Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco [Hardcover]

Josh Sides (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0195377818 | ISBN-13: 978-0195377811

Since the 1960s, San Francisco has been America's capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars. In this highly original book, Josh Sides explains how this happened, unearthing long-forgotten stories of the city's sexual revolutionaries, as well as the legions of longtime San Franciscans who tried to protect their vision of a moral metropolis. Erotic dancers, prostitutes, birth control advocates, pornographers, free lovers, and gay libbers transformed San Francisco's political landscape and its neighborhoods in ways seldom appreciated. But as sex radicals became more visible in the public spaces of the city, many San Franciscans reacted violently. The assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were but the most brazen acts in a city caught up in a battle over morality. Ultimately, Sides argues, one cannot understand the evolution of postwar American cities without recognizing the profound role that sex has played. More broadly, one cannot understand modern American politics without taking into account the postwar transformation of San Francisco and other cities into both real and imagined repositories of unfettered sexual desire.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This cultural history makes a sound and stimulating case for including the fraught public negotiation of sexual desire in our assessment of the transformation of the postwar urban environment. Sides, professor of California history, in part does for San Francisco what cultural historians like George Chauncey have done for New York: resurrect the semi-hidden antecedents to the flourishing of sexual expression in the 1960s in adult entertainment, prostitution and public performance of sexual desire including among homosexuals (Chauncey's specific subject). But rather than emphasize the way the city shapes sexual identity, Sides is keen to emphasize how public displays of and trade in sexual desire as well as the reaction to them-by individuals, civic leaders, neighborhood organizations, churches and those in the political and legal systems-together fundamentally defined the physical and social shape of the metropolis. This measured, fascinating and politically timely study of sex radicals and their reactionary counterparts, in a city long considered (however accurately) as a haven for libertinism, will prove a vital and welcome addition to the study of urban culture in general and San Francisco history in particular.
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Review

"A welcome addition to a rich historiography on the development of urban spaces in the postwar years. Sides's scope is comprehensive and provides a useful overview of the twentieth century's mnay different sexual revolutions and the men and women who participated in them and opposed them." --Journal of American History

"Sides...does for San Francisco what cultural historians like George Chauncey have done for New York: resurrect the semi-hidden antecedents to the flourishing of sexual expression in the 1960s in adult entertainment, prostitution and public performance of sexual desire including among homosexuals...Rather than emphasize the way the city shapes sexual identity, Sides is keen to emphasize how public displays of and trade in sexual desire as well as the reaction to them--by individuals, civic leaders, neighborhood organizations, churches and those in the political and legal systems--together fundamentally defined the physical and social shape of the metropolis. This measured, fascinating and politically timely study of sex radicals and their reactionary counterparts, in a city long considered (however accurately) as a haven for libertinism, will prove a vital and welcome addition to the study of urban culture in general and San Francisco history in particular." --Publishers Weekly Online

"Sides, an urban historian, argues that San Francisco's legacy has been shaped as much by sexual culture wars as it has been by class, ethnicity or earthquakes. For the scavenger-hunting neighborhood historian, his book is catnip for its footnotes, primary sources, the quick ride through police blotters and mayors' desks of a hundred sex scandals." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Sides has a knack for showing how the city's sexual and cultural evolution has not occurred linearly, but instead through an intense series of pendulum swings and other contrary movements...This being a history book, written by a professor and published by a university press, it might be seen by some San Franciscan aficionados of cities and erotica to lack intimacy. There is evidence throughout of a dry wit, and one chapter is called 'When the Streets Went Gay,' but beyond that, Sides' copiously researched, stylishly written report really doesn't try to be cute. Or hot. Or personal. There is no 'This reminds me of the time I ...' And that is very much for the best." --SF Weekly

"For readers looking to beef up their IQ in the ultimate sex ed course, this account of the sexual histories and revolutions that shaped the cultural and social dynamic of modern San Francisco reads like a gritty, no-nonsense textbook." --Sacramento News & Review

"Brilliantly researched." --San Francisco Book Review

"Josh Sides' Erotic City is a fascinating tour through the wide-open sexual history of a city that's never really gotten over its beginnings as a Gold Rush center of vice and high times, San Francisco. The Tenderloin, the Haight, the Castro, the Mission, and other colorful neighborhoods come alive. Most important, Sides examines the broad legacies of the sexual revolution from where it first flourished. The depth of scholarship, plus Sides' skill as an engaging writer, makes this necessary reading for anyone interested in how the sexual revolution has influenced urban life."--Bill Boyarsky, author of Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics

"Erotic City is a thrilling, page-turner about the sexual revolution in San Francisco. Digging deep into the very epicenter of the revolution, author Josh Sides reveals in fascinating detail the fault lines, the movers-and-shakers, and the survivors and victims of this profound social conflagration-and, through his lively prose and original research, sets off a few temblors of his own."-- Martin Meeker, author of Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s

"Challenging the idea that race relations alone explain postwar urban transformation, Josh Sides artfully and comprehensively explores San Francisco's vibrant but always contested history of sex radicalism. In doing so, Sides illustrates the integral role sexual politics played in the development of postwar US cities. With an eye to San Francisco's function as a potent and national symbol of sexual excess, Sides' insightfully argues that the emergent sexual cultures that underlie postwar urban transformations are not specific to San Francisco but, rather, part of every metropolitan city's claim to progressive and neoliberal cosmopolitanism."-- Nan Alamilla Boyd, author of Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco

"Erotic City offers numerous fascinating anecdotes in clearprose with fun photographs, making it appropriate for undergraduate surveys, as well as specialists in urban and sexuality studies. From the Victorian vice district into the new century of the Internet, Sides chornicles a city where sexual desire marched on." --Pacific Historical Review

"Highly recommended." --GLBT Roundtable of the American Library Association

"With an engaging writing style and inherently interesting topic, Josh Sides takes on the question of how San Francisco 'became an internationally renowned bastion of sexual libertinism." --Contemporary Sociology

"A treasure trove of information and interpretation that contributes important new perspectives on the history of sexuality and marriage."-- Journal of Social History

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195377818
• ISBN-13: 978-0195377811
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 0.8 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #132,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hi, good readers. I am the Whitsett Chair of California History at Cal State Northridge, as well as the Director of the Center for Southern California Studies. Here are the books I've written.

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: UC Press, 2004)
Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford, 2009)
Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles (editor) (Huntington Library/UC Press, 2012)

I am currently working on 2 books: one is a work of historical fiction. The other is a book about homesteading in California. If you are interested, you can follow my work on Twitter.

Follow Josh Sides on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshsidesbooks

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent June 25, 2011

By Wellslake

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

While cities in the United States tend to be fairly progressive when it comes sexuality and gender, San Francisco is doubtlessly the most progressive of them all. It is fabled for its tolerance and more closely identified with sexual liberation--particularly gay liberation--than any other city in the world. As such, it is a major destination for sexual radicals of all types and often used as a symbol of freedom or decline, depending on your perspective, in national battles over sexual mores.

But how exactly did it become such a city and at the cost of what efforts?

Josh Sides's outstanding, newish book, Erotic City Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, goes a long way toward answering these questions and will likely be the definitive work on the topic for years to come. Though focused particularly on the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, his study goes as far back as the skirmishes between sex radicals and conservatives in the mid-nineteenth century and right up to the debates about same-sex marriage that Proposition 8 sparked in 2008. It is truly comprehensive.

There are essentially three protagonists in the book: sex radicals, who self-consciously sought to transform sexual relationships; people employed in the sex industry (prostitutes, pornographers, etc), whose livelihoods put them at odds with prevailing norms; and conservatives. Sides's sympathies clearly lay with the radicals but, to his credit, he concentrates on chronicling a story, not promoting a cause.

Sides shows not only that San Francisco's sexual physiognomy changed over the years, but also helps explain why it changed. He does this not by focusing on major figures--Harvey Milk, for example--or the vicissitudes of legislation, but rather by looking at the manifold and often subterranean efforts made by activists, partisans, and even those unwittingly thrown into the drama, all of which cumulatively shifted the sexual tides of the city.

To do this, he had to conduct a prodigious amount of research and, indeed, he did: Sides draws from memoirs, newspaper records, interviews, direct observation, among many other sources. And yet, for all his scholarly thoroughness, the book remains highly readable and communicates that a moral drama of great import played out in the streets and bedrooms and barrooms of San Francisco.

Whether you are a scholar of sexual radicalism or just curious about the Bay Area, you will want to grab a copy of Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Vital Urban History! January 26, 2010

By Veritas

Format:Hardcover

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.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating! October 23, 2009

By M. Wasserman

Format:Hardcover

As a San Francisco native, I found this book to be endlessly fascinating, to see how the Sexual Revolution had transformed various neighborhoods throughout the years. A fun and engaging read!