Abstract
The first thing that should be noted about this book is that it is a good read. With an engaging writing style and inherently interesting topic, Josh Sides takes on the question of how San Francisco “became an internationally renowned bastion of sexual libertinism” (p. 6), something he claims it was not “destined to become” but rather was the creation of “sex radicals.” San Francisco’s place as a leader in sexual and lifestyle innovation has attracted increasing scholarly attention, including recent books by Nan Alamilla Boyd and Martin Meeker, both of whom offer laudatory cover blurbs for this book. Erotic City is written by an historian and offers a narrative history running from World War II to the mid-1990s, with an epilogue on some recent events.
The book implicitly sorts San Francisco history into three periods. The first treats a series of turf wars between respectable business and white ethnic neighborhoods on one side and the sex industry, and to a lesser extent, gay men on the other. The second, marked symbolically by the late-1960s Haight-Ashbury hippie phenomenon at one end and AIDS on the other, embraces a turbulent era of liberalization, institutionalized in law reform and the consolidation of gay and lesbian community organization. The third, most recent period, is given over to a perceptive review of the growth of San Francisco as an international financial center accompanied by spiralling real estate costs, gentrification, and yuppification, and the decline of many of the venues that had given the city its libertine reputation.
My somewhat sociologized typification of these periods does not do justice to the flavor of this book which is packed with stories about police raids, public health campaigns around sexually transmitted diseases, moral entrepreneurs of the left and the right, and unique historical moments like the (often short-lived) Sexual Freedom League, the Psychedelic Venus Church, the murder of Robert Hillsborough, the 1957 Golden Gate Park rapist, or the Gay Shame critique directed against widening class divisions in gay and lesbian communities in the later period. Sides makes good use of public health statistics on abortion and enteric diseases, for example, to give a glimpse into changing sexual practices. Voting statistics on key propositions show how the city was often divided on major issues. A number of turning points occur through court decisions that for some decades allow police to quarantine sex workers under public health legislation, suppress gay bars through licensing regulation, or manage the sex industry through zoning laws. Sides seems sure that “the bathhouses needed to be closed” (p. 178) during the AIDS crisis, though other cities more wisely enlisted them as allies in getting the HIV prevention message out. Through it all is a certain resourcefulness displayed by sex businesses, hippies, lesbians, gay men, and “sex radicals” in evading or resisting the efforts of city administrations. Erotic City is particularly good in countering the view that the evolution of San Francisco was simply a natural process of liberalization, offering lively accounts of the battle lines which included “young neighbourhood toughs [who] physically assaulted and sometimes killed free-loving hippies, gays, and lesbians to punish them for their unorthodox appearance and their ‘faggoty’ behaviour” (p. 7) among the many actors that altogether created the San Francisco of today.
Erotic City was not intended as a sociological treatise—sociological considerations come and go in the historical narrative. Much of this territory has been treated by scholars before either as gay and lesbian history or as the history of prostitution. The inclusion of these two primary domains under the category of the “erotic,” the “libertine,” or the “sex radical” at least implicitly adopts the authoritarian viewpoint of the state, church, and their agents, interested in the control of “immorality” and “deviance.” This category perhaps works best in the early postwar period when gay men, lesbians, and sex workers are denied voice, but unravels as they assert themselves in later periods. The book increasingly must tack between separate treatments of populations that have little in common with each other, and so must also move back and forth through historical periods, as there is no common historical narrative that can bind them together. It also means that lesbians and gay men are treated exclusively in terms of their sexuality, and the public manifestations of it at that, a trend that runs counter to recent scholarly trends that explore the wide range of community and sociality of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) worlds. It is also an historical narrative populated by great, sometimes extravagant personalities—mayors and police chiefs with personal agendas, pioneering sex radicals, and pornographers—and less by global political economy, social structure, race, or class. This analytic tendency is strongest in the early period, perhaps a reflection of the historical documents at hand that likely emphasize personalities, while financial capital comes more into view in the late period with the influx of capital that fundamentally changes the social profile of the city. AIDS is treated rather glibly. Accounting for so complex a phenomenon as the erotic reputation and partial reality of San Francisco is, of course, no easy task. Tourism and migration of new populations to the city come up as potential factors in the larger story, as does technological change (the invention of 16mm film in the 1970s and the attendant pornography booth). The national media (a major topic of the Meeker book) and Hollywood are episodic actors, generating panic about sex crime or the vision of an erotic oasis, sparking a cultural imaginary that seems to have played a role in making the Haight-Ashbury moment, and the idea of San Francisco as a place of refuge for LGBT people. One might now wonder how the Internet is reorganizing much of this, a question too new for this book.
Overall, there is much to recommend in this book and its contribution to the social history of sexualities.