The Slide was a large and wicked place – smoky, noisy and packed with hundreds of “male perverts” and “faeries”. Located on Bleecker Street in lower Manhattan, it was one of half a dozen or so “resorts” (dance clubs) in the area where sexual “inverts” gathered to party. Before the cops finally shut it down in 1892, writes historian George Chauncey in his widely-acclaimed social history Gay New York, it was also a mandatory stop for middle class New Yorkers and tourists when they went “slumming”.

Charles Nesbitt, a medical student from North Carolina, visited the city in 1890 and went slumming to The Slide with a friend. First they hit several other clubs where, as Nesbitt wrote in his memoirs nearly 50 years later, “male perverts, dressed in elaborate feminine evening costumes, ‘sat for company’ and received a commission on all the drinks served by the house to them and their customers.” When they arrived at The Slide, they found the “perverts” dressed in male attire.

Fascinated, Nesbitt struck up a conversation with one of the men, known as “Princess Toto”, and thus began a night he’d remember for the rest of his life. To his surprise Toto turned out to be sophisticated and “unusually intelligent.” The two men got on so well in fact that Toto invited Nesbitt to accompany him to a ball at Walhalla Hall, one of many venues in the area that social clubs rented out for their events. What Nesbitt found there amazed him: 500 same-sex male and female couples “waltzing sedately to the music of a good band.” In addition to the male couples there were “quite a few … masculine looking women in male evening dress” dancing with other women. What’s more, everyone in attendance appeared to be of good breeding. Why if you didn’t know any better, he wrote, “One could easily imagine oneself in a formal evening ball room among respectable people.”

Something else about Toto surprised Nesbitt: He made no apologies for who he was. Indeed Toto “… had pretty clear cut ideas about his own mental state and that of his fellows.” Nature had made him that way, he insisted, and what’s more there were many more men just like him. He was proud of the openness which “my kind” refused to deny who they are at places like The Slide. He called them “superior” to the middle class “perverts” who lived uptown and “practice perversion surreptitiously.” “Believe me there are plenty of them,” Nesbitt recalls him saying, “and they are good customers of ours.”

You might say Toto had an early kind of “pervert” pride. It was to become a trend.