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(More customer reviews)There is certainly no dearth of historical work on sexuality and San Francisco, but Sides' contribution proves to be both productive and revelatory--in short, Sides has seriously moved urban and sexual history forward (he goes beyond the 1990s). And he has moved it well: Erotic City is truly a page turner!
Building on the work of historians such as Nan Boyd (see: Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965), Sides not only maps San Francisco in terms of the still-resonant political and cultural developments that have taken place there since the WWII, but he does so by bringing readers to the streets, from neighborhood to neighborhood, so that we can witness the way in which the city was shaped by its many sexual "revolutions." What's more, Sides brings "heterosexuality" back into the postwar historiography of sexual geography in an artful way--before you know it, you've been transplanted from a discussion of pornography, to leather S/M clubs, to radical feminism, so that the reading experience comes to mirror rapidly changing cityscape itself.
One of many interesting details Sides marshals (a concept which comes up only very briefly in Marc Stein's City Of Sisterly And Brotherly Loves: Lesbian And Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972) is that gay men were, for the Castro, the foot soldiers of gentrification--a point which has hitherto lacked sufficient attention in urban histories of sexuality. All told, Sides details the way in which the shifting spatial relations of power in the Erotic City were active in the production of sexuality and sexual experiences (in the most broad sense--read the book) as well as the way in which the city hosted and even created the conditions for the emergence of sexual identities, political factions, social and judicial controversies, and even revolutionary public health measures. And that emergent sexuality in turn left it's mark (for better and for worse) on the city.
All said, Erotic City is a tour-de-force tour of a city that you thought you knew.
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