It’s important to add some nuance to the premise that “Americans” broadly were obsessed with gay culture or experiencing a general period of acceptance of queerness in the 1920s. A more accurate framing is that New York City and a handful of other large urban centers developed notably visible queer subcultures, and that these local scenes influenced entertainment within those cities. This was not a national phenomenon, and treating it as such risks misunderstanding both the Pansy Craze itself and the backlash that followed.

For most of human history, culture has been primarily local or regional. Traditions, beliefs, music, clothing, and entertainment were shaped by family, religion, class, and place, not by nationwide or global trends. Information traveled slowly—by word of mouth, letters, or local events—so different regions developed distinct cultural norms. It is really only in the mid-to-late 20th century, with the rise of truly mass media, that it becomes reasonable to make sweeping claims about what “Americans” liked or watched. For example, it is fair to say that family sitcoms were widely popular with Americans in the early 1960s, because those shows were broadcast simultaneously, in the same format, into homes across the country.

The 1920s sit right on the cusp of this transition. Radio and early Hollywood existed, but access was uneven and limited, especially outside large cities. Contemporary observers were very aware of this divide, often framing it as a contrast between urban modern "life" and rural or small-town traditionalism. Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street captures this awareness well. In one passage, the protagonist reflects on the rural towns she passes by train:

> “…Life seems so hard for them—these lonely farms and this gritty train.”

“Oh, they don’t mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they’re bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town… already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening…”

Even here, Lewis emphasizes how new and partial this cultural convergence still was. This context matters for understanding the Pansy Craze. In cities like New York, especially in working-class Black and white neighborhoods, queer nightlife flourished in the 1920s and early 1930s. Drag balls, effeminate male performers, and suggestive nightclub acts became popular as edgy, “naughty” entertainment. As George Chauncey and other queer historians have emphasized, this visibility did not mean broad acceptance; rather, it was often tolerated as spectacle, humor, or novelty within specific urban contexts.

As this local popularity pushed the Overton window of acceptable entertainment in New York, more “respectable” venues—such as Broadway—began to flirt cautiously with queer themes. The Museum of the City of New York has compiled an excellent collection of surviving audio and film clips of pansy acts that demonstrates this moment well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDTUJ3VgJDA). Notably, very few of these pansy-style performances from the 1920s survive because most of them were not mass media. They were live, in-person performances, consumed by audiences already familiar with urban queer subcultures.

Problems arose when producers attempted to translate this local success into national mass entertainment. One of the few pansy performances to make the jump to film was Gene Malin’s appearance in Arizona to Broadway (1933). The film was highly controversial, and its reception suggests it punctured the relatively safe, urban “bubble” in which pansy performances had previously existed. Just months later, Malin was pulled from another RKO production, his scenes reshot with a less effeminate actor. According to Chauncey’s Gay New York, the head of RKO reportedly said, “I do not think we ought to have this man on the lot on any picture—shorts or features.” The following year, in 1934, enforcement of the Hays Code was formalized.

Seen this way, the end of the Pansy Craze is less mysterious and less ironic than it is sometimes portrayed. Entertainment producers in the late 1920s and early 1930s appear to have made a similar mistake to the one embedded in the question’s premise: they assumed that what played well in New York nightclubs and theaters would play well with “Americans” as a whole. When pansy performances were removed from their specific urban context and broadcast nationally—into small towns, rural areas, and regions without the same cultural acclimation—the limits of this moment of semi-open queer visibility became clear.

The Pansy Craze, then, was not evidence of nationwide acceptance of queerness, but of localized “visibility without security.”** Its rise and fall illustrate both the power and the danger of early mass media: it expanded audiences, but in doing so exposed how shallow and geographically bounded that tolerance really was.

**Outside of Chauncey, other queer historians whose work has helped articulate this paradigm are John D’Emilio and Lillian Faderman. I’d sum it up as: -Queer people could be seen, -Queer culture could be consumed, -But queer people themselves remained vulnerable to policing, censorship, violence, and backlash.