City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. (Reviews).

City of Sisterly & Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945- 1972. By Marc Stein (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xv plus 457pp. $35.00).

In City of Sisterly arid Brotherly Loves, Marc Stein has produced a most intriguing and curious book: a work that immediately becomes a major contribution to queer / gay history that is concerned "primarily with cross-sex relationships" (p. 10). For it is Stein's original and central contention that lesbians and gay men, together and apart, have been on the cutting edge of the key 20th century changes in relations between men and women that have seen the move from a primarily homosocial to an heterosocial culture between men and women. Ironically, lesbians and gays "have used same sex sexualities to set up, invent, multiply and modify cross-sex relationships" (p.2) Stein claims. Hence Stein attempts to move the field of gay male and lesbian history into the 21st Century field of queer history by stressing the redundancy of fixed gender definitions and the malleability and changeability of the object of sexual desire over the life course. He situates his own experience in the queer movement, as the reason for his choice of topic: "the history of heterosocial relations between gay men and lesbians." (p. 3)

Stein also tries to move gay and lesbian history forward in another important way. He positions his work especially in the context of the two other great books of lesbian and gay male history. First, he sees the focus on political movements of John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983) as inadequate. Second, George Chauncey Jr. in his 1994 book, Gay New York, argued that "the history of gay resistance must be understood to extend beyond formal political organising to include strategies of everyday resistance." This is not enough for Stein who intriguingly further develops further Carol Smith Rosenburg's 1975 work in "The Female World of Love and Ritual" which suggests that 19th century homosocial culture was "political in its own right" (p. 6). In other words everyday relationships among lesbians and gay men are intrinsically political and indeed therefore every bit as political as more formal movements: "everyday resistance nor only inspired, supported and sustained organised movements, but also worked at odds with them." (p. 6)

Stein's book is then a history of "both everyday resistance and organised movement politics" in gay and lesbian Philadelphia between 1945 and 1972. With characteristic clariry of thought, Stein divides the work into four--equally good--parts. The first concerns lesbian and gay cultures as they intermingled in the urban geography of Philadelphia. While Stein rather self-consciously, and not entirely convincingly, claims that gay and lesbian history is a vital part of urban history, he reveals the lesbian tendency towards public invisibility that led such women to come together more in the 'private' sphere than more visible gay men did. Yet both lesbian and gay men lived in the same neighbourhoods. Forty-five oral histories illuminate this era, particularly in Part 2. With special originality, Stein examines the discourse on lesbian and gays in local print culture. There is a wealth of invaluable material here, especially on Drum magazine which exerted quite a significant national influence and on the 1950s de bate on the naming of the Walt Whitman bridge which centered on the concern of some denizens that the poet was a homosexual. Part 3 concentrates on the interaction between gay men and lesbians in the homophile movements of the period 1960--1969 which he usefully dubs "militantly respectable" (p. 314). Whatever their differences, lesbians and gay men believed that united they stood, even though they persisted in the "conservative" view that men and women were basically different.

Part 4 deals with the period of the gay and feminist revolution between 1969 to 1972 and with the impact of the New York Stonewall riots down the road in Philadelphia. Here Stein struggles to convince and fails to pull out the full implications of his evidence, which shows that with the brief onset of the Gay Liberation Front and of Radicallesbians, things turned nasry as the women particularly turned on men as a class, with many failing to differentiate between gay and straight men. He insists that he still is concerned here to explore "the influences that gay liberationist men and lesbian feminists had upon one another" and that he wishes to "resist the tendency to see separation as a sign of isolation" (p.l2).

Even foes impact on one another, of course. Eager to find evidence of continuing co-operation, I think he is here far too uncritical of the turn to vicious warring among some gay men and lesbians that was wrought, especially by second-wave feminism. He is on sounder ground with his astute observation that even in this period of apparently revolutionary change, lesbian and gay men "have participated in and contributed to conservative consensus about the nature of differences between women and men" (p. 386). The queer theorist in Stein is no doubt appalled, but like all the best historians, Stein here honestly identifies how hard social change is to bring about.

Stein's two central premises are also problematic. Firstly Stein repeatedly talks about "everyday resistance". Yet, to offer an obvious criticism, I think his definition of the political is far too broad. Throughout the book gay men and lesbians are constantly presented as agents. Everything is political. Yet, boringly, the invisible gay men and lesbians were those who did not care about politics and would be shocked and wouldn't understand how their actions could be deemed political. Second, and related to this, how far have gay men and lesbians been on the cutting edge of the 20th century move from a homosocial to a heterosocial culture? Not very far, I suspect, as this shift began in the early twentieth century when gay men and lesbians were not very visible at all. For Stein's claim for the importance, even centrality, of gay male and lesbian relationships in social change between the sexes is untenable. Here I think he has lost the broader national picture (a classic danger of such local studies of cour se). I would argue that far from gay men and lesbians (and their cross-sex relationships) being such active agents in bringing about social change, changes in the construction of homosexuality have in fact been heterosexually led. As heterosexuality became more liberated, so a greater toleration of homosexuality developed. Therefore, Stonewall, a major event in gay history, was but a footnote in the sexual revolution of the 1960's / 1970's (which itself was probably a result of the moral complacency brought on by consumerism in tandem with the coincidental coming-of-age of the huge baby-boomer cohort).

It follows that the history of gay men and lesbians, while certainly worth doing, is not nearly as important a field as Stein thinks it is. Nevertheless, Stein's accomplishment is enormous. For, like all the best works of history he raises more questions than he answers. He has uncovered the whole history of a community at a vital turning point. He shows, in doing so, rare qualities of the historian: clarity of thought, empathy, even (if I may be so bold) objectivity. Above all, his book is a thumping good read--I found it quite un-put-downable. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves therefore, together with D'Emilio and Chauncey's great books will be seen as one of the two or three indispensable studies in its field of the last twenty years, reminding us what an exciting time it is be to a scholar.

ENDNOTES

(1.) John D'Emilio Sexual Politics and Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority (Chicago, 1983).

(2.) George Chauncey Jr., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 to 1940 (New York, 1994).

(3.) Carol Smith Rosenburg; "The Female World of Love and Ritual", Signs 1, No. 1 (1975).