Before the Before.

INGRAM, GORDON BRENT

Queer Sites: Urban Histories Since 1600

Edited by Davig Higgs

Routledge, 1999. 240 pages, $22.99

Most gay men still know very little about the self-defined "inverts," "homosexuals," and "queers" who came of age decades or centuries before Stonewall, who often lived in our own neighborhoods and cities. Among several recent efforts to fill this historical blind spot is Queer Sites, by David Higgs, who teaches at the University of Toronto. This slim volume furnishes short, well-written profiles of seven cities--Paris, Moscow, Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and San Francisco--and is a delight to read.

Queer Sites begins with a history of gay male Paris, in which Michael Sibilis explores the rise of the comparatively recent tactic of gay visibility. He highlights the ambivalent relationship that gay men there have had with openly making social space and particularly with Paris's new strip of tourist-oriented gay establishments in the Marais. Sibilis highlights the persistent homophobia in the City of Lights, including the city government's attempts to ban rainbow flags, sprinkling his travelogue with historical tidbits, such as that "Only seven Parisian sodomites were burned at the stake in the entire eighteenth century." Unfortunately, Sibilis practically ignores the working-class and neighborhood-based scene that persists west of the Bastille.

University of Amsterdam sociologist Gert Hekma's chronicle of his city is similarly powerful and relates large-scale social and political economic forces to the efforts of a handful of men to build a community in the latter half of the 20th century. Hekma notes that well into the 18th century Dutch Protestantism was less concerned with punishing homosexuality than with anything perceived to weaken the State. In the expanding mercantile city, there were always a few places that remained outside the interest of police, where "wrong lovers" could cruise and perhaps even have sex. A culture of male Vriendschap (friendship) often triumphed over the surrounding homophobia. Moving into the modern period, there is something chilling about Hekma's understatement concerning the Nazi occupation, as he writes: "Notwithstanding the introduction of the harsher German legislation regarding 'unnatural lewdness' in the Netherlands there was less prosecution of homosexuals than before the war because the police had other prio rities."

The slim offering on gay life in London is just plain insufficient given the scholarship that's already available. Editor Higgs's own two chapters on Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro are intriguing, especially in how he chronicles homosexuality in societies in the grip of the Inquisition and then the only slightly kinder, gentler, but still exceeding vicious homophobia of the Catholic Church that followed. Les Wright completes this journey with a particularly thoughtful history of San Francisco into the 1980's. The exploration of how gay men have transformed urban spaces pretty much stops there, at about ten years back. Still, if we can forgive the book's title and the pretentiousness in which these sketches occasionally indulge, this is a collection of fine local histories.

In the end, of course, these short chronicles can tell only part of the story. The social lives and communal histories of networks of homoerotic males are more complex and contradictory than the crisp social narratives of Queer Sites would suggest. What's more, research into this history is still sketchy for most cities; Queer Sites begins to explore some of the major themes in the emerging field of queer urban histories.

Gordon Brent Ingram is Associate Professor in the Forest Science Division of the International Institute for Aerospace Survey & Earth Sciences in Vancouver.