Arts :: Books
Sexuality and the city by Scott Kearnan
Arts EditorWednesday May 13, 2009Gay people are everywhere.
Easy, now. That wasn’t the battle cry of the religious right, urging you to bolt your doors and protect your children from the onward march of the Homosexual Agenda. Rather, it’s a statement of fact: from the big city to small town USA, LGBT people have always lived in places that reflect the community’s broad diversity.
Yet there has always been an inextricable cultural link between gay people and urban settings. Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities, the new book by Julie Abraham, professor of literature and LGBT studies at Sarah Lawrence College, isn’t the first work to connect those dots; social scientists like Richard Florida and others have long ruminated on the topic. But Metropolitan Lovers is unique as a fine distillation of the storied history behind homosexuality in cities, a fascinating and thorough depiction of how the development of cities and the evolution of queer culture have so importantly influenced each other in a real, symbiotic relationship. More importantly, it examines the impact of these cultural associations - where they are founded, and where perhaps they are not; where they positively inform our understandings of what it means to be gay or urban, and where they limit our conceptions with regard to both.
Bay Windows spoke with Abraham about her book, the history of gay/urban associations, and whether the recent "surprising" outcomes of equal marriage in Iowa and California should challenge us to rethink some of these notions.
Given that Bay Windows is published in Boston, I have to start with the obvious, self-serving question: how does Boston figure in to the link that’s developed between homosexuals and cities?
Well for example, Boston gave its name to the "Boston Marriage," the 19th century phenomenon of female couples. I talk about that [in the book], and the whole question of women’s political involvement, particularly upper class white women, so Boston appears in that. And I think it’s quite interesting that the form of that relationship gets an urban name. But Boston doesn’t appear otherwise extensively in my particular study. ... Which is not to say that Boston doesn’t have a great queer community. Part of the issue is that my book is not about actual places, but ideas about cities. So certain [other] cities have figured disproportionately. Even though in practice they may not have been disproportional as places in which [gay people] live, they are disproportional when we think about it.
Speaking of "Boston Marriages," I really enjoyed that Metropolitan Lovers gave a lot of attention to lesbians. Most studies of the intersection between gay life and urban life seem to focus almost exclusively on gay men.
I came up against that issue time over time. But that’s not always been the case. I go back to the early, mid-19th century, where lesbians were associated with the city through the whole conception of decadence and prostitution, the literature that came out of Paris, and Jane Addams and the Settlement House [movement]. But that is absolutely the case, that now we much more think of the gay male urban presence. In the ’70s the gay ghetto image emerged, and images of gay men have dominated this gay city connection. There’s this whole other history to take into account of gay ghettos in cities in the ’70s and ’80s. In the whole kind of discussion of post-Stonewall queer community, they focus endlessly on men. I decided it was because there was a whole set of assumptions about the propensity of men for public life in the cities that converged with assumptions about what gay men are like - say, cruising and being present on the street. And there are even larger conceptions of men in cities that overshadow [conceptions of women in cities].
"I wanted to step back and think about the conceptual: why homosexuality and urbanization go together and how the practical reasons have fed a whole set of ideas that are even more familiar." I feel like I’m hearing echoes of Capitalism and Gay Identity -
- by John D’Emilio, yes. ... He sort of began the whole set of developing this understanding of homosexuals and cities. His work was to explain the rise of visible queer communities and he saw urbanization as fundamental to that. I think he was absolutely correct. But he was focused very much on the practical reasons why urbanization was crucial. I wanted to step back and think about the conceptual: why homosexuality and urbanization go together and how the practical reasons have fed a whole set of ideas that are even more familiar.
You’ve already mentioned the notion of the "gay ghetto." Bay Windows is published in Boston’s South End. Did that neighborhood come up in your research at all?
It actually came up with regard to the work of Edmund White in the ’70s and ’80s. In States of Desire, he traveled around the country to assess queer life in all the different cities he visited and he visited Boston. He decided that Boston had a thriving queer community but not a ghetto. ... I think what he was pointing to was the whole debate within queer writers and urbanists as to whether to use the term "ghetto." There was a movement of people who were very ambivalent about this term because it seemed to equate the social disadvantage of queer people with the disadvantage of [other] minority groups when there didn’t seem to be equity. I think other people wanted to get away from the racial implications of ghetto, because it was a really charged term for a while. I think people have gotten used to it, but there’s still some uneasiness around it. I think a lot of people now, in the ’90s and more recently, use the term to critically distance themselves. ... There was a study that came out a few years ago where the sociologist interviewed young gay men who said, "We don’t want to live in the gay ghetto, we want the suburbs." Actually gay people in the suburbs! Which you think would not be news and certainly not news every year or so. It’s perpetually news [laughs]. ... So there’s a whole constellation of negative ideas. ... It gets used in a strange way to stigmatize certain gay, queer people by other queer people.
As noted in Metropolitan Lovers, discussions of the "gay ghettos" often turn into discussions of gentrification. The usual imagery is of the upscale and white, generally conceived of as male, moving in and displacing lower class racial and ethnic minorities. Which seems to reinforce popular notions of what gay "looks like" - as if there were no queer people in the lower class racial and ethnic minorities!
It reinforces the idea that all queer people are upper-class white males, when in fact the much wider range of people moving to cities or occupying certain neighborhoods were not so visible. So gentrification then becomes shorthand for referring to a certain kind of gay life. The ghetto identity and gentrification idea go hand in hand and ironically reinforce this, obscuring the presence of lesbians of all classes and races of men, and leaving this shadow figure of the upper class white male invoked as the "typical" figure.
When you talk about folks being surprised that there would be gays "in the suburbs," I find myself thinking of how the community reacted to marriage equality in Iowa, versus in California. It seems like there was a collective gasp of shock when we saw marriage prevail in Iowa, which for all intents and purposes represents the "suburb," and likewise when we saw it defeated in California, for this discussion our "city." Did you sense that as a reaction, or am I projecting?
You’re not projecting. And it’s peculiar to me. What I ended up thinking as I worked on this book is the way homosexuality and place are tied together in ideas. This is a perfect reflection. Iowa becomes the "suburb," the implication being that there are no cities in Iowa. Of course, then I saw a little article that discussed Iowa City as a little enclave for queer people that was behind them, but the rest [of the state] wasn’t, and an NPR piece by Scott Simon [that said] now that Iowa had same-sex marriage queer people are really American, and only the queer people living in the cities think it’s a peculiar formation [Arts Editor’s note: In Simon’s piece - Iowa Turns Toward Gay Rights, Apr. 4 2009 - he said that, "Whatever the final result may be, it seems to me that the decision reminds us that gay life in America is not confined to certain zip codes of lower Manhattan, West Hollywood, Miami’s South Beach and Chicago’s Lakeview. It is as American as Iowa"]. If Iowa or Vermont changes [on marriage], the editorialists have to re-imagine Iowa or Vermont to explain it - "Vermont individualism," for example. They have to rearrange the place in order to conceptually allow for queer people to be present. Another way in which we saw this was the Matthew Shephard case. When a young man is queer and murdered in Wyoming, it’s all about Wyoming. As though queer people don’t get attacked in cities; [and] what is he doing in Wyoming? ... There are all these close connections making meanings about homosexuality and place.
The book also touches on the idea that gay life in the city versus the suburbs represents a greater cultural idea, of "progressive city folk" infringing on down-home, traditional values. So when marriage happens in Iowa, I often wonder if it feels like a greater victory because it sends a message that it’s not some radical notion anymore.
Well, one would hope that in fact that’s what would happen; that we would have this endless rediscovery about queer people all over the country. In fact, we find ourselves redefining Iowa by making it a more progressive place than we thought it was, which does suggest a certain kind of attempt to work around the [actual] implication that there are gay people in Iowa, there always have been, and there’s a possibility of coexistence and equality.
I return to the rage that met Prop 8 in California and I wonder... over the last few years we’ve seen state after state after state enshrine bans on equal marriage in their constitutions. And yet, none of them received that kind of attention. Where was the outcry when we were sorely needed by those in our queer community in Oklahoma, or Nebraska, or Mississippi. I guess I’m asking, does the queer community itself bear some of the culpability in reinforcing limited ideas of gay life, and where it’s important that it exists?
I don’t know. I do think that [in California] the force of taking away what was granted really made the Prop 8 decision particularly enraging to people, like if you gained this foothold and then the rug is pulled out from under you. But it’s true that we have higher expectations of California than Oklahoma, and higher expectations of urban settings than non-urban settings. I don’t quite think the queer community is culpable, in the sense that we often frame our own debates around these issues. As I was saying before, some people will think that they can live a more complete, but somehow less gay life in the suburbs, as if they couldn’t live the same life and it would be equally gay in both places. So also where queer people say things like that - or that, "I want to live in Iowa, not New York, because I want a more acceptable life than the gay life I would have had in New York" - then they are reinforcing these divisions.
Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities by Julie Abraham is available now from the University of Minnesota Press.
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