Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco

This cultural history makes a sound and stimulating case for including the fraught public negotiation of sexual desire in our assessment of the transformation of the postwar urban environment. Sides, professor of California history, in part does for San Francisco what cultural historians like George Chauncey have done for New York: resurrect the semi-hidden antecedents to the flourishing of sexual expression in the 1960s in adult entertainment, prostitution and public performance of sexual desire including among homosexuals (Chauncey's specific subject). But rather than emphasize the way the city shapes sexual identity, Sides is keen to emphasize how public displays of and trade in sexual desire as well as the reaction to them-by individuals, civic leaders, neighborhood organizations, churches and those in the political and legal systems-together fundamentally defined the physical and social shape of the metropolis. This measured, fascinating and politically timely study of sex radicals and their reactionary counterparts, in a city long considered (however accurately) as a haven for libertinism, will prove a vital and welcome addition to the study of urban culture in general and San Francisco history in particular.