Nights in Fairyland
Gossip, Blackmail, and the Many Lives of “Broadway Brevities”
Format:Paperback
Publisher:McGill-Queen's University Press
Publishing:17th Feb '26
£19.99
This title is due to be published on 17th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The story of a New York City magazine whose obsessive interest in non- conforming sexualities left in its wake an abundance of detail about alternative ways of living and loving.
Drawing on a singular complete collection of Broadway Brevities issues discovered over decades of research, Nights in Fairyland is a rich account of a virtually unknown form of periodical publishing, urban nightlife, queer sociability, and the commodification of gossip in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1925 the publishers of Broadway Brevities were tried for running an extortion operation targeting New York’s social and cultural elites. While the first version of the magazine whispered gossip in columnists’ suggestive innuendo, later incarnations shouted bold accusations in graphic tabloid headlines. On the pages of Broadway Brevities gossip was instrumentalized and urbanized, taking its place among the noisy, sensational features of city life.
The life of the magazine’s long-time editor, Canadian-born Stephen G. Clow, runs through this story, connecting the different incarnations of the magazine and the circles in which they were published (in New York, 1917–34, and later in Toronto). Clow’s career took him from Manhattan’s literary world, in his role as a critic and book publisher, to notoriety as a scandal-mongering editor. Beginning in the 1920s Clow gathered – or fabricated – allegations about high-profile people in theatre, cinema, and enterprise, then threatened to publish unless they paid up. Clow would brag to Time magazine that he was “the most famous and wicked blackmailer in world history.” Broadway Brevities became infamous for sensational, vicious, and lurid coverage of gay life. Despite its mocking homophobia, Will Straw shows, the magazine can today help reconstitute the spaces and places of historical queer life in New York.
Drawing on a singular collection of Brevities issues discovered over decades of research, Nights in Fairyland is a rich account of an overlooked form of periodical publishing and of urban nightlife, queer sociability, and the commodification of gossip in the 1920s and 1930s.
"Nights in Fairyland is the exciting tale of an archetypal gossipmonger with nine lives and the many magazines he published. Will Straw sinks his hooks with gusto into ephemera, trivia, and trifles, extrapolating significance out of cultural cast-offs. Stephen G. Clow's Broadway Brevities is Straw's ultimate flea-market find: a largely forgotten magazine that shows how the cocktail of entertainment journalism got its punch mixing stardom and fandom with rumours and gossip, exposing the often-implied link between showbiz and queer life. Nights in Fairyland fizzes with cultural histories that tickle your tongue as you sip the main story with unusual anticipation." – Paul Moore, co-author of The Sunday Paper: A Media History
"Will Straw is the world's leading expert on Broadway Brevities, a tabloid whose news and gossip columns chronicled essential queer history that would otherwise be lost. This is a book I have long been waiting for, the indispensable study of an important source." – Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer
"Nights in Fairyland is an awe-inspiring work of primary research. Straw unearths entirely novel sources in the Brevities periodicals: widely circulated and influential in their time, they now exist as rare print artifacts that were never collected or archived and have been almost entirely neglected in print culture histories until now. By examining Stephen G. Clow's career, his networks, his magazines, and their imitators, the book documents the rise of the night-life column. Along the way, it elucidates all kinds of unexpected links: between literary circles in Greenwich Village and sensational journalism, between anti-fascism and tabloid publishing, and between Hollywood scandal and New York queer subcultures." – Faye Hammill, University of Glasgow
ISBN: 9780228026594
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown