Abstract
In the opening pages of Ann Bannon’s 1962 lesbian pulp novel, Beebo Brinker, executive Jack Mann emerges from the subway on West Fourteenth Street, gateway to New York’s queer bohemia. Musing about recent raids on Greenwich Village bars where “volatile, will-o-the-wisp boys . . . loved him on Saturday and left him on Sunday,” Jack spots a newcomer. The boyish girl searches a travel guide, “comparing what she read to the unfamiliar milieu surrounding her.” Although greeted as “friend” by a passing butch lesbian, the exhausted Beebo realizes that although maps and books have brought her this far, they won’t help her survive in the city. Jack approaches, puts her at ease with a cigarette, and buys her a much-needed meal at a gay restaurant. Later that evening, he will use his queer networks to find this new friend a job and a room. Waving off promises of repayment, Jack explains that gay men and lesbians are never really strangers. “When I first hit New York I was as pea green as you are,” he explains. “Somebody did this for me. . . . This is my way of paying him back. Ten years from now, you’ll do this for the next guy. Fair?” 1
Neither Jack nor Beebo know that by 1970, Greenwich Village—and urban neighborhoods like it across the nation—will no longer be “underground bohemias.” They will even have their own historians. By the 1980s, gay bookstores began stocking works by gay and lesbian novelists, as well as pioneer scholars like Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, and John D’Emilio. These early historical accounts theorized and documented the origins of sexual identity and community in cities, laying the groundwork for a wave of social histories that mapped the emergence of queer public spheres in places like New York, Buffalo, and Philadelphia. 2
These path-breaking studies were methodologically anchored in a social and urban history tradition that digs deeply into a single place in order to establish larger theories about identity and community formation. “What, then, are the relationships between the free labor system of capitalism and homosexuality?” John D’Emilio asked in his classic 1983 essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” Wage labor, cheap travel, and urban anonymity liberated individuals from the nineteenth-century family economy, freeing men and women to migrate to the city, form same-sex households, and name new pleasures. 3 Not surprisingly, typically urban spaces that catered to pleasure-seeking individuals—bars, hotels, and avenues like New York’s Bowery where working people went to play—also became touchstones for new twentieth-century sexual identities throughout the United States. 4
Recently, however, queer history has drawn more heavily on interdisciplinary fields like cultural, media, ethnic, and performance studies than on social history and, as a consequence, has been laying claim to geographies that render the concept of urbanism more complex. 5 Contemporary queer communities may be considerably less tangible than they were in 1962: aside from a few shopping districts, they may exist largely in catalogues and archives, and on Gay Pride websites. As Dianne Chisholm concludes in Queer Constellations, the post-gay liberation city quickly became defined by its relationship to decay and to the subsequent processes of renewal that delivered bohemias to the wealthy. By the 1980s, queer life was haunted by urban “ruins”: deindustrialization, AIDS, and neighborhoods transformed by an ownership society of married, prosperous, nuclear families that are both straight and gay (p. 254).
If the city is now not always queer, and queer history is not always urban, these two fields continue to share a mutual assertion that the built environment matters and sexuality has its own geography. Newer work is also far more attuned to race, as well as to the dialectical relationship between urban queerness and rural, suburban, and small town sexualities. In Same-Sex Affairs, Peter Boag demonstrates that every city exists in a larger queer, multiracial, and international context. Portland, Oregon, anchored a region defined by migratory, laboring bodies, not static ones who carved out queer neighborhoods. Single men and boys who worked on the farms and fishing ships that fed a globalizing economy drifted into Northwestern industrial cities in the off-season for shelter, recreation, sex, and to position themselves for a new season of work. Prior to the emergence of a visible queer community in Portland, the city’s sexual landscapes were, on the face of it, distinctive because they were male, immigrant, and working class.
When these rural and international ties become explicit, queer historians underline a key feature of any urban geography: its multiple, overlapping histories. In Wide Open Town, Nan Alamilla Boyd describes a city defined by empire, existing simultaneously at the northern rim of a colonized Mexican landscape, and at the eastern rim of a migrant Asia-Pacific. In San Francisco, sex became a business by the mid-nineteenth century; by the twentieth century, it was part of a civic plan to market bohemian, sexual, and ethnic communities to a nation of tourists and traveling businessmen. Further south, the sprawl of what is now Los Angeles reveal two very different kinds of queer cities emerging, both structured as much, or more, by political activism and art as by geography, migration, or sex. In Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, Daniel Hurewitz takes us to Edendale, a close-knit neighborhood where left-wing artists created affective political communities that translated, for some, into deeply felt sexual identities. Eric Wat, in The Making of a Gay Asian Community, explores the power of racism to construct, as well as undermine, sexual communities. Departing from ethnically Asian neighborhoods to find love primarily with white men, Wat’s subjects theorize that their partners’ antiracist organizing allowed them to integrate and politicize their racial, gendered, and sexual selves.
Queer history’s new wave is still preoccupied by the metropolis, but by invoking larger historical contexts for the study of sexuality, it also suggests the insufficiency of any urban history that begins and ends at the city limits. This has had a particularly important impact on undoing the notion that pre-liberation queer migrants may have had sexual feelings, but they had no “identities” prior to their arrival in the city. This transformation is even reflected in the work of individual scholars. For example, as the late Alan Berube proposed in his path-breaking Coming Out Under Fire (1990), the military state brought a critical mass of queer people together in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller cities. There, they recognized themselves and their desires. But in his subsequent research, Berube himself decentered the city. Some of his more personal essays, as well as his new research, emphasized that queer people retained a sense of their origins. Demobilization sent queers back out again: to college, to their home communities, back to the farm, and sometimes to married, covertly bisexual lives. And in his unfinished research on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, Berube viewed the ships that only docked in San Francisco as crucibles for a politicized interracial queer community. 6 Historians of the queer city are increasingly providing larger analyses, with the effect that they also force historical attention to go beyond concerns that are strictly urban.
How was the paradigm of queer history as urban history established? By policing sexuality, of course, cities made sexual bodies visible and gave them voice. But urbanists need to look to culture as well. Queer activists steeped in civil rights and other New Left struggles, as well as representations in popular media of the sexual revolution, reinforced the romance that sexual subcultures were primarily urban and that queer identities were “discovered” in cities. Armistead Maupin’s fictional multivolume Tales of the City, begun as a San Francisco newspaper serial in the 1970s and eventually made into a television series, featured gay, lesbian, and transgender people who abandoned boring, limited lives to invent new selves in San Francisco’s queer bohemia. 7 Similarly, Randy Shilts’s biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982), shows migrant queers moving from social weakness to political power under Milk’s charismatic leadership, with San Francisco’s Castro district providing a stage for their civic ambition and activist mobilization. 8
As early as 1993, however, anthropologist Kath Weston questioned that urban–rural dichotomy, one in which country queers were invisible, even to themselves. Queer urban dwellers, she noted, often lived most of their lives “outside metropolitan areas, render[ing] problematic the very concepts of city dwellers and country dwellers.”Abraham Verghese’s memoir of the early years of AIDS epidemic in Kentucky, My Own Country (1995) also underlines this ethnographic insight, since urban migrants infected by AIDS often returned to a rural “home,” one where they knew they would be loved and cherished, when they needed care. 9
More recently, on National Coming Out Day in 2012, southern historian Karen Cox sparked a fury of angry comments when she asserted in a New York Times op-ed that gay, lesbian, and transgender people living in Georgia, Mississippi, and other bastions of small town Christian conservatism lived happy, openly gay lives without discussing their sexuality with neighbors at all. 10 The force with which both cases were made highlights the extent to which much of what we know about queer geography at all is not research based, but highly anecdotal. As in the nineteenth century, contemporary sexual identities may fluctuate, be renamed, and may change their social meanings as individuals move through space, travel between cultural contexts, and situate themselves in different built environments. Peter Boag argues that rural working men of many ethnicities brought their sexual desires with them to Portland, but had sex just as frequently with other men and boys in the hobo camps, fishing ships, and rude male living quarters maintained by their industrial employers outside the city. Boag (who has also written a foreword for a reissue of John Gerassi’s 1965 classic account of small-city gay life, The Boys of Boise) demonstrates that Progressive ideas about political and social order only consolidated around the threat posed by “homosexuality” when these men practiced their “perversions” with Portland’s white men and boys. 11
Not an emerging queer community at all, Portland’s multiethnic North End might be better described as what Kevin Mumford has called a sexual “interzone,” a district where bourgeois white men found erotic, interracial pleasure with their “social inferiors.” 12 But unlike class and racially mixed bohemias (e.g., New York’s Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s North Beach or Los Angeles’s Edendale), the North End was populated by migrant working men, a population that rose and fell with the agricultural and fishing seasons. Using an impressive array of police, prison, legal, and municipal vice commission records, Boag illuminates a city within a city that was populated by rural, not urban, folk (pp. 47, 66–85).
Furthermore, Boag’s queer migrants passed through many landscapes, rural and urban, before arriving in Portland. These turn-of-the-century labor networks stretched across the Pacific and into Mediterranean Europe, south to the fields of California, into the mines of the Mountain west, and northwards onto the Canadian and Alaskan fishing industry. The male transient workers who queered the streets of Portland describe the expansion and contraction of male sexual worlds, not community formation or the emergence of identity through mutual recognition. In this, Boag recalls the panoramic view of Gareth Stedman-Jones’s classic history of the migrant city, Outcast London (1971). 13
Boag reminds us that the idea of queer community is only recently a sign of progress and sexual liberation, and that publicity about the 1895 Oscar Wilde trial gave Portland’s white bourgeoisie a new political language for identifying and condemning perversion. When homosexuality was “discovered” in 1912 Portland, it did not describe the rough erotic couplings of working-class “punks,” “wolves,” and male prostitutes that had always been tolerated, but the purported dissolution and effeminacy of Portland’s bourgeois male reform circles. As Kevin Murphy has also demonstrated, such men were derided as effeminate, corrupt “mollycoddles” who harbored confusing and unnaturally tender feelings for the poor. This, in turn, sparked a call to police public sexuality. White men were shamed and driven from public office; nonwhite men were imprisoned and, for a brief time, castrated to prevent future offenses. Between 1907 and 1926, average sentences for sodomy convictions among working-class and immigrant men nearly doubled. Although the Portland scandal of 1912 originated in a political struggle among white men, by the time it ended, the notion of degeneracy, disease, and “the attendant myth of the homosexual child molester” (p. 221) was firmly established as a problem of the degenerate, nonwhite poor. 14
A key theme for these urban studies is, therefore, the process by which a body becomes gay or lesbian after entering the urban matrix, and how this transformation produces a self. In Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, Daniel Hurewitz proposes a dialectical relationship between spaces and selves: similarly self-fashioned people often choose to live contiguously, while geographical choices make “identity” material, embossing it on the urban landscape. Hurewitz’s book is figuratively structured around two figures who “become” homosexual in quite different ways: the largely forgotten, sexually ambiguous female impersonator Julian Eltinge and the iconic and militantly queer, Mattachine founder Harry Hay. In between, Hurewitz describes the “bohemia” that established itself in Edendale, the southern California bohemia where both men lived (now known as Silver Lake and Echo Park) that exploded from a population of 100,000 in 1900, just prior to the great migration to Los Angeles, to 1.2 million in 1930.
Hurewitz maps the hilly terrain of Edendale as well as the downtown Los Angeles streets where commercial establishments and public spaces played host to gay men. But Hurewitz also sees sexual community as the outcome of an identity formation process that puts feeling, emotion, and political commitments into conversation with same-sex desire. “Community” consolidates complex commitments that go beyond the initial preoccupations of its various members. In this context, the emergence of a sexual identity is, itself, dependent on knowing what identity is. “[Far] from being natural,” Hurewitz writes, “the very notion of a self or an identity—let alone an interior self that you can find—are the products of a distinct cultural moment and intellectual history” (p. 5).
Bohemian Los Angeles takes as its central concern the emerging links between identity and community, as well as the historical events, that eventually made Julian Eltinge impossible and The Mattachine Society possible. In the case of Edendale, where Eltinge moved in the 1910s and Hay in the 1950s, those links were consistently artistic. Edendale residents who were committed to the performing and visual arts created the conditions for bohemian attitudes that also centered sexual freedom, Communism, and antiracist politics. Each of these represented commitments of the self to community. Together, they made it possible to imagine a same sex desire as one kind of commitment that might also anchor broader, deeply felt, and progressive identities. As bohemians, Edendale’s residents collectively invented a modern notion of identity that simultaneously relied on a self that was “private, interior and uniquely idiosyncratic,” as well as “public, political and communally shared” (p. 7).
Bohemian Los Angeles argues for an urban history that is as invested in a geography of ideas and emotions as it is in bricks and asphalt. Tracing Edendale’s growth from a rural community where William Selig moved his Chicago film production company in 1907 to its emergence as a racially integrated, left-wing, Cold War suburb thus requires significant interpretive effort on the part of writer and reader. While Eltinge (who had sex with men but did not identify as the “fairy” or “pansy’ that the law later declared him to be) and Hay (who created the framework for a politicized homosexual identity and embraced effeminacy) provide “bookends,” most of the research focuses on the political and artistic milieu fostered by Edendale’s winding streets and intimate seclusion.
Bohemian Los Angeles does, however, provide the satisfying sexual geography that every queer historian wants in a community study. The public use of the Los Angeles landscape (particularly the details of “96 clubs” and the parks where men cruised) and The Los Angeles Times’ spectacular investigation and series of police campaigns against “perverts” in 1914 provide this critical counterbalance to the focus on Edendale’s social and intellectual life, showing how one neighborhood is linked to a metropolis undergoing transformation. As Hurewitz argues, the gay men of Los Angeles developed “a network or circuit of meeting spots” and commercial establishments across the city during the interwar period (pp. 48–52).
Thus, an idea about “sexual identity” might be incubated in one neighborhood, but spread to others through affective and desiring networks. This is a fascinating argument, but one that sometimes relies on inference and chapters speaking to each other indirectly. For example, Hurewitz’s strongest evidence about the emergence of Edendale as a distinctive community points to art and politics, not sexuality, as focuses for deeply felt processes of self-fashioning. As Edendale emerged as a place for artists to live and work, its residents became known for a “new aesthetic sensibility” in which art was—like sex—intended to spark deep and authentic feeling. This sense of artistic mission was self-consciously cultivated through cooperative ventures, trading, conversation, familial intimacy, sociality, and an aesthetic pragmatism that anchored their work in political struggle. While only some members of the group joined the Communist Party, others joined the John Reed Clubs, and participated in the racial and class politics that dominated the American artistic left between the wars (pp. 77, 113).
Hurwitz implies, similar to Esther Newton’s study of the queer Manhattan theater folk who colonized the beaches of Fire Island, New York, that creative enclaves are semiprotected spaces where politics and sexual identity consolidate themselves beyond the scrutiny of powerful urban political interests. 15 If, by the end of the 1930s when female impersonator Julian Eltinge’s career was undone because “Long-haired radicals and long-haired ‘fairies’ were now perceived as the same powerful enemy force,” Edendale had also consolidated as a community of loyal friends who at least partly sheltered each other from the political storms to come. Communism, antiracist organizing, and art resulted in “politicization of emotional lives and individual essence” and the incubation of intersectional, moral positions from which struggles against an unjust state might be launched. “That notion of analogous minorities,” Hurwitz concludes, “further paved the way for the birth of Mattachine” (pp. 149–54, 185–86, 195, 228).
The idea of the city as embedded in distinct racial, political, and regional spaces also sketches the possibilities for a queer urban history that tells a larger story about the American West. The title of Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide Open Town documents the history of San Francisco’s anything goes atmosphere as a phenomenon of shrewd urban planning, heterogeneous social movements, civil rights organizations, and boosterism. “Queerness,” Boyd emphasizes in her introduction, “is sewn into the [San Francisco]’s social fabric” because of its history “as a frontier town on the far reaches of overlapping empires” (p. 2). By the mid-twentieth century, at least two distinct queer communities had emerged in “Sodom by the Sea” that overlapped, complemented, and sometimes competed with each other. The entertainment industry and bar cultures gave queers a safe location to work, socialize, and launch activist politics; meanwhile, an associational homophile movement emerged as a liberal alternative to pursue normality and decriminalization through lobbying religious, medical, and political leaders.
Over the course of several decades, the two movements were indistinguishable to outsiders. But one of the strengths of Wide Open Town is that each retains its distinctiveness while marking their points of intersection. Activists drew on both business respectability and the queer outlaw subcultures embedded in sexual bohemia to negotiate the safety and political rights of the community. Through trial and error, they learned to play the game of machine politics with San Francisco’s police and civic leaders whose desire for order competed with the economic benefits of the sexual tourist economy.
Most prominently, the story of San Francisco as a queer city is marked by the long history of promoting and regulating alcohol consumption. “In 1890,” Boyd writes, “there was one saloon for every ninety-six residents, the highest proportion in the United States—double that of New York or Chicago” (p. 26). Boyd brilliantly details why the emergence of a multilayered state apparatus—zoning boards, police commissions, and the California State Liquor Board—shaped opportunities for a politics of queer resistance. Businesses, entertainers, and patrons of the sexual entertainment industry combined forces to evade, negotiate, confront, and cooperate with power. Although the political climate increasingly put them at odds with each other after World war II, sexual entrepreneurs, politicians, and the police more frequently teamed up to fleece the wide-eyed tourists who made San Francisco a destination. When the city’s vice districts wilted temporarily under enforcement of the Volstead Act in 1926, city officials promptly barred the police from enforcing the law.
By the 1930s, this former frontier town was “the wettest city in the West,” a place where sexual tourism, prostitution, and nightclub culture helped to “establish a public culture for homosexuals in San Francisco.” Blurring the lines of gender and sexuality for everyone, these businesses were safe spaces for queer socializing and employment (pp. 45–52). Legendary tourist establishments like the Black Cat Café, Mona’s (“Where Girls Will Be Boys”), Tommy’s, and Finocchio’s (“America’s Most Unusual Nightclub”) also became epicenters for queer political organizing in the 1950s, when law and order political campaigns sought to regulate these established businesses by cancelling their liquor licenses and threatening patrons with violence and arrest.
Through tenacity and organizing, bars remained a protected space because of their economic significance and the ways in which they blurred—rather than defined—sexual identity. Queers became tourist entertainment and tourists could be queer—if only for a night. The bars were particularly nurturing for women’s activism, since lesbians adapted savvy strategies for resisting police pioneered by the prostitutes who shared their bars and their beds. In the 1940s, North Beach alone boasted eight lesbian bars; by the 1950s, there were ten. Queer tourism also overlapped with the postwar rebuilding of ethnic neighborhoods, or what Boyd calls “race tourism”: nightclubs like Chinatown’s Forbidden City “attracted a significant queer clientele” (pp. 69–84, 100).
Repression that had begun under military police surveillance during World War II intensified under the Cold War “lavender scare.” Because of their familiarity with urban political culture, when relations between queer businesses and city officials broke down in the 1950s, San Francisco’s activists were ready. 16 Bar owners’ success in fighting for their businesses won new civil rights for patrons as well. In 1951, Black Cat owner Sol Stouman went to court to fight the suspension of his liquor license and won: in the process, homosexuals also won the right to public assembly. Despite increased policing of sexual acts, the rigorous suppression of bar life that had characterized the war and postwar years lifted by 1955, allowing “an urban culture of queer conviviality and sexual transgression to consolidate in the city’s Tenderloin and North Beach districts” ( pp. 92, 122–23).
The homophile groups that flourished in the 1950s Bay Area built on this civil rights framework. Although class distinguished bar and homophile lesbian networks, Boyd argues instead that they represented two sets of political concerns—bourgeois and working class—whose geographies and constituencies inevitably overlapped. The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was concerned with the right to privacy, whereas bar politics had cut their political teeth on the right to public assembly. Bar culture thrived on gender transgression, while homophile politics emphasized the similarities between straight and queer people, and eliminating heterosexual prejudices “that conflated gender transgression with homosexuality.” And yet as it grew, DOB leaders “depended on bar life—the central artery of queer life—for their activities” (pp. 160–79).
Bar owners and homophile organizations also launched a series of successful lawsuits that ended “gayola” payments, transforming the police force from “a protector of heterosexual prerogative (and violence against queers)” to “a mediator of lesbian and gay rights” (p. 201). Queer businesses and social spaces thrived in this new atmosphere, allowing GLBT citizens to emerge as a legitimate urban political constituency. By 1965, it was possible to imagine a movement for “homosexual civil rights” in San Francisco on the radical model established by African American activists in the American South. This, in turn, set the stage for the entry of community activists like Black Cat performer Jose Sarria and Castro Street businessman Harvey Milk into electoral politics, and ultimately for a gay liberation movement modeled on the New Left and the civil rights movement.
As Boag, Boyd, and Hurewitz demonstrate, gay and lesbian identity politics always demand a racial analysis, but this points to one of the great gaps in the field: although each author works hard to illuminate the multiracial quality of urban sexual subcultures, few studies focus on communities of color. When published in 2002, Eric C. Wat’s The Making of Gay Asian Community was the first book-length historical study of a queer Asian American community. Astonishingly, it remains the only such study. While historians like Boag, Nayan Shah, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu document a queer Asian American past, Wat’s work suggests the limits of the word community to define an urban collectivity based on sexual practices. 17 Because of the ways that men and women of Asian descent remained subordinate to the dominant white power structure, a queer Asian community cohered relatively late in Los Angeles, “although gay Asian men have lived here for a long time” (pp. 1–5). As Wat notes, particularly prior to the lifting of racial segregation in the 1960s, an Asian American queer history is simply not visible in the “communities” that are of the greatest interest to many queer urban historians: bars, taverns, neighborhoods, and vacation spots. 18
Wat’s oral histories raise recognizable themes: migration, World War II, transnational sexual formations, queerly coded spaces, and the anonymity of city life all played a role in allowing men of different Asian ethnic origins to self-identify collectively as gay “Asian” men. As Andre Tsing, who was born in China, grew up in Malaysia and Brazil, and attended college at a Catholic university in Texas, recalled, when he first walked into a gay bar: “I realized that’s where I belonged.” When he discovered the Advocate, a queer publication, he recognized himself in its pages: “I felt those were my people, you know” (p. 18). Tsing moved to Los Angeles because the Advocate was published there and, like the other men Wat interviewed, relied on the increasing visibility of gay commercial ventures to support and act on their desire for other men.
Many of Wat’s subjects were actively and openly involved with other boys and men from an early age, but without any particular stigma or name attached to their sexuality. As Wat writes, “in most Asian cultures, sex was not a topic for conversation. Unless one was openly challenging the dominant sexual mores or flaunting his or her ‘deviancy,’ most people tolerated homosexuality with one eye open and the other eye closed.” Bars, where they went to primarily to meet white men, played an important role in socialization and consolidating a queer self that also gendered Asian men as subordinate and feminized. 19 Informant Paul Bautista suggests that this understanding might have been incomplete: “straighter-acting” queer Asian American men might have absented themselves from the racist bar scene (pp. 22–28, 53).
Wat also proposes that racist structures of queer urban life in Los Angeles may have pushed Asian men to choose, or default to, an effeminate sexual persona, when they might otherwise have chosen a more masculine or assertive role. “Their passivity,” Wat concludes in a chapter on L.A. nightlife, “unwittingly reinforced a cultural stereotype, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.” This power dynamic, however, also brought Asian queer men together socially. Mugi’s, an Asian American–owned bar where “rice queens” (white men attracted to Asian men) gathered, was a “cliquish bar,” and one of the few that catered to interracial relationships. When a couple entered together, they tended to split off—not just into racial groups, but also into ethnic groups. “A Filipino would go to a Filipino group, a Chinese to a Chinese group,” a former Mugi’s patron recalled. “But when we left, we left with our lovers” (pp. 64–84).
Thus, Asian American queer community would form every evening, only to be interrupted by the dynamic of the interracial couple. Radicalized by gay liberation, some of these white men belatedly interrogated the racial politics of their own relationships. In 1980, white queer organizer Morris Kight (also a founder of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center) called a meeting of Asian American men and their white lovers in his home. That evening, the small group created Asian-Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG), which still exists three decades later as Asian/Pacific Gays and Friends. Leadership of the organization was gradually taken over by its Asian members and it came to include lesbians as well. 20
Wat’s oral history ends with cohesion and promise, and just prior to the cataclysm of AIDS, whereas literary critic Dianne Chisholm anticipates that moment of trauma. Queer Constellations centers decay and collapse in postliberation sexual politics and culture. Following Walter Benjamin, Chisholm places “queers at the visible and knowable center of thriving urban intercourse where they have, at least clandestinely, always been”; her argument links “scenes of democratizing, casual contact in the theater of collective memory.” These “queer constellations” stand in contrast to fixed geographies. They displace linear history and community mapping in favor of an ongoing dialectic between the present city and its predecessors; between the rise of the city and its decline; between the birth of the modern flaneur and late twentieth century queer urban cruising; between a queer subculture in formation and a hegemonic urban consumer culture shaped and articulated by queer artistic expression (pp. 5–11).
Chisholm’s analysis speaks usefully to one of Boyd’s central themes: that what the modern city sells is not consumer goods or even work, but itself. Queer sexuality thus becomes an essential ingredient to fashioning the urban bohemias that drew bourgeois citizens back to the city after the economic collapse of the 1970s, as residents and as consumers. Centering on the work of Samuel Delaney, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and Sarah Schulman, Chisholm describes queer constellations as “fictions of space.” Urban territory becomes queer because of the way it is used and inhabited by queers, but not because it constitutes a community as social historians might define it. This is a particularly critical, Chisholm argues, since gay and lesbian communities have themselves become part of the engine of gentrification, making neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side safe and hip, and thus opening them to development. “The city of queer constellations,” she writes, “is, queerly, a ‘village’ enveloped in the phantasmagoria of late capitalism” (p. 44).
Chisholm relies on the social histories that have been critical to understanding gay and lesbian bohemias, but writes against them in ways that historians will find useful as they began to imagine the history of the queer city since 1980. Her archive is queer fiction. As she points out, queer urban fiction is inevitably a mix of allegory, autobiography, fantasy and history. Historical events, such as the gentrification of Times Square, and neighborhoods like the East Village often anchor fiction protagonists, who act as the reader’s queer guide through the postmodern city. They map the crumbling institutions that constitute community, such as porn parlors, the Gem Spa, and Tompkins Square Park. They teach norms of citizenship that centers care for strangers and everyday democratic action. In other words, these fictions reveal how to see and inhabit urban spaces queerly, and by doing so promote an alternative to the capitalist development and ongoing urban renewal that proposes to save the city through tourism, consumption, and taxation.
Given the extent to which historians of the queer city have foregrounded the importance of fiction, and later, guidebooks, in helping queer migrants locate the urban communities they seek to join, we might want to make more of the literary methods Chisholm employs. 21 As the migrants in Queer Constellations inhabit queer spaces—bathhouses, bars, public toilets, and streets—Chisholm argues that the direct result of their presence is to cleanse and gentrify the very neighborhoods that first welcomed them. Here, her analysis of Sarah Schulman’s East Village trilogy that culminates in Rat Bohemia (2008) is particularly important. Schulman, who was involved in prolonged copyright litigation against the author and producers of the Broadway musical Rent, has pointed out that this long-running musical’s celebration of the East Village was a critical cultural engine for a redevelopment scheme that pushed its queer, poor, ethnic, and artistic populations out. Purging lesbians—both from the musical and from the East Village—has been particularly crucial to Lower Manhattan’s new consumer bohemia. Chisholm’s fictional New York is “an image of collective memory for socially disenfranchised groups, including sexual minorities” (p. 102). Queer authors trace the palimpsest of urban memories that constitute community, producing a postcapitalist city that both welcomes them and pushes them out. For Eileen Myles, the city is site for trauma; for Samuel Delaney, loss; and for Sarah Schulman, a site of perpetual unemployment and eviction. The city is home, but it is characterized by homelessness, as SROs, rent-stabilized apartments, and working-class neighborhoods are evacuated of their queer residents by the police, landlords, and AIDS and cleared for “middle-class consumption” (p. 227).
By the 1980s, Chisholm points out, “queering space,” meant clearing space—“appropriating the city for middle class living.” Even as the institutions so critical to the mapping of the queer city by earlier generations—gay pride, bars, restaurants, and boutiques—became more visible, they were evacuated of their democratic potential because they represented nothing but consumption. The cataclysms that made this possible were not just conservative backlash and the AIDS epidemic but the rise in urban real estate values that fashionable gay ghettoes inevitably promote. Thus, the queer city is also a palimpsest of memory, performance, and art that is on the brink of being marketed to the next wave of chic urban settlers.
Literary scholars are at their best when producing theoretical perspectives that cause historians to return to material evidence about urban landscapes and rethink it through alternative ideological frameworks. Sometimes, however, Queer Constellations begs for the historian’s heavy hand. For example, Chisholm might have leavened her queer dystopia by including phenomena that actively worked to preserve and take space on behalf of radical democracy: ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and Lesbian Avengers. And Chisholm sometimes ignores or fails to identify which fictional landmarks actually existed and which did not. For example, in the chapter on Schulman, she puts scare quotes around “the Pyramid Club” and “the Clit Club,” implying that those were invented places—when in fact they were anchors of lesbian, gay, and trans sociality in the East Village at the end of the twentieth century.
Investigating the ongoing history of these institutions would have deepened Chisholm’s analysis. By the late 1990s, the Clit Club still existed, but not in any one spot: rather, it had taken to migrating between downtown spaces, moving lesbians between establishments, none of which they were invited to inhabit for more than a night or two, but all of which—like ACT-UP zappers—they own temporarily. The Pyramid Club, on the other hand, still functions at its original Avenue A location as an art space and a club known for its transgender go-go dancers and indie bands. It is a perfect example of Chisholm’s argument about the paradoxes of queer community: the club is one of the few remaining signs of the “queerness” in a bohemian neighborhood largely subsumed by New York University undergraduates (whose gleaming, high-rise dormitories are less than six blocks away), tourists, and heterosexual hipster couples in search of their own bohemia.
In 2013, Beebo Brinker and Jack Mann would find their beloved Greenwich Village a changed landscape, one that has been transformed by the possibilities of queer people moving openly through all spaces and one whose possibilities have been narrowed by the efforts to reverse the decline of the city that was celebrated by authors like Schulman and Delaney. And yet, if Chisholm is right, the evolution of social institutions—marriage, child-rearing, religion—that seem to be normalizing gay, lesbian, and transgendered people may simply be shifting the grounds of what it means to queer the city. We need to look for new geographies—ones that are embedded in larger imperial geographies, as Peter Boag suggests; in more expansive ideas about community and identity formation, as Daniel Hurewitz has sketched; that cross neighborhoods and locate themselves in mixed race terrains, as Eric Wat proposes; and that link broader political and social histories to the emergence of distinctive acts of resistance, as for which Nan Alamilla Boyd has argued. If queerness is at the heart of the modern city, then it may well sketch the contours of a new urban history practice as well.