File:Clagsweekspost20.jpg

Cartoon of clerk fixing his hair. Caption: "A Counter-Part." Published 1910; postmarked July 29, 1911. Identification on back "S 116."

In this card, an effeminate clerk in a dry-goods store fixes his hair while customers go unattended; his vanity and the needs of consumer capitalism are implicitly at odds. As early as 1860 a parody of Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" attacked the poet by picturing him as a "weak and effeminate" dry-goods salesman or "Counter-jumper," an occupation thought suitable for only the most effete of males (see Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (NY: Crowell, 1976), p. 655 n. 133). Another reference, of 1868, refers to a song titled the "Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store," by Will S. Hays, a female impersonator (cited on the published sheet music of Hay's "Mistress Jinks of Madison Square," NY: J. I. Peters, 1868, in the collection of Marshal Weeks). This is one of the earliest documented uses of the word "gay" in relation to an effeminate man. Research Request: The earliest documentation of the word gay being used for men who desire sexual contact with men occurs in [?].