Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2002"

Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist

Abstract: In North American and European cities, gay and lesbian residential and commercial zones have become increasingly visible to and visited by the public at large. Although this trend could readily be attributed to the success of gay civil rights movements and the recognition of gays as a niche market, it has been accompanied by other forms of urban transformation, notably the commodification of space related to a growth in tourism and a shift toward an entrepreneurial form of urban governance. As secondary U.S. cities such as Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portland, Oregon, compete to lure footloose capital in the financial, information, and high-tech industries, they seek to market themselves as centers of culture and consumption. To stake a claim to cosmopolitanism, one of the most desirable forms of contemporary cultural capital, many emphasize their ethnic diversity. In a growing number of instances, “queer space” functions as one form of this ethnic diversity, tentatively promoted by cities both as equivalent to other ethnic neighborhoods and as an independent indicator of cosmopolitanism.1 The popular press reinforces the queer cachet, noting the gay quotient of clubs and neighborhoods in explorations of the “geography of cool.”2 In an article that serves as a tour guide to the international club scene, highlighting places frequented by “both gays and straights” in European cities such as Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam, Roger Cohen writes that in Berlin, “a cooler note” can be found at the Greenwich, where

Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization

Abstract: While I was in Trinidad and Tobago in February 1998, a curious incident set off a series of conversations about the often tense relationships between the interests and effects of globalization and postcolonial gay and lesbian identities. After the Cayman Islands, a British territory, had refused docking privileges in December to a so-called gay cruise originating in the United States, several other Caribbean governments expressed the intention to refuse the same cruise ship and those that might follow. The local Caribbean media engaged in no editorial discussions or debates about the cruises but merely printed press releases from Reuters and other global wire services. Caribbean Cana-Reuters Press reported that, in the Bahamas, a ship with nine hundred gays and lesbians on a cruise arranged by the California-based Atlantis Events had become a “test for the tourist-dependent Caribbean islands after the Cayman Islands refused the ship landing rights.” Officials from the Cayman Islands said that gay vacationers could not be counted on to “uphold standards of appropriate behavior.”1 Islanders had apparently been offended ten years earlier when a gay tour had landed and men had been seen kissing and holding hands in the streets. A U.S.-based gay rights organization now called on the British government to intervene. British prime minister Tony Blair did so and determined, in the case of the Cayman Islands (dubbed by Out and About, the leading gay and lesbian travel newsletter, the “Isle of Shame”), that codes outlawing gays and lesbians, many of which have descended from colonial legislation, breach the International Covenant of Human Rights and must be rescinded.2 U.S. officials followed suit, insisting that human rights had been violated.3 I watched with confusion, hopeful that both former and current British possessions would tell Blair and the United States to mind their own business, but aware of my ambivalent solidarity with Caribbean activists.4 Some activists, rely-

Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the "Third Gender" Concept

Abstract: We come to this discussion from anthropological experience as well as from personal transsexual experience. As the self-conscious subjects of our own inquiry into how anthropologists and transidenti* ed individuals alike use transgender-native models, we are ultimately invested in ensuring careful, responsible representation of individuals outside our culture. We are simultaneously committed to supporting transgender/transsexual scholarship, representation, and activism. If a common complaint among trans individuals is that their lives and identities are violated and misrepresented for the goals of scholarship, then it behooves us to make sure that we do not commit the same o/ ense against others for the goal of political advancement.

Mardi gras tourism and the construction of sydney as an international gay and lesbian city

Abstract: The capital of New South Wales is the oldest and largest city in Australia, and probably its best known. It is a vivid, busy, brash semitropical city built around the spectacular Sydney Harbour with its famous icons of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. It has a large gay and lesbian community which holds international standing particularly through the world-famous Mardi Gras held each year at the end of February. 600,000 people watched the 1993 Parade and 20,000 people partied till dawn (and much later) in the spectacular costume party, the world’s largest gay party. A visit to Mardi Gras is an absolute once-in-a-lifetime must for every gay travelling man. . . . Sydney is the gay capital of the South Pacific. —Bruno Gmunder, Spartacus: International Gay Guide (1995)

De Ambiente : Queer Tourism and the Shifting Boundaries of Mexican Male Sexualities

Abstract: Do you know Mexico?” coyly poses the opening page of Mexico’s official tourist Web site.1 Do you? Perhaps not. This is not a Mexico of social inequality, economic turmoil, indigenous uprisings, and mass emigration. No, this is a different Mexico—a sexy Mexico. Additional headers entice the reader to “come, feel the warmth of Mexico,” where “beaches are such as moods: bays that with happy smiles, beaches that spread in straight line, as to remind its steadiness, female beaches, smooth and with cadence, frisky beaches, that open and close, decline and go up” (grammatical errors in original). The sexual imagery of the Web site leaves the (presumably heterosexual) reader with a coquettish frustration and a desire for more than a virtual tour can provide. While it may seem otherwise, Mexico’s flirtation with tourists is not limited to straight travelers. In fact, the nation has become a major destination of gay and lesbian tourists, particularly Americans, in a growing global tourism industry. In turn, its ambiente [homosexual subculture] is undergoing its own transformation, intimately linked to queer tourism.2 The purpose of this essay is to examine two sides of queer tourism “south of the border”: the development of gay and lesbian tourism in Mexico and the effects of this industry on Mexican sexualities. I should state up front that I refer to “gay and lesbian tourism” as an identity-based industry and to “queer tourism”

HOMOSEXUAL EXISTENCE AND EXISTING SOCIALISM New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Stalin's Russia

Abstract: Queer historians and activists have a peculiar relationship with the history of the Soviet Union. It is a relationship that has been shaped by Cold War politics and the rise, initially in the Anglo-American world, of the gay liberation movement. For activists on the left, the knowledge that the world’s first socialist state proclaimed a radical sexual politics has served as a talisman and guide. The decriminalization of male homosexuality, in the form of sodomy, in early revolutionary Russia was one of the sweeping changes to criminal, family, and property law that marked the coming of the Bolsheviks to power. The comprehensive clearing away of the tsarist regime’s religious and reactionary regulation of sexuality has been presented as the benchmark of an enlightened sexual politics. The same viewpoint interprets the Soviet government’s recriminalization of sodomy during 1933–34 as one feature of the “reactionary trend” accompanying Joseph Stalin’s rule, a degeneration from Vladimir Lenin’s (or Leon Trotsky’s) presumed legitimate socialism.1 Our narratives also present the Soviet reversal on male homosexuality during the troubled 1930s through the prism of international relations. This perspective draws heavily on the work of the Freudian and Marxist sex reformer Wilhelm Reich, who in 1936 published an indictment of the repression of Soviet homosexuals.2 The antihomosexual drive was in this view a response to the supposed discovery of espionage networks run by Nazi Germans infiltrating homosexual circles in Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities. The handful of Soviet

Situating Sex: Prison Sexual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract: One of the most important insights in the history of sexuality has been that “sexual identity”—the notion that the direction of one’s sexual desire determines and reveals the truth of the self—is a relatively recent production. Most historians locate the formation of modern Euro-American sexual identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Around this time, so the argument goes, sexual acts became newly constitutive of identity: what one did, and with whom, came to define who one was. In Michel Foucault’s famous words, “The nineteenthcentury homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, . . . with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”1 During the last fifteen years or so this insight has become a guiding truism, a mantra even, for historians of sexuality, inspiring work that highlights the alterity of sexual systems remarkably different from our own, as well as explorations of the emergence of this new “species” in the relatively recent past. But some sexual acts and actors confound this historical narrative. Practices associated with certain sex-segregated spatial settings—prisons and other carceral institutions, the armed services, boarding schools—and performed by those who understand themselves and are understood by others as “normal” or “heterosexual,” stand in an awkward relationship to sexual identity formation as outlined by historians. Apparently unmoored from identity and resistant to the taxonomic pressures of the twentieth century, these sexual acts and their practitioners can seem curiously outside time. The term that evolved by the mid–twentieth century to describe same-sex practices produced by circumstance, architecture, and environment, situational homosexuality, aimed to distinguish these practices from a “true” or authentic homosexuality, presumed to have a somatic or psychic origin.

Madrid en Transito : Travelers, Visibility, and Gay Identity

Abstract: In the tourist’s snapshot quoted above, Spain—surrounded by superlatives— moves ahead on a global map of advances toward progressiveness. In this map, the “flowering of gay life” is perceived as evidence of historical progress; through the eyes of a gay tourist, Spain proves to be, finally, contemporary. The figure of gay and lesbian tourists “coming out” to the world combines travel and politics in an explicit way. Gays and lesbians traveling around the world as gays and lesbians reveal a map of democracies where it is increasingly conceivable to claim gayness as a way to move across spaces and borders. Gay tourism functions, in this sense, as an articulation between discourses of political rights and transnational displacements in a landscape where national borders are currently being reformulated in both their symbolic and their practical effects. In this context, the gay tourist emerges as a cultural role, a persona that combines travel, social progress, and politics in new ways. “The tourist is one of the best models available of modern man in general,” Dean MacCannell pointed out in the opening pages of his classic text, The Tourist.1 For MacCannell, the tourist represented one of the purest specimens of industrial society, a figure who allegorized the tension between the present of modern society and its touristic outsides. This pure representation is no longer a totalizing figure: in recent decades the tourist as the “modern man in general” has been persistently challenged by alternative narratives and gazes, one of them that

Russian Gays/Western Gaze: Mapping (Homo)Sexual Desire in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: When the first English edition of Ivan Bloch’s Sexual Life in England, Past and Present appeared in 1938, the publisher seemed to feel obliged to explain why a book on England written by a German should be translated at all: “Readers might justifiably wonder why any publisher in this country should issue a history of English morals written by a foreign author.” The answer, he continued, “is as simple as it is surprising. No comprehensive history of English morals in the English language has ever been published.”1 Until the late 1980s the same could be said of sexual life—in particular, homosexual life—in Russia, where the Soviet regime “repressed sex as a cultural language and commercial practice.”2 Widespread “sexophobia,” if not explicit homophobia, created conditions both institutional (homosexual activity was illegal from 1934 to 1993) and attitudinal that were adverse to public discussions and representations of same-sex desire. In 1989 the mother of a homosexual boy complained in a letter to Literaturnaia Gazeta that she could find little information on the subject in the medical literature. “Why,” she lamented, “is science silent?”3 This broad repression of sexual discourse produced a variety of silences that complicates any attempt to map the landscape of male (homo)sexual desire in the Soviet period.4 This task has been further complicated by the rarefied Cold War climate that made discussions of sexual life in Russia especially susceptible to Western fears and fantasies. “During 74 years of Soviet rule,” writes Donovan Hohn in a review of contemporary Russian fiction, “Russia became a fantastic landscape in the American imagination, home simultaneously to Pasternak’s snow-covered dachas and Solzhenitsyn’s gulags, to gray-suited apparatchiks and gray-haired babushkas, to ballerinas and beautiful, murderous spies.”5 The few Western scholars who took on the topic of homosexuality in Russia during the Soviet period

Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys, and Graceless Women: French Colonial Constructions of Vietnamese Genders

Abstract: Strollers: Two beings walk up the street, placidly, with tiny steps. They take each other by the hand and window-shop in every storefront. Their costume is bizarre, escaped from some comic opera. Red bands circle the calf, above the bare ankle and foot, with close-fitting pants and a billowing shirt from which hang two large red ribbons. The head, of which one sees only a black chignon, is topped with a small-brimmed red hat. Strange girls? Little savages on parade? But no, it is two infantrymen out strolling. —Jean d’Estray, Pastels d’Asie

Homoland: Interracial Sex and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israeli Cinema

Abstract: Narratives of biracial sexual unions are common in Israeli cinema, from the early Zionist cinema of the 1930s to today. Among them are Sabra (dir. Alexander Ford, 1933), My Michael (dir. Dan Volman, 1975), Hide and Seek (dir. Volman, 1980), Hamsin (dir. Daniel Wachsmann, 1982), Drifting (dir. Amos Guttman, 1983), On a Narrow Bridge (dir. Nissim Dayan, 1985), The Lover (dir. Michal BatAdam, 1986), Nadia (dir. Amnon Rubinstein, 1986), Ricochets (dir. Eli Cohen, 1986), Lookout (dir. Dina Zvi-Riklis, 1990), and Day after Day (dir. Amos Gitai, 1998). In the Israeli social psyche, miscegenation gives rise to fears of racial, sexual, moral, physiological, and national decay and degeneracy, because it poses a threat to Jewish “purity” and dominance and so fuels the desire to maintain the binary oppositions between colonizer and colonized, “civilized” and “savage,” Israeli and Palestinian.1 Specifically, sexual relations between a Jewish woman and an Arab man (as opposed to those between a Jewish man and an Arab woman) evoke the greatest fears for Jewish racial purity, inasmuch as the Jewish woman, and not the Jewish man, is the origin of Jewish identity: hence the strict religious and cultural prohibition against such relationships. This anxiety, as an indicator of the sexual activity of the Arab man, pathologizes him as a sexual deviant, a criminal, and a barbarian. The Arab man, as the Israeli member of Parliament Rabbi Meir Khanna put it in his racist diatribes of the early 1980s, threatens “to steal our wives and daughters.”2 The Israeli female body is perceived in this context as national property beckoning to the enemy within. Like the “primitive” male other, the woman is seen as a threat to the very existence of the Jewish nation. Anxieties about racial sexual hybridity arise from the desire to reinforce racial dichotomies. Yet the very existence of those dichotomies indicates the mutual dependence and construction of Israeli and Palestinian subjectivities. The Jewish

Rome's World Pride: Making the Eternal City an International Gay Tourism Destination

Abstract: World Pride was an international gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) event that took place in Rome in early July 2000 during the Vatican’s Jubilee, commemorating two thousand years of Christianity. Just one of many millennium celebrations around the world, the Jubilee was meant to call attention to the very reason for the date itself: that Jesus Christ had been born two thousand years before. Millions of Catholic pilgrims arrived in Rome in 2000, many in the summer during Italy’s peak tourist season.1 World Pride’s name suggests a reaching out beyond Italian borders, but Rome was specifically chosen as the host site because it is the nerve center of Catholicism and the Jubilee would take place concurrently.2 World Pride’s planners hoped to bring about improvements in the Roman and Italian gay and lesbian communities as well as to stimulate increased gay and lesbian tourism to Rome in order to sustain the momentum of change.3 The planners hoped also to open a dialogue with the Catholic Church and induce it to change its anti-GLBT stance, thereby affecting the gay and lesbian community throughout the world.4 World Pride sought to bring together components of the gay and lesbian community from around the world to achieve these goals. Yet there were clearly distinct categories among the gays and lesbians at World Pride. Westerners, characterized by consumerist Americans and northern Europeans, represented one end of this spectrum. At the other end, perhaps less visible overall, were gays and lesbians from the developing world, many of whom were able to come because of the sponsorship of Western organizations. This essay examines how these communities interacted during World Pride. One of the event’s goals was to infuse ideas from the global gay and lesbian community into the local Roman value system. This local change would then be projected out again globally both by participants

HOMOPHOBIA, VICHY FRANCE, AND THE “CRIME OF HOMOSEXUALITY”The Origins of the Ordinance of 6 August 1942

Abstract: On 26 April 2001, toward the end of a long speech given at the dedication of a plaque in memory of Georges Morin, a member of the French Resistance during the 1940–44 German occupation, the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, made a remark that took his audience by surprise: “It is important that our country fully recognize the persecutions perpetrated during the Occupation against certain minorities, [whether] the Spanish refugees, the Gypsies, or the homosexuals.”1 With this one sentence Jospin thrust into the news an issue that had been of little interest to anyone besides French gay activists, who had been demanding official recognition for almost three decades. In addition, only three weeks earlier, on 6 April 2001, a representative of the French secretary of state for veterans’ affairs had received a delegation of gay activists and promised them that the government would set up a historical commission to investigate fully the fate of French homosexuals during World War II. As the secretary of state himself later put it: “We have decided for the time being to undertake a historical study in order to make a record of those men and women who have reportedly been victims of deportation for [reasons of] homosexuality. It is a task that we are going to carry out with historians.”2 Although it may be presumptuous to anticipate exactly what such a commission will conclude after a thorough examination of the relevant archival sources, some of which are still closed to historians, this essay seeks to provide

At the Juncture of Censure and Mass Voyeurism: Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in Post-Mao China

Abstract: In the years immediately following Mao Zedong’s death, fiction writers in the People’s Republic of China consistently pushed the limits of sexual representation. The liberation of desire was considered a project integral to the restoration of subjectivity to individuals, a topic that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions in the mid-1980s.1 In this cultural milieu many works rescuing human desire from sexual puritanism, state repression, the institution of marriage, and the pragmatism of procreation appeared in the 1980s, such as Zhang Xianliang’s The Other Half of Man Is Woman [Nanren de yiban shi nüren] (1985) and Wang Anyi’s three novellas about “illicit love” [san lian] (1985 – 86). The literary trend of exploring sexuality has continued into the 1990s and the new century, an era whose cultural economy differs dramatically from that of the mid-1980s, in that elite ideologies such as aesthetic humanism have lost their luster and cultural production is now complicated by market competition for audience and profit.2 The most scandalous, best-selling erotic publication in China in the early 1990s was probably Jia Pingwa’s Abandoned Capital [Fei du], whose traditional vernacular style and numerous sex scenes—often insinuated by deliberate marks of omission—made critics liken it to the Ming-dynasty erotic masterpiece The Golden Lotus [Jin ping mei].3 In 1996 something peculiar happened. The editor responsible for the publication of The Abandoned Capital advised a female writer that, if she wanted to find a publisher willing to put out a work she had finished some time earlier, she would have to delete its entire first chapter because of its inappropriate sexual material and would have to make significant changes to the sexual descriptions throughout the rest of the novel. What was this novel? How could it be judged obscene compared with The Abandoned Capital, the modern Golden Lotus?

"Certain Places Have Different Energy": Spatial Transformations in Eresos, Lesvos

Abstract: The village of Eresos is located in the western part of the island of Lesvos, about ninety kilometers from Mytilini, the capital, and has a permanent population of over twelve hundred.1 It is considered the birthplace of Sappho and of Theofrastos, a student of Aristotle. Eresos was built between the eleventh and ninth centuries B.C. by Aeolians, at a spot now known as Vigla, on a hill on the southern side of Skala Eresos. In the seventeenth century A.D. the town was moved to a more mountainous area, about six kilometers from the sea. It was liberated from Ottoman domination in 1912. Eresos has a rich tradition in the arts and letters. Since the 1950s, however, its population has gradually decreased through emigration. The village’s present economy is based on agriculture and tourism. Having a sandy beach some 2.5 kilometers long and deep-blue seas that have been awarded the European Economic Community “Blue Flag,” and offering tourist services at the highest level, Eresos is one of Lesvos’s main tourist spots.2 Eresos is also a place with female energy, a place where lesbian women gather to pay tribute to Sappho.3 Since the end of the 1970s a fairly large number of lesbian women—coming initially from the United States and northern Europe and later from Italy, Spain, and other places, as well as from elsewhere in Greece —have visited Eresos, which has become known as a point for lesbian women from all over the world to meet during the summer. A seasonal lesbian community is re-created every summer, a community with its own territorial and symbolic boundaries, a community differentiated over time. The first paragraph above constitutes a brief description of the place as it is presented in tourist guides and brochures published by the municipality of Eresos, while the second focuses on the characteristics of Eresos that have attracted

Ovidian Homoerotics in Twelfth-Century Paris: The Letters of Leoninus, Poet and Polyphone

Abstract: For historians of sexuality in the premodern West, the “long twelfth century” represents something of a watershed. The epoch is framed at one end by the writings of the French archbishop Baudri of Bourgueil (1046 –1130), whom John Boswell highlighted for his “baldly erotic poetry” written to both men and women, and, at the other, by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which Michel Foucault credited with a foundational role in the invention of the confessional subject and Christianity’s initial deployment of a scientia sexualis.1 In the elite, Latinate literary spheres of cathedral and abbey, the twelfth century sees an explosive appropriation of the amatory works of Ovid as part of a more general and quite selfconscious renaissance of ancient learning. Apparent in such works as the Carmina Burana, Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, and the Latin dramatic tradition based in the Loire valley is a new appreciation for the sexual malleability of Latin in all its many rhetorical colors.2 In the domain of vernacular letters, the twelfth century witnesses the invention of the language of fin’amor in the songs of the troubadours and trouvères; the rise of a romance poetic tradition centered on seduction, erotic adulation, and adultery; and the cultivation of new, often antiprocreative models of masculinity and femininity. It is no mistake that Jacques Lacan devoted significant portions of his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, to excavating the psychic fantasies structuring the “courtly love” dynamic and its crucial historical role in the formation of the desiring subject in the West.3 For Boswell, the twelfth century held pride of place in what he called the

Heinrich Rutha and the Unraveling of a Homosexual Scandal in 1930s Czechoslovakia

Abstract: In a quiet cemetery on the c outskirts of Osečná, in northern Bohemia, at one with nature and overlooked by Mount Ještěd, lies the plot of the Rutha family. Two black metal plaques bolted to a stone wall commemorate Heinrich Rutha (1897–1937), with an inscription in German: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). For those who erected this memorial, the meaning was undoubtedly clear. Heinz Rutha (as he was usually called) had died as a martyr to a higher cause, in service to the Sudeten German people—the German minority in Czechoslovakia who were struggling in the 1930s to secure greater autonomy for themselves. Rutha was a prominent Sudeten German leader and ideologue. Indeed, he was the unofficial “foreign minister” of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei; SdP), led by Konrad Henlein, which had won 63 percent of the German vote in the parliamentary elections of 1935. Early on the morning of 5 November 1937 Rutha was found dead in his prison cell in the town of Böhmisch Leipa (Česka Lípa).1 Although all the evidence pointed to suicide, rumors spread immediately that he had been murdered, either by the Czechs or by some other (Nazi) political opponents. The inscription on Rutha’s grave, however, also has a cryptic significance, especially if we assume (as seems possible) that Rutha himself left instructions as to the wording. It hints at his philosophy of life and his vision for a new type of

“SEER OR QUEER?” Postwar Fascination with Detroit's Prophet Jones

Abstract: Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., writing in the November 1951 issue of Ebony, began an article about the need for sex education in the African American church with a story about an unidentified pastor’s grief at the death of his handsome, talented young male assistant. In describing the funeral, Powell stressed the preacher’s quavering voice, his tear-soaked eyes, his shaking body, and his attempt to leap into the grave with the coffin. “The minister’s broken sobs sounded as if they had been wrung from the tragedy-twisted heart of one who has lost his lover,” Powell wrote. He then played his narrative trump: “Actually, the two had been sharing an unnatural relationship for a number of years. The entire congregation knew about it. The whole community knew about it—and yet, that minister was and is today one of the most powerful and ‘respected’ Negro pastors in all America.”1 Falling within the purview of Powell’s attack on “a tiny minority of degenerate ministers,” and the likely focus of his wrath, was Prophet James Francis Jones of Detroit. Prophet Jones, or, as some accounts said he preferred, “His Holiness the Rt. Rev. Dr. James F. Jones, D.D., Universal Dominion Ruler, Internationally Known as Prophet Jones,” drew national attention for his extravagance and flamboyance during the 1940s and 1950s. His antics, fanciful teachings, and immoderate lifestyle were noted in Time and Newsweek. Life profiled him as one of the most prosperous evangelists in the country. The Saturday Evening Post dubbed him the “Messiah in Mink.” Such exposure made Jones one of the most visible, if most curious, African Americans in the white-controlled mass media during the Truman and Eisenhower years.2 The self-styled preacher’s rise to prominence was partly due to a strong homosexual subtext. His congregation and his community knew about, or at least suspected, his same-sex desire. Jones used the tensions surrounding his near-

Down There: The Queer South and the Future of History Writing

Abstract: It’s been a long time comin’—a breakthrough book in modern U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history. John Howard’s Men Like That is that book: something exciting, something new, something so apparently modest in focus and understated in voice that it could almost be overlooked. It approaches you quietly, with charming reserve; begins to enthrall you; then takes your breath away. I haven’t been so taken by a book in queer history in, well, much too long a time. Since Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s astonishingly generative string of articles beginning with “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” Jonathan Ned Katz’s pioneering document collection Gay American History, John D’Emilio’s foundational narrative Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and paradigm-setting “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Esther Newton’s provocative challenge “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis’s innovative, meticulous community study Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, modern U.S. historians and historical ethnographers have produced supplements, corrections, elaborations, and repetitions of earlier studies—but nothing one might call a breakthrough.1 Some of these histories have been politically or pedagogically significant and/or models of first-rate scholarship. Examples include community studies,

The Easy Way Out: Gays and Lesbians in Academia

Abstract: In his deservedly lauded book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings asks a particularly challenging question of gay and lesbian academics: how has our “success” been made possible by the crisis of the postnational university?1 According to Readings, when the processes of economic globalization render the nation-state no longer the primary site at which capital reproduces itself, the university no longer needs to fulfill the role of producing subjects for that nation-state. It thus opens its doors to new kinds of subjects, including so-called cultural minorities, and plays a role in their continuing formation. The three books under review are symptomatic of this shift in the university’s role in that their theme is a subject— the self-identified nonheterosexual academic—that might be said not even to have existed forty years ago.

"Nocturnal Birds" in the Champs-Elysees: Police and Pederasty in Prerevolutionary Paris

Abstract: When Louis Thiroux de Crosne took office as lieutenant general of police of Paris in 1785, he recognized “the necessity of tolerating certain disorders so as to avoid even greater ones,” but he remained inflexible on the subject of sodomitical solicitation in public places. He seemed determined to follow the example of his predecessor, Jean Charles Pierre Lenoir, whose agents had allegedly arrested “seven hundred pederasts of all ranks” during the preceding year.1 If not for those efforts to control sexual activities in the parks and streets, we would not know as much as we do about men sexually interested in and involved with other men in late-eighteenth-century Paris. In 1780 Lenoir made one of the forty-eight district commissioners (Pierre Louis Foucault and later Charles Convers-Desormeaux) and one of the twenty inspectors (Louis Henri Noël) who worked with them responsible for the surveillance of what the police by this time called pederasty rather than sodomy. I have already analyzed the relevant reports in Foucault’s papers, and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. has already studied the relevant reports in ConversDesormeaux’s.2 More research remains to be done in the records of other groups that collaborated with the commissioners in policing the capital and its environs, such as the Swiss Guards who patrolled the Champs-Elysées.3 The reports of their commander that are discussed and translated below confirm subcultural patterns documented in the more obvious sources and shed additional light on the limits of repression in Paris before the Revolution. At that time the Champs-Elysées was still a wooded, marshy area west of