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Book Review
| Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. By Peter Boag. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv, 321 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-23604-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-520-24048-0.)Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. By Nan Alamilla Boyd. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii, 321 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-520-20415-8.)
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| Why did San Francisco become notoriously the queerest city in the United States while Portland, Oregon, did not? The question is not obvious—why is Portland even in consideration for the title?—and neither Peter Boag nor Nan Alamilla Boyd wrote to address it. Reading these two books together does lead one to the question, however, and the information they provide toward an answer gives us fascinating insight into the relationships among class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the history of the United States. |
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Separately and together, these two
books illustrate vividly the enormous value of the work
LGBT
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) historians are currently
doing, not only for our understanding of the queer past but for
our understanding of United States history as a whole. Historians
of the West, of Progressivism, of labor, class struggle, and working-class
culture, of politics, policy, and social movements, in addition
to historians of LGBT life, sexuality, and gender, will all benefit
from Boag's and Boyd's work.
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With a 1912 scandal centering on the Portland YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) at the apogee of his story, Boag describes male same-sex sexuality and culture in much of the Pacific Northwest from the 1880s through World War I. If the actual content of the book falls a bit short of the title's ambitious promise, at least in geographic terms, the fascinating insights that Boag provides more than compensate. His description of relationships, usually sexual and often durable, between adult "jockers" and adolescent or young-adult "punks" among the transient workers of the period (pp. 25–32) is a signal contribution to the discipline by itself. His thoughtful explication of the myriad ways in which these men's age, ethnicity, and class created both opportunities and constraints, significantly shaping the emerging male homosexual culture of Portland in the early twentieth century, will be an interpretive touchstone for practitioners in the field for the foreseeable future. |
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Perhaps most fascinating is Boag's demonstration of how native-born, middle-class Portlanders categorized transient men's sexual practices according to ethnic stereotypes, especially about the sexual proclivities of Greek immigrants, combined with assumptions about class. His discussion of the perception by a prosecutor and several judges in 1912 that sodomy among the middle-class men who figured prominently in the YMCA scandal was a new crime connected to a particularly modern identity (pp. 145–53), along with his material on intersections among class, race, and sexuality, should lay to rest any doubts about Michel Foucault's argument for the emergence of "the homosexual" as a type of person during the late nineteenth century. Boag demonstrates above all how class informed the experiences of men who engaged in same-sex activity and the thinking about the topic by officials and observers in the surrounding society. Men's sexual relationships served in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Portland as a bright line marking working- from middle-class identities. |
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