cover image Queer Sites Gay Urban History Since 1600

Queer Sites Gay Urban History Since 1600

. Routledge, $39.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-415-15898-5

Discussions of ""gay geography"" and ""gay space"" have recently become popular both in and out of the academy. David Bell and Gill Valentine's Mapping Desire, Aaron Betsky's Queer Space and Queers in Space, edited by Gordon Brent Ingram et al., laid the groundwork for sophisticated new discussions of sexuality, public space and privacy. Higgs's collection of seven original essays revealing the history of same-sex activity and community in Paris, Moscow, Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco fills in the gaps left by the more theoretical earlier works. The contributors, all academics, draw upon the disciplines of history, sociology, urbanology, public policy, gender/sexuality studies, anthropology and sometimes even literary criticism to delineate how physical topography, economy, customs and daily life shaped and have been shaped by the presence of clearly defined and socially acknowledged same-sex populations. Most of the pieces here are engaging and provocative, if occasionally unconvincing. Ralph Trumbach's description of a sodomitic ""third sex"" in 18th-century London radically reinterprets familiar material and uses gender as well as sexual activity as focal points. Dan Healey's analysis of Russian drinking habits and arrests in Moscow public men's rooms in the 1940s is strikingly original. Too often, however, exacting scholarship gives way to generalizations and easy assumptions, particularly in Les Wright's delineation of San Francisco's history. While this is a serious flaw, it is offset by the fact that these essays map a mostly uncharted field of study. Illustrations. (June)