Jan Gay

Jan Gay (born Helen Reitman, 1902–1960) was a German-born American journalist, author, activist, and researcher.

She is known for her pioneering research on the realities of gays and lesbians in 1930s Europe and the US, conducted as part of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants. Previously, she had visited Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.

Gay was also a relevant early figure of nudism in the US, a topic on which she wrote the essay On Going Naked (1932) and the script of the documentary This Naked Age (1932). 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 mended their fraught relationship.

Early career Gay worked several different jobs in her early career. She started reporting for Chicago's Herald-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.

Research The Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, which Gay visited and inspired her to pursue her research, was destroyed by Nazi authorities and its library burned down in 1933. 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. Over the next ten years she 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. His work exploring and studying homosexual cases without the commonly held disdain for it could have intrigued Gay and influenced her choice to collaborate with him. The personal stories collected in the Sex Variants Study, which revealed that a lot of subjects were not ashamed and were even proud of their identities, 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. and Gay moved to California. Gay died in 1960 at the age of 58.

In media Jan Gay and the Sex Variants Study play a key role in Justin Torres's 2023 novel Blackouts. 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 Gay's work has long been erased from modern understandings of queer history. Books Essay On Going Naked (1932, 1940). Translated to Spanish as Andando desnudos (1996). Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) (only credited in acknowledgments)

Children's books Pancho and His Burro (with Zhenya Gay) (1930) The Shire Colt (with Zhenya Gay) (1931) The Goat who Wouldn't be Good (with Zhenya Gay) (1931) The Mutt Book (with Zhenya Gay) (1932) Town Cats. A Book of Drawings (with Zhenya Gay) (1933)