Quotes from Jim Elledge

She—Sometimes you appear really manly and sometimes you are effeminate. How do you account for it? He—I suppose it is hereditary. Half of my ancestors were men and the other half were women.

Like the sodomite, "normal" men looked and acted like any non-queer man in Chicago, and so they too fit seamlessly into, and went unrecognized by, society. The investigator did learn, however, that they had a way of recognizing each other, often wearing red neckties to signal to others in the know that they were queer.

Young, socially liberal women whom society called flappers and their male counterparts, labeled sheiks, crowded the cabarets where jazz was performed.

there seemingly is not race distinction between them." But African Americans weren't the only disenfranchised people these men noticed. Vollmer recalled "a preponderance of Jews and the Latin Nationalities" among the revelers, adding, "Many of the men are of Polish blood." With more than a tinge of disdain, he concluded from his observation that "homosexuality is no respecter of races.