| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. By Nan Alamilla Boyd. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii + 321 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, index. $27.50, £19.95.)

Nan Boyd's cultural history of queer communities in San Francisco prior to 1965 anchors the city's sexual permissiveness in its nineteenth-century history. San Francisco's diverse and transient population, Boyd argues, gave rise to a live-and-let-live sensibility, an anti-Prohibition politic, and a resistance to the social purity movements of the Progressive Era, all of which would foster queer cultures. Boyd shows how, between 1906 and 1961, various queer communities cohered just enough so that they could act as a gay rights movement during the 1960s. Wide Open Town offers a satisfyingly complex narrative, weaving together queer genders and sexual pleasures with pop culture, race, class, political and legal conflict, official oversight and harassment, and group recognition and survival.

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