Chauncey notes that, until the 1930s, authorities would often take a hands-off approach unless gay men's presence moved beyond the category of harmless spectacle. In Part II, Chauncey describes how gay men produced the space of an urban 'gay world.' They turned to semi-public spaces as zones of security, such as local YMCAs, boarding houses, and cafeterias. Chauncey argued that this developed as an anxious response to working-class sexual practices (bottom-up influence on culture) and middle-class male anxieties over their own manhood. In contrast, a growing middle class during the 1910s and 1920s turned to sexual preference to develop a heterosexual identity of masculinity in which 'queers' (middle-class equivalents of 'fairies') were defined by their attraction to men. In this way, working-class masculine men, particularly sailors and laborers, could have sex with effeminate 'fairies' yet not be considered 'gay' (provided they were the one doing the penetrating). In this world, the later homosexual/heterosexual binary was not yet in force, and men were defined on the basis of their masculinity or femininity rather than the sex of their sexual partners. George Chauncey uncovers a previously hidden ' gay male world' in New York City before World War II, a world that had been lost through the myths of 'isolation, invisibility, and internalization.' Instead, the world Chauncey describes is a vibrant and surprisingly visible gay culture between 1890-1940.

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