Metropolitan Lovers : The Homosexuality of Cities

J. Abraham

That urbanization was the basis for the development of "modern" conceptions of homosexuality has been a fundamental argument of the history of sexuality. In "Metropolitan Lovers" the author re-frames that proposition and the many others in which same-sex desires and cities have routinely been joined - that cities produce homosexuals, for example, and that homosexuals produce cities. The author wants us to look again at the familiar union of the queer and the urban. She begins in Europe in the 1830s and end in the past decade in the United States. Her sources include literary works and the literatures of sexology, sociology, urban planning, lgbt politics, the history of sexuality, and queer studies: from Balzac and Baudelaire, to Jane Addams and Robert Park, James Baldwin and Jane Jacobs, Edmund White, Manuel Castells, Richard Sennett, and Richard Florida; from "Nana" and "The Importance of Being Earnest," to "Boys Don't Cry" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Western conceptions of "cities" and of "homosexuals," she argues, have become entirely interdependent. First and last, extremely limited but extraordinarily useful understandings of lesbians and gay men have been fostered by cultural elites managing their own positions in modern and postmodern cities. Over the course of the twentieth century, lesbians' and gay men's efforts to create conceptual as well as physical space for themselves, as well as conflicts between advocates of queer difference and advocates of assimilation, became fundamentally entangled in battles over the characteristics and value of urban life. The analyses and the goals of urban advocates and gay advocates intertwined. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, political conflicts over same-sex desires had become inseparable from conflicts over place and space. The consequences for homosexuals, of this joint history, have been great, but the consequences for cities might have been greater.