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Review
| Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957, by Matt Houlbrook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 271 pages. $29.00, cloth.
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| Queer London promises in its introduction to map out the spaces and places inhabited by London's queer community in order to reconceptualize the history of urban sexuality in the twentieth century. Drawing on police records, newspaper accounts, and personal letters (usually obtained via police records), Houlbrook successfully paints a vivid picture of an alternate London, invisible to the normative city imagined by the post-WWI citizenry. His argument rests in part on undermining whiggish interpretations of a "coming-out" for London's gay community and in part problematizing the available source material through a practical application of Michel Foucault's theories of "the gaze". Rather than representing complete openness and freedom of action, these sources show that our knowledge of a queer London is a result of surveillance and police scrutiny. Within that surveillance, however, queers enacted a reverse surveillance to form a parallel London that operated not on the margins of society, but within the very heart of the metropolis. |
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Houlbrook begins and ends this provocative analysis with a vignette about Cyril, a man who "discovered" his queer identity only after moving to London. Known to history only because his personal correspondence was confiscated by the police, Cyril embodies the private man forced into a public discussion of his life. Cyril's story is part of a book divided into four sections that tease out this public / private dichotomy: "Policing," "Places," "People" and "Politics" are woven together culturally and geographically. Part I focuses on the mechanism of regulation and the fears of the police force particularly its undercover (or plainclothes) agents. Regulation in fact could not be escaped—it was part of the fact of life upon entering Queer London (though Houlbrook later analyzes the ways in which privacy avoided regulation). The first task for the plainclothes officer was to locate the local geography, requiring in some instances the "practical immersion" (pp. 26, 30) of the police into the world of the homosexual. Part II is divided into four subsections—again beginning with a geographic mapping of public sex. The primary focus of this section, however, is the precarious relationship between the public and the private and how both could spell danger in decidedly different ways for London's queer population. Part III, "People," is an exploration into various characters of London—the queen, the Poof, the working-class masculine—that unpacks the diversity of queer London and suggests that its history cannot be a history of uniform identity but rather a history of the varieties of identity formations. Finally, Part IV, divided into two sections, begins a concluding discussion by linking the sexual politics of London to the politics of "Britishness." Homosexuals, as defined by the legal structures of the state, where a threat to the social body because their effeminacy and their corruption of youth undermined the demographics of a Britain recovering from the brutality of WWI. The law, therefore, worked to limit the inclusion of homosexuals by using medical knowledge to categorize and therefore ostracize them. From immigration controls to local regulations, authorities tried to silence queerness. Queers occupied a space, both physically and culturally, outside the sanctioned construct of "Britishness" because they tainted the image of restraint and respectability. Queers rallied against government regulations throughout this period by using the same tropes about medicine, citizenship and power to assert their own rights to exist within normative culture. In effect, homosexuals appropriated the discourse of exclusion to make the case for inclusion. But at the same time, as private, same-sex relations became decriminalized in 1967, queers had constructed their own normative behaviors, regulating and consequently limiting availability and accessibility for urban homosex. It is ultimately a story of loss, as Houlbrook contends, because the possibilities for reconceptualizing the urban landscape dissipated as queers were incorporated into the official map of London. By drawing on the intersections of law, culture and society and linking them to the world of male homosex, Houlbrook creates a book that places the history of urban queer culture squarely in the structures and motifs of everyday life. |
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This book is an important contribution to histories of public space, sexuality and London. However, the book is specifically about men, as he mentions in his introduction. Houlbrook does not explore the history of lesbianism in the city in part, he asserts, because of gendered constructions that limited women's ability to manipulate the dichotomies of public and private in the venue of the law courts. While not a holistic account of early twentieth-century sexuality, the book nevertheless successfully delivers on its promise to rewrite (and remap) London's history during this period. The monograph is sophisticated in its application of Foucaultian theoretical models, but even the theory-shy will find it accessible, especially given its critical examination of extant archival criminal records and the connections of law, culture and the politics of citizenship. This reviewer, in fact, was so impressed with the quality of the scholarship that she adopted it for an upper-division course. Queer London will be a useful addition to Modern Britain courses as well as theory courses or more specialized special topics classes for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Sharlene Sayegh |
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