Jan Gay: An enigmatic cultural force
The lesbian nudist maverick who defied shadows and challenged cultural norms
In an era when Comstock Laws still clamped down on the dissemination of sexual information and LGBTQ+ identities were forced into the shadows, an out-and-open lesbian named Jan Gay challenged these constraints with her words, actions, and art.
Best remembered as an early nudism advocate who wrote the 1932 book On Going Naked, which was the basis for the subsequent documentary film This Nude World, Jan Gay’s extensive career touched on everything from early sex studies to LGBTQ+ rights and children’s literature, all within an unconventional story that even includes a short stint as roommate to a young Andy Warhol.
Gay’s courage to explore and advocate for the unspoken aspects of human identity helped to carve out spaces of freedom and understanding in an unforgiving landscape and laid down a legacy that, though largely forgotten, continues to empower and inspire.
Early life & family
Jan was born Helen Reitman on Valentine’s Day 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, to American parents Ben Reitman and May Schwartz. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she grew up with her mother in Illinois.
Helen’s father, Ben, is remarkable in his own right. For his work with the homeless and marginalized in Chicago, he became known as the “hobo doctor” and later, “king of the hobos.” He was a political anarchist and a lover and collaborator of radical activist Emma Goldman.
Wikipedia’s entry for Ben Reitman describes some of their activistic exploits:
During this time, the couple became involved in the San Diego free speech fight in 1912–13. Reitman was kidnapped by a mob, severely beaten, tarred and feathered, branded with “I.W.W.,” and his rectum and testicles were abused.[14] Several years later, the couple were arrested in 1916 under the Comstock laws for advocating birth control, and Reitman served six months in prison.1
Ben Reitman’s work included organizing shelters and advocating for social reforms aimed at assisting the poorest sectors of society. He wrote a book titled Sister of the Road, which later became the basis for Martin Scorsese’s 1972 Roger Corman-produced film Boxcar Bertha.
One might assume this environment of activism may have provided the foundational experiences of advocacy that would come to underpin Jan Gay’s lifelong pursuits, but in reality, she and her father were not very close. An online biography on the Gay History Wiki says of their relationship:
Although she and her father lived in the same city in those early years, they did not see each other.2
Whether it was through her father’s influence or not, Helen clearly shared his sense of humanistic justice, and her early interests in journalism and science reflected her preponderance toward speaking the truth. After studying at Northwestern University and the Missouri University of Journalism, she commenced her journalistic career at the Chicago Examiner in 1922.
Helen later worked as a translator for the National Railways of Mexico, a job that came with opportunities for her to travel to Mexico, South America, and Europe.3
Jan and Zhenya
In the late 1920s, Helen encountered an artist named Eleanor Byrnes. This meeting swiftly blossomed into a profound partnership, both personal and professional. By 1927, the bond between Helen and Eleanor was so strong that they lived together in New York City and traveled extensively, marking their commitment by adopting pseudonyms with the shared surname Gay. According to an article written in 2022 for Harper’s Bazaar:
In 1927, to distance herself from her father, she changed her name to Jan Gay—either as a nod to the dual meaning of the word gay, or, more likely, as a reference to her mother’s family. (Gay was her maternal grandfather’s middle name.)4
Together, Jan and Zhenya produced folksy children’s books. Both were often credited as writers, with Zhenya producing illustrations. Zhenya wrote and illustrated more than forty children’s books, the majority of them solo.
“The leader of nudism in New York”
Jan had experienced social nudity in her European travels and wrote about what she’d seen for a book called On Going Naked, which was published in early 1932 and featured illustrations by Zhenya. That same year, she also produced the first known American documentary film on the subject of the growing nudism movement, which was called This Nude World, although it was also distributed under the title This Naked Age.
Both the film and her book featured images shot on a property in Highland, NY, known as the Auchmoody Out-of-Doors Club—also known as Fresh Air Club—one of the first and only official landed nudist camps ever to exist in the state of New York, for which Jan served as Camp Director for a number of years. She was very open with the press around the time she was promoting her book and film, inviting many journalists onto the camp’s grounds to document what they saw. As a result, the club attracted several sensational newspaper headlines.
Gay was also involved in the first assemblies of the International Nudist Conference (INC), which was the organizational seedling that would grow to become the American Sunbathing Association (ASA) and, many years later, the American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR). Due to her formative involvement and prolific advocacy for the burgeoning nudist movement of the era, the Buffalo Evening News referred to her in print as the “leader of nudism in New York.”5
Sex variants
Being an openly lesbian individual during a time when such identities were not widely discussed, Jan became deeply interested in exploring the psychological differences between gay and straight people. Inspired by a visit to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, she embarked on an ambitious project to conduct over three hundred interviews with lesbians across Europe and New York, many through her personal network. Her study had the noble aim of decriminalizing homosexuality in the United States.
Despite her rigorous research, the requirement for medical endorsement to publish her findings led her to collaborate with Dr. George W. Henry.
From Harper’s:
Gay was assigned a chaperone, a psychologist at New York Hospital named George W. Henry. Yet it was her research—and, more specifically, her connections in the queer community—that made the study possible in the first place. In its initial outline, the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants noted that the subjects of its study “were to be obtained through the services of Miss Jan Gay,” adding—euphemistically—that Gay had “close contact with this field for a number of years.”6
Henry was eager to expand the study to include men, and with his involvement, the project gained institutional backing through the “Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, Inc.”7
However, when the work came to be published, Gay found her contributions marginalized. The two academic articles that were published from the study in 1941, titled “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns,” largely overlooked Gay’s foundational role, listing Henry as the author and reducing Jan’s role to an editorial assistant. The study was somewhat groundbreaking, published more than a decade before the Kinsey Reports came along in 1953. This sidelining Jan Gay experienced was indicative of the era’s gender biases, as well as the common challenges faced by LGBTQ+ researchers in gaining recognition for their work.
Queerly influential
In the 1940s, Jan and Zhenya broke up. Jan began dating the dancer Franziska Boas. With Boas, Jan shared a chic apartment in Chelsea, where Andy Warhol rented a room when he first moved to New York from Pittsburgh.
Art historian Blake Gopnik wrote of that time in Warhol’s life:
For several months late in 1949, soon after he’d arrived in New York, Warhol rented a corner of the Chelsea loft that Boas shared with her nudist lesbian partner. It was his first sustained contact with New York’s gay bohemia, and I think it affected him deeply.8
After two decades of fairly public triumphs and failures promoting new and then-radical ideas, Jan Gay had forged a certain progressive impact on the culture that was remarkable, especially given her social station as a lesbian woman in the 1930s and 40s.
Not much is written about the later years of Jan Gay’s life, but she died fairly young, at just 58 years old, in San Rafael, California, toward the end of the Summer of 1960. Her nudist work has been remembered and celebrated within the subculture of nudism, but her work for queer studies and gay rights has been largely forgotten. Though her legacy was partly overshadowed, her story is historically important.
Luckily, it’s not too late to tell the real story of Jan Gay and to rectify her injustice in the muniments of queer cultural history. Through her work, Jan Gay heralded the dawn of a new social movement, ignited new social discourse, pursued study into previously unexplored aspects of human nature, and left a legacy of seeking truth, challenging norms, and promoting greater acceptance. By celebrating her, we can share her truth. 🪐
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Ben Reitman. In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 15, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Reitman
Gay History Wiki. (n.d.). Helen Reitman. Retrieved from http://gayhistory.wikidot.com/helen-reitman
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Jan Gay. In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 16, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gay
Waters, M. (2022, March 2). The Lesbian Sex Researcher that History Forgot. Harper's BAZAAR. Retrieved from https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a39296814/the-lesbian-sex-researcher-that-history-forgot/
Ryan, Hugh (2019-03-05). When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Ibid. Harper’s.
Fehler, B. (2020, Nov-Dec). 'Sex Variants' Were Everywhere. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, 27(6). Retrieved from https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA639993354&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15321118&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E93a94bc7&aty=open+web+entry\
Gopnik, B. (2021, April 21). Sixty years ago this week, pop art went public for the first time. Warholiana. Retrieved from http://warholiana.com/post/649083157044396032/sixty-years-ago-this-week-pop-art-went-public-for
Evan, this is a great article and really expands the life of Jan Gay. Thank you. You mention that her father was Ben Reitman who had a relationship with Emma Goldman. Emma started a progressive school in NYC and had Abby and John Russell Coryell as instructors. Students took co-ed physical education in the nude. John Russell Coryell is reported by a number of nudist pioneers as being the "father of American nudism." Coryell's grandson had memories of Emma visiting their lakeside home not too far north of NYC and going skinny-dipping. Perhaps Jan received some seeding for her nudist interests through her father, Emma, and the Coryells.
Thank you so much for this work! Super cool.