User:TerrenceLY/Jan Gay/Purplelily21 Peer Review

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This is a very strong article overall! You provide substantial information in a concise, easy to follow manner. Additionally, the entry feels complete and not like there are any sections missing. You have a lot of compelling sources to support your entry and its notability, which is important. There are a few areas I've marked that could be improved, for grammar, word choice, or clarity, but overall I feel like this is a strong draft. I've left comments in parenthesis and in bold. Let me know if you have any questions! - Sara

Jan Gay (born Helen Reitman, 1902-1960) was an American (Is she described in sources as only American? Or saw herself as American and not also German?) journalist, author, activist, and researcher. Her pioneering work with Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Science and her efforts as a member of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants throughout the 1930s helped bring awareness to the lives of gays and lesbians throughout the world.

Gay was also the author of many children's books, as well as a treatise on nudism On Going Naked. She died in 1960, at the age of 58, in California. (Good lead section! Includes necessary information while being concise/not too long)

Early life[edit]
Jan Gay was born Helen Reitman on February 14th, 1902 in Leipzig, Germany to parents Ben Reitman, an American physician, gynecologist, and anarchist who is known for being one of Emma Goldman’s lovers, and May Schwartz, an American musician. Reitman abandoned Gay and Schwartz when Schwartz was still pregnant in 1901, a decision that Reitman expressed regret for over the years despite the fact that he and Gay never amended their fraught relationship. Schwartz was institutionalized when Gay was a child, and Gay was raised by several of her mother’s relatives in the midwest.

She legally changed her name to “Jan Gay” in 1927. According to her half-sister, the name “Gay” was taken from a maternal grandmother. It is also speculated (Might help to clarify who speculates this) that she chose the name “Gay” to allude to her lesbianism, given that her name change took place around the time that the word “gay” started to become adopted by homosexuals.

Early Career[edit]
Gay worked several different jobs in her early career. Her professional life started in reporting for the Chicago Examiner in 1922 after she completed her education at Northwestern University. She then moved on to work for the National Railways of Mexico in the late 1920s as a secretary and translator, traveling to places in Mexico, South America, and Europe. It was also around this time that she met Eleanor Byrnes (Zhenya Gay) and the two together wrote and published a set of children’s books called The Shire Colt.

While in Europe, Gay grew a strong interest in the practice of nudism and wrote a book titled On Going Naked (1932) about her nudist experience in Europe. The book included photographs of nude people that Gay took during her time there, and was later transformed into a documentary titled “This Nude World” which Gay wrote the script for. According to Gay, “human bodies are phenomena no more spectacular than trees.” The book was said to generate a hit in the United States (Wording here sounds a little awkward, maybe was said to be a hit?), and Gay was credited by the Newspaper (What newspaper?) at that time as “the leader of nudism in New York.”

Research[edit]
In the 1920s, Gay grew a strong interest in the study of homosexuality. After visiting “Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin” and learning the methods to conduct a questionnaire on sexuality, Gay embarked on her own career in research and over the (change to the next ten years or take out the) ten years garnered over three hundred interviews with lesbians in Europe and New York. The survey included both the participants’ general life experiences and their homosexual experiences. Yet, to get published, Gay was forced to have medical backing to reassure (reassure doesn't sound right here. Maybe confirm?) her research, which led to her ultimate selection of Robert Latou Dickinson as her research collaborator. Dickinson in the 1920s and 30s was a strong medical advocate for for birth control. His work on exploring and studying homosexual cases without the commonly held disdain for it could have intrigued Gay and influenced her choice to collaborate with him. Dickinson saw a potential for Gay’s homosexual research to perhaps enlighten new ideas about heterosexuality. He not only agreed to launch a “large-scale medical investigation of homosexuality,” therefore certifying Gay’s work for publishing, but also gave her money to start it. Yet, in the process of applying for further sponsorship from the maternal health committee, Dickson failed to gain approval from the majority of the members who did not see this research in line with the committee's overall objectives. This disapproval led to Dickinson's creation of his own committee called “the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants.” In the process of recruiting members for the committee, psychiatrist George W. Henry was eventually assigned as Gay’s research director.

Gay’s sex variants study moved to include men when she met Thomas Painter, another homosexual researcher, who was studying male prostitution. With his connections to the homosexual world, Painter joined her study. The two of them then gathered a group of lesbians and homosexual (maybe gay men instead) men to conduct interviews. The interview included questions about participants’ personal lives, work experiences, sexual habits, and perspectives on homosexuality. The participants’ narratives revealed shared experiences and struggles as being homosexuals which were previously hidden in the medical field. One of the participants Ellen T., an artist, stated “In the beginning I was very silly about homosexuality. Never for a moment did I think it was anything very wrong…. I know now that that is stupid.” In addition to interviews, Henry also conducted medical examinations on the participants to assess their physical masculine and feminine traits. The result turned out to counter the conventional belief that homosexual people would display physical traits opposite to their biological sex, as Henry reported that four-fifths of the male participants display masculine traits such as athletic physique and broad shoulders.

In the process of research, Gay gradually lost control of the study and was barely mentioned in the acknowledgments of the final publication of the research. Henry concluded the study that homosexuals are “socially maladjusted individuals who could not adapt to social laws and conventions,” and could be prevented through a set of “occupational, psychiatric, and institutional treatment.”  Yet, despite Gay’s initiative being appropriated and the research data being maneuvered to fit the medical experts’ goal of displaying homosexuality as a social problem to be solved, Minton, the author of Departing from Deviance, argues that Gay’s effort still held considerable significance to homosexual activism. The personal stories collected in the Sex Variant Study which revealed that a lot of homosexuals were not shamed and even proud of their identity were significant to the self-attitudes of other gay and lesbian readers of the era, thus serving as a powerful counterpoint to Henry’s negative attitudes towards homosexuality in the study.

Personal Life[edit]
Gay was openly a lesbian, and her identity informed her research interests. She had a long partnership with illustrator Zhenya Gay (born Eleanor Byrnes). The pair lived in New York City together and collaborated on a number of children’s books, as well as the book On Going Naked, which promoted their love for nudism. By the 1940s, Gay and Zhenya had split up. According to Gay’s close collaborator on the Sex Variants study, Thomas Painter, Zhenya was the one who “left” Gay. In the 1940s, Gay had a relationship with dancer and activist Franziska Boas. Her relationship with Boas ended in 1950, the same year that Boas moved to Rome, Georgia, and Gay moved to California. Gay died in 1960 at the age of 58.

In Media[edit]
Justin Torres’s 2023 novel Blackouts tells the story of an older man named Juan Gay who discovers a copy of “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” Distressed that Jan Gay’s contributions to the study have been largely sidelined, Juan enlists an unnamed narrator to complete her work. Torres’s novel acknowledges and attempts to correct how Jan Gay’s work has long been erased from modern understandings of queer history.

References[edit]

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