, artists, and poets.”

From about the mid-1850s to just after the end of the Civil War (give or take a few years), Charles Pfaff’s in midtown Manhattan was a gathering place for a group of New York City writers and artists who attempted to recreate the bohemian lifestyle of Paris’s Latin Quarter that Henri Murger had chronicled in his 1851 book Scènes de la Vie de Bohême.  That phrase - la vie Boheme might be familiar to those of you who have seen the movie Rent - whose characters could be considered modern Bohemians.

The leader of the group at Pfaffs, often referred to as “the King of Bohemia,” was Henry Clapp, Jr., a former antislavery and temperance activist from New England who, upon returning to the United States from a trip to France in 1850, renounced his allegiance to social reform movements of any kind. Instead he set up a Parisian-style salon that included intellectuals, utopianists, artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, and actors, along with the occasional banker, politician, and even police officer. Henry Clapp Jr. was also the founder and editor of The New York Saturday Press, a literary weekly that served as the organ of the Pfaff’s crowd. One of many articles celebrating the bohemian lifestyle that Clapp ran in The Saturday Press described Pfaff’s as “the trysting-place of the most careless, witty, and jovial spirits of New York,—journalists, artists, and poets.

But not all of the denizens of Pfaff’s were “careless, witty, and jovial.” Scholars and biographers have noted for many years that Whitman came to Pfaff’s at a low point in his life. After both the 1855 and 1856 editions of the poem collection called Leaves of Grass failed to catapult its author to literary stardom, Pfaff’s was a place where Whitman could retreat from the public eye and lick his wounds. Clapp’s relationship with Whitman has long been regarded as an important chapter in the publishing history of Leaves of Grass, with Clapp’s advocacy for Whitman in the pages of The Saturday Press contributing significantly to the success of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860. Scholars have recognized for years that Clapp and The Saturday Press (if not the Pfaff’s scene in general) got Whitman back on his feet and put Leaves of Grass on the map.

Now, Walt Whitman spent his childhood and early adulthood amid the sights and sounds of New York City. As a young man Whitman worked as a journeyman printer for several New York newspapers, before ultimately becoming a journalist and editor in his own right. Before committing himself to poetry, Whitman also worked as a schoolteacher, a carpenter, and a writer of sensational prose fiction. In 1855, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, the book of poems that defined his career as a poet; he hoped that Leaves of Grass would take the literary world by storm. While there was a flurry of attention that surrounded the initial publication of his book–including positive appraisals by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton – Whitman did not achieve the immediate fame that he had hoped for. When he released a second and expanded edition of Leaves of Grass the following year that similarly did not catapult him to immediate literary stardom, he withdrew from the public eye for a number of years before releasing the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860.

It is during this period of Whitman’s life that he began frequenting Pfaff’s bar - in other words, he was really down on his luck. If the literary mainstream failed to recognize Whitman’s genius, the Pfaff’s bohemians were able to give him the moral and intellectual support he needed. Later, in the pages of the New York Saturday Press Whitman was acclaimed as “The New Nebuchadnezzar” of American poetry and made the focus of more media attention than any other writer mentioned in the Press.  In fact, many scholars believe that Henry Clapp reviewed Leaves of Grass given his role as editor of the Saturday Press and his commitment to promoting Whitman's poetry.

Whitman, like several other bohemians, experimented with the boundaries of human sexuality while at Pfaff’s. As Ed Folsom and Ken Price write in their biography of Whitman, “It was at Pfaff’s, too, that Whitman joined the ‘Fred Gray Association,’ a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection”

Whitman left New York and Pfaff’s in 1862 to work in the hospitals of the Union Army in Washington, D.C., during the U.S. Civil War - a period that I will delve into later. Whitman llived in Washington in the years following the War and eventually settled across the river from Philadelphia in Camden, New Jersey, where he spent his twilight years receiving visits from fans and admirers of his poetry. On an August day in 1881, however, Whitman returned to Pfaff’s – now relocated uptown on twenty-fourth street – to visit with Charles Pfaff and reminisce about the bohemian days. When Whitman arrived at Pfaff’s he said that the proprietor “quickly appear’d on the scene to welcome me and bring up the news, and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar, talk about the good ole days t and the jovial suppers at his then Broadway place, near Bleecker Street”

In “A Visit to Walt Whitman” (Brooklyn Eagle. 11 Jul. 1886), Whitman enthused:

“I used to go to Pfaff’s nearly every night. It used to be a pleasant place to go in the evening after taking a bath and finishing the work of the day. When it began to grow dark Pfaff would politely invite everybody who happened to be sitting in the cave he had under the sidewalk to some other part of the restaurant. There was a long table extending the length of this cave; and as soon as the Bohemians put in an appearance Henry Clapp would take a seat at the head of this table. I think there was as good talk around that table as took place anywhere in the world. Clapp was a very witty man. Fitz James O’Brien was very bright. Ned Wilkins, who used to be the dramatic critic of the Herald, was another bright man. There were between twenty-five and thirty journalists, authors, artists and actors how made up the company that took possession of the cave under the sidewalk. Pfaff himself I took a dislike to the first time I ever saw him. But my subsequent acquaintance with him taught me not to be too hasty in making up my mind about people on first sight. He turned out to be a very agreeable, kindly man in many ways. He was always kind to beggars and gave them food freely. Then he was easily moved to sympathize with any one who was in trouble and was generous with his money. I believe he was at that time the best judge of wine of anybody in this country.”

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the bar was how the Bohemians who frequented Pfaff’s bohemians shaped American culture:

The bohemians of antebellum New York published regularly in the daily newspapers, literary weeklies, and monthly magazines that proliferated throughout the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. Writers and artists at the beginnings of their careers published in periodicals as a way to build their reputations and attract the attention of book publishers. A number of the periodicals that began during this period, such as The New York Tribune and Harper’s Monthly, became very successful and continued to be published well into the twentieth century.

 And the homosexuality?

Well, I mentioned that it was at Pfaff’s that Whitman joined the “Fred Gray Association,” a loose confederation of young men who seemed anxious to explore new possibilities of male-male affection. The name was from one of the members, a young man named Fred Gray, the son of a doctor, who went on to become a doctor himself in the Civil War. Among those in the association were Gray, Hugo Fritsch, who was the son of the Austrian consul, and Nat Bloom, who became a successful merchant, and eventually had a store on Broadway.

Now, When Whitman started frequenting the saloon, he was thirty-nine years old. He stood roughly six feet, tall for the era, but weighed less than two hundred pounds. His hair was cut short, a salt-and-pepper mix of brown and gray. His beard was trimmed. Only later would he put on weight, the wages of stress and illness and advancing age. Only later would he grow his hair long and let his beard go thick and bushy.

But he was already an eccentric dresser. Whitman favored workingmen’s garb, such as his wideawake, a type of broad-brimmed felt sombrero. He liked to wear it well back on his head, tilted at a rakish angle. His trousers were always tucked into cowhide boots. He wore rough-hewn shirts of unbleached linen, open at the collar, revealing a shock of chest hair. Whitman had a rosy complexion, almost baby-like, and quite incongruous for a big man. Because he was meticulous about hygiene, he always smelled of soap and cologne. His manner of dress often struck people as more like a costume. Or maybe it was a kind of armor, protecting the vulnerable man underneath.

It has been suggested that instead of calling Pfaff’s a “semi-gay bar” it might be more accurate to refer to it as a “semi-adhesive” bar — “adhesiveness” being a term from phrenology, that popular 19th-century pseudoscience that enchanted Whitman, as well as Poe - tho we certainly don’t have any evidence that Poe was gay.  But personally I think that Edgar Allan Poe - especially when he lived in New York City - would have been rather tolerant and not had any problem with same-sex attraction. 

When Whitman first began visiting Pfaff’s, he was in an “adhesive,” serious relationship with a young man named Fred Vaughan, nearly two decades the poet’s junior.  By the way, adhesive was a common term during the period of same-sex relationships. Whitman and Fred Vaughn lived together on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn and would often sit at the same table in Pfaff’s larger room. Vaughan was among the first people Whitman showed his coveted, now-famous letter of encouragement from Emerson.
Now - I am going to veer off the subject of Fred Vaughn for a minute to try and explain the importance of that letter of encouragement from Emerson.

Imagine that you were Whitman - and you received what has become one of the the most famous and encouraging letters written by a literary mentor
to a mentee ever published in the 19th century.  The great Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter of encouragement to Walt Whitman in response to Whitman sending him a first copy fresh off the press of “Leaves of Grass.”
And Emerson wrote this:
"Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves
of Grass."
I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom
that America has yet contributed.
I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.”

A little further down, Emerson wrote:
"I give you joy of your free and brave thought.
I have great joy in it.
I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be.
I find the courage of treatment which so delights us
and which large perception only can inspire.”

And here's the most famous line:
"I greet you at the beginning of a great career.

And Emerson goes on to write that until he saw this book advertised in a newspaper, he couldn't imagine that it had come from an actual post office.
It seemed to him somehow beamed from a region not precisely of this earth.

So Whitman was extremely encouraged to continue writing.  Unfortunately, the romance between Fred Vaughn and Whitman soon ended.  You see, Fred Vaughan had reached an age when society expected him to find a proper mate, that is, a woman.

Vaughan ended up getting married and settled into a rather conventional life. He worked a series of jobs such as insurance salesman and elevator operator and with his wife raised four sons. He also became a terrible alcoholic. In the early 1870s, after roughly a decade of silence, Vaughan reconnected with Whitman, writing him several letters, one of which includes the following heart-rending passage: “I never stole, robbed, cheated, nor defrauded any person out of anything, and yet I feel that I have not been honest to myself — my family nor my friends.” In the letters, Vaughan never spells out the source of his anguish. Perhaps it was the result of living in a state that felt unnatural to him.

In conclusion, I hope that you understand a little bit more how this bar or watering hole was an important part of Whitman’s world - not only to his social and sexual life - but also to his literary development.

Join Celebrate Poe for episode 250 - Whitman and the Civil War, and learn the dramatic story of how the Civil War affected Walt Whitman’s life.  From what I understand, reaching 250 is a real milestone in the life of a podcast, and I want to thank you for downloading and subscribing to Celebrate Poe. 

Sources include: The Complete Works of Walt Whitman, especially Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman by Ivan R. Dee, Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman by James E. Miller, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life by Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, What Is the Grass by Mark Doty, and the Walt Whitman Archives edited by Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.