Abstract
In the 1990s, a spate of queer community histories defined the growing field of queer history. “Queer in Blank” is how I cleverly, or so I thought at the time, described it in my favorite graduate paper title. These community histories were in conversation with, and received productive support from, the field of urban history. Indeed, urban history led the way as a platform for queer history, where other specialties have been content to leave queer histories to other disciplines. The books under review here revive the community study with refreshing research and methods. Christina Hanhardt and Timothy Stewart-Winter focus on community and queer politics, while Julio Capó, Jr. explores a tourist community created by a booster-led urban identity. These three authors demonstrate that urban queer studies are not just about finding queer in this place or that, but how a place makes queer happen.
Urban historians have long recognized the importance of political action in transforming the city and its infrastructure. In his 1998 review of the field, Timothy Gilfoyle identified a necessary chaos caused by interdisciplinarity and cultural analyses. Safe Space, Queer Clout, and Welcome to Fairyland are the result of a refusal to allow urban history to cling to the commonplace—the sweeping urban narrative. Queer history disrupts traditional notions of urban growth by mooring politics and urban neighborhood development to a creation of queer space. As Gilfoyle noted, the city itself is chaotic. The books reviewed here support that. 1
Hanhardt’s Safe Space examines queer activist responses to urban violence from the 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In spite of the concern over bicoastalism in queer studies, Hanhardt argues that a focus on San Francisco and New York is appropriate for the study of anti-queer violence because it is in these two cities where we find the most organized and earliest development of anti-violence movements. While she acknowledges the limits of the city as a focal point of queer research, and the potential for normalizing urban space as the best and truest space to understand queer experiences, she makes the case for the “centrality of the city” in Safe Space. The city serves as a “critical nexus for analyzing how politics, policy, and property have indelibly shaped LGBT social movements” (p. 11). Hanhardt and Stewart-Winter both establish cities as fruitful sites to understand queer politics and its focus on anti-violence.
Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of Safe Space. Hanhardt acknowledges her plan to “mix” metaphors and methods while purposely making “the road bumpy” to avoid a progressive history, or even a narrative with a tidy endpoint (p. 19). The result is a history of gay people and their relationship to the concept of neighborhood, not simply “Gay Neighborhood History” as the subtitle suggests. She produces a community study at the neighborhood level by demonstrating the fluid relationship between gay and neighborhood while exploring the broad urban context that defines the queer political actions taking place. Marrying neighborhood politics to queer identities defines queer urban history as an integral part of urban history, not a separate endeavor. Safe Space locates the point at which neighborhood anticrime movements and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights intersect. Through a wide-ranging examination of queer activist responses to violence, Hanhardt provocatively identifies violence as both crucial to the LGBT political movement in the 1970s, and the “defining feature” of gay visibility. Her approach demonstrates that there is no singular narrative of queer politics.
In the richly detailed first chapter of Safe Space, a focus on pre-Stonewall (homophile) activists in 1960s San Francisco allows Hanhardt to show how activists who recognized the intertwined nature of those left out of the city’s narrative—gay, drug user, poor—harnessed this alignment of marginalized peoples to claim access to urban support structures. For example, homophile activists eager to fight inequality and “take on the violence of poverty and the police” utilized President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Economic Opportunity Act program (p. 41). The rhetoric of this Great Society program called for involving poor in conversations on economic development, which led to collaborations between gays and other social minorities. Hanhardt demonstrates that this collaborative approach would not survive in the coming decades.
The first neighborhood block association based on sexual identity included members from the short-lived organization Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals (SMASH) organized in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in 1976. Hanhardt claims that members of SMASH and similar safe-street patrols in San Francisco set the stage for generalized assumptions about queer violence. This brand of “militant gay liberalism began to assume hegemonic form and . . . at its center were issues of violence, safety and neighborhood” (p. 84). SMASH focused on anti-gay violence and recognized the political “power of neighborhood” as they ultimately defined a plan for safety that would exclude “people of color–including those of LGBT identity” (p. 115). As queer activists worked to take back their streets, Hanhardt shows a bumpy path to the power of safe neighborhood space, which became safe for some while excluding others—defining safe within the confines of gentrification and neoliberal economic policies.
When Hanhardt turns to lesbian activist groups who challenged gentrification she keeps her methodological promise by refusing to build a tidy narrative. Lesbian activists like the antiracist Lesbians Against Police Violence (LAPV) in San Francisco challenged the whiteness of queer anti-violence campaigns, by recognizing “that police violence is selectively used against lesbians and people of color—in particular, lesbians of color” (p. 137). In analyzing the Boston black feminist group, the Combahee Collective, she moves beyond Safe Space’s geographic limits, to focus on lesbians of color who produced “foundational analyses that would be taken up by small organizations across the country” (p. 121). In doing so, Hanhardt presents challenges to the dominant white gay male narrative found in safe-space campaigns, which were increasingly tied to the process of gentrification. The primarily lesbian members of Combahee recognized the intersections of “racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class” advancing the needs of black women and working to free them from fear (pp. 125-27). Neighborhood anti-violence movements like SMASH led to the prioritization of safety through the economic benefit brought by white gay men. This process, Hanhardt demonstrates, excluded minorities, vulnerable queer people, transgender women, and queer minorities, and led activists to rail against these groups as generalized threats to neighborhood safety.
Hanhardt and Stewart-Winter both locate pre-Stonewall militancy among gay activists. Their work makes a strong case for a long and occasionally fluid queer rights movement because they unsettle the lingering and popular obsession with claiming Stonewall as a beginning for the LGBT movement. Both scholars refute the notion that homophile activists were unwilling to confront violence, demonstrating that Stonewall was not spontaneous but born of leftist actions in the 1960s that coalesced in the 1970s. In Queer Clout’s Chicago, there was not a definitive split between homophile activism and gay liberation but rather a continuity. Stewart-Winter demonstrates that post-Stonewall gay liberation was built with homophile ideas and by those activists themselves.
Exploring queer activism in conversation with Chicago’s political urban history, Stewart-Winter moves from the 1950s to the rise of Barack Obama in Chicago politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Cities provided fruitful ground for black and gay community development and the gay movement flourished in Chicago because gays and blacks, and necessarily queers of color, were concentrated there. By linking gay politics and black civil rights, in particular the black media’s willingness to highlight gay rights as a civil rights issue, Stewart-Winter adds layers of racial analysis often lacking in gay history. He is explicit about the need to expand the reach of gay history beyond its bicoastal focus, arguing that Chicago is more representative of the average “regional Gay magnet” city, a claim that some scholars are sure to contest (p. 4). Yet, “gay rights were won in the cities” and Queer Clout richly supports this claim (p. 10).
In Chicago, as in pre-Stonewall San Francisco, black and gay political interests were often linked. This merger continued beyond Stonewall throughout the 1970s as gays openly entered politics in the Chicago Democratic Party and gained support from black politicians and the black press. Queer activists mirrored Civil Rights-struggle models set up by black Chicagoans and forged a coalition between black and gay activists focused on police violence that ultimately led to support from black politicians. Black political interests and gay political interests ideologically bonded the two groups in opposition to the Chicago police. For example, the New Deal ideology of breadwinner liberalism increased attacks on gay night clubs and African Americans, as the heterosexual white male’s need to provide for a family played a substantial role in post-Depression politics. This emphasis marginalized both queers and African Americans as deviant. Queer Clout demonstrates that in spite of the Cold War sex panics of the 1950s, it was a freer period for queer people in comparison to the increased policing, especially in the form of bar raids, of the 1960s. The arrival of the 1968 Democratic Convention in the city only increased the raids on gay bars and black neighborhoods. Gay militants were turned on by the organizational model of the Black Panthers, as the homophile organization Mattachine Society in Chicago followed the Panthers lead in policing the police (pp. 87-88).
As queer historians continue to produce new and exciting work in the field of AIDS, Stewart-Winter effectively shows why the urban relationship between the politics of AIDS and the city matters. In late twentieth-century Chicago, neighborhoods that received AIDS services were predominately white and gay, whereas the few city services that existed ignored black, Latinx and poor neighborhoods. The AIDS crisis emphasized the disparities in access to services and resources, with Chicago’s North Side wealthier and whiter neighborhood residents receiving the most support and “those treated in public hospitals” like Cook County Hospital on the West Side, receiving lesser care (p. 206). This meant that queers of color and those in poverty suffered the most. In detailing the story of AIDS and Chicago’s black politicians, Stewart-Winter brilliantly weaves together the 1980s mayoral administration of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor and a supporter of gay rights, with the arrival of AIDS in the city. Washington’s untimely death and the ensuing political wrangling demonstrates the importance of queer history to urban progressive politics. Washington’s gay-rights ordinance survived his death, but so did his problematic health commissioner, who he intended to let go from his administration. Uninformed, quick to spout incorrect information, and prone to scare tactics when discussing AIDS, Washington’s health commissioner, Lonnie Edwards, cost Washington’s successor the critical gay vote (pp. 199-200). Political links between black and gay interests broke down as the city turned its investment toward white gay enclaves and gay activists moved away from policing and crime, politically vital for non-whites, to AIDS and then marriage equality. In the final chapter of Queer Clout, aptly titled “Gay Economic Muscle,” Stewart-Winter traces the exemplary record of the African-American U.S. Senator Carol Mosely-Braun on gay rights, and notes the rise of U.S. Senator Barack Obama, whose Chicago roots were “critical to his perception of gay rights as an extension of black civil rights” (p. 230). Continued black political support of urban gay rights remained crucial, but the alliance largely benefited the wealthiest and whitest queer constituents in Chicago.
Both Safe Space and Queer Clout move close to the historical present in their narratives, while Welcome to Fairyland stands in contrast to the other two works under review in geographical focus and its early-twentieth century time period. Yet Capó’s Fairyland is also a work of urban politics, as he situates his work in the limited historiography of the queer American South uncovering acts of daily resistance in a pre-political era, prior to the queer activisms of midcentury. Presenting Miami as a different kind of urban space—a border town without an industrial revolution—Capó paints Miami as a queer frontier “challenging dominant meanings of urbanity, the frontier, and the U.S. South” (p. 16). According to Capó, the “next urban history” should be transnational, shifting “urban history’s focus outward and away from the insular” (p. 7). Miami operated as a “tropical extension of the Caribbean” (p. 8). Those that traveled there as a destination and those that crossed the border for work found a city that welcomed gender transgression and sexual exploration.
Because of its colonial past Miami’s identity and traditions were “constantly in flux,” as developers worked to define the city (p. 25). In the early twentieth century Capó describes the city as a sexual tourist center hosting an underworld where different forms of “deviant” sex were tolerated at various levels, depending on race, gender, and class. In fact, Miami’s economic development relied on the cultural racism of Jim Crow and a “segregated, sexual underground” as a space for queer development, especially for nearby Bahamians who migrated to the city (p. 59). Migrants who were heavily scrutinized, labeled as more sexually perverse, and perceived as hypersexual and extremely masculine, found work in the city and participated in acts of queer sexuality. Based on selective race and class belief systems local law enforcement and government officials policed sexual behaviors and inadvertently defined a queer frontier. Urban boosters developed Miami with a commitment to tourists and white respectability. Indeed, the city offered a clean slate to white Protestant settlers seeking to reinvent themselves.
Building fairyland meant that boosters staged the urban landscape for wealthy tourist performances of gender as black and brown bodies served as “‘props’ on the city stage” (p. 127). Gender-bending on the performance stage would be acceptable as entertainment but if acted out on the street, law enforcement would police the behavior as criminal. Within respectable confines, urban anxieties could be escaped, transgression would be expected, and hedonistic pleasures could be explored in fairyland. White privilege allowed for this “tropical dandyism” within city limits, but it was not always accepted outside of Miami, as Capó demonstrates in recounting the tale of a traveling queer elite from Miami who was greeted with disdain at a Dallas, Texas, hotel (p. 118).
Miami’s frontier image allowed some white elite women to move beyond the domestic sphere and build independent lives. Progressive-Era ideologies gained a foothold in Miami buoying white feminist reform and political organizing as spaces like the YWCA offered the opportunity for same-sex intimacies. Capó’s captivating discussion of the white feminist Marjory Stoneman Douglas as a gender–transgressive New Woman in Miami serves as an excellent example of white women’s politicization, especially important to document in the Progressive-Era South. As boosters continually worked to sell the image of Miami to wealthy tourists, the sun-worshipping “Miami mermaid” became a symbol of white beauty standards, creating a space for privileged women to come and explore body and desire through risqué and modern bathing suits (pp. 225-27). The mermaids promoted the dominance of heterosexual women in the city while challenging the mannish New Woman. Like many of his chapters, Capó’s exploration of women and Miami’s heterosexual consumer culture will work beautifully as a stand-alone upper-level course reading for undergraduates.
Miami experienced a massive urban transformation in the 1920s and 1930s. This revolution, coupled with the city’s entrenched relationship to the Caribbean, leads Capó to adopt a “necessary transnational view of Prohibition-era politics” in his analysis of this period. He argues that “queers made fairyland work,” during and after Prohibition, because they performed the labor of “keeping Miami profitable” while also making the city work as queer space for themselves (p. 235). Relying on a General Index to Criminal Cases for Dade County, Capó reveals queer working-class life, recorded as crimes against nature, vagrancy, sodomy and oral sex. Queer sexual behaviors and problematic racial identities were policed selectively as they intertwined with Miami’s booster-built fairyland persona. Tourism depended on liberal sexual interpretations and freedoms, which allowed for queer spaces and queer work especially during high season. Reading carefully for silences and innuendo, Capó’s Fairyland serves as a research how-to guide for scholars looking to unearth queer life before Stonewall. Mining personal newspaper clippings, fiction, and anecdotal writings of a Miami Herald newspaper columnist, he locates nightclubs with queer patrons who faced police harassment in the 1930s and finds traces of feminine men and sex workers.
In crafting Miami, boosters promoted the oh-so-queer moniker of fairyland to welcome tourists and their dollars. Understanding this created identity is integral to finding queer life in early twentieth-century Miami. To understand post-midcentury politics in Queer Clout’s Chicago—especially black Democratic politicians—we must unpack the relationships between queer and black politics. And to know the queer activisms of neighborhood safety campaigns in Safe Space’s San Francisco and New York is to witness the whiteness and privilege of safety for some, at the expense of the vulnerable non-white other. The moneyed power of white gay men, and some white women, allowed them to move beyond black and brown political alliances and vulnerabilities. In Miami, white elites and tourists enjoyed space for queer lives prior to Stonewall built on the backs of black and brown residents. In San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, queer youth activists of color and impoverished neighborhoods were left behind.
Capó, Hanhardt, and Stewart-Winter demonstrate how the nuance of the city, its history, and its neighborhood development are bound up in queer activism and identity building. Importantly, racial analysis is at the heart of each inquiry. Black and queer are not necessarily separate, and historians must be mindful to avoid presenting these as divided identities. 2 Stewart-Winter brings important research to the question of queer people of color, noting that “black queer Chicagoans” moved between “two ghettoes,” one black and the other gay. (pp. 103-04). In Hanhardt’s exploration of the Combahee River Collective and the activist queer youth of color organization FIERCE, we witness the power of whiteness as a tool to silence subjugated queer people. In Capó’s Fairyland, readers are invited to witness the shifting intersections of race, privilege, and sexuality again and again as Miami boosters worked tirelessly to build the exotic and erotic playground.
As scholars work to include queer experiences in the traditional history survey course, these books offer superb teaching opportunities. 3 For example, Hanhardt and Stewart -Winter present black activists as leaders and models for white queer activists far beyond the traditional dates of the midcentury Civil Rights Movement, where we know that homophile activists participated and trained for their own actions. For Capó, LGBT identity labeling does not take center stage because his research occurs prior to homophile organization formation at midcentury. By using queer as a blanket term, he easily includes lives at the queer margins more fully, even as he notes the privilege of white and queer identity for upper-crust women and men as tourists and residents in Miami. This offers an excellent tool for explaining to students the historicization of the language of queer identity.
Political histories occasionally silence individual stories, but Safe Space and Queer Clout bring characters to life. Lesbians and queer women play a role in each of these projects, although in Chicago women’s activism is understood primarily through the gay male world. All three books make an argument for separate inquiries and approaches to lesbian history because of their placement of lesbian and queer women’s life as separate chapters. In other words, to find queer women’s activism as all of these books do, looking to different sources and utilizing different approaches will produce further and fuller work on queer women’s urban lives. 4 Each of these scholars offers excellent examples of how to research queer life outside of mainstream power networks.
At the recent inaugural Queer History Conference (QHC), the growth of queer history from a once nascent field, where white scholar-activists toiled outside of the academy to uncover primarily white gay lives, was on full display. No longer simply recuperative but now vital to other “traditional” fields of history, queer scholarship is driven by a clear recognition that urban space is where we find queer activism, even as the rural, suburban, and remote are also recognized in current research. With all three authors fully engaged at QHC, the conference, like their research, represents the chaotic body of work Gilfoyle imagined—moving queer urban history beyond the confines of its recently siloed past.