In Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, Josh Sides argues, “Some of the most important battles of the sexual revolution were fought not necessarily in the mind, around the dining room table, or in the nation’s courtrooms but instead in the streets of America’s cities. Furthermore, the outcome of this bitter contest about sexual expressions in public spaces – on streets, in parks, on newsstands, in bars, in nightclubs, and in steam baths – is the most enduring legacy of the sexual revolution in the United States” (pg. 5-6). Sides challenges “the notion that race was always the prime mover in postwar urban history by arguing that it was the shifting culture of cities that more directly influenced their destiny” (pg. 10). In his examination, Sides combines elements of gender analysis with both the statistical and spatial turns in history.
Beginning in the early twentieth century, Sides writes, “Between World War I and the late 1950s, representatives of the city’s financial elite, municipal government, local law enforcement, and sundry cultural and religious leaders, like their counterparts in other large American cities, sought to suppress the ubiquitous and irrepressible human tendency to express sexual identities and desires” (pg. 17). Sides linking zoning and urban renewal to morality crusades, writing, “Further intensifying the postwar crusade against prostitution in San Francisco was the ascendancy of a powerful coalition of progrowth business leaders, ambitious politicians, public administrators, and professional planners under the auspices of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA)” (pg. 30). Though Sides argues the beats played a limited role in themselves, he sees them as indicative of a larger trend encouraging sexual experimentation in San Francisco. He writes, “The proliferation of pornography in the 1970s, essentially the product of changing values among young Americans and increasingly liberal Supreme Court decisions, was also the product of technological changes – in particular, the rising popularity of 16-millimeter film” (pg. 59). Examining the intersection of race and gender, Sides writes, “The explosion of prostitution in the Western Addition in the 1960s and 1970s was part of the citywide relaxation of both social and legal codes against casual and even commercial sex. But in the Western Addition, this explosion was also the product of the deepening economic deprivation of many African Americans in the 1960s” (pg. 62-63).
Examining the gay rights movement, Sides writes, “As the sites of gay sociability expanded in San Francisco, most gay men in the 1970s abandoned the political agitation of their forebears in the homophile and gay liberation movements and sought simply to enjoy active and free sexual lives. By contrast, as lesbians built a separate world for themselves in the Mission District – a world informed largely by the ideology of cultural feminism – lesbian sex became highly politicized, generally to the detriment of erotic freedom. Ultimately, however, if the immediate political legacy of gay and lesbian liberation was sometimes uncertain and unsettled, the geographic impact was profound and enduring” (pg. 85). He does offer the following criticism: “Gay men broke sharply with lesbian women, with whom they had shared social space before the sexual revolution. Given their freedom, many gay men simply replicated the same sort of misogynistic ‘boys only’ policies and attitudes that had once impeded them” (pg. 106-107). Further, “As many gay men in the midst of their revolution too easily adopted the sexism of American society, they often adopted its racial mores as well” (pg. 107). Of Golden Gate Park, Sides writes, “Despite the genteel discourse of the park, it also served unsavory purposes from the beginning. The very design of the park – its winding roads, high shrubs, and isolated dells – allowed people to act out their human penchant for violence with sex and anonymity and, usually, impunity” (pg. 124).
Sides argues that moral crusaders knew public protests often earned them derision, while “far more effective were municipal leaders’ campaigns to legislate limitations on public spectacles of sex. The approached purported obscenities as symptoms of urban decline, the process of urban divestment that plagued many cities during the 1960s and 1970s” (pg. 141). The more outspoken politicians created a new round of hate crimes, however. Sides writes, “Exceptionally troubling to gay rights advocates was the rhetoric of this new wave of homophobia, which not only asserted the general depravity and criminality of homosexuality but often implicitly condoned violent attacks against homosexuals themselves” (pg. 156).
Turning to the AIDS crisis, Sides shifts the focus of the historiography, writing, “Peoples’ social and economic class status, race, and location within the city all shaped responses to AIDS in ways that elude quick calculation. And the changing epidemiology of the disease after the early 1980s also changed the meaning of the disease for San Franciscans. In short, the historic devastation to the Castro must be seen in its proper context – as the most affected district of a city in which other affected districts and numerous people were also deeply transformed by the debilitating virus” (pg. 176-177). Despite this devastation, Sides argues that the revolutionary sexual character of the city remains, though in changed form. Looking at the 1990s and early 2000s, he writes, “Developers, planners, and businesses both small and large repurposed much of the urban landscape of San Francisco during these decades, and though the intent was rarely to diminish public spectacles of sexuality, it often had that effect” (pg. 206). Many of the businesses were replaced by online sources following the rise of the Internet and the anonymity it afforded, though the city still attracts those interested in sexual revolution. ( )