Queer Sites

Gay urban histories since 1600

Edited by David Higgs




i

Queer Sites
Queer Sites is a history of gay space in seven of the worlds major cities from the early modern
period to the present. The book focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London,
Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow, and examines the transition
from the sexual furtiveness of centuries when male homosexual behavior was criminal, to the open
affirmation of gay identities in the 1990s.
The book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries,
poems, legal accounts and journalistic material. Original in its comparative approach to gay urban
history, the work reveals the differences between the American model of gay male life and that of
cities in other societies, and the impact of changing regimes. By concentrating on the importance of
the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even
churches, the essays explore the extent to which gay space existed and the degree of social
collectiveness felt by those who used this space. Queer Sites offers compelling individual histories and
discusses the gay past beyond living witnesses.
David Higgs is Professor of History at the University of Toronto.
ii
First published 1999 by London E C4 P 4 EE
Typeset in Baskerville by Routledge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd,
Guildford and Kings Lynn
All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers
Library of Congress Cataloging m Publication Data Queer Sites gay urban histories since 1600/ [edited by] David Higgs p cni
Includes bibliographic al references and index 1 Gay men history 2 Gay men Social life and customs 5 Urban parks History I Higgs,
David, 1939 HQ76 Q43 1999
305 3896642 dc21 98 35022 CIP
iii
Contents
Illustrations ...................................................................................................................................... v
Contributors.................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
David Higgs................................................................................................................................. 1
Time-frame .............................................................................................................................. 2
Why male-centered? ................................................................................................................ 2
Methodological issues.............................................................................................................. 4
Terminology............................................................................................................................. 4
Documentation and evidence ................................................................................................... 4
Sites ......................................................................................................................................... 5
Age groups and homosexuality................................................................................................ 5
Identity..................................................................................................................................... 6
The general and the particular .................................................................................................. 6
Notes........................................................................................................................................ 9
1 Paris ............................................................................................................................................ 10
Michael D. Sibalis...................................................................................................................... 10
Space, visibility and the gay identity...................................................................................... 10
Gay Parees ............................................................................................................................ 11
Public space ........................................................................................................................... 15
From gay commercial space to gay ghetto ............................................................................. 23
The ghetto in question............................................................................................................ 34
Notes...................................................................................................................................... 36
2 Moscow...................................................................................................................................... 38
Dan Healey ................................................................................................................................ 38
Moscow 16001861: traditional masculinities and love between men................................. 39
Moscow 1861-1917: the appearaiice of a homosexual subculture.......................................... 43
Moscow 1917-91: carving privacy from communal space..................................................... 49
Notes...................................................................................................................................... 57
3 Amsterdam.................................................................................................................................. 61
Gert Hekma................................................................................................................................ 61
Introduction............................................................................................................................ 61
The secret world of sodomy................................................................................................... 62
Modern times ......................................................................................................................... 68
Wrong lovers.......................................................................................................................... 70
Medical theories, emancipatory efforts .................................................................................. 73
From twilight to floodlight..................................................................................................... 77
A new vibrant gay world........................................................................................................ 84
4 London........................................................................................................................................ 89
Randolph Trumbach................................................................................................................... 89
Notes.................................................................................................................................... 110
5 Lisbon....................................................................................................................................... 112
David Higgs............................................................................................................................. 112
The Inquisition and the sodomites........................................................................................ 112
The sailor made no reference to sodomizing women. .......................................................... 126
iv
Conclusion........................................................................................................................... 136
Notes.................................................................................................................................... 136
6 Rio deJaneiro ............................................................................................................................ 138
David Higgs............................................................................................................................. 138
Notes.................................................................................................................................... 163
7 San Francisco............................................................................................................................ 164
Les Wright ............................................................................................................................... 164
Notes.................................................................................................................................... 189
Some suggestions for further reading........................................................................................... 190
Bibliography................................................................................................................................ 194
Index............................................................................................................................................ 209

v
Illustrations


1 Apollo and Cyperus by Claude-Marie Dubufe (1790-1864) 3
2 A Gay Pride float in downtown Toronto, 1996 8
1.1 Statue of a wild boar in the Tulleries Garden 17
1.2 The Galerie dOrlans in 1845 19
1.3 Six-place public urinal. Place de la Bourse, Paris, c. 1875-78 20
1.4 A Parisian gay bar in 1908-9 26
2.1 Nikitskie Gates, a square on the Boulevard Ring notorious as a haunt of homosexuals 47
2.2 Arbat Square on the Boulevard Ring, c. 1930 48
3.1 Justice glorified by the discovery and punishment of rising sin (1730) 64
3.2 A print representing a tale of two sodomites 66
3.3 Map of Amsterdam indicating the meeting places in the late nineteenth century 71
3.4 Public toilet, specifically designed to prevent homosexual acts in Amsterdam 72
3.5 American drawing by Peg, seized by the Dutch police 88
3.6 The first leathermen on Amsterdams streets, c. 1955 81
3.7 Party in the dancing DOK, c. 1955 82
4.1 A 1707 London broadsheet of verse mocking suicides of men 100
5.1 Early eighteenth-century print showing a Lisbon Inquisition procession 122
5.2 1785 map of Lisbon 129
5.3 Early nineteenth-century neo-classical statue The Love of Virtue 131
6.1 Carnival in Rio. 1978 162

vi
Contributors

Dan Healey is Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of
Glasgow, UK. He has published scholarly articles on Russian history, and a broad range of gay
journalism. Email>[email protected]
Gert Hekma is a lecturer in Gay and Lesbian Studies at the University of Amsterdam in the
Netherlands. He has published widely on the history of sexuality. Email >[email protected]
David Higgs, a Professor of History at University College of the University of Toronto, Canada, has
published on aspects of French, Portuguese and Brazilian social history.
Email>[email protected]
Michael D. Sibalis is an Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He has
published a variety of articles and book chapters on French social history. Email>msibalis@m a
chl.wlu.ca
Randolph Trumbach, Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, USA,
has published a variety of books and studies on sexuality.
Les Wright, Associate Professor of Humanities and English at Mount Ida College, Massachusetts,
USA, has published on the history of sexuality, is a past co-chair of the Gay and Lesbian Historie
al Society of Northern California and the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, and presently
serves as book review editor for the CL GH. Email>[email protected]

1
Introduction
David Higgs
The writing of histories of cities is an old idea, particularly dating from the age of dynastic seats.
Dynasties have been as decisive in shaping capital cities as nationality, climate or geography European
capitals like Vienna and Berlin eclipsed centers like Lyons, Frankfurt and Nuremberg that lacked a
resident ruling family (Mansel 1995: xi). The seven cities considered in this book were not all of the
same antiquity and did not always house ruling dynasties: Lisbon was the oldest, founded in
approximately 1200 BC, London and Paris had settlements by 200 BG, and the walls of the latter were
in place 400 years later around the year 250AD. Amsterdam was founded in 1225, and Moscow was a
settlement before 1300. Rio de Janeiro was founded in 1565, but a royal household was only resident
from 1808 to 1889. Rio is three centuries older than San Francisco which dated from 1839 and was
never home to a ruling monarch. Thus the seven cities include three with settlement for more than
2,000 years, two with almost a millennium, and the two American cities which are each less than 500
years of age.
If the palaces of ruling dynasties often figured prominently in historical accounts of cities scant
attention was paid in those chronicles to the urban population of homosexuals. Royal households were
often said to be hothouses of homosexual behaviors. Dynasties rise and fall but homosexual activities
are a more permanent feature of city life. This book examines seven cities in order to trace the
development of dissident sexualities in them over the last four centuries. The title of this book was
inspired by an international conference held at the University of Toronto in May 1993 in which several
of the authors took part and which explored Queer Sites: Bodies at Work, Bodies at Play
Michael Sibalis opens this collection with Paris, for long the heart of the most populous monarchy
of western Europe. Moscow (by Dan Healey) was an Orthodox metropolis dwelling within very
different cultural traditions from those of Catholic Europe. Amsterdam (by Gert Hekma) like London
(Randolph Trumbach) were major port cities with extensive maritime imperial connections for
centuries. Lisbon (by David Higgs) was the leading city in the Portuguese-speaking world for many
years and exported its cultural and social forms to the outpost of empire in Rio de Janeiro (by David
Higgs). Rio was also a non-European city with its own distinctive forms of social development that
owed much to Africa.
2

The book closes with an essay on the gay past of another city of the Americas, San Francisco (by
Les Wright). Comparing the past of the seven cities may tell us more about differences in sexual
cultures than to point to vague similarities in experience.
Queer city histories attract a readership because gay men are intensely urban. Few live by choice in
the country on a permanent basis since they usually feel that cities offer a much greater variety of
ways in which to enjoy ones life. Bonding with a city may also be bonding with a foreign place which
was the site of special memories. More than one gay tourist undertook a nostalgic walking tour in a
foreign city in daylight to photograph parks, railway stations, bars, cafes and apartments to make a
visual record to remind himself of earlier experiences in those places. Like the Parisian mentioned by
Sibalis, an American in another city in the 1960s laid a wreath on the snow which covered a
demolished park tearoom (Humphreys 1975: 14).
Time-frame
Homosexuality flourished most particularly in cities from antiquity to the present; more evidence
on aspects of urban homosexual behavior has survived the centuries following 1600 than those before.
The editor proposed that date as a convenient starting point. Historians of the seventeenth century have
convincingly shown that it was an era of crisis and historical change in society not just in Europe but
in other parts of the world (Aston 1965; Parker and Smith 1997).
Why male-centered?
The collection deals primarily with male experience. All seven cities had and have lesbian
residents but the documentary evidence surviving from the past and the interpretation of it pose special
questions best dealt with by separate studies. In early modern Europe, particularly at night, girls and
women were subject to an informal curfew in the name of propriety. Even if a respectable girl or
woman went out it was under the supervision of a chaperone or male protector. Indeed, in many
societies only sex workers and abject women were encountered in the streets and outdoors after dark.
The men folk who control led females watched over their vulnerability (Hufton 1995). This was
evident in Europe and the Americas.
In some situations, particularly during the Belle poque, cross-dressing lesbians and gay men
associated in tourist amusements in Paris and elsewhere. In brothels for heterosexual men some of the
prostitutes were lesbian in their personal affections, and in the same establishments men or boys
sometimes dressed as women to provide sexual services for clients in search of novelty. Despite
overlapping arenas of sexuality, and sometimes of sociability, between lesbians and gay men in some
times and places the authors in the present collection kept their focus primarily on males because they
have more evidence about the latter.
3


Figure 1 Apollo and Cyperus by Claude-Marie Dubufe (1790-1864), exhibited in the 1822 Paris
Salon. It shows Apollos pity for a suicidal youth who had accidentally killed a cherished stag,
but can simultaneously be viewed as a representation of homoeroticism.

Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis made acknowledgements to personal informants over four
and a half pages in the history of Lesbian Buffalo (Kennedy and Davis 1993). In the preface they
wrote:
We are forced to start in the 1930s be cause that is as far back as our narrators memories reach.
It is difficult to test the existence in the past among males of what Kennedy and Davis affirm:
community is key to the development of twentieth-century lesbian identity and consciousness.
Kennedy and Davis sought this from the group of people who regularly frequented lesbian bars and
open or semi-open house parties during the 1940s and 1950s.
Twentieth-century lesbians in the cities discussed here generally do not use parks and the outdoors
like the gay men who enjoy outdoor cruising, and certainly did not do so in the past. So there is not the
same sexualized use of outdoors. Even indoors there was less tendency for women to own their own
housing and to live adjacent to other lesbians than is the case for gays in the
4

emergent gay ghettos of the bigger US cities from the 1970s on. The socializing of lesbians and gays
in a united community is, roughly speaking, a modern phenomenon, dating from the mid-century. It
suggests non-genital activities and political solidarities which were unthinkable before 1900.
Methodological issues
No attempt is made by any of the authors to provide a sustained methodological discussion of past
urban gay geographies because of the highly disparate historical sources available for that enterprise.
Much more theorizing on geography and architecture that reflect same-sex desire is available for the
contemporary period than that prior to 1900 (Bell and Valentine 1995; Betsky 1997).
Terminology
The language(s) of sexual labeling evolved in tandem with changes in city forms and continues to
do so. Altitudes towards expressions of masculinity and femininity have also changed. Since any
speaker or writer is in a dynamic relationship with her or his self-image and that of others the way in
which terminology is used in text or inflected in speech is extremely complex, for sexuality as much as
for race. An obvious example in North American English is the disappearance of the word negro
from African - American civil discourse, even though such heroes of the Civil Rights movement of the
past as Booker T. Washington used it without embarrassment (Brotz 1992).
In a similar way in English and the other languages spoken in the seven cities of this book the
words used by and about same-sex activities underwent frequent changes over centuries. Thus in
English Canada in 1998 the word faggot said with a smile can be a term of complicity among gays
while pronounced with venom it is an abusive term. The head of psychiatry in a hospital would not
usually talk about faggots among her patients but a new Judge of the Supreme Court (Binnie) spoke to
law students of a faggoty dress-up party Although the North American use of faggot to speak of
homosexuals in a derogatory way began in the USA around 1914 the word meant a shrewish woman
before that, and was recorded in dialect English from 1591 {Shorter Oxford). This was presumably
transferred to an effeminate man who wanted sex with other men.
The authors deliberately avoided encumbering their discussions with extensive digressions on
shifting current and past vocabulary and linguistic usages, speech situations and changing definitions,
but are entirely aware that terms used for same-sex practices have different values in different mouths
at different times.
Documentation and evidence
Historians who work on gay urban history during the centuries out of reach of living witness - now
essentially all time before 1900 - must turn to inanimate documents. Records of urban male
homosexual behaviors in elude derisive
5

commentaries, like the pamphlet about the bougres (buggers) among the deputies of the National
Assembly sitting in Paris in the 1790s. A 1906 book on libertinism in Rio de Janeiro used the
neologism of Homosexualism in the subtitle and took a medical stance. A gossipy Russian text
described homosexuals in Saint Petersburg of 1908. Tabloids often commented on homosexual
activities which were not mentioned in more serious newspapers.
An account of homosexuality in a city established through contemporary oral history gained from
willing and loquacious informants is not available to the historian of earlier times. A narrative has
frequently to be constructed out of mere scraps of information. Criminal records and scandal sheets
have to be re-read with the imagined viewpoint of the prisoner or the denounced individual (Norton
1997). What Levi-Strauss called the bricolage approach to information about behavior is necessary for
the composition of gay urban histories. Bartlett (1988: 227) hailed two early writers on male
homosexuality for their inspired queenly assemblage of fragments. Attention to detail that perhaps
others might not interpret in the same light was of the essence of same-sex practices.
Sites
The same-sex network of sexual encounters emerged as a subculture in urban settings with cruising
sites such as the ruins of the Coliseum in Rome or places for sociability such as taverns and public
baths. Furtive urban subcultures existed for centuries despite reprobation from the majority. As the
subcultures extended in the growing urban context there was a commercial side of expenditures for
drink, food, prostitution and entertainment.
Age groups and homosexuality
In the twentieth century the question of the exploitation of under-age partners in sexual activity
became an issue for gay men. Many heterosexuals accused adult homosexuals of preying on the young
and innocent and of perverting them. In 1922 a Portuguese doctor who advanced a typology of
homosexual tastes thought that 5 per cent of male homosexuals were pedophiles and another 5 per cent
were gerontophiles, while half of the remainder were ephebophiles (seeking partners aged 16-25) and
the other half liked mature men, and were androphiles (Monteiro 1922: 251). From childhood to old
age the individual with homosexual inclinations passed through changing targets of desire and perhaps
himself revised the directions of his own lusts. In his travels in gay America during the 1970s one
writer evoked cities where the beau ideal was no longer the beautiful boy of 18 but the hot man of
35 and he added that two of those hot men had become free to find each other attractive. He drew a
contrast with an older paradigm frequently found in these pages that he associated with Kansas City:
6

The compliant, slightly nelly boy and the dominant, quietly masculine man form the usual couple.
The age difference between them and their different degrees of assertiveness approximate the
dimorphism of the heterosexual husband and wife, a model that the gays also emulate through a
lot of role-playing.
(White 1986: 137)
In Europe and the Americas more choice of partners from across the spectrum of different age
groups was usually found in cities.
Identity
In the 1960s the movement for homosexual rights between legal adults became highly vocal in a
variety of capitalist countries in the West. This call for rights went beyond demanding the freedom for
adult members of the subcultures to do in private what they pleased. An identity was asserted, founded
on a sense of being a self-perceived group of people who hold in common a same-sex sexual
orientation not shared by the majority with whom they are in contact. Stephen O. Murray wrote of a
quasi-ethnic community (Murray 1979). As a result of shared responses to the heterosexual
dictatorship, as Christopher Isherwood put it, the identity was forged.
The gay identity of the 1960s on was accompanied in the Atlantic world by a fast build-up of
businesses and institutions serving self-identifying gays. Intellectuals and historians who commented
on this trajectory over time from sexual networks of partners often anonymous and silent, to
subculture evolving into a public identity took a variety of postures. They ranged from theoretical
commentaries on epistemology and discourses to simple efforts to amass information on how gay men
lived over past centuries to the present.
Mass media in the 1960s began to carry non-judgmental reports on the urban sites and activities
where lesbians and gays congregated. An annual festival parade started in 1970 as the commemoration
of a riot in New York when lesbians and gays fought back against police raiding a bar. In 1978 a
rainbow flag was devised and became an international symbol. The American usage of an adjective for
happiness into a sexual label, gay, supplanted local names for homosexual males in a variety of
languages.
The general and the particular
The problem in making sweeping statements about the emergence of altitudes and sexual
subcultures over time is not merely the parochial one of asking whether the relatively open political
society of eighteenth-century England had the same sexual traditions as those of the Holy Roman
Empire, or colonial Brazil or tsarist Russia. Why were there cyclical surges of calls for the repression
of male homosexual activity? Various hypotheses can be advanced about moral panics or fears
driven by economic change (Bech 1997: 181-91).
7

In the 1990s people in the developed world in jurisdictions where same-sex activities between
consenting adults are legal have totally polarized views about what should be permitted under the law,
or what constitutes morally acceptable conduct. A 1995 survey of Canadian altitudes found that half of
the population believed the practice of homosexuality to be wrong, but the number viewing
homosexual relations as not wrong at all or sometimes wrong had risen to 48 per cent from 28 per
cent in 1975. A 1996 French survey found 67 per cent of the respondents thought homosexuality was
a way to express ones sexuality like any other, 16 per cent thought it a sickness for which a cure
should be found, while 15 per cent described homosexuality as a sexual perversion to be fought
against. Possibly such figures might be reversed subsequently according to respondents with different
characteristics of age, ethnicity or residence.
As the essays in this book show, there were sharp cultural differences in how same-sex practices
were manifested in the seven cities. San Francisco has in the 1990s a more vocal gay presence and a
higher percentage of its population as self-identifying gay men than any of the other six cities. Self-
identifying San Francisco gay men demanded safe streets and rights for co-resident couples with the
same insistence as bourgeois heterosexuals. At the same time a swelling chorus of dissent arose among
homosexuals against a glorification of the Adam and Steve model projected by the US media. Adam
and Steve was inappropriate to various categories under the umbrella of the gay identity. The sadists
and masochists, people of color, those who did not dwell in dyads and other clusters of diverse sexual
agendas did not all recognize themselves in the media formulation of the gay life. The tacit imposition
of a white, consumerist, US male couple as the appropriate paradigm for gay lives in urban Europe and
else-where may not long continue into the third millennium.
At the end of the twentieth century about one-third of adult North American exclusively
homosexual men are in some kind of sexual relationship and of that third a substantial number are co-
residents. For the majority of homosexuals who for whatever reason are not in an ongoing relationship
with another male the domestication of gay sex is now the theoretical ideal. That ideal contrasts with
other realities, like that of the low-income solitary without children or a support group. Declining
fertility, longer lives and heterosexual family break-down rates mean that in future many men and
women of all sexual persuasions will not be living in a couple for extended periods of their lives.
Whether these generalizations hold equally true for all of the big cities of South America, Western and
Eastern Europe is not easily answerable at this point of time. Latin-American familianism may inhibit
same-sex cohabiting as much as housing shortages in Eastern Europe. However it appears undeniable
that in those cities at the end of the second millennium the spaces for domestic and public gay male
urban experiences have developed to an extent never previously known in history. Jane Jacobs told a
lesbian and gay newspaper in Toronto that in any city she had ever been in she enjoyed what people
call gay ghettos and added:
They really show evidence of people caring for the area and the community and each other.
8

The postmodern city with its predominance of tertiary economic activities counts considerable
numbers of gay couples miming the co-resident nuclear family, affirming a same-sex version of
romantic love, and displaying ongoing mutual support. Such couples may have only limited contacts
with consanguine relatives and find their incomes from activities which are not directly dependent on
their birth families. They often live in cities which are far from their birth-places and they have
replaced the socialization network of their childhoods and early adolescence with new networks of
friends and colleagues. Such men are frequently DINKS (dual incomes and no kids) with higher
household incomes than the median of heterosexual nuclear families. Just as in the case of
heterosexuals their gay partnerships can be marked by physical violence, disputes over assets,
withdrawal or expulsion of one or the other because of new sexual interests. Nevertheless in all the
cities considered in this book there are examples of co-resident male couples who live together in
house or apartment over decades and until death. Such couples are increasingly impatient with the
demeaning and dismissive altitudes towards them found not only among heterosexual bigots but some
homosexuals married to wives.
In the second half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1970s on, there was a quantum
leap to the gay communities/villages in larger cities. There was also self- identification. This
emergence of gay districts could even be recognized officially by urban authorities as in the case of
Chicago in 1997.
The identification of a district as a focus of gay life permitted the proliferation of sexual fantasies,
tastes and pleasures: clones, S&M, transvestites, girth-and-mirth, ephebes, bears, leathermen and so
forth. The diversity and differentiation in

Figure 2 A Gay Pride float entitled Latin Flavor in a downtown parade on the main street of
Toronto,June 1996.
9

the modern city is a function of the increase in scale and the absolute size of the membership of the
urban gay community. The differentiation is reflected in the diversity of queer sites in large cities.
Such variety was not, and is not, possible in small towns where the number of gay folk is small. Even
in the capital cities of the past public authorities terrorized queer minorities and prevented the
elaboration of sites of diversity. Sometimes, however, the police might extend limited forbearance
with a view to milking blackmail victims.
At the end of the twentieth century lesbians and gays and other adult formulations of sexual desires
enjoy more liberty than in the past in all of the cities considered in this book. In the 1980s a modish
complaint of some older gays, at least among the white, gentrified professional bourgeoisie in the
USA, was that gay liberal ion had taken the edge out of gay life (White 1986: 156). One English
entertainer in 1996 was wistful for a time before the clear identities of either straight or gay and said
that half a century earlier he would have been married with three children and having affairs with men
on the side. He thought he would probably be happier in the past than the present (David 1997: 269).
Whether his putative wife, children and affairs would also share his felicity was unclear.
Growing acceptance of law-abiding homosexual behavior by adults robbed such conduct of the
dangers and interdependencies which were, in some eyes, its charm in former days. The constant
manipulation of deceptive protective stances made many a hapless individual homosexual in the past
feel like a reproved outcast. In a society where adult sexuality per se is no reason for claiming
distinction gay men must strive for status on other grounds. In knowing more about the furtive as well
as the overt sexual histories of the seven cities in this book the reader will better understand how
homosexual men sought to cope with the prohibitions of their days and to satisfy their needs and
aspirations.
Notes
1 Globe cmdMcI (Toronto), 7 November 1995, A7.
2 LeMonde, 22 June 1996, 11.
3 XTRA! (Toronto), 9 October 1997, No. 338, 13.


10
1 Paris
Michael D. Sibalis
Refugees from Sodom. - We know that the biblical fire did not destroy all the inhabitants of this
corrupt city. Scattered over all the earth, they proliferated in Paris...
(La Petite Revue, 15 October 1864)
Space, visibility and the gay identity
In 1895, Andr Raffalovich drew public attention to the clandestine homosexual subculture of
Paris and other European urban centers with the warning that everywhere...Sodom exists, venal and
menacing, the invisible city (Raffalovich 1895: 447). One hundred years later, on Saturday afternoon,
24 June 1995, 80,000 Parisians celebrated la Lesbian and Gay Pride - the international
commemoration of the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City - with a parade along the
boulevards of the Left Bank. Banners and placards raised high, balloons and flags afloat overhead and
music blasting from a hundred loud-speakers, the jubilant crowd of men and women made its way
along the 4-kilorneter route from the Montparnasse Railway Station to the Place de la Bastille.
Parisians have observed Gay Pride in this way every June since 1982, but until recently the number
of participants rarely exceeded 5,000-10,000. The unprecedented turnout in 1995 therefore marked a
turning-point for Frances gay community. Visible we chose to be... exulted one gay journalist at the
time. And numerous we were... (Muhleisen 1995). Subsequent demonstrations have been even
bigger. In 1996, 120,000 people showed up, and twice that number marched during the Europride
celebrations of 1997, when (in the words of a leading newspaper) Paris became, for a few days at least,
the European capital of homosexual visibility Clearly, the denizens of Raffalovichs invisible city
have taken visibility as their watchword.
Visibility is a very re cent objective for French homosexuals. For many centuries, homosexually
inclined men and women usually preferred to conceal their unconventional desires from a hostile
society. Todays gay visibility is the culmination of a long process by which homosexuals not only
created and expanded private gay space, but also struggled to secure a share of public space.
11

This effort to appropriate urban space for sexual activity has been the work of gay men in
particular, whereas lesbians have tended to be more discreet and more private in the conduct of their
sexual lives.
A sociological study of contemporary French male homosexuals published in 1984 has pointed out
the paradoxes inherent in gay mens strategic use of urban space: Space is a very complicated thing.
... Because space is defined by an inside and outside, it excludes and includes, endoses and liberales.
Closed and private space - like clandestine or semi-clandestine commercial venues, but also personal
networks of friends and acquaintances - protects, but at the cost of isolating men from the outside
world. And yet closed space also creates new possibilities by bringing men together, ending their
individual sense of isolation and confer [ring] a collective strength that allows people to be
themselves in public Inversely, however, gay liberation (as being oneself in public has come to be
called) leads to a proliferation of exclusively gay spaces (like bars, clubs and cruising areas), which
eventually creates gay-dominated enclaves (so-called gay ghettos) that can sometimes cut
homosexuals off from the broader society in which they live. Ghettos set gay men apart from fellow
citizens so that they run the risk of making their status as a scorned minority a permanent one
(Cavailhes et al 1984: 43-4).
Historically, Parisian gay spaces have been situated both literally and figuratively on the margins
of city life. Thirty years ago, a rather unusual guidebook classed Pariss gay spaces among the citys
many bad places (mauvais lieux), which it defined as [s]treet, business, quarter, residence, even
public place, square, train station, riverbank that human evil and the force of circumstances have trans-
formed into a chosen domain of sin and vice(Bastiani 1968: 7). This equation of homosexuality with
moral turpitude is typical of how most French people have traditionally regarded sexual relations
between men or between women.
Terminology provides striking evidence of these negative public altitudes. Frenchmen who have
sex with other men have been designated by many words over the years: sodomites, buggers, vile
creatures (infames) and anti-physicals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; pederasts (still
the most common term) from about 1740; uranians, inverts and especially homosexuals since the
late nineteenth century; and gays (a term imported from the United States) beginning in the 1970s.
As these words indicate, society at large has usually considered these men to be sinful, depraved,
degenerate, sick or insane. Even today, although two-thirds of the French tell pollsters that
homosexuality is just another way to live ones sexuality, the words pede (slang for pederast and
equivalent to the American fag or the British poofter) and encul (literally, a man who is
sodomized) are common taunts with an especially harsh sting.
Gay Parees
Urbanization is a precondition to emergence of a significant gay subculture. Paris is Frances
historie capital and has always been by far its largest city. It had perhaps 300,000 inhabitants in 1600,
slightly less than half a mi Ilion under
12

Louis XIV in the 168 Os, and close to 600,000 on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. The
population reached 1 million by 1850 and 2 million by 1876. It peaked at 2.9 million in 1921. Only 2.2
million people live within city limits today, but the greater Paris region counts 11 million inhabitants,
or about 20 per cent of the national population (Fierro 1996: 278-9). And yet a 1993 study of French
sexual behavior indicated that the region was home to 46 per cent of the countrys homosexual men.
The sample was small: 2,359 heterosexuals, 53 bisexuals, 52 homosexuals (Messian and Mouret-
Fourme 1993). Gay men have apparently migrated to Paris from every part of the country.
Countless heterosexuals have also moved to Paris in search of work, professional advancement or a
new life, but the city has almost certainly drawn a disproportionately high number of homosexuals.
Until quite recently, even the largest of other French towns offered these men very little in the way of
a gay subculture. Gay venues were (and in most cases still are) rare in provincial France, and strong
social and familial constraints make it very difficult to live ones homosexuality openly there. As a
result, as an American journalist explained in 1976:
Gay Paris is the center of all homosexual life in France. A French homosexual will almost
inevitably turn to the anonymity of the French capital to escape his fate in any one of thousands of
provincial outposts. This makes Paris a privileged place no other city in the country can match.
5

One gay journalist, now in his forties, recently recalled his move to the capital some twenty years
ago: Paris to me meant freedom. ... Things became much easier for me. I knew... that I would end up
living the life that I wanted. And a much younger biologist, still in his twenties, remarked that in the
provinces, there are very few places to meet someone...Its different in Paris. There are a lot more
possibilities(Minella and Angelotti 1996: 61-2).
Foreign homosexuals, too, have often seen Paris as a promised land of freedom. In the words of
Dennis Altinan:
Paris occupies a special place in the homosexual imagination. It offers neither the tolerance of
Amsterdam or San Francisco, nor the inexhaustible sensuality of New York. But we are reminded
by such names as [Marcel] Proust, [Andr] Gide, [Jean] Cocteau, Colette, and [Jean] Genet that
Paris has certainly been a major center for homosexual culture and a refuge from more repressive
cultures for homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and James
Baldwin (who set Giovcmni s Room there).1
The citys appeal to homosexuals undoubtedly extends well into its past. Of forty-six sodomites
incarcerated in Bictre prison between 1701 and 1715, only twenty-one (45.7 per cent) were native-
born Parisians. One hundred and fifty years later, the director of the citys vice squad reported that
only 32.3 per cent of the pederasts arrested between 1860 and 1870 were born in Paris, whereas
13

58.5 per cent originated in the provinces and 9.2 per cent were foreigners (Carlier 1887: 444-5).
The recorded history of Parisian homosexuality begins in the Middles Ages. An anonymous
twelfth-century poet observed that Up to now Chartres and Paris have revelled / In the vice of
Sodom, while a clergyman lamented in the early thirteenth century that this shameful and
abominable vice was rampant in the city (Boswell 1980: 262; Lever 1985: 43). Allusions such as
these to same-sex activity be came more frequent as the centuries advanced. By the 1500s and 1600s,
accusations of sodomy were standard weapons in the rhetorical arsenal of polemicists, who often
alleged that foreigners (especially Italian courtiers) had first brought this strange taste for ones own
sex into France and that it infected principally artists, clergymen and libertine noblemen, as well as the
domestic servants whom they purportedly corrupted. Although men of every social class almost
certainly did participate in same-sex activity, the surviving evidence from before the eighteenth
century displays a marked bias toward the privileged elites. Consequently, to the extent that this can be
determined, if seventeenth-century Paris had gay space (a term that is surely anachronistic for the
period), it was in the all-male schools run by the clergy, in aristocratic mansions and at the royal court,
where in the 1680s many of the highest nobles in the land allegedly belonged to a secret Italian
brotherhood of sodomites (Lever 1985; Estre 1902).
By the eighteenth century, however, there is substantial evidence of a more widespread and more
socially diverse sodomitical subculture in Paris among men who se sexual desires defined a
collective identity and, so me historians would claim, even a distinct lifestyle. Maurice Lever, for
instance, has argued that:
[d]espite disparities of social class, the homosexual world [of eighteenth-century Paris] formed a
community apart, with its own language, rules, codes, rivalries and clans. A closed society, secret
by necessity, perhaps also by taste, situated on the margins of traditional society... For everybody,
young or ode, priests or laymen, great lords, financiers, workers, vagabonds, a single activity,
devouring and obsessive: cruising for sex [la drague}.
(Lever 1985: 299)
If this subculture existed earlier, it has unfortunately left almost no trace in the archives. Police
reports, the main source for the history of homosexual activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, do not exist for the period before 1700. It was only in 1667 that Paris got an effective police
force to administer the growing city, control criminal activity, maintain good order and enforce public
morals. In the early 1700s, special police agents began to patrol those parts of the city known to be
frequented by sodomites, and harassed, entrapped and arrested the men they found there. Sodomy was
a serious crime at the time and formal legal penalties harsh: death by fire until 1791. In practice,
however, enforcement was almost always lenient. Only seven Parisian sodomites were burned at the
stake in the entire eighteenth century, and five of them had other serious crimes, like rape and murder,
on their conscience. The exceptions were a
14

couple of hapless wretches executed by way of example in 1750, after the night watch caught them
having sex in a darkened street. The police more usually released arrested sodomites with a warning or
locked them up for a few weeks to teach them a lesson (Rey 1979-80).
In 1791, the French Revolution enacted a new penal code that decriminalized sodomy between
consenting partners in private. A homosexual act was now criminal only when it occurred in public
space, in which case it constituted an offense against public decency. The police consequently paid
little heed to private and discreet homosexual conduct, but in 1817 a reconstituted vice squad resumed
its rounds in the streets and parks (Sibalis 1996). The se patrols continued into the early 1980s. The
reports generated by policing constitute one very valuable source for the history of homosexual men
and their use of Parisian space. Other kinds of sources also appeared in a gradually widening stream in
the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Policemen, magistrates, clergymen and medical
doctors - the pillars of the established order -expounded their expert (and generally hostile) opinions of
homosexual behavior. Newspapers reported trials for public indecency and the occasional sensational
scandal. Law courts kept records of such cases, which eventually found their way into the archives.
And books, written for an insatiably curious reading public and sporting lurid titles like Parish
Garbage (1874), Corruption in Paris (1890), Salan Leads the Boil (1925), Among the Bad Boys
(1937) and The Underside of Paris (1955), purported to expose the seamy side of Parisian life
(including crime, prostitution and homosexuality), while clearly reveling in the accounts of the moral
evils that they stigmatized (Urville 1874; Coffignon 1890; Georges-Anquetil 1925; Coglay
1937;Delpche 1955).
Fiction, too, can be a useful historical source. The first French literary master-piece to deal
extensively with homosexuality was Marcel Prousfs seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu
(1913-27), translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, which shocked many people with
its panoramic view of Parisian homosexuality at the turn of the century. But even before Proust set pen
to paper, minor novelists had already treated the subject and dozens more of varying talent would
follow suit over the years. So me of their novels offer precious insights into past altitudes and sexual
activities through their strong characterization of homosexual men and their vivid evocations of urban
gay spaces.
For instance, Dr Luiz (pseudonym of Paul Devaux), author of Les Fellalors (1888), claimed that
his mildly pornographic book was more a social study [of sexual perversion] than a novel Its main
character, a beautiful Spaniard named Arthur, was one of those young men, models of elegance and
good taste, who live in luxury and idleness, spending their time in the fictional Caf de la Guerre
(standing in for the real Caf de la Paix). Luiz told readers that he wanted to to aid you by dissipating
your last doubts concerning those overly well-dressed ephebes. Francis Careos Jsus-la-Caille (1910)
examined a very different but no less shocking milieu. In recounting the story of a teenage male
hustler. Careo portrayed the world of crime, prostitution and homosexuality that flourished in
15

the Montmartre district of early twentieth-century Paris. Montmartre was also the setting for Adonis-Bar,
by Maurice Duplay (1928). The plot of this novel centered on a gay bar in the 1920s and sketched a
realistic picture of the decadent lives of Horace, the middle-aged owner, and Fred, his much younger
lover. The eponymous hero of Marcel Guersanfs Jean-Paul (1953) dies at 23 after winning the struggle
against his homosexual inclinations thanks to his recovered Catholic faith. Despite its moralizing tone,
the book included realistic descriptions of homosexual cruising in Parisian streets in the mid-1930s.
(For other French literary representations of homosexualities see Robinson, 1995; Summers 1995:
290-302).
As these few examples suggest, most novelists have demonstrated a marked antipathy toward their
homosexual characters, often killing them off at the end of the story as if they had to die to atone for
their deviance. This changed significantly only after the World War II and especially from the 1960s,
when openly gay novelists began to produce a literature that celebrated their own experiences. The
voice of homosexuals could be heard elsewhere as well, once they began speaking up, speaking out
and speaking for themselves. Arcadie, a politically moderate homophile review that appeared
between 1954 and 1982, was the first long-lived gay publication, and dozens of more militant
newspapers and magazines started up in later years.
Thus, police reports, newspapers, non-fictional books, novels and gay publications of all sorts offer
the historian a wide range of valuable source material. If most Parisian homosexuals have managed to
keep their personal life behind closed doors, where historians cannot easily go, surviving documents
do make it possible to see how these same homosexuals have used both open public space and closed
commercial space in the course of the last 300 years.
Public space
A 1969 guide to Parisian pleasures observed that for homosexuals [i]n the streets, of course,
there is every hazard but also every possibility Every possibility meant chance sexual encounters with
young male models from the Faubourg Saint-Honor, workmen in the Metro... students near the
Sorbonne, sailors around the Gare Montparnasse...North Africans in the Barbs-Rochechouart district.
Negrees almost everywhere, and everybody at Saint-Germain-des-Prs. Police surveillance was the
hazard (Rudorff 1969: 298).
For hundreds of years, homosexual men have sought sexual adventure in the streets, squares and
parks of Paris, and they have often risked arrest to find it. This, for example, is the advice proffered by
a guidebook for the gay visitor to Paris in 1995: swimming pools, public parks, the quays along the
Seine, train stations and major tourist attractions all have potentials never imagined by their builders.
Keep your eyes open (Vichit-Vadakan 1995: 111). But homosexual cruising is nothing new, as the
following comments from 1826 demonstrate:
16

You can see these disgusting men move about Paris, at the Palais-Royal, in certain cafs, where an
exquisite elegance almost always sets them apart... In the evening, at the setting of the sun, you
will notice a good number on the Quai Saint-Nicolas, the Quai du Louvre and the Quai de
1Archevch: in the Place du March-Neuf and the Place de la Sorbonne and along the Champs-
Elyses; and everywhere you will see with what assurance and with what shamelessness they dare
to make you the most filthy propositions.
(Guyon 1826: 218)
One of the best-known places for cruising today is the Tulleries Garden. According to one recent
guidebook, [a] 11 gay life is here, whispering on the benches, leaning against the balustrades,
reading under trees, or sauntering around outside the former Orangerie museum but all
following a routine as mannered as anything out of Jane Austens Bath society
(Phillips 1990: 155).
Parisian gays firinly believe that men have been coming here for centuries to meet other men and
sometimes to have sex with them at night in the bushes or under the trees. In the words of one habitual
visitor in 1987, The Tulleries , its not even because of the tradition, its naturally a place for
cruising... you cant keep a guy from smelling it. There are always boys... As long ago as 1830, a
writer observed that one specific corner of the garden near the antique statue of a wiid boar (Figure
1.1) was the rallying point of our modern Antinouses (Lamothe-Langon 1830: 20). (Antinous was
the famed lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.) The statue turns up again in a newspaper article of
July 1845:
The section of the trees in the Tulleries Garden... at the center of which a marble statue of a wiid
boar stands on a pedestal, has for many years been known as one of the meeting places of those
immoral creatures whose vice seems to be spreading at a frightful rate in Paris. It is above all on
days of public festivities, when the garden stays open rather late at night, that these wretches
gather at this spot, where the thick foliage keeps out the light.
7

And yet the Tulleries Gardens reputedly timeless tradition is almost certainly not an unbroken one.
Although the marble boar stood crumbling in place until finally restored and moved to shelter in the
Louvre Museum in 1992, it had apparently lost all significance as a landmark by the 1850s. The
Tulleries Garden itself almost entirely disappeared from descriptions of homosexual activity until the
1960s, when a Parisian tabloid newspaper called on the police to put an end to the scandal of the
Tulleries , which it presented as a recent development:
What goes on there every day, in the heart of Paris, in a place where children come to play, is
revolting. The Tulleries Garden has become the number one meeting place for homosexuals in the
capital...They come and go with their effeminate walk. One hears... their indecent giggling. There
are dozens of them. They seek each other out. They wink, accost each other, arrange
rendezvous...Its appalling.
8

17


Figure 1.1 Statue of a Wiid Boar in the Tulleries Garden as it appeared in 1910
Source: Cabinet des Estampes, Bib Nat
Between 1850 and 1960, the principal cruising site in Paris was not the Tulleries Garden, but rather
the Champs-Elyses. This does not refer to the famous avenue of that name, which was called the
Avenue de Neuilly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather the Elysian Fields
themselves, meaning the wooded parkland along both sides of the avenue between the Place de la
Concorde and the Rond-Point. The Champs-Elyses had been known for both heterosexual
prostitution and homosexual cruising since the early eighteenth century. In 1845 a Parisian complained
to the police about the hideous leprosy that infected the Champs-Elyses every evening between nine
and eleven oclock: [H]ere its women, shameless in every way, who take you by the arm and try to
drag you under the trees, further along its some of those miserable creatures that one still calls men.
An agent with the vice squad explained in 1868 that no spot in Paris favors debauchery more than
[the Champs-Elyses].
18

This was because of the twisting paths in the shadows of the tall trees which a feeble ray of light
barely penetrates and the cafs installed amidst the clumps of trees along both sides of the avenue
and which remain open until at least half past midnight.
One particular tree in the park achieved special renown by the 1880s:
The headquarters of these pederasts in this corner of Paris... is called the tree of lave... and it is
located near the Caf des Ambassadeurs [on the Avenue Gabriel]. Every evening around this tree,
one can see vile rascals wandering about, easily recognizable by their clean-shaven face, their
lifeless gaze and especially the peculiar way they sway their hips as they glide rather than walk
over the ground.
(Delcourt 1888: 285)
The public urinals installed amidst the trees and hedges made the park even more enticing to
homosexuals. They prowled there nightly until they were scared off in the late 1950s, when, because
of the Algerian War, the police tightened security around the Elyse Palace, the Presidents official
residence, which backed onto the site.
As well-known and well-frequented as they may have been since the early eighteenth century, the
Tulleries Garden and the Champs-Elyses were just two cruising sites among countless others. The
Grands Boulevards - the wide promenade laid out in the 1680s across northern Paris in a vast semi-
circle along the line of the citys demolished fortifications and stretching between the Place de la
Concorde and the Bastille - attracted pleasure seekers of every kind from their very inception.
Pederasts and prostitutes walked these boulevards throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In 1850, for instance, an angry citizen wrote to the prefect of police that in the course of his
evening stroll along the boulevards, he regularly witnessed scenes of a most shameful immorality... I
am speaking principally of those offered by those nameless creatures, those hideous
hermaphrodites!...In short,... the boulevards are now a genuine den of thieves implanted in the heart of
Sodom and Gomorrah.
11

Then there were the banks of the Seine. In the eighteenth century, pederasts often went down to the
river to ogie (and sometimes pick up) the men who commonly bathed there naked. One official
complained in 1724, Its a horrible scandal that a large number of libertine men swim in the nude in
Paris in sight of so many people, principally of the opposite sex...They also commit abominations with
those of their own sex. Men also went to the river bank at night, sometimes to urinate and defecate
(public latrines being rare in those days) and sometimes to look for sex. Nude bathing within city
limits ended in the early nineteenth century and the rivers graveled shores became paved
embankments, but the quays still drew men every evening, as the police noted in 1865: The river
banks, the arches of the bridges and certain spots relatively rarely frequented will attract, on the
pretext of satisfying their natural needs [to urinate or defecate], pederasts who will have an excuse for
finding themselves there."
19

Changes to the urban landscape in the course of the nineteenth century created new cruising sites
without eliminating the older ones. Among these new sites were the commercial arcades: enclosed
galleries roofed over with glass, lit by gas and lined with shops, cafs and restaurants for well-to-do
consumers. The first dates from 1791 and the last from 1860, but most were constructed between 1823
and 1846. The arcades provided sheltered public space for window shopping, dawdling and
philandering, which brought throngs of idle strollers, including female prostitutes, the so-called
suiveurs (followers), who accosted passing women, and, almost inevitably, pederasts who came
looking for other men. Pederasts frequented three arcades in particular: the Galerie dOrlans (Figure
1.2), built in 1828-30 at the south end of the Palais-Royal Garden, already a notorious site for
debauchery and for male and female prostitution since the 1780s; the Passage des Panoramas (1799),
which opened onto the south side of the Boulevard Montmartre; and the Passage Jouffroy (1847),
which faced it from the opposite side of the boulevard. Shopkeepers complained that the presence of
these men drove away customers, and in the mid-1840s the police began raiding the arcades to arrest
these suspicious and vile prowlers with which the busiest galleries and passages swarm.

The public urinals installed in the Paris streets from about 1830 provided hundreds of additional
spots for cruising. These vespasiennes (named for the emperor Vespasian who built public urinals in
first-century Rome) were free-standing structures of sheet-metal that usually had room for three to six
men (Figure 1.3). Paris had 500 of them by the early 1840s, and within a few decades

Figure 1.2 The Galerie d0rlans in 1845
Source: ho ffbauer (1875-82)
20

they were ubiquitous along the streets and in the parks and squares (Guerrand 1985;Maillard 1967).
The police regularly staked out those urinals most used by pederasts. An agent testifying at one
scandalous trial in 1876, after he and his colleagues caught municipal councilor Charles de Germiny
engaged in mutual masturbation in a public urinal with an unemployed 18-year-old worker, described
the scene they had witnessed:
The sixth of December [1876], at 10:40 p.m., I noticed Monsieur de Germiny exposing himself.
He went into the same facilities six times. Suspect Chouart entered the same one as Monsieur de
Germiny... Glances were exchanged... Both of them then went to sit on a [nearby] bench;
I didnt see them speaking, but they undoubtedly understood each other and went back in together.
Seeing then the unequivocal turn that events were taking, we put our hands on the shoulders of the
two individuals [and arrested them] .
lf

The police made 200-300 similar arrests almost every single year. It is no wonder that in 1910 an
outraged newspaper columnist blasted the citys vespasiennes as a school of apprenticeship in the
supreme vice and railed against the graffiti scrawled inside them: With what disgraceful things they
are covered inside... ! Inverts are not satisfied with making them one of their meeting places, they
write in them, using advertising to make converts by contagion."
An old ledger kept in the Paris police archives adds detail to an otherwise impressionistic picture of
late nineteenth-century cruising. It records the names

Figure 1.3 Six-place urinal. Place de la Bourse, Paris, c. 1875-8
Source: Bib. Hist. de laville de Paris.
21

of more than 900 men arrested between March 1873 and March 1879 for offenses against public
decency with other males or for solicitation for the purposes of prostitution; it also gives the precise
locations where the police arrested them. The ledger probably does not indicate every single place in
the city that pederasts went looking for sex, but only those spots that the police chose (for whatever
reason) to keep under surveillance. Even so, the data are suggestive. First of all, they confirm the
importance of the Champs-Elyses to the homosexual subculture. The police made 26.7 per cent of all
their arrests there, and one-third of the se occurred in and around one specific urinal located near the
Caf des Ambassadeurs on the Avenue Gabriel, making it the busiest cruising site in the entire city.
The Grands Boulevards accounted for 9.8 per cent of arrests. The three arcades already watched by the
police in the 1840s also remained busy: the Passage Jouffroy (8.4 per cent of arrests), the Passage des
Panoramas (1.8 per cent) and the Galerie d0rlans (2 per cent). Many of those arrested on the
boulevards and in the arcades were young men whom the police subsequently charged with soliciting.
They were presumably prostitutes, like the numerous women who plied their trade along the very
same boulevards. That is what a journalist meant when he wrote in 1891 that from 11 p.m.,
sometimes even earlier, the boulevard, along a long stretch from the Ru du Faubourg-Montmartre to
the Opera House, belongs to the girls and, alas!, even to the boys.
17
The police made an other 11.6
per cent of their arrests along the quays of the Seine, either in the latrines installed there for the men
who worked on the ports or under the sheltering arches of the many bridges that spanned the river.
All of these sites had been cruising places for decades, but newer ones also appear in the ledger.
For example, the public urinals in the Place de la Bourse, site of the Stock Exchange, now accounted
for 13.4 per cent of arrests, probably because the business quarter was conveniently deserted at night
and also strategically situated halfway between the Galerie d0rlans and the Grands Boulevards. As
for railway stations, twenty arrests (2 per cent of the total) occurred in the public toilets at the Bastille
terminus of the Vincennes Railroad Line, which took commuters between Paris and suburban
Vincennes, and another six (0.6 per cent) at the Saint-Lazare Station, the busiest in Paris because of its
heavy suburban traffic. On the other hand, the public parks seem to have been significantly less
frequented in the 1870s than before 1850. Apart from the notorious Champs-Elyses, only Monceau
Park, built in the 1860s, accounted for a significant number of arrests (twenty, or 2 per cent of the
total). There were a mere three arrests in the Tulleries Garden, two in the Luxembourg Garden and six
outside the city in Vincennes Woods.
The patterns established by the 1870s changed little until the 1950s or 1960s, except that cruising
declined in the arcades, while it increased in other places of passage: railway, bus and subway stations,
where men could offer police a believable excuse if stopped for loitering. To take a single example:
from the 1940s into the 1970s, the Invalides Station, city terminus for the buses to and from Orly
Airport, saw intensive homosexual activity; When a friend once spotted
22

Jean Genet there, the homosexual novelist, referring to the international travelers who passed through
the terminus and whom he was trying to pick up, remarked, Tm doing a tour of the world(White
1993: 350).
The most obvious change of all resulted from the gradual suppression of the citys vespasiennes.
Municipal officials frankly admitted that they got rid of the urinals not only because they were
unsightly and malodorous, but also for reasons of public order, when the improper use that is made of
them [by homosexuals] becomes a real nuisance to the neighbors. Paris, which still had more than
1,000 public urinals in the 1930s, had about 350 in 1961, 100 in 1980 and only 2 by the 1990s.18
Many gay men lamented this loss. In the Place dIna, according to a 1969 guidebook, we have
even seen a wreath laid on the pavement in honor of happy memories on the site of a former
vespasienne (Rudorf 1969: 298).
Gay guidebooks indicate with precision where men have been cruising since the 1960s. There is
still always the possibility of an encounter on any street or boulevard, but without urinals to provide
focal points, gay men increasingly turned back to the citys many public parks and gardens. The
Tulleries Garden was only the busiest among many, and almost any dimly lit park would attract
homosexuals looking for a pick-up or for quick on-the-spot sexual gratification. The late Pascal de
Duve, a young novelist with a personal experience of Parisian parks in the 1990s, has described what
went on there in striking albeit overblown prose:
Parks are Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes in ecological form. There, in the daytime, you see children,
the elderly and young mothers with infants. At night, they are haunted by shadowy silhouettes
drawing together and moving apart like moths engaged in a strange ballet. Sometimes the
silhouettes merge in ephemeral couplings screened by a bush, from which a soft moan rises into
the coolness of the night.
(Duve 1994: 47)
The banks of the Seine remain as popular now as in the eighteenth century. Paris has a raunchy
[nighttime] waterfront scene, like New York, near the Austerlitz Railway Station on the Quai de la
Gare, a large, dim boulevard peopled by spectres, hard, dangerous and anonymous, where men can
copulate amidst the concrete pillars that support the shipping sheds overhead. And Parisian gays have
dubbed the Quai des Tulleries , the embankment that runs along the edge of the Tulleries Garden,
Tata Beach (tala being slang for auntie), because skimpily ciad gay men regularly sunbathe there
on sunny summer days. They also congregate there year round after dark.
Despite all this activity, evidence suggests that outdoor cruising may have somewhat declined after
the mid-1970s. Before, one man explained in 1987, there were guys hanging around every Parisian
bush. Now, its over. AIDS scares us much more than the police do...The Tulleries arent what they
used to be. But disease was hardly the only factor, any more than the marked increase in assaults by
fag-bashers. City Hall began fencing off the parks, installed bright
23

lights in some spots to dispel the shadows and even instituted a special brigade to patrol the gardens in
1980. Of at least equal importance has been the growth of alternative ways for gay men to meet each
other. The gay press, especially after the magazine Gen Piedwas launched in 1979, has featured personal
advertisements by men seeking sexual partners for a night or a lifetime. The 1980s also saw the
introduction of the minitel, a simple home-computer wired into the national telephone system and
offered at minimal cost to every customer. The most successful commercial servers have been erotic
ones, which enable subscribers to post messages, communicate and eventually arrange intimate
encounters (Duyves 1993: 193-203). Finally and most significantly, the development of an extensive
network of bars, nightclubs and bath-houses has not only given men comfortable places to socialize,
but also encouraged the formation of gay enclaves within the city and provided the infrastructure for a
new gay community.
From gay commercial space to gay ghetto
Commercial establishments that cater to a predominantly homosexual clientele are nothing new. As
long ago as the eighteenth century, Parisian homosexuals met together in specific taverns and cafs,
where obliging publicans might even rent out private rooms for sexual encounters. Sources from the
1700s name many known hangouts for the citys sodomites. (Police reports mention eight different
taverns in 1748 alone.) For example, at the Caf Alexandre on the Boulevard du Temple, according to
a pamphleteer in 1781, one finds only street-walkers, buggers and bardaches [passive sodomites]. In
this caf there occur vile acts and horrors that it is pointless to name... The wisest and safest course
would be to shut down this receptacle of lesbians and sodomites (Rey 1979-1980:65; see also Rey
1994: xii-xiv; Lever, 1985: 304; Mayeur Saint-Paul 1781: 38-9).
Nineteenth-century documents likewise indicate some of the various hotels, restaurants, lodging
houses and taverns regularly patronized at one time or another by the citys pederasts. In 1822, for
instance, the prefect of police noted that a man named Dupetit, who owned a caf at the entrance to the
Champs-Elyses since about 1805: has been reported to me for receiving, in small individual rooms of
his caf, depraved men, who come to indulge safely in the most shameful sort of debauchery. For
some time Sieur Dupetit has encouraged these disgusting rendezvous in his establishment.
Fifty years later, the vice squad recorded that a certain Rousselot makes of his lodging-house [at
50 Ru Greneta] a den of pederasts and that the Bamboulme restaurant at 1 (bis) Ru de Bivre was
a [known] meeting place for pederasts(Peniston 1996: 135-6).
An expos of Parisian corruption published in 1890 explained that many pederasts:
24

meet together in special establishments, in wine shops, in dairy-shops, indeed in beer-halls...The
owner is almost always a former pederast; when they have a foothold in an establishment of this
kind, it is not easy to dislodge them except by using violence, which students have done on
several occasions.
The book told the story of a small shop that sold fried potatoes on the Ru Monge in the Latin
Quarter. The shopkeeper brought in a piano and:
began radically to transform not only the building, but the quarter, by letting his clients dance
until two in the morning. And what clients! Men, nothing but men. Impossible, moreover, to know
what went on inside. Every evening the shutters were closed, the transom-windows plugged up,
the doorway curtained.
The distraught landiord, with no legal grounds for breaking the lease, was unwilling to hire thugs
to throw out this undesirable tenant and in the end he had to pay the man to move away (Cofignon
1890: 347-8).
It would be difficult (even impossible) to map the precise location of these many venues, some of
which remained open for no more than a few months. In a recent study of queer space, Aaron Betsky
has concluded that most nineteenth-century gay bars throughout the world depended heavily on...
darkness and a position on the edge of town. For middle-class men, the latter position meant a location
at the point where their order broke down: in the slums (Betsky 1997:
157). This was certainly true of Paris. Most homosexual venues there seem to have been located on
side streets in the poorer and seamier quarters of the city center, like those along the waterfront or
close to Les Halles (the wholesale food market). Others were on the citys periphery, especially in the
closest suburbs (absorbed into Paris in 1860), traditional places of cheap pleasure where Parisians had
been going to drink, die and dance since the seventeenth century. Still others were convenient to busy
cruising areas like the Champs-Elyses.
A police raid in 1908 provides a rare glimpse into one homosexual venue of the period. Late on
Sunday evening, 26 February 1908, the police descended on a small caf of very respectable
appearance on the Quai de 1Hotel de Ville, which allegedly served for overly amorous rendezvous
by sexual maniacs... from diverse social classes. This was the Caf des Ardennes, a small provincial
caf, with a discreet facade, whose Windows are decorated with white cotton curtains brightened with
simple lace...Along the length of the narrow room, whose walls are covered with a wallpaper with
large red and green flowers, runs an unpolished bench, and a dozen tables with white marble tops press
together as if to facilitate the clients effusive and tender whispers... Despite an unprepossessing
appearance, the establishment did a very good business, but only in the evening. A neighbor
toidjournalists that:
25

[a] 11 day... the door of the bar stayed tightly shut; if the rare client entered by chance,... he had
trouble getting served. But... the cabaret filled up from 9 p.m. . . . .You can imagine how surprised
we were to see very chic men get out of automobiles and consort in the bar with several workers
and soldiers...
Couples formed in the caf could adjourn to a hotel just around the corner on the Ru de 1Hotel-
de-Ville for more intimate tte--ttes. Parisian homosexuals were al so frequenting bath-houses by
the late nineteenth century. The tradition of public baths as the favored zone of debauchery,
homosexuality, prostitution, [and] public indecencies dates back to the Middle Ages, (Csergo 1988:
201), but the first recorded police raid on a Parisian bath-house took place only in 1876. Young men,
most likely prostitutes, had been soliciting in the Galerie d0rlans and then taking men back to the
Bains de Gymnase, a bath-house located more than a mile away on the Ru du Faubourg-Poissonnire.
The courts condemned the manager and two of his employees for facilitating pederasty in his
establishment and six working-class men, aged 14 to 22, for an offense against public decency. In
1891 Parisian newspapers gave more extensive coverage to another raid on the Bains de Penthivre, a
bath-house on the Ru de Penthivre, and to the subsequent trial of sixteen found-ins (twelve middle-
class men, three domestic servants and the son of a British baronet). The newspapers titillated readers
with pointed allusions to the goings-on in the steam room, where naked clients committed unspecified
acts that would make a monkey blush. An American expatriate and connoissEurof European
homosexual life noted that by 1900 [i]n Paris, [there] are at least a dozen baths that are homosexual
rendezvous. Five or six are of wide popularity (Mayne ? 1908/1975: 440). This popularity has not
faltered since. The Bains de Penthivre itself remained in business until the late 1960s - an amazing
and probably unmatched life span for a gay commercial establishment in Paris - and the latest gay
guidebooks list a dozen exclusively gay bath-houses and saunas in the city today.
A small but significant gay commercial world comprising bath-houses, bars and restaurants had
thus emerged in Paris by the early 1900s. A satirical magazine declared in 1909, with an allusion to a
famous dancing boy:
How the times have changed! In our Third Republic, Bathyllus reigns in Paris as he once reigned
in [ancient] Rome. Under the tolerant eye of our police, select bars, dedicated to the new cult,
receive, every evening, a public of sick people, perverts, snobs, provincials and foreigners...
An accompanying illustration (Figure 1.4) depicted a rather posh bar and its youthful, stylish and
patently effeminate clients.
Three short articles published in The Archives of Criminal Anthropology at about the same time
compared the homosexual underground of Paris and Berlin. The articles mentioned the Parisian bath-
houses and several sordid restaurants, frequented by the lowest class of homosexuals, on the Ru des
Vertus, not far
26


Figure 1.4 A Parisian gay bar in 1908-9
Source: Fatitasiom\.3.
from Les Halles, but reported that otherwise Pariss homosexuals, unlike Berlins, tended to go to the
same establishments as other citizens: In the Grand Caf on the Boulevard de la Madeleine numerous
homosexuals meet, or at least used to meet a few years ago, but absolutely mixed in with other
persons. Its the same for certain other known cafs or restaurants...
8
Other sources, however, suggest
that spatial segregation might sometimes occur within ostensibly mixed venues, like the fashionable
Caf de la Paix on the Boulevard des Capucines. This caf had two outdoor terraces, and in the 1920s
and 1930s the one facing the Opera House be came known as the ladies side (cote des domes), be
cause well-to-do inverts congregated there every evening (Raynaud 1934: 148).
Sometimes, too, pederasts used heterosexual venues for their own purposes. The standing galleries
(promenoirs) in Parisian theaters and early movie houses provided cheap entry to anybody who
wanted inexpensive entertainment. Pederasts, however, looked on the standing galleries primarily as
crowded places where they could take liberties in the dark. A complaint to the prefect of police in
1840 indicated that among the many theater-goers who bought the standing-room tickets are some
who, addicted to the vice of pederasty, come there on purpose to satisfy their unnatural desires on the
men next to them. The advent of moving pictures changed nothing. The narrator in one
autobiographical novel recounted how in 1913 a friend took me to the promenade of a very big
cinema, the fashionable meeting place of our secret brotherhood. We spent feverish evenings there,
amidst ajostiing crowd, the heat and stimulus of which impelled me to commit a thousand follies under
cover of darkness (Portal n.d.: 129).
As specifically homosexual venues multiplied, they began to cluster in certain neighborhoods.
Between 1880 and 1910, the district of Montmartre in northern Paris emerged as the center of
anarchism, bohemianism and illicit sexuality,
27

including prostitution, lesbianism and male homosexuality (Varias 1996: 29-40; Wiison 1991: 195-
222).
A newspaper, reporting in June 1909 on two police raids on Mauris Bar on the Ru Duperr and
Le Bar Palmyre on the Place Blanche, commented that several establishments in Montmartre have for
some time been the theater of scandalous scenes. An entirely homosexual clientele frequented them
and didnt hesitate to engage publicly in their favorite practices. By the eve of the First World War,
Montmartre had acquired a reputation as the land of cocaine, bars for pederasts and all-night
restaurants (Willette 1919: 105).
After the war, Parisian homosexuality stepped even more boldly into the open. Sisley Huddieston,
an Englishman then resident in the city, described the ten den cy to make the abnormal the normal as
almost important phenomenon in post-war France. Citing authors like Marcel Proust and Andr
Gide, Huddieston condemned [a] whole literature... which is tainted with homosexuality That there
should be tolerated special cafs in Paris, is an affair of the police, he pontificated. What is serious...
is that writers and artists should publicly proclaim with complacence and sympathy the prevalence of
(to use the current expression) the love that dar not speak its name (Huddieston 1928: 270-2).
The emblematic event of homosexual life in Paris in the inter-war years was a series of masked
balls he Id annually during Carnival on Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) and Mi-Carme (Thursday of
Mid-Lent) at Magic-City Dancing, an immense dance-hall on the Ru de 1Universit, near the Eiffel
Tower. Carnival merrymaking traditionally encouraged people to give free rein to all their fantasies.
Carnival had consequently always been the holiday of sexual marginals, [and] most particularly
pederasts, many of whom used the occasion to wear womens clothes in public, transvestism having
been outlawed by police ordinance during the rest of the year (Faure 1978: 77). Private fags balls
(bcds de tapettes or bcds de tantes) were held during Carnival throughout the nineteenth century.
Between 1922 and 1939, thousands of men, most costumed and many in extravagant female drag,
attended the balls at Magic-City every year. On this night, wrote a journalist in 1931, all of Sodoms
grandsons se altered throughout the world. .seem to have rebuilt their accursed city for an evening.
The presence of so many of their kind makes them forget their abnormality Gyula Brassai, whose
photographs have immortalized the se fabulous balls, described the immense, warm, impulsive
fraternity at Magic-City:
The cream of Parisian inverts was to meet there, without distinction as to class, race or age. And
every type carne, faggots, cruisers, chickens, old queens, famous antique dealers and young
butcher boys, hairdressers and elevator boys, well-known dress designers and drag queens...
(Brassai 1976)
On the other hand, one homosexual novelist described himself as humiliated by the effeminacy of
this equivocal masquerade. Why did those young men ape a sex of which they ought to have been
the enemies? Why did the most
28

adorable youths... simper in that manner?...When a man gives himself to another man, he ought not to
forget that he is a man (Portal n.d.: 142).
The Magic-City balls were only the most conspicuous manifestation of Pariss thriving
homosexual sub culture in the 1920sand 1930s.And yet the city probably could not compare in this
respect to Berlin before the rise of Hitler in 1933, a fact bemoaned by one Parisian bar-owner in the
mid-1920s: Isnt it shameful for Paris to be so far behind: in Berlin they have 150 establishments like
this one, and here there are bar ely ten! (Georges-Anquetil 1925: 237). Nevertheless, there were in
fact many specialized bars and nightclubs for gay men, lesbians and their friends on the Left Bank at
Montparnasse, on the Champs-Elyses and still (and most especially) in Montmartre. Some venues
were very elegant, like Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which opened in January 1922 on the Ru Boissy-
dAnglas, just off the Champs-Elyses. Contrary to rumor, the writer Jean Cocteau did not own this
bar, although he and his circle patronized it regularly. Cocteau himself said that the place was not a
bar at all, but a kind of club... - everybody met everybody at the Boeuf (Steegmuller 1970: 282-3). One
of his biographers has described Le Boeuf as:
an in spot where the smart set met for drinks after dinner and stayed until the early morning and
where high tone consisted of sexual ambiguity, campy spoofing, brashness and quid pro
quos...Homosexuality had become chic, and Le Boeuf its stronghold.
(Brown 1968: 212-14)
Homosexuality in Montmartre, however, was far from chic. In 1932 one magazine took readers on
a journalistic tour of the dives of the new Sodom on the Ru Germain-Pilon, the Passage de
1Elyse-des-Beaux-Arts and the Boulevard de Clichy, which were much frequented by male
prostitutes, their pimps and their customers.i One of the most famous venues in the district was La
Chaumire on the Ru Gabrielle, where night-owls mingled with drag-queens: On the hill, at the foot
of the funicular, dropped there like a turd, the little thatched cottage sits majestically... - vice is master
here - the men are mistresses. There are wooden tables... a moth-eaten carpet, the hint of a table-cloth
and a lot of dust (Georges-Anquetil, 1925: 226). Another was Graffs, a busy tavern and restaurant on
the Place Blanche, a few steps along the sidewalk from the world-famous Moulin Rouge. Graffs
turned into a homosexual venue late every night. At 9 p.m. Graffs was still only bourgeois, wrote one
novelist who frequented the place. Later, when the theaters and the movie houses let out, a
tumultuous throng of boys invaded it, shrieking like old ladies... (Du Dognon 1948: 56). Montmartre
of the 1930s was a murky world of thieves and whores portrayed so graphically by the novelist Jean
Genet (Divine, the prostitute in Our Lady of the Flowers, took tea at 2 a.m. in Graffs - overcrowded
and foundering in smoke - and hustled on the Boulevard de Clichy and in the Place Blanche),
although a re cent biographer has suggested that Genet may have be en depicting, as so many
outsiders do, more a realm of the imagination than an actual district... (Genet 1963: 81ff; White
1993: 209).
29

The boundaries of gay Paris in the inter-war years stretched well beyond Montmartre. So many
homosexuals went to the working-class dance-halls (bcds musette) on the dark and squalid Ru de
Lappe near the Place de la Bastille that one witjoked in 1927 that the city planned to rename it the Ru
de Loppe (Fag Street) (Willy 1927: 162; Dubois 1997: 218-24). A Dutch visitor to Paris in 1932
wrote: One of the dance-halls in the Ru de Lappe has a special character and also caters to a special
kind of clientele; he re the prohibition against men dancing together is not enforced. It is a terrible evil,
which is getting worse and worse in these working-class neighborhoods... (Faust and Schiphorst n.d.:
119). Fifty years later, a regular customer fondly recalled these dance-halls as tiny nightclubs where
the re were accordionists and a small band on a balcony. These were sexual clubs and not
homosexual clubs, he explained, but there was a great deal of permissiveness in
them...Homosexuality and heterosexuality rubbed elbows on the Ru de Lappe without any problems
Gurin in Barbedette and Garassou 1981: 48-9). Ano ther popular dance-hall, located across the river
in the Latin Quarter, was the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevive, where Sodom and Gomorrah - or
Lesbos, rather - got along beautifully together... Men and women flocked to it from across the city.
but also:
Once in a while one would see [there] butchers from the neighborhood -rather common in
appearance, but with hearts full of feminine longings -forming surprising couples. They would
hold han ds thick, calloused hands - like timid children, and would waitz solemnly together,
their eyes down-cast, blushing wildly. (The Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevive, in Brassai,
1976 unpaginated)
After World War II, French intellectual life, dominated by existentialism, set up headquarters in the
cafs of Saint-Germain-des-Prs on the Left Bank. The districts bars and clubs were soon the focus of
the citys vibrant nightlife. They drew so many gay men and lesbians that guidebooks labeled Saint-
Germain-des-Prs a world center for all such [homosexual] activities and the kingdom of queens
(Rudorff 1969: 300; Bastiani 1968: 115). The most famous gay venue there was Le Fiacre on the Ru
du Cherche-Midi, which advertised with the slogan: The place is not very big, but the entire world
meets there and treasures it. Le Fiacre did indeed enjoy an international reputation. Its upstairs
restauran! served a cosmopolitan elite that included international stars of stage and screen, while its
ground-floor gay bar welcomed more plebeian customers (Martel 1996: 83-4). The English novelist
Christopher Isherwood went there in 1955 and found himself jammed into a crowd so dense you
could only sway with it like seaweed in water. His visit occurred on New Years Eve, but the bar was
always full of people and in summer the overflow spilled out into the street (Isherwood 1997: 563).
Le Fiacre was only one of many gay bars, nightclubs and restaurants that prospered in Saint-
Germain-des-Prs in the 1950s and 1960s. A tabloid newspaper
30

warned readers in 1961 that Saint-Germain-des-Prs has become a degenerate district...Lets have to
courage the say it: Saint-Germain-des-Prs has be en invaded by the Third Sex. It quoted hostile
comments by Paul Boubal, owner of the Caf de Flore, celebrated as the place where the philosophers
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir once held court:
Its a veritable scourge. Of course, there were already some [homosexuals] a few years ago. But
they were few, courteous, polite, discreet... .But today, its become a real nightmare... .On my
terrace, there is nothing else. Do you know what people call my upstairs room? La salle des
mignons [the pretty boys room].
The tabloid urged the police to den up the quarter, because Paris must not become Berlin of
1925."
In the 1970s, gay night life migrated across the Seine to the district between the Palais Royal and
the Opera House, and most notably to one street in particular: the Ru Sainte-Anne. In both
Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prs, the homosexual subculture had been part of a more general
ambiance of unconventionality and bohemianism. The Ru Saint-Anne, in contrast, was in an
ordinarily tranquil residential and business district in central Paris. It was almost deserted after the
workdays end, which may well have been what first attracted gay venues at a time when many
customers put a priority on secrecy. A gay restaurant and a gay nightclub had already opened in the
quarter in the mid-1950s, while Le Royal Opera, a large caf on the Avenue de 1Opra, stayed open
all night and attracted nighthawks ranging from taxi drivers to men who cruised the nearby Tulleries
garden. Then, in 1964, a former barman named Fabrice Emaer (1935-83) opened Le Pimms Bar at 3
Ru Sainte-Anne. In late 1968, he inaugurated Le Club Sept, a ground-floor restaurant and basement
discotheque at number seven of the same street. Le Sept was an immediate hit, described by one
guidebook as one of the home ports of fashionable Paris. Of fashionable homosexual Paris, need one
specify? Writers, actors, dancers, couturiers, even politicians mingle there into the late hours of the
night (Angeli 1974: 158).
Many more bars and nightclubs soon sprang up in the neighborhood. Not all were as fashionable as
Le Sept, but all were nearly as expensive, levying a hefty cover charge at the door and charging high
prices for drinks. One of the busiest, Le Bronx, at 11 Ru Sainte-Anne, was only two doors down from
Le Sept, but was otherwise, as an American journalist remarked, a far cry from the tight-assed
atmosphere of its neighbor. Le Bronx was the citys first backroom bar, so-called because it
provided a dimly lit back area where customers packed together for mutual groping and semi-public
sexual activity in the darkness.
David Girard (1959-90), who began a highly successful business career by selling his body on the
Ru Sainte-Anne in the 1970s, later remembered it as:
the first and the only gay street in Paris. During the day, the only people you met there were office
workers and the neighborhoods little old ladies. But
31

once night fell, the little old ladies double-locked their doors, afraid of those boys who came
looking for other boys, and who invaded the street.
(Girard 1986: 56-7)
A journalist writing in 1975 also noted the dramatic transformation: From 10 p.m., the street
changed completely: it teemed with young men, clogged up with cars. By 1 a.m., it was nothing but
chrome and blue jeans."
The heyday of the Ru Sainte-Anne coincided with an era of sexual liberation that began in France
in May 1968, when strikes and riots almost toppled the conservative regime of Charles de Gaulle. The
gay liberation movement came to the country with the foundation of FHAR (the Homosexual Front for
Revolutionary Action) in 1971. The permissive mood of the 1970s meant increased social tolerance
for homosexuals and a rapid expansion of commercial gay space. The first edition of the gay Incognito
Guide in 1967 published the names and addresses of eleven bars, twelve restaurants and two cabarets
in Paris. Its 1976 edition listed twenty-nine bars, nightclubs and discotheques and thirty-eight
restaurants. The Gai-Pied Guide for 1986/7 carried entries for eighty-three restaurants and snack bars,
thirtybars, eighteen discotheques and eighteen bath-houses. This rapid proliferation brought
diversification and specialization, so that by the 1980s there were gay venues for every taste: swanky
discotheques, grungy leather clubs, convivial piano bars, sdate coffee shops, raunchy back-room bars,
a wide choice of restaurants and a dozen or more bath-houses. This extensive network of
establishments shaped and defined an emerging gay community.
In 1980 the pioneering gay activist Guy Hocquenghem (194688) told an American interview er:
[W]e dont have a gay community in France. That is, we have a gay move-ment - with several
organizations actively working for political rights, as in all the Western countries - but people do
not feel part of a community, nor do they live together in certain parts of the city, as they do... in
New York City or in San Francisco, for example. And this is the most important difference and
the most significant aspect of gay life in the US: not only having a movement, but having a
sense of community - even if it takes the form of ghettos - because it is the basis for anything
else.i8
Within only a few years, however, Hocquenghems analysis was clearly out of date. A gay
community was in the making in the 1980s and a so-called gay ghetto had started to develop in the
district of Le Marais.
Le Marais, once a wealthy neighborhood of aristocratic mansions, had decayed throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gradually becoming a working-class district of small workshops
and run-down housing. It was one of Pariss poorest and most decrepit quarters in 1965, when the
Ministry of Culture stepped in to preserve its historic character by declaring it a protected district.
Restoration and gentrification could begin. The image of Le
32

Marais has profoundly changed in the space of a few years, wrote a sociologist in 1980. Long
forgotten. Le Marais... is tending to become an esthetic oasis reserved to the middle class. Because
its architecture reflects an order, [and] a more stable society Le Marais appealed to a bourgeoisie
whose values are all being called into question. Ironically, the districts apparently ineluctable
evolution into an stately bourgeois neighborhood was soon to be interrupted by an unexpected
invasion.
Gay men found Le Marais attractive for a number of reasons: low rents that were still a bargain in
the early 1980s (they later soared); old buildings and narrow streets of un deniab le charm; and an
exceptional location in the city center and in close proximity to Beaubourg and Les Halles. Beaubourg,
a former slum, was enjoying new prestige after extensive urban renewal and the opening there of the
Pompidou Center, a modern art museum, in early 1977. Les Halles, site of the citys immense
wholesale food market since the Middle Ages, under-went major commercial development after the
market transferred out to the suburbs in 1969 and also became a main hub of the regional public
transportation system.
The first gay bar in Le Marais opened its doors in December 1978. This was Le Village, a tiny caf
on the Ru du Pltre, a nondescript little street. The two new owners took over the lase mainly
because they could afford the cheap rent and partly because of the proximity of the Pompidou
Centerjust 150 meters to the west. Their gamble paid off and they were soon doing a roaring business.
They sold out in 1980 and opened a larger bar nearby: Le Duplex on the Ru Michel-le-Comte. Other
gay bars were soon springing up in Le Marais (along with several bars and nightclubs close by in Les
Halles). These quickly became (and have remained) some of the most popular gay venues in Paris: Le
Bar Central in 1980, Le Piano Zinc and Le Coffee Shop in 1981, Le Swing (now 1Amnsia Caf) in
1983, Le Quetzel in 1987 and so on.
The bars in Le Marais charged less than those on the Ru Sainte-Anne, they opened in the
afternoon or early evening rather than at 10 or 11 p.m. and they did not screen their clients at the door:
They valued visibility, which corresponded to the new public demand at a time of coming out of the
closet (the bars were well lit and open to the street in Le Marais, whereas they were still equipped
with reinforced doors, doorbells, peep-holes, and bouncers on the Ru Sainte-Anne) (Martel 1996:
197-9). Maurice MacGrath, who still owns Le Bar Central today, explained in 1983:
It was necessary to change the gay scene in France. Until [1980], it revolved principally around
exclusive venues like Le Sept [on the Ru Sainte-Anne]. The idea of a daytime bar had been
initiated with Le Village and I took the plunge... One of my goals in opening the Central was to
integrate homosexual life into everyday life.
Even Fabrice Emaer, who had launched the Ru Sainte-Anne in the 196 Os, bestowed his blessing
on Le Marais:
33

I am 100 per cent for these initiatives. The policy of low prices is the best, especially because we
are in an economic crisis. I am, of course, in favor of the multiplication of places of [homosexual]
expression...We are following in the footsteps of the Americans, the gay world is revealing itself.
By the mid-1990s, at least forty gay businesses were operating in Le Marais. Mainly bars and
restaurants, these also included the citys only gay bookstore, Les Mots la Bouche (since 1983), and
its only gay drugstore. La Pharmacie du Village (since 1995). One street in particular, the Ru Sainte-
Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, has become gay Pariss display window In 1996 its 100 meters boasted four
bars, four restaurants, three clothing stores, a bookstore, a hotel and a sex shop, all serving a
predominantly gay clientele. While entirely new venues have opened in Le Marais every year,
existing ones have changed in order to appeal to new customers. In 1995, for instance, when their
regular business began to fall off, the owners of one traditional caf at the strategic intersection of the
Ru des Archives and the Ru Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie modernized the decor and renamed it
(in English!) 1Open Bar, to show that we are open to everyone: homos, lesbians, heteros, without
distinction. The bar is also open in the literal sense, because in good weather the waiters slide back
glass panels to expose the interior and they line up tables and chairs along the sidewalk. Business
booms every day through the afternoon and evening until 2 a.m.
lf

Initially at least, the commercial success of Le Marais appeared to signal the impending collapse of
the gay liberation movement, as an English journalist living in France recognized in 1985:
On the one hand, the movement. ..reminds us of our oppressed past and warns us (perhaps
rightly) of a possible return of the pendulum. On the other hand, walk around the streets of Les
Halles and you11 see hundreds of pretty young post-hunks whove never heard of Christopher
Street (is he an American actor?) and who identify themselves much more with the subculture of
Le Marais than with any gay movement. And why shouldnt they? Its surely the ultimate aim of
all militant movements to become totally irrelevant.
In fact, the fight against AIDS would rekindle political militancy in the late 1980s, but the new
and stronger sense of gay identity that began to emerge in Le Marais in the first years of the
decade owed more to capitalism and consumerism than to the gay liberation movement, as a
French journalist has recently implied:
Le Marais... answered an urgent need: to bring gay men out of their anonymity and to free them of
their shame. In creating establishments run by themselves and for themselves, gays set up
prosperous businesses and have grouped interdependent activities in a single quarter for practical
reasons... to bring together offer and demand
34

David Girard, the former hustler whose business acumen and talent for self-promotion earned him
a fortune as well as the contempt of most gay activists, responded to his many detractors by boasting
that businessmen like himself had actually achieved more for the gay community than its political
activists:
The bar owner who, in the summer, opens a terrace where dozens of guys... meet openly, is at
least as militant as they are. Even if he earns money from it. By creating two bath-houses, two
magazines distributed in every city in France, a much-talked-about restaurant and a crowded
night-club, I think that I have done more for gays than they ever have.
(Girard 1986: 164)
Girards self-serving argument has more than a germ of truth to it.
Of course. Le Marais did not at first entirely eclipse the older gay quarters. A guidebook published
in August 1981 still divided gay Paris into four main districts: Montmartre (four bars, eleven
restaurants), Saint-Germain-des-Prs (four bars, nine restaurants), the Ru Sainte-Anne (eleven bars,
eight restaurants) and Le Marais/Les Halles (ten bars, seventeen restaurants). By the late 1980s,
however, the trend was evidently un stop pable. Today Saint-Germain-des-Prs has all but disappeared
from the map of gay Paris, Montmartre and the streets around the Ru Saint-Anne count only a few
bars and restaurants, while Le Marais and Les Halles have by far the heaviest concentration in the city.
Even so, only a minority of Pariss many gay venues have actually located there. Le Marais does not
possess a single bath-house (these are scattered across the city) and only one or two discotheques
(most are located in Les Halles or the streets around the Palais-Royal or off the Grands Boulevards,
while Le Queen, the newest and most fashionable, is on the Champs-Elyses). Even the citys Gay and
Lesbian Center is elsewhere, 500 meters to the east of Le Marais on the Ru Keller.
More over, the inhabitants of Le Marais re main socially, ethnically and sexually a highly diverse
group, including (among others) bourgeois families of Old French stock, orthodox Jews from eastern
Europe or North Africa and much more recent immigrants from the Far East. Although many gay men
have chosen to live in Le Marais and many more have installed themselves in the less expensive
districts close by, generally speaking Parisian gays continue to live everywhere in the city. Le Marais
nonetheless provides a clearly delineated gay space - a gay ghetto - in the heart of Paris, where men
can stroll hand in hand and kiss in the street without embarrassment. As one 20-year-old recently
remarked: We feel more among family here than anywhere else in Paris. Perhaps thafs what we mean
by the [gay] community.
8

The ghetto in question
Some long-time residents of Le Marais are unhappy about what they see happening to their quarter.
A neighborhood association protested in 1996 that
35

[t]he multiplication of homosexual businesses, with the special public that they attract, has
provoked a major change in the atmosphere of [Le Marais] and growing irritation among the
inhabitants, several of whom have already moved away or plan to do so. The police responded to
their complaints by harassing the gay bars - for example, by laying charges for making excessive
noise or for blocking the sidewalk with their tables - and by forcing gay establishments to take
down their rainbow flags (the international symbol of the gay nation), which the districts mayor
contemptuously dismissed as multi-colored rags. The police justified their order by arguing that:
[i]f a single flag in a quarter does not seem likely to provoke hostile reactions in the
neighborhood, the grouped and systematic display of large emblems is likely to induce hostility.
And, in these circumstances, it is not necessary to wait for trouble to occur before imposing a
ban.
The authorities soon called off their campaign of harassment, but French gays themselves have
remained engaged in heated debate over the pros an of forming a gay community, lobbying for gay
rights and constructing a ghetto within Paris. Critics argue that such initiatives are quintes senti ally
American and insist that any talk of a gay community in France smacks of American-style identity
politics. They portray the United States as a mosaic of competing minorities, each affirming its own
identity and lobbying for its own special interests to the detriment of the national community as a
whole. This runs counter to Frances so-called republican tradition by which equal and autonomous
citizens live harmoniously within a centralized and homogeneous nation-state. France has always
sought to assimilate its minorities by imposing a monolithic culture and a single set of national values.
Defenders of the republican tradition maintain that homosexuals are not and should not aspire to be
one distinct minority among many others; they constitute no more than a broad group of varied
individuals from all races and classes who happen to prefer their own sex.
Others condemn Le Marais as the embodiment of an insidious cominercialism and consumerism
that is no less objectionable simply be cause the capitalists who own the bars and restaurants are
themselves usually gay. One veteran gay militant has regretted bitterly that the social and political
radicalism of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s has since given way to the management of the
profits to be made from a very specific and captive public (nightclubs, specialized newspapers). This
phenomenon is the gay-ttoizalion of the so-called gay movement and the Americanization of
European homosexuality (Dispot 1986: 310). Still others do not oppose Le Marais in principie, but do
deplore the lifestyle that it promotes, which shows little tolerance for the poor, who cannot consume,
or for the old, the homely, the flabby and the overly effeminate, who violate current canons of
homosexual desire. Le Marais, one political activist has complained, has taken homosexuals
hostage...A single look [predominates]: attractive, young, muscular, white, incidentally tanned and/or
36

smooth-bodied, with alert eye and tight clothes. Without it, one earns a scornful glance..."
This ongoing debate over the nature, significance and very meaning of Le Marais, by conflating
issues of urban space and gay identity, takes us fll circle back to the starting point of this chapter and
reminds us that the two issues are inextricably intertwined. As a space that affirms and celebrates gay
visibility, Le Marais shapes and sustains a nascent gay community. The quarters venues are much
more than highly profitable businesses to the men who frequent them. They facilitate sociability and
reinforce solidarity among men who share a sexual orientation. But the dispute among gay men over
the social utility of Le Marais is an important reminder that profound social, political and cultural
divergences persist within the so-called gay community. And the fact that Le Marais is still at times
sharply contested terrain, with gay men pitted against some heterosexual residents, highlights the
limits of freedom even within a liberal and avowedly tolerant society.
A specifically gay ghetto in Paris is a recent phenomenon, but one that in hindsight has been
centuries in the making. As the invisible city - the hidden homosexual subculture that has existed in
Paris since at least the eighteenth century - gradually emerged into the open, it required a geographical
center to showcase its new visibility. It remains to be seen, however, whether a distinct and separate
gay space will remain a permanent fixture of the urban landscape or whether, as some fear and others
hope, the gay ghetto will ultimately disappear once gays, having attained full and equal rights, lose
their sense of uniqueness and merge more completely into the larger society around them.
Notes
1 Librcion, 28/9 June 1997, 1.
2 La Tolrance des Francais 1gard des homosexueis tend diminuer, Le Monde, 22 June 1996,
11.
3 HarryBlake, Gay Paree, The Paris Metro, 21 July 1976, 10.
4 Dennis Airmanslnternational Journal: Paris, Christopher Street, July/Aug. 1980, 24.
5 Bibliothque Nationale, Ms Clairambault 985, Extraits dinterrogatoires (statistics provided by
Jeffrey Merrick).
6 Thierry Vidal, Oiseaux de nuit, Gai PiedHebdo 309 (23 Feb./4March 1987), 54-5.
7 Gazette des Tribunaux, 31 July 1845, 945-6.
8 Robert Justice, Le Scandale des Tulleries , France-Dimanche, 16/22 Feb. 1966, 4.
9 APP [Arch, prefecture pol], D/a 230, #140, letterto prefect of police, 27 Oct. 1845;
D/a 223, #30, police report, 4 July 1868.
10 Petit Guide de la zone Bleue", in Le Crapouillot, Aug./Sept. 1970 (Les Podrosles), 85.
11 APP, D/a 230, # 206, letter, 18 Nov. 1850.
12 Lever 1985: 299ff; Rey 1979-1980: 53-6, 1994: xii-xiv; Joly de Fleury, quoted by Gabanes, La
Vie aux bains, 2nd edn (Paris, n.d.), 329-30; APP, D/a 230, # 343, police report, 19 May 1865.
13 Gazette des Tribunaux, 5 June 1847, 783.
14 Le Temps, 24 Dec. 1876, 2, 4.
15 Lucien Descaves, Invertis et pervertis, Le Joumal, 2 March 1910.
16 APP, BB6 (Pdrastes et divers). Arrests totaled 939.
37

17 Henri Fouquier, LaVie de Paris, Le XIXe sicle, 25 April 1891, 2.
18 Plus de vespasiennes de papa en 1963 and Une Nouvelle toilette pour les vespasi-ennes,
France-Soir, 18 March 1961, 26 Jan. 1980; M. Gazaux, La Sanisette renouvelle le mobilier
urbain, LAurore, 22 Feb. 1980; Frdric Chaleil, Les derniers de latasse, Tlrama, 11 May
1994.
19 Weavers 1984 Gay Guide: Paris (London, 1984), 56; Gai Piedhebdo: Guide Frcmce 83-84
(Paris, 1984), 124.
20 Catherine Alessandri, Tata-beach, la plage parisienne des homos, Libralion, 15 June 1981, 9;
TataBeach, mode dernploi, Exit: Le Journal, 4 Aug. 1995, 6-7.
21 Herv Liffran, Fin des idylles nocturnes aux Tulleries and Frdric Bouelle, Dans les pares, la
baise pour la baise na plus la cote!, Gai PiedHebdo 218 (3/16 May 1986), 12-13, and 297
(5/11 Dec. 1987), 26-8.
22 AN, F7 9546, dossier 4339-A2, police reports, 8 July and 13 Sept. 1822.
23 Archives of the prefecture of police, BB6, Pdrastes et divers, # 555, 1087-8.
24 Les Hornosexueis surpris par le cornrnissaire, Le Journal, 27 Jan. 1908, 1.
25 Gazette des Tribunaux, 18 June 1876, 1228; Archives de Paris, DI U6/67, 17 June 1876.
26 Forexarnple.ie Motin, 25 April 1891, 3; Le Sicle, 25 April 1891, 3.
27 LHrsie senmenta.\e,Fantasia 3 (1908-9): 647-8.
28 Marc-Andr Raffalovich, Les Groupes uranistes Paris et Berlin; P. Naecke, Le Monde
homosexuel de Paris and idem, Quelques dtails sur les homosexueis de Paris, Archives
dcmthropologiecriminelle 19 (1904):926- 36, 20(1905): 182-5,411-14.
29 APP, D/a 230, # 89, letter to prefect of police, 4 Feb. 1840.
30 Un Scandale Montrnartre, Le Journal, 22 June 1909, 6.
31 Jean Laurent, Le Bal de Magic, un soir de Mi-Carrne, La Rompe, 1 April 1931. 35-8.
32 Henri Danjou, Les Pourvoyeurs, Detective 181 (14 April 1932): 4-5.
33 Le Fiacres advertisements appeared regularly inJuventus, 9 nurnbers (1959-60).
34 Le 3e sexe envahit St-Gerrnain-des-Prs, France-Dimanche, 21/27 Sept. 1961, 8.
35 Blake, Gay Paree, 9.
36 Renaud Vincent, Les nuits bleues parisiennes: La ru aux hornrnes, France-Soir, 25 Oct.
1975.
37 Incognito Guide: Europe Mditerrane 1967 (Paris, 1967); Incognito Guide: Europe 1976 (Paris,
n.d.); Gai-PiedHebdo: Guide 86/87 (Paris, 1987).
38 MarkBlasius, Interview: GuyHocquenghern, Christopher Street, April 1980, 36.
39 Alain Prigent, La Rhabilitalion du Morals de Paris (unpublished study for the Ecole des Hautes
Eludes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Nov. 1980), 96.
40 Authors interview with Jo el Leroux, owner ofLe Village and Le Duplex, July 1997.
41 Le Central, 5 sur 54 (Dec. 1983), 7.
42 Audrey Coz, Fabrice Ernaer du 7 au Palace, Gai Pied, Oct. 1980, 13.
43 Philippe Baverel, Le Drapeau gay flotte ru Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, Le Monde, 22 June
1996, 11.
44 Claire Ulrich, Le Marais, quartier general du lobby homosexuel, L vnement dujeudi,
20/26June 1996, 28-9.
45 Alex Taylor, A Gays Gaze, 5 sur 5 20 (April 1985), 54-5.
46 Tirn Madesclaire, Le Ghetto gay, en tre ou pas?, Illico, Aug. 1995, 48.
47 Guide de Paris, inseri in GaiPied, Aug. 1981.
48 Micro-trottoir dans le Marais, ru Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, Exit: Le Journal, 21July
1995,8.
49 Les policiers harclent les bars gays du Marais, Libralion, 18/19 June 1996.
50 Jean Le Bitoux, Marcher dans le gai Marais, LaRevuet 1 (Surnrner 1996), 50-1.
38
2 Moscow
Dan Healey
While going about her duties one summer evening in 1955, Tatiana Aleksandrova, a railway guard,
noticed two males writhing by the side of the tracks not far from Moscows Kazan Station. She
sought a policeman and when they returned they found Mikhail Pokrovskii, 47, engaged in sexual
intercourse with 16-year-old Sasha Borisov. Both men were found lying on their sides, with Sashas
back to Mikhail, their trousers round their knees. Tatiana testified she saw the older mans penis in the
anus of the youth. That night in Moscows police station No. 68, Pokrovskii and Borisov gave
contradictory accounts of themselves.
From the moment of arrest, the young man began loudly protesting his innocence, claiming he had
been raped by Pokrovskii. At the police station, he said he had met the older man at a beer kiosk near
the railway, where Pokrovskii sexually propositioned him with an offer of 1 ruble. Borisov told police
he walked with the older man along the tracks to a deserted spot. He admitted he allowed himself to be
fellated, penetrated anally, and masturbated to orgasm, before being disturbed by Aleksandrova and
the policeman. Pokrovskii mean-while claimed he was merely sitting with the youth when they were
arrested. A married man, he had been drinking vodka with two companions when the youth joined
them. The lad allegedly offered the drinkers the use of a tumbler in exchange for the redeemable
vodka bottle, once they had drained it. The trans-action was agreed, the vodka drunk, and Pokrovskiis
two drinking buddies then left. Pokrovskii denied any sexual act had been committed.
Judging the truth of these two conflicting claims from the handwritten, tattered file recording the
criminal investigation, trial and appeal, all swiftly concluded within two months of the offense, is
virtually impossible.
i
Yet in many details, this obscure case neatly encapsulates the experience of men
who sought sexual contact with other males in Moscow from the seventeenth century to the present
day. Mens sexual misconduct was frequently associated with the consumption of alcohol, and, indeed,
vodka provided not only an opportunity to socialize, but an excuse for whatever misdeeds might
ensue. Sexual relations between males were also inflected by social hierarchies. Age, relative strength,
wealth or command of resources determined the forms of exchange which accompanied sexual
intercourse (if not always who performed insertive or receptive roles). The vexed question of where
Muscovites of all sexual proclivities were
39

able to make love is also laconically evident in this sodomy trial. None of the authorities associated
with the case was surprised by the commission of sexual acts out of doors, in an ostensibly public
place. As we shall see, for a significant proportion of the citys population, heterosexual as well as
homosexual, public sex was a familiar experience. In tsarist Moscow private space for the poor had
always been at a premium, while in the Soviet era, domestic space for all was squeezed by
unprecedented pressures. In such conditions, Muscovites were accustomed to appropriating public
spaces, and constructing privacy in them through various devices. The citys gay male subculture
today, characterized by alcohol abuse, great social and economic disparities, and a habit of discreet
public contact, is not the result of a sudden change of regime in 1991, although this circumstance
certainly has contributed much. (Excellent introductions to Russias gay male culture in English are
Tuller 1996 and Moss (ed.) 1996.) It is rather the product of several centuries of evolution and, as
might be expected, it reflects the history of Moscows society and culture at large.
Moscow 16001861: traditional masculinities and love between men
The relative paucity of sources on everyday life in early modern Moscow, the difficulties in
gaining access to those he Id in the old USSR, and historians conservatism, dictate that our
knowledge of sexuality in Russia before this century is modest, compared to what we know about
Western Europeans. A handful of Western works examine same-sex love in medieval and early
modern Russia, using religious texts and foreigners accounts of traveis to Moscow. On all aspects of
sexuality much is to be found in Levin (1989). Karlinsky (1976, 1989) wrote landmark articles on
Russian homo sexuality and culture. New American and Russian research on sanctified unions
between persons of the same sex can also provide clues to the status of same-sex love in early Russia
(Bosweil 1994;Gromyko 1986). In the absence of more precise data about our subject from 1600 to
1861, a picture of masculine mentalities can at least be sketched as a means to understanding later
developments and their differences from Western European experience.
Until some time into the nineteenth century, it appears that masculine norms for the majority of
Russians (i.e. peasants and lower orders of townsmen) included permission for some forms of same-
sex erotic contact. There was no homosexual identity discernible among a subset of Muscovite men,
much less a corresponding subculture. Instead, sin with boys or men was celebrated in the general
male culture through bawdy stories and praise for the sinner, and justified by the immoderate
consumption of alcohol. Europeans in Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries commented
on the prevalence and acceptance of sex between males they observed, noting that married men of
many classes, under the all-forgiving influence of drink, might prefer other males to their wives as
sexual partners. Karlinsky (1976: 1; 1989: 348 n. 3) discusses such reports as does Koziovskii (1986:
20-1. Westerners accounts of sexual disorder
40

they encountered elsewhere in this period, in the Americas, Asia and Islamic societies, often noted
critically the practice of sodomy in native populations, and such reports must be treated cautiously as
sources on actual customs (Bleys 1995: 18-22). Yet Moscow, on the fringe of Christendom,
represented a border zone between supposed barbarity and civilization, and travellers accounts of
Mu seo vite sodomy could re semble condemnations of the vice internal to European societies. Adam
Olearius, a diplomatic secretary, visited Moscow four times from Holstein between 1633 and 1643,
and his comments on sodomy during these years are revealing:
they speak of debauchery, of vile depravity, of lasciviousness, and of immoral conduct committed
by themselves and others. They tell all sorts of shameless fables, and he who can relate the
coarsest obscenities and inde-cencies, accompanied by the most wanton mimickry, is accounted
the best companion and is the most sought after...
So given are they to the lusts of the flesh and fornication that some are addicted to the vile
depravity we call sodomy; and not only with boys... but also with men and horses. Such antics
provide matter for conversation at their carouses. People caught in such obscene acts are not
severely punished. Tavern musicians often sing of such loathsome things too, in the open streets,
while some show them to young people in puppet shows.
(Baron 1967: 142)
Olearius description conveys accurate informal ion about popular culture in seventeenth-century
Muscovy. The introduction of sodomy into the text is clearly a device to distinguish European
readers from the Muscovites, yet it is integral to a description of a coherent popular culture. Sex
between males in Muscovy appears to have been, at least on a plebeian level, scarcely a sin not to be
named, but an aspect of male sociability lightly proscribed and effectively protected by a double
standard.
One of Russias most cherished national institutions, the bath-house, which by the late nineteenth
century had become a significant locus of male prostitution in Russian cities, was a probable site for
sexual indulgence between men at an earlier period. The first commercial baths appeared in Moscow
in the seven-teenth century and the state mandated that the sexes should be scrupulously segregated
(Biriukov 1991: 17; Rubinov 1990: 19). Authorities vary on how rigorously segregation was observed,
and on whether the baths represented a desexualized space in Russian culture. Levin (1989: 195-7)
concludes the Russian baths were desexualized space, although foreigners accounts contradict this
picture of decorum, suggesting that in peasant villages and disreputable establishments in towns the
sexes mixed freely (Grve 1990: 948-54). Separate steam rooms for men and women created a
homosocial environment which certainly contributed to the evolution of bath-house male prostitution
in a later era. A seventeenth-century miniature illustrating a visit by be arded, mature males to the
baths shows four beardless, youthful males serving them.
1
One
41

youth, in trousers, removes an older mans boots; another trousered lad draws water from a well. A
naked young man pours water on the stove to produce steam, as another, also unclothed, beats a
bearded older visitor, lying nude on a bench, with a leafy switch. While there is no intimation of
sexual acts in the illus-tration, the young mens subordinate social position in their roles as servitors is
emphasized by their beardlessness. Clerics, for ex ample the fifteenth-century Metropolitan Daniil, and
later archpriest Avvakum, condemned men who shaved off their beards as inciting immorality,
apparently because smooth faces were an invitation to sodomy (Koziovskii 1986: 21). Russian men
adopted shaving from the West in the seventeenth century. With the growth of commercial relations in
the eighteenth century, youths appear to have sought out careers in Moscows public bath-houses. A
group of 16-year-old peasant males apprehended entering the city in 1745 claimed they came to seek
work in commercial baths. Moscows spas, staffed by beardless youths, may have be en sites of
mutual male sexual relations long before the recorded instances of the nine-teenth century, to which
we will return.
The apparent indulgence of same-sex relations does not mean that there were no countervailing
cultural norms. Religious prohibitions existed, but were never as harsh as Roman Catholic ones.
Russian Orthodox authorities preserved a vague definition of sodomy as any unnatural sexual act,
with man, woman or beast, well into the seventeenth century. Penances were lighter than those for
rape and adultery (Levin 1989: 197-203). The intensification of contact with the West in that era
brought new altitudes which altered some aspects of elite strictures on male same-sex relations.
John Bosweil (1994) discussed the widespread observance of rites of bonding between persons of
the same sex in early Christian liturgy. The same-sex union, known in modern Russian as
pobralimstvo (making brothers might accurately render the sense of this term), was part of the
Christian heritage Russia shared with Europe. Such services of union were expunged from the Roman
Catholic liturgy in a systematic fashion after the twelfth century, leaving only vestigial documentation.
There were female ceremonies as well (Bosweil 1994: 19-20, 264). Bosweil said little about the later
fate of pobralimstvo in Russia. These rituals survived as officially approved offices in Russian
Orthodox liturgical texts until the mid-seventeenth century. Unions of two men or two women of this
kind when solemnized by the Church were almost on the same level with blood relations (rodstvo)
and served to some degree as a barrier to marriage between families; and prayerbooks carried advice
about mixing bloodlines created by pobralimstvo, marriage pledges, and godparenting. Canon law
revisions of the mid-1600s saw the first prohibitions of ceremonies of making brothers under
reformer Patriarch Nikon (Gromyko 1986: 81). But popular versions of the cere-mony were observed
around rural Russia until approximately the 1880s. The exchange of crosses worn on the body was
very common; other rites included swearing vows in church before a revered icon, or in a field facing
toward the east (Gromyko 1986: 81-2).
Any possible erotic element in these unions remains a subject of speculation
42

(Bosweil 1994: 267-79). Gromyko wrote of the depth of emotional and material support offered by
pobralimstvo but it would have been politically impossible for her 1986 monograph to address
homosexuality directly (chapter 2, passim.); she noted one instance of denial of erotic content in these
unions, from a female late-tsarist ethnographer (Gromyko 1986: 86). The two cultural traditions, an
indulgence of male lust for boys or other men, and a religious and popular custom of male pair-
bonding, could have overlapped to create a space for emotional and sexual relations between men. Yet
the two cultural traditions were not identical. Male sexual adventuring reflected Moscows hierarchical
society; much of the mirth generated by tales of sodomy was evoked by the inversions of popular
and religious notions of order they retailed (Levin 1989: 199203). Such inversions in Russian
popular culture have been discussed by Peter Burke (1978: 214). Sexual relations between males
reflected the forms of domination and submission prevalent in Muscovite society Pobralimstvo, on the
other hand, emphasized loyalty and particularly friendship, brotherly love and devotion. The bond
has frequently been presented as a matter of mutual aid and emotional intimacy. Nineteenth-century
observers reported pairings between peasant males of the same occupation, especially where distance
from home and the dangers of a livelihood made pacts of mutual assistance prudent (Gromyko 1986:
82, 867). The two traditions organized different elements of everyday life - lust on the one hand,
and personal survival and mutual comfort on the other - and reading into them modern notions of
companionate marriage distorts our understanding of their place in Muscovite mentalities. BosweIPs
1994 monograph on same-sex unions, because of its vast temporal and geographic sweep, obscures
the differ-ences between local practice and the continuity of a specific liturgical rite; his argument that
these unions often had erotic content is a speculative hypothesis at best.
These traditions were disrupted by the cultural division which began with the westernizing rule of
Peter the Great (1689-1725). As nobles adopted European dress and mores during the eighteenth
century, peasants retained older folkways. Enlightenment ideas on relations between the sexes, and the
Europeans who came to teach, practice technical professions and serve what became in Peters reign
the imperial court and state, infused new altitudes toward the erotic, including a novel stigmatization
of sodomy (Healey 1993: 28). Sex between men in the remodeled military was criminalized, and
while indulgence of such relations beyond the army and navy doubtless continued, occasional attempts
to impose civilized norms by condemning sodomy in elite circles can be observed (Gostiow et ai.
1993). Sanctions for improprieties with imperial choirboys were enunciated (Maroger 1955: 193).
Moscow ceased to be the capital of Russia, and the transfer of power to the window on the West, St
Petersburg (founded 1703), introduced an other division in Russian culture, between the old,
Muscovite, capital, where traditional ways were thought to persist, and the new city of Peter, a center
of wealth and European influence. Moscows eclipse as capital until 1917 rendered the forms of same-
sex love observed there perhaps less Western. less modern. than those found in its glittering rival.
43

Popular pobralimstvo declined during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among settled urban
dwellers, while it probably persisted among peasants who migrated to Moscow for seasonal labor.
Meanwhile, in elite culture, the adoption of Western codes of morality followed at an accelerating rate,
and in 1835 sodomy between males was formally criminalized for all parts of Russian society, in
legislation enacted by Ni cholas I. Indulgence of mal e-t o-male lust apparently continued, since few
cases of sodomy were actually formally prosecuted (Healey, 1993: 28).
Moscow 1861-1917: the appearaiice of a homosexual subculture
The late tsarist decades were a period of rapid social transformation, and as might be expected,
Moscow shared in that change. In 1861, when the Emancipation Edict freed the serfs, there were
350,000 inhabitants in the old capital. By the 1880s and 1890s, a national policy of industrialization
had transformed d Moscow into a major manufacturing center and tran sport hub. Meanwhile, much
production continued in workshops, often extended house-holds with apprentice boys. To be an
apprentice, in the language of the day was to be in the boys (v inaichikakh). Industrial districts
began to develop beyond the citys traditional limits, while more peasants came from the countryside
to stay) and an urban working class emerged. By 1914, the population of Moscow had reached 1.4
million.
The character of same-sex erotic relations underwent associated transformations. We notice an
increase in sources on same-sex love, logical given that eros in general was receiving greater attention.
Diaries, criminal court records and medical texts now began to speak about love between men, and
these are only beginning to be exploited by historians. The continuing inflection of sexual relations by
social ones took on new forms as market relations mixed with traditional patterns. Finally, in Russias
cities, gathering places appeared where individuals who felt desire for their own sex began to
recognize each other and create a subculture.
The transitional mentality characteristic of the era is illustrated in the altitudes of a Moscow
merchant from the peasant estate, Pavel Vasilevich Medvedev, whose diary of the year 1861
describes his emotional and spiritual inner world.
7
Unhappily married, Medvedev sought consolation
alternately in church and at the tavern. When drunk, he indulged in lustfulness with both male and
female partners - and recorded these encounters in his diary. This document reveals a male homosocial
culture, indulgent of sex between men, reminiscent of that witnessed by foreign visitors two centuries
before. Yet at the same time, in the commercialization of Medvedevs sexual encounters, and their
location outside the home, we can also discern the seeds of a transition to a modern homosexual
subculture.
When aroused, Medvedev and his companions were apparently indifferent to the sex of potential
sexual partners. While walking one June day to Sokolniki
44

(a park beyond Moscows Garden Ring) with his wife and a male friend, he quarreled with his wife
and she abandoned them. Medvedev wrote of his emotions:
And so with annoyed vexation Sinitsyn and I continued walking along the railway line, and the
desire to drink and give myself up to debauchery took shape in me, there appeared a disturbing
desire to have a woman or a man for onanism, kulizm? anything... 8
Eventually, Medvedev got drunk with Sinitsyn, meanwhile trying to prepare his companion for
mutual masturbation or anal intercourse by encouraging him to talk about his own fantasies. Sinitsyn
was at first unresponsive, and so they visited a den of women prostitutes (referred to as camellias).
There, they discovered that all the women were busy - and drunkenly, Sinitsyn agreed to
Medvedevs proposition, declaring spontaneously in the street Lefs feach other! They
found a deserted spot in Sokolniki and set about trying to produce lust - falling asleep, dead drunk,
in the mud before their tryst could be consummated.
Medvedev and his companions habitually used subordinate males for sex when lust was unleashed
by vodka. An account of an evening of theater, dining and drinking to excess ended with
Medvedevs reflections on how to satisfy ones arousal on thejourney homeward:
For some time now my lust leads me to pick a younger cab-driver, who I make fun of along the
way; with a littie nonsense you can enjoy mutual masturbation. You can almost always succeed
with a 50-kopek coin, or 30 kopeks, but there are also those who agree to it for pleasure. Thafs
five times this month.
Gab-drivers who supplemented their income (or simply took pleasure) in this fashion are not
unusual characters in Russian legal and psychiatric literature of the era (Tarnovskii 1885: 69-71).
Coachmen were not alone among male servants willing to service male employers sexually. From
medical reports we can observe that youths and young men profited in this fashion as waiters,
household staff and as simple soldiers or officers servants. It is not always possible to gauge whether
subordinates were motivated solely by incentives of money and advancement, but the easy willingness
of Russias urban serving classes to tolerate gentlemens mischief as they were said to call it
(Tarnovskii 1885: 70) suggests continuities with an earlier indulgence of mutual male relations.
In workshops, apprentice boys were the object of sexual advances or assaults by older males, often
in positions of authority over them. Medvedev confessed to his diary that he repeatedly masturbated
with a member of his large household, a boy of 18 an apprentice or servant - who satisfied me
according to my desire with manual onanism, and I did the same for him. Medvedev consoled his
religious anxieties by writing that the youth enjoyed their encounters, arguing he was old enough to
know what he wanted. Court records of male rapes in Moscow workshops demonstrate a similar if
more violent pattern of
45

relations. In one 1874 trial, the 17-year-old rapist was the son of the workshops owner, and the court
reacted sternly to his assault on an 11-year-old apprentice. In another case in 1892 a more indulgent
attitude prevailed, because the alleged rapist was himself a subordinate within the workshop, and
because the 13-year-oid youth was perceived as nearly fully grown and capable of looking out for
himself.
Bath-house attendants, whose age and status probably made them objects of sexual commerce in an
earlier era, appear in a range of sources from the late tsarist years as homosexual prostitutes. Pavel
Medvedev wrote of a visit with an old drinking buddy to an unnamed Moscow bath-house, where
they found onanism and kulizrri awaiting them, in 1861.11 Few references to this trade in Moscow
appear in forensic texts or the city court records, but there are enough discussions of the phenomenon
in St Petersburg baths to suggest that what Medvedev encountered at the bath-house in Moscow
persisted and flourished until the 1917 revolution. In one 1866 St Petersburg sodomy trial, a young
peasant told of finding work in an upper-class bath with private rooms, where another lad from his
village was already an attendant. The young mans testi-mony reveals a high degree of indulgence of
clients tastes without regard to sexual object choice:
[the client] lies with me like with a woman, or orders me to do with him as with a woman, only in
the anus, or else [he is] leaning forward and lying on his chest, and I [get] on top of him, all of
which I did. Besides all this, other visitors to the baths demanded that we bring them a woman
from a public house; they would first make me do the deed (copulate) with her, while they
watched, then they would use the womanin front of me.
(Merzheevskii 1878: 239)
These attendants earned about 1 ruble for each session of sodomy they provided. Petersburg bath-
houses were noted in professional and later popular texts as places where pederastie prostitution
flourished. Blackmailers exploited the bath as a site for shaking down victims (Merzheevskii 1878:
252; Koni 1912: 152-6):
psychiatric patients reported discovering their sex inclinations with the help of bath-house
attendants (Bekhterev 1898: 1-11); eventually, social critics bemoaned the existence of such male
brothels (Matiushenskii 1908; Ruadze 1908). while foreign homosexual advocales sang their praises
(Mayne ?1908: 431).
The records of a case against a Bishop Palladii in 1919 indicate that homosexual practices in spas,
especially ones with private rooms, were notorious in Moscow as well. This cleric was accused of
pederasty with a monastic novice of 14 who served as his servant, Ivan Volkov. Twice the bishop
testified that while they had indeed been to public baths or the baths for the upper clergy in Moscow,
he specifically insisted he had never taken the novice to baths with private rooms. He said it was the
custom that two boys went with me, to allay the suspicions of bystanders. The allegation that he had
been to different bath-houses with Volkov and other novices was perceived as damaging, and the
46

notoriety of baths with private rooms in Moscow was sufficiently widespread to move Palladii to
repeated denials.
A most significant development in the emergence of a homosexual subculture in Moscow was the
arrival of patterns of street cruising, with the mutual recog-nition and communication beyond
workplace and c1ien t-patron relations this implied. also increasingly evident is the use of public space
not merely for social-izing, but for sex as well. Sources for these patterns are again more modest for
Moscow than St Petersburg, and suggest a slower evolution toward modern homosexual behaviors.
Medvedevs 1861 diary made no mention of cruising or male prostitution in the streets (as in
European capitals); meanwhile public cruising, male prostitution and sex were already part of the St
Petersburg streets cap e. Well-to-do individuals such as the composer Peter Tchaikovsky found lower-
class sexual contacts in Moscow among servants or through louche friends, rather than risk scandal
through direct cruising. In 1878, Tchaikovsky wrote to his homosexual brother Modest, describing
how a friend Nikolai Bochechkarov introduced him to a young butler. The three met on the boule-
vard, went to a pub, and an infatuated Tchaikovsky took the butler to a private room (Poznansky
1996: 19).
An example of a Moscow street pick-up comes from an 1888 sodomy trial of 4 2-ye ar-old Petr
Mamaev. Mamaev was apprehended after a drunken scuffie with Nikolai Agapov, 28, on
Prechistenskii Boulevard on the night of 29 July 1888. The older man claimed he had committed
sodomy with Agapov on the boulevard and admitted that he had picked up strange men for this
purpose on city boulevards for the previous eight years. Medical examinations of the men convinced
investigators that Mamaev was a passive pederast, while Agapov was released, since he bore none of
the supposed signs of active pederasty. Married with two sons, but with his family living in distant
Ekaterinburg, Mamaev described his sexual habits thus:
For the past eight years I have been committing sodomy with different, unknown persons. I go out
to the boulevard at night, strike up a conversation, and if I find a lover (liubitel), then I do it with
him. I cannot identify who I did it with... I attempted to dojust the same with Agapov, without
money, without any exchange of money in mind, just to obtain pleasure for myself and for him.
Mamaev was able to find lovers on the boulevard who shared his aim of pleasure without
necessarily re quiring payment for a service, an indication that like-minded individuals might
recognize each other and even use public space to consummate their desires.
Rather later, in 1912, the same Moscow boulevard was the scene of a formative encounter for
Pavel, a 17-year-old peasant newly arrived from Smolensk province. The story of this youths progress
through the homosexual world before and after the 1917 revolution was described by psychiatrist
VA. Belousov. in 1927, as a case history of male prostitution in a psychopathic individual.
47

Forcee! to leave home after compromising sexual misadventures, Pavel found employment through
a woman from his own village who was resident in Moscow While working as an apprentice at the
Nature and School shop, he began to attend night courses for workers. Coming home in the evening
after classes along Prechistenskii and Nikitskii Boulevards, he met his own people and many
acquaintances appeared. He began to have sexual relations with these men, and found himself drawn
to loiter on these boulevards every night -it was boring to stay at home. Pavel soon met Prince Feliks
Feliksovich lusupov and they had a sexual liaison intermittently over the following two years. Pavel
joined the princes household service as a lackey in order to deflect the suspicions of the princes
wife. lusupov reportedly kept two other male servants, a cook and a coachman, as sexual partners.
17

Pavel recalled the two years before the Great War as a marvellous time, when first lusupov then a
second wealthy sponsor showered him with money and presents. Pavel also described to his
psychiatrist aspects of the homosexual subculture of that time. He attended balls of women-haters
(zhenonenavistniki) in drag as an Ukrainian woman; to avert the attention of the suspicious, lesbian-
prostitutes were invited to come along, but we werent bashful around them. A beer-hall near
Nikitskie Gates was run by an auntie (tetka), an older homosexual man, and there was a special room
there with an electric organ. where only our kind were admitted and where dancing was
permitted.18 When he wasnt staying with the prince, he would pick up a variety of men for sex,
claiming to his psychiatrist (who did not believe him) that he did this without mercenary motives. He
said he would take home beggars, give them a bath and

Figure 2.1 Nikitskie Gates, a square on the Boulevard Ring notorious as a haunt of homosexuals.
Behind the monument were underground public facilities where men had sex together during
the 1920s and 1930s.
Source: Photo undated, late 1920s, D Healey collection
48


Figure 2.2 Arbat Square on the Boulevard Ring, c. 1930. In the foreground ofthe photograph is
the start of Prechistevskii Boulevard where the young peasant Pavel met his first homosexual
contacts upon arrival in Moscow in 1912.
So urce: D Heaiey Collection
make them stay the night; he also loved soldiers, and cruising public pissoirs and baths. When Pavel
lived with Prince lusupov, he was not permitted to loaf about in the street, perhaps with good reason,
for he had a sharp nose for finding Moscows homosexual street life of the day.
Pavels account of Moscows male homosexual subculture on the eve of the Great War and the
1917 revolution catalogues the transformation of mutual male erotic relations and the social practices
which grew up around them. The contrasts and continuities with Medvedevs world are instructive.
Instead of a sexual identity based on a sinful but unavoidable male lust to be satisfied with either
woman or man, PavePs world included men who identified themselves as exclusively attracted to their
own sex (the so-called women-haters). Others, like Prince lusupov, indulged themselves with both
men and women, and still others, perhaps from poverty, confined the homosexual element of their
lives to a subculture of the streets (for example, the tramps and soldiers Pavel picked up, or the men he
cruised in public toilets). Yet a new group of our people also appeared in Pavels account, and they
had ways of recognizing each other on the boulevard (argot, gesture and dress were among the signs
they used, to judge from criminological comments about male prostitutes). Moreover, they
congregated in notorious public locations to socialize and have sex. New commercialized spaces for
the subculture (balls organized by their own kind, a beer-hall with music and dancing) reflected the
growing intrusion of the market
49

even into highly specialized leisure activities. Despite these changes, as in Medvedevs time, same-
sex relations continued to reflect social hierarchies, and the cash-for-sex exchange (and its non-
monetary variations) remained a promi-nent part of everyday life for both the affiuent and the
indigent.
Moscow 1917-91: carving privacy from communal space
The World War, revolution and then civil war brought sweeping and devastating change to
Moscow in the years between 1914 and 1921. Combat, epidemics, migration and starvation decimated
the urban population, and from a 1917 high of 1.9 million, the citys inhabitants dropped to only 1
million in 1921. An important factor for the future of the citys homosexual sub culture was the
governmenfs move from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. This shift brought diplomatic and
administrative personnel to the Soviet capital and also contributed to its artistic life. The arts, as we
shall see, were to become a refuge for male homosexuals in the Soviet era.
As would be expected, the social and political realignments of the first socialist state greatly
affected the lives of Moscows homosexuals. Revolution brought pluses and minuses for them. On the
one hand, formal legalization of sodomy between consenting adults came with the first Boishevik
criminal code (1922), and this along with marriage, divorce and abortion legislation was heralded as
the most radical sex reform in Europe (Healey 1993: 37). Yet the regimes instrumental view of law,
and frank embrace of terror, meant political campaigns (especially in the 1930s, during the first Five
Year Plans) could overwheim mere legislation. More pervasive perhaps was the effect of the new
governmenfs economic policies on everyday life. A culture of shortages and exchange through
informal and illegal networks evolved, re-casting human relationships in ways unintended by
economic and social planners. also unanticipated were the effects of socialized housing and the
elimination of private space on the human need for intimacy.
Sources for Moscows male homosexual subculture in the 1920s and early 1930s are scant. With
sodomy legalized from 1922 until 1934, formal court records hold less information than in previous
and subsequent periods of crimi-nalization. The psychiatric literature of the 1920s presents a shift of
interest away from male homosexuality toward lesbianism, leaving us with fewer sources on mens
same-sex relations for the entire decade. The male prostitute Pavel, described by Dr Belousov in
1927, remains our richest informant on Moscows homosexual subculture for the 1920s. His testimony
may be compared with data drawn from 1930s sodomy trial records held in Moscows municipal
archive.
Pavel reported that in the post-revolutionary era, the Boulevard Ring remained the focal point for
meeting and socializing between homosexual men. Apart from factors affecting housing opportunities,
to which we shall return, the street setting in itself had considerable logic. This ring of connected
boulevards (each with its own name) surrounded the heart of Moscow in a semi-circular
50

band of greenery dottedwith shrubs, benches and small kiosks selling newspapers and refreshments.
There were also public pissoirs and toilets. Ideally situated to be come the arena for a male
homosexual sub culture, boulevards provided pleasant places to sit, smoke and converse; there was a
constant circulation of pedestrians; links with public transport made them accessible. The boulevards
were but a few minutes walk to Moscows greater and lesser theaters, to the Conservatory, and to
shops and department stores. Pavel quite accurately noted, You can find and meet men on any
boulevard.
Parts of the Boulevard Ring also had a seedy reputation as the main centers of female prostitution,
and, as in European and American centers, there was often a sharing of urban territories between
public women and male homosexuals. Tsvetnoi Boulevard and adjoining Trubnaia Square were
dubbed by two 1923 critics the classic centers of Moscow prostitution. In that year they observed
how organized professional women sold themselves on the boulevard and consummated their
liaisons in private rooms, usually rented out by older women, in the side-streets off these
thoroughfares. Meanwhile the boulevards near Trubnaia Square were becoming homosexual haunts,
as would the nearby Ermitazh Park and Trubnaias public toilets by the mid-1930s.
The specific stretches of the Boulevard Ring which homosexuals frequented seem to have changed
littie during the 1920s and 1930s, to judge from Pavels remarks and the 1930s court records. The
stretches of Nikitskii Boulevard leading to Moscows most important den", the square known as
Nikitskie Gates, were singled out by the male prostitute; the memoirs of Yugoslavian communist
Anton Ciliga, also name this square as the site of a secret market of homosexual men in the late
1920s (Ciliga 1979: 67). In a trial of three young men in 1941, contacts were said to have been made
on Nikitskii Boulevard and on Trubnaia Square and the adjoining boulevards. One of the three men
explained during his interrogation: In 1936 in the apartment where I lived, Afanasev, an artist of the
ballet, moved in... He showed me the places where pederasts meet: Nikitskii Boulevard and Trubnaia
Square. Not long after this friendship began, the dancer was convicted for sodomy while on tour in
Irkutsk in Siberia. During interrogation, another defendant in this case retated how Sasha told me that
the chief places for pederasts were Nikitskii Boulevard, Trubnaia [Square], a bar on Arbat [Street], and
the TsentraPnye Baths. He was speaking of the early 1930s.
Sretenskii and Chistoprudnyi Boulevards were also mentioned by the ex-pros-titute Pavel as places
where an especially important public among Moscows homosexuals gathered and made
assignations. In a 1935 sodomy trial, Sretenskii Boulevard was mentioned as a meeting place and as a
possible trysting ground too. Thus in its sentence a municipal court noted that [the accused] met by
chance on Sretenskii and other boulevards of the city of Moscow with men-pederasts [muzhshchiny-
pedercistyj, and entered into sexual intercourse with them in toilets, in apartments and on the
boulevards... Other places mentioned in the trials include Manezh Square and nearby Sverdiov
Square, located in front of the Bolshoi Theater in the heart of the city.
51

Public toilets were noted by Russian psychiatrists as places of male homosexual contact from the
late nineteenth century. In the early Soviet period, many venues for meeting, such as bath-houses or
sympathetic bars, were nationalized and consequently grew less likely to function as homosexual
gathering points or havens for same-sex prostitution. Locations for balls of women-haters, or even
homosexual poetry readings, hired in the past in private transactions, were now control led by
government functionaries hostile to displays of disorder. The public toilet thus took on a new
significance for the male homosexual world. Dr Belousov reports that Pavel observed, Now, after the
revolution meetings in toilets have become the most predominant [means of contact]. The male
prosti-tutes description of the toilet in the cinema Maiak in Kharkov in the 1920s, as particularly
convenient, betrays an awareness of the perverse applications of such architectural accidents. The
revolution, by virtually eliminating commodified indoor space available for private rental and
enjoyment, relegated male homosexuals to a culture of the toilet.
In the sodomy cases from the 1930s various toilets betray their reputations:the most important one
in the decade, it seems, was on Trubnaia Square. This facility was constructed underground in the
shape of a circle, with the stalls against the perimeter wall, facing inward. There were no doors on the
stalls, which had simple holes in the floor. All users were in a position to observe each other, and this
perverse panopticism apparently enabled as many meetings as it prevented. One defendant
investigated for sodomy in 1941 described his discovery of this facility:
Once in autumn 1940 I left a restaurant on Tsvetnoi Boulevard and was walking toward my
apartment on Neglinnaia Street. On the way I stopped in the toilet on Trubnaia Square and there,
against my will, an act of sodomy was committed with me. A man came up to me and began to
masturbate, touching my penis. I did not particularly object. A month and a half after this I once
again went to the toilet on Trubnaia Square, but this time with the deliberate intention of
committing an act of sodomy. In this manner I committed acts of sodomy about five or six
times...
8

Sometimes, this man invited partners home to sieep overnight with him; others he had sex with
then and there. He claimed to police that his loneliness drove him to drink, and it was only the alcohol
that was responsible for his cruising in the toilet - not his desire for company.
The public toilet remained a focal point for Muscovite gay lives after World War II, when more
efficient enforcement of the sodomy statute raised the number of convictions from 130 in 1950 for the
entire Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to464in 1961 and 854 in 1971. Facilities in the
heart of the city, near major department stores, railway stations and in Aleksandrovskii Gardens by the
Kremlin wall, were well known to homosexuals, police and the KGB, and entrapment was common.
i

In the handful of post-1945 sodomy trials preserved in the open sector of
52

Moscows municipal archive, one unveils something of the culture of the toilet - and in an
outrageous location. In 1955, two young men met and attempted to have sex in the very center of
Moscow. Klimov, a 27-year-old stoker at a Moscow railway depot, who commuted to work from an
outlying settiement, related in his interrogation:
I came from the village to Moscow, and I was looking for food in GUM [Department Store on
Red Square], when during that time I went to the mens toilet. In the toilet a young lad came up to
me, shook my hand and said lefs get acquainted. He was called Volodia, and he said to me Lefs
go over to the Lenin Museum... I went with him to the Lenin Museum, he bought the entrance
tickets with his money, and we went straight to the mens toilet. He began to grope me, he
grabbed me by the penis, held it for some time, but just then some strangers came in and disturbed
us and we left the Lenin Museum.
The pair agreed to another rendezvous, but Klirnov, apparently unnerved by city-dweiler
Volodias bold ways, did not keep the date. Nevertheless, some three weeks later in the GUM
department store toilet, Klirnov and Volodia chanced to meet, and this time they took the metro to
Sokolniki Park, where they made love in a secluded wooded spot.
The mens toilet in the Lenin Museum surfaces some twenty-five years later in a memoir written
by a lawyer who defended the ringleader of a gang of Moscow queerbashers in the late 1970s or early
1980s. The ringleader claimed he had been raped in this particular toilet and believed himself to be a
fag (gomik) (Koziovskii 1986: 196-9). It is probable that facilities such as this one, the GUM
department store toilets, and those in nearby Sapunov Lae and the Aleksandrovskii Gardens,
remained points of contact for Moscow homosexuals, because of architectural features exploited by
homosexuals to construct a ration of privacy. Their proximity to Sverdiov Square in front of the
Bolshoi Theater, a cruising ground from at least the mid-1930s, guaranteed a steady circulation of
men seeking contacts. Homosexuals made creative use not only of the conve-nient layouts of toilets,
but of entire streetscapes between them, and by the 1970s observers spoke of a periodically shifting
route, a kind of gay promenade between the Bolshoi Theater and Nogin (now Old) Square
(Koziovskii 1986: 54;Gessen 1990: 46-7).
If the garden in front of Russias most famous theater was a constant on the homosexual map of
mid-to-late twentieth-century Moscow, then other gathering spots in the vicinity appeared and
disappeared over time. Cafes located near the Bolshoi such as the Sadko and Artisticheskoe, with
an apparently indifferent management, were meeting places in the 1970s and 1980s. Of the two nearby
bath-houses, the Sandunovskie and the TsentraPnye, the latter most often appears as a place where
contacts were made (though not consummated) in this period. An anonymous writer G reported
queues for entry to the TsentraPnye lasting for up to an hour (G 1980: 16). An American reported in
1973 that
53
54

on the tram in Moscow, and spent a day off showing him the sights of the capital. Muravev was said
to have displayed particular zeal in trying to find the Turkmen a place to live; he introduced him to a
homosexual Communist Party member, Venediktov, who testified that the Turkmen immediately
offered him sex, apparently in hopes of obtaining accommodation.
i1

A 1950 Moscow sodomy caseiIlustrales the vulnerability of the domestic sphere in the communal
flat which was a constant of Soviet lives. Ivanov, a 50-year-old professor of Marxism-Leninism in a
Moscow technical institute, was arrested after his wife, with whom he shared one room in a
kommuncdka, became fed up with his drunken carousing with men half his age. She did not put up
with his disruptive behavior for long. In one statement to the police, she described how she watched
her drunk husband and a man of about 25 commit sexual acts together in their room:
[The younger man] undressed my husband and laid him on the bed. Then he got undressed and lay
down with my husband. I demanded that he not get into bed with my husband, but he didnt listen.
They both began to shout at me to get rid of me, but I stayed. [The young man] embraced my
husband. The light in the room was on. Then they began to commit sexual acts... I was indignant
at this and pulled the sheet off them... my husband fell from the bed, but then he got up and started
to swear at me. I took fright and called for our neighbor. Vera. She arrived when my husband and
[the young man] were already up out of bed.
Ivanovs wife did not call the police this time, but a later episode exhausted her patience. police
were summoned and caught Ivanov in bed with a 17-year-old youth. The neighbor Vera, a trusted
Communist Party member, provided sharp-eyed reports of gossip against Ivanov in the communal
kitchen, and an eye-witness account of his unmasking in bed with this friend.
i8
The crowded world of
the communal flat was dangerous territory for all sexual non-confor-mity, and drove illicit
relationships out of the domestic sphere. A 1946 survey of 5,000 male clients of the capitals central
VD clinic revealed that 75 per cent had met female sexual partners (previously unknown to them) on
the streets or in theaters and restaurants; fully 30 per cent had sex with these women not in domestic
circumstances but on the street, in entrance halls to blocks of flats, in parks or automobiles.
Homosexuals were not alone in constructing privacy out of public spaces for sexual purposes.
Although Moscows housing stock expanded after World War II, so too did its population,
reaching 9 million by the 1980s. The domestic situation of Sasha, a young homosexual met by Tom
Reeves on the streets of the capital in the early 1970s, was typical. A student in his twenties, Sasha
shared a two-room flat with his mother and sister; all three siept in the same room (Reeves 1973: 5).
Reeves and Russian observers also reported encountering pockets of privilege. Dormitories at Moscow
State University - a top institution of higher learning -had been alienated by non-conformists, the
children of high officials, and among
55

these Reeves found two suites of gay men living among a larger grouping of artists and musicians, in
a congenial version of communal domesticity Parental connections were instrumental in obtaining
self-contained flats for other fortunate gay men described in 1980 (G 1980: 18-20). Widespread
overcrowding affected innumerable groups in Soviet society. Yet pervasive surveillance, whether by
family, neighbors and inquisitive superintendents, or more formally by the police and KGB, rendered
the home a desexualized space for all but the most resourceful of Moscow homosexuals (Gessen 1990:
46-7).
If physical space was difficult for homosexuals to control in Soviet conditions, then at least one
social space offered the hope of respectability and even prestige. This important locus of Moscows
male homosexual subculture was the art world. Homosexuals believed with some justification that
they were tolerated there, and they gravitated toward music, drama, dance, the visual arts and allied
professions. Homosexual figures at the summit of Russias artistic life have been well documented in
English (Karlinsky 1976, 1982, 1989; Poznansky 1991, 1996; Moss 1996). Littie has been said,
however, about ordinary homosexuals and their use of the arts as a cloak of respectability in a society
which assigned great prestige to officiai culture.
Antinoi (Antinous), a private arts circle devoted to the appreciation of male beauty in prose,
verse, drama and music, functioned in Moscow during the early 1920s, staging readings of consciously
homosexual poetry, recitals of music by their composers, and even an all-male ballet. The group
made plans to publish an anthology of homosexual verse from ancient to modern times. The collection
went unpublished, and our knowledge of the Antinoi groups activity begins and ends with
correspondence relating to the Leningrad poet Mikhail Kuzmins May 1924 reading to the group in the
Blue Bird Cafe just steps from Tverskoi Boulevard. The group appears to have disbanded as it became
more difficult to rent meeting space, or publicize its activities even by word of mouth.11
If private artistic action was politically dangerous, then officiai culture provided opportunities for
homosexual men, and indeed would have been the poorer without them. Great talents such as Serg
eiEisenstein and Sviatoslav Richter married to make their peace with an economy offering only one
patron:
the state (Karlinsky 1989: 361-2). Others did not always fare as well. Of the thirty-six individuals
named in the Moscow sodomy trial documents for 1935-41, fully one-third were employed, or getting
training, in the arts. A further four out of ten homosexuals briefly mentioned in the 1941 sodomy trial
of students at the Moscow Glazunov Musical Theater College were cultural employees. Most of these
men were dramatic actors, but there were dancers, a film executive, a pianist and a humble ticket-
collector from a branch of the Bolshoi Theater. One man even claimed to be a stage designer when he
met boulevard pick-ups, according to the man whose testimony led to his arrest. A student of the
Musical Theater College, examined in court by his defense lawyer, explained that he deliberately
sought out actors and wanted to work in the theater, because I engaged in that [sodomy]."
The cultural world remained a haven for male homosexuals after World War
56

II, although the authorities increased awareness of homosexuality in general meant that periodic
prosecutions, centered on elite institutions and sometimes involving the sons of high officials, took
place. Mosfilm Studios, the Moscow Conservatory of Music and Moscow State University were
scenes of at least one sodomy scandal each in the 1950s through 1970s. Such scandals were normally
hushed up and archival access to criminal records on them remains blocked.
lf
A 1959 sodomy case
against an instructor in the Moscow Conservatory was perhaps typical of these scandals. The teacher
was accused of requiring sex from his male students in exchange for serious instruction from 1950 to
1959. When the son of a high Party member complained, about two dozen students signed a petition to
the procuracy praising their instructor and demanding his release, on the grounds that Khrushchevs
newly enunciated principies of social ist humanism dictated that individuals should not be prosecuted
for such offenses. Nevertheless the instructor received a five-year prison sentence. Despite these
setbacks, some homosexuals interviewed in 1973 recalled the Khrushchev years of political thaw as
a time when the invigorated culture of jazz clubs and literary cafs brought fresh opportunities for gay
men to meet and forge social networks (Reeves 1973: 6). Khrushchevs successors tried to force all
non-conformism back into the closet. High-profile sodomy prosecutions of cultural and sexual
dissidents took place, such as that of poet Gennadii Trifonov in 1976. Other homosexuals sought to
lead their lives discreetly in the hopes of escaping official persecution. Some wrote honestly but for
the desk drawer (Evgenii Kharitonovs then unpublishable stories of gay experience were written in
the 1970s), adopted false marriages or relied on friendship networks in the arts world for mutual
support (Koziovskii 1986: 187-95; Gessen 1990: 47; Moss, 1996: 196, 226-32).
Driven from communal domestic space and forced by the command economy to retreat from the
once commodified spaces of bars, meeting halls and hotel rooms, Moscow homosexuals along with
others who had illicit sex sought contacts - and consummation - in public space. For men who had sex
with men, certain boulevards, parks and toilets became the chief zones where sexual release was
possible. At times during the communist era, bath-house contacts and cafe or bar pick-ups were
possible; but the subculture was not able to gain stable purchase on these now nationalized
establishments. Homosexual desire, unac-knowledged by the planned economy, led some men to
appropriate and redefine public space to satisfy their own needs. Others sought respectability and
perhaps an escape from the culture of the toilet in the arts as a means of making contact with like-
minded men. And there were those who inhabited both territo-ries, crossing the boundary between
respectability and illicit acts, some paying with harsh prison sentences when they were unmasked.
In the 1990s, gay men in Russia are enjoying a social and political thaw The emergence since
1991 of a small network of bars, dance clubs, publications and campaigning groups owes much to the
end of Communist Party rule, the decriminalization of sodomy in 1993, and the arrival of foreign
activism and money. As so often in Russias past, a number of Western modeis (of gay libera-
57

tion, of AIDS activism, of commercialized identities) compete for influence -but they do not confront
a blank slate. An indigenous homosexual subculture has been an element of Russias urban heritage
for the past century, a reflection of the simultaneous modernization or westernization of social
relations, character-ized by lunges and lags in diverse fields (Engelstein 1993: 338-53). Russias gays
and lesbians are faced with appeals to come out and to adopt identities that may not always make
sense in a culture which seems almost Mediterranean in its respect for family and in its extreme
patriarchalism (Tuller 1996).
At the heart of the evolution of Moscows homosexual subculture lie the priv-ileges of masculinity
in Russian culture. Overwhelmingly, homosexuals formed a maie subculture. Women who loved
women rarely took on an open, public role as lesbians (Healey 1997: 83-106). Mens mobility, their
relative freedom to earn a living, the drinking culture and the permissiveness conferred by vodka, and
the licensing of heterosexual brothels between 1843 and 1917, were all elements of a masculine
culture increasingly inflected by market relations. Traditional hierar-chies of age and social position
within the homosocial world of men reproduced themselves in new forms during the nineteenth
century, as men with experience, status and resources exploited these advantages over apprentices,
servants and newcomers to Moscow.
The tsarist bath-house, too, contributed to the evolution of a homosexual subculture, by sheltering
and institutionalizing commercial sex between males, in a quintessentially homosocial and hygienic
environment. Although bath-houses continued to operate and remained popular during the Soviet era,
socialist disapproval of commercial sex, and modern forms of surveillance, drastically reduced the
degree of male prostitution they sheltered. Nevertheless the national culture of the bath-house, in its
elemental celebration of all bodies, lent itself to a perverse reinterpretation through homosexual eyes.
If men were less able to consummate sexual relations in these spas, they were at least capable, through
the rituals of bath-house sociability, to recognize like-minded men and begin the search for privacy.
Moscows homosexuals still confront the problem of constructing privacy in a transitional
economic order. In the past, they made astonishingly bold use of Moscows most important central
landscapes. They persistently exploited secluded and marginal spaces in the heart of the national
capital, perhaps secure in the knowledge that their perverse appropriation of these sites was
sufficiently unthinkable to call attention from the uninitiated. Such energetic resistance, given the
frequency of official persecution, suggests that Russias gay men have a heritage which we would do
well to study before we offer them modeis they may not wish to assume.
Notes
1 The case of Pokrovskii and Borisov is located in TsentraPnyi munitsipafnyi arkhiv Moskvy
(TsMAM), Moskovskii narodnyi sud, fond 1919, (Zheleznodorozhnyi raion), opis 1, dlo 238.
All names in criminal cases cited from TsMAM have been altered.
58

2 Ibid., 11: 9-12,45.
3 The peoples court sentenced Pokrovskii to five years imprisonment for aggravated sodomy (i.e.
with the use of force). On appeal, his defense lawyer had the crime requalified as consensual
sodomy by convincing a higher court that no force had been proven, but the court refused a
shorter penalty. No action was taken against Borisov despite the implied shift from victim to
consenting partner; ibid., 11. 46, 53-4.
4 Akademiia nauk SSSR Istoriia Moskvy, 7 vols (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1952-9), vol. l, p.
515.
5 Istoriia Moskvy, vol. 2, p. 553.
6 See article under pobraiimstvo in Vladimir Dal, Toikovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka.
(St Petersburg-Moscow: 1903-9), t. 3, col. 348.
7 Jeffrey Burds, trans, and ed., Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa Pavia VasiVevicha Medvedeva, 1854-
1864gg. [Diary of Moscow merchant Pavel Vasilevich Medvedev, 18541864]
(forthcoming). I am very grateful to Prof. Burds for providing me with generous access to this
text.
8 Kulizm (i.e. anal intercourse) was derived from French cuV (ass); see entry for culiste in
Courouve(1985).
9 BurdsDnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa, p. 152.
10 See e.g. VG. Golenko, Pederastiia na sude, Arkhiv psikhialrii, neirologisudebnoi
psikhopatologii (3 1887): 4 2 - 5 6.
11 N.A. Obolonskii, Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva. Russkii arkhiv palologii, klinicheskoi
meditsinyi bakteriologii (1898): 1-20, esp. 15; VM. Bekhterev, O polovykh izvrashcheni-iakh,
kak patologicheskikh sochetatelnykh refleksakh, Obozrenie psikhialrii (7-9 1915):
1-26, esp. 9-13; VA. Belousov, Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki, Prestupnik
iprestupnost. Sbornik7/(l927). 309-17.
12 Burds, Dnevnik moskovskogo kuptsa, p. 144.
13 Tsentralnyi gos. istoricheskii arkhiv g. Moskvy (TsGlAgM), f. 142, op. 3, d. 233; f. 142, op. 2,
d.433.
14 Burds, Dnevnikmoskovskogo kuptsa, p. 157.
15 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossisskoi federatsii (GARF), f. 353, op. 3, d. 745, 11. 39, 32 ob.
16 TsGlAgM, f. 142, op. 2, d. 142,1. 148.
17 On Pavel, see Belousov, Sluchai gomoseksuala-muzhskoi prostitutki; on the princes identity
and family life, see V Sheremefevskii, Neobkhodimoe dopolnehie, ^erkolo:Informalsionnyi
biulleten GenderDok (2 1996): 1415. The princes son, himself a bisexual, was the famous
murderer of Grigorii Rasputin.
18 The word Hetkd used to denote homosexual, following from the French tante, dates at least
from Merzheevskiis (1878: 205) use of the Russian word to render the Parisian argot for a male
prostitute. Tetka soon acquired the meaning of middle-aged homosexual, to judge from
Tchaikovskiis use of the term in his diary (13 March 1888) to describe a gathering of such men:
Russian tetki are repulsive (Chaikovskii 1923/1993: 203) and Koziovskii (1986: 69).
19 St Petersburg was redubbed Petrograd in 1914; from 1924 to 1991 it bore the name Leningrad.
20 On the shift of attention to lesbians, see Dan Healey, Unruly identities: Soviet psychi-atry
confronts the female homosexual of the 1920s, in Gender and Sexual Difference in Russian
Culture and History, ed. Linda Edmondson (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).
21 Part of the following discussion is based on a sample of fourteen sodomy trials (with forty-four
named defendants) from Tsentralnyi munitsipalnyi arkhiv Moskvy (TsMAM), dating from
1935 through 1956. Eight of the trials, and thirty-six defendants, fall within the 1935-41 period;
the remaining eight individuals were tried between 1949 and 1956. All names cited from these
trials have been altered. It is not possible to determine from TsMAM inventories what
proportion of Moscow sodomy offenses this sample represents. Uncatalogued and inaccessible
sodomy files are known
59

to exist. I am gratefl to Julie Hessier whose suggestions on this archive were invalu-able.
22 L.M. Vasilevskii, and L.A. Vasilevskaia Prostitutsiiainovena Rossiia (Tver: Oktiabr, 1923).
23 TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 51,11. 57, 106 ob.
24 Belousov, Sluchai gomoseksuala - muzhskoi prostitutki, p. 312. Pavel also listed meeting places
and trysting grounds in major cities of the USSR in the 1920s. All of these were on public
terrain: embankments, boulevards, toilets in cinemas, public gardens.
25 TsMAM.f. 819, op. 2, d. 10,1. 297.
26 Belousov, Sluchai gomoseksuala - muzhskoi prostitutki,p. 314.
27 Personal communication, Viktor Guishinskii of the Russian Library of Lesbians and Gays
(GenderDok), 4 Nov. 1995.
28 TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 51, 1. 83. Sodomy in Soviet-era police documents might mean any
sexual contact between males.
29 Convictions for 1950: GARF, f. A353, op. 16s, d. 121, 11. 16 ob.-24. In this year, Moscows
share of convictions wasjust six persons, while Leningrad had nine, see 1. 18 ob. Convictions
for 1961, GARF f. 9492 sekretnaia chast, op. 6s, d. 58,11. 37, 99;for 1971, f. 9492 s.ch., op. 6s,
d. 177, 1. 45. Convictions remained stable at this approximate rate in the 1970s; 849 persons
were sentenced in 1981 for sodomy, f. 9492 s.ch., op. 6s, d. 328, 1. 30. These now declassified
sources do not distinguish between convictions for consensual or aggravated sodomy.
30 Koziovskii (1996); see also TsMAM, f. 1919, op. 1, d. 136 for a 1952 trial involving sex in public
toilet near Leningrad railway station.
31 TsMAM, f. 1921, op. 1, d. 69,1. 10.
32 This is the same park where, ninety-four years earlier, Pavel Medvedev sought to produce lust
with his male friend. Klimov and Volodia had the misfortune to be discovered by a police dog
while it was being walked by two Moscow policemen; both defendants received 3-year prison
sentences. TsMAM f. 1921, op. 1, d. 69, 11. 6. 8, 43-4.
33 Both baths served approximately 2,000 customers a day in 1979, see P.A. Voronin et ai. (eds)
Moskva: Entsikiopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsikiopediia, 1980), 126.
34 TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 11,11. 238-45.
35 Ibid, 1.242.
36 On the communal flafs effects on heterosexual married couples, see Kotkin (1995:195).
%
37 TsMAM, f. 901, op. 1, d. 1352.11.49ob.-50.
38 Ibid, 1.7.
39 GARF, f. A482, op. 47, d. 4868,11. 40-40 ob. Soviet-era hoteis officially only admitted out-of-
towners or foreigners, eliminating another site for non-approved sexual encounters.
40 Pokrovskii, described in the introduction of this chapter, lived with his wife and stepson. The wife
told police she siept in a bedwith her son while Pokrovskii always siept apart, on the sof and
refused sex with her, TsMAM, f. 1919, op. 1, d. 238,1. 27 ob.
41 Describing obstacles to holding the reading in a letter to Kuzmin, VV Ruslov blamed the
generally awful mood reigning at the moment in Moscow, among Muscovites in general (the
reason - mistrust and arrests) and also among our own, who, as you doubtless know, are more
timid than desert gazelles; as a result, frightened by the mood here, they are prostrate and at the
thought of our evening immediately fall into hysterics and refse to purchase tickets. See
A.G. Timofeev, Progulka bez Gulia? (K istorii organizatsii avtorskogo vechera M.A. Kuzmina
v mae 1924 g.). In Mikhail Kuznunirusskaia kultura XXveka: tezisyimaterialy konferentsii 15-
17 maia 1990g., ed. G. A. Morev. (Leningrad: Sovet po istorii mirovoi kultury AN SSSR,
1990), p. 187.
60

42 TsMAM, f. 819, op. 2, d. 51.
43 Ibid., 1. 106 ob.
44 While conducting research in Moscow in 1995-6, employees at one archive advised me of the
existence of a classified file on a 1955 sodomy scandal at Mosfilm; in another archive,
employees allowed me limited informal access to a file on a similar scandal at the Moscow
Conservatory of Music. G described a psychiatrist who treated several gay Conservatory
students, sons of powerful officials, for homosexu-ality in the 1970s, and described a similar
scandal involving the University, (G 1980:
21-2)
45 1959 criminal case in RSFSR Supreme Court against music instructor at Moscow Conservatory
of Music, personal communication fi-oin staff at one Moscow archive. Tolerance of amours of
a different kind at the Conservatory was the subject of journalistic attack in 1878, see
Poznansky (1996: 18).
61
3 Amsterdam
Gert Hekma
Introduction
Amsterdams gay world came into full blossorn in the 1960s. The city afforded an exarnple of
tolerance and of pleasure for people all around the world. During the Golden Age of the seventeenth
century the city was already farnous for religious toleration when other religions were perrnitted
alongside the Dutch Reforrned Church. Many dissidents from other parts of Europe sought refuge in
the city. By the eighteenth century Arnsterdarn was considered a center for the distribution of
pornography, especially libertine writings in French. That tradi-tion continued to the present for kiddy
and bestial porn that elsewhere in the Western world is more strictly controlled. This reputation of
tolerance is not always well de serve d. During the eighteenth century the Dutch Republic, including
Amsterdam, was the location of the largest persecutions of sodomy of the age with at least 800 men
persecuted and 200 capital punishments. Even in the 1990s a majority of the urban population and of
the municipal authorities would like to see an end to Amsterdams reputation as a place where sex and
drugs are easily available. The city government enforced stricter rules on activities that denote
hedonism outside the bounds of the capitalist marketpiace (van Naerssen 1987).
The earliest settiement of the site of Amsterdam dated from around 1225. Dams were required to
hold back heavy flooding of the River Amstel which threatened the terp or artificial mound on the
bank where houses were built. By 1275 Amsterdam became a city and the settiement grew from one of
landowners and fish dealers to a center for commerce. The beginnings of the city coincided with rising
persecution of sodomy in Europe. The first recorded burnings of sodomites in the Flemish Netherlands
took place in Ghent at the end of the thirteenth century Around 1500 Amsterdam accommodated about
5,000 inhabitants. It was a center of Catholicism with many cloisters. In 1578 the city converted from
Catholicism to Calvinism, some time after other Dutch cities. After the occupation of Portugal by
Spain in 1580, the fall of Antwerp in 1585 and the repeal of
62

the Edict of Nantes in France in 1685 large numbers of PortugueseJews, Flemish Protestants and
French Huguenots found refuge in the city. Most of them were wealthy or skiliful exiles. By 1700
Amsterdam had an cosmopolitan population of some 200,000 including Germans andJews,
Norwegians and Armenians among many others. The city was the financial and commercial center of
the world. Its sea connections made it the prime trading center of the globe. The East and West Indies
Companies (founded in 1602 and 1621) made Amsterdam the ir home. During the eighteenth century
the city gradually lost its pre-eminent posi-tion to Paris and London although it remained a financial
center. Industries and markets declined and, while the rich continued to enjoy prosperity, it derived
from their property rather than from trade or industry. The lower classes bore the burden of
Amsterdams commercial and industrial decay.
After Amsterdam joined the Calvinist insurrection against Catholic Spain in 1578 it became the
principal city in the Dutch Republic of seven relatively autonomous provinces that forged its political
identity during the eighty-year war against Spain (1568-1648). The city itself belonged to the province
of Holland, by far the richest part of the country. Because of the intricate but weak organization of the
Republic and because of the citys wealth and power, Amsterdam was very independent in its policies.
The functions of the Republic, based in The Hague, were mainly restricted to foreign and military
affairs. The city was a world to itself and has remained so. In 1806 it became the capital of the
Kingdom of Holland under King Louis, brother to Napoleon. Nowadays Amsterdam is the capital as
well as the financial and cultural center of the Netherlands while The Hague has remained the seat of
government. As the saying goes, money is earned in Rotterdam, divided in The Hague and spoilt in
Amsterdam.
The secret world of sodomy
The first recorded execution by fire for sodomy in the northern part of the Netherlands concerned
two men in Egmont, not far from Amsterdam on Hollands coast, in 1321 (Noordam 1995: 22-4). The
first known court case in Amsterdam for crimine pessimo, probably sodomy, was in 1534 and
involved a priest and a Franciscan monk, but the sentence is not known (Boomgaard 1992:276).
During the seventeenth century there were some convictions in 1632 and 1641 of women who married
or had sex with one another. The latter concerned Hendrikje van der Schuur who had served as a
soldier and had a passionate relation with a woman named Trijntje. The case attracted attention
because the Amsterdam physician Nicolaas Tulp discussed their case in his Observaliones (1641). He
attributed the masculine sexuality of Hendrikje to her large clitoris.
An Italian was banned from the city in 1648 for buggering littie girls and possibly also a boy; he
was later punished for the same crime in Utrecht and The Hague. Persecution of men for sodomy
remained rare in Amsterdam until the great persecutions of 1730-1. One legal treatise mentioned two
men who were executed in Amsterdam in 1686 while in 1726 Fierre Pelaxi was sentenced to
63

thirty-five years of solitary confinement. The first notorious cases dealt not with sodomites but with
those who tried to blackmail them. In 1664 the court sentenced a blackmailer to flogging, branding
and banishment from the city. Two other men received a similar punishment in 1689 while a third man
was hanged. An other blackmailer was convicted in 1715. Their presence in the judieial records
suggests that at least since the 1660s there was a twilight world of sodomites in the Dutch Republic
(Van der Meer 1995).
In other places convictions were more common, especially in much smaller Rotterdam, where in
the same period fifteen men were convicted for sodomy or tentamina sodomitica of whom six
received the death sentence. From the thir-teenth century until 1730 some 100 convictions for sodomy
have been recorded for the northern Netherlands. Most of these were for anal intercourse between
men. About fifty men were executed for this crime. Very few cases of bestiality or heterosexual anal
intercourse are known (Noordam 1995). It is possible that more cases will be identified in archives in
future research; it is equally possible thatjudicial records have not survived. The suggestion that
sodomy trial records were deliberately destroyed seems in general not to have been the case in the
Netherlands because of the number that have survived and because legal treatises rarely specified such
a requirement of records of the crimen nefandum the crime that should not be discussed).
If convictions for sodomy in Amsterdam before l730 were so few the question can be asked
whether the activity was rare. It appears that same-sex sexual acts were not as general in the
Netherlands as in fifteenth-century Florence described by Rocke (1996) where such pleasures were
part and parcel of male sociability However research has been concentrated onjudicial records and
there is a lack of historical inquiries into the fields of art, literature and private life. A thorough
investigation of Dutch art, from Maerten van Heemskerck and Hendrick Goltzius to Rembrandt van
Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen and many others who painted mythology as daily life would
provide more information on same-sex desires. Goltzius made drawings of heroic figures, van
Heemskerck is famous for his Lord of Sorrows which serves as Leo Steinbergs (1983) main example
of a Christ with pronounced genitals, while Rembrandt depicted a Ganymede and a mastur-bation
scene. One of Vermeers portraits may be of a male-to-female transvestite. Etchings of Sodom and
sodomy were widespread from the start of printing culture and many tracts that appeared in the wake
of the sodomy persecutions of the 1730swere illustrated (Schenk 1982).
Sources from private life and literature might also yield a harvest of information but in the present
state of research we can only offer some hypotheses. Obviously official altitudes and those of the
public at large were quite negative, especially when cases of sodomy became public. Sodomites
themselves felt guilty about acts that were considered the epitome of sin, although since it should not
be named perhaps many individuals did not know what was meant. A group of young orphans who
had anal intercourse with each other continued to do so after one of them suggested sodomy was not
what they did sexually but meant the cutting off of penises. Men arrested for sodomy in the village of
Faan who
64


Figure 3.1 Justice glorified by the discovery and punishment of rising sin. The drawing
represents the unveiling ofthe undei-world of sodomites, below left, by Justice, in the middle.
Some men run off to escape Justice. Above right, the fire that extinguished the city of Sodom.
Below right, four women who represent the sins offolly [frolic], avarice, lewdness and
voluptuousness. Above left, the ngel of revenge with the bible text men abandoning the use of
women. From 1730.
Source: Reprinted from Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zvuschenslitfen 8 (1907)
might have heard their clergyman inveighing against sodomy seem to have made no connection with
their own behavior.
Research in the archives of the Amsterdam Reformed Church revealed that Church Counciis
discussed sexual sins quite frequently, especially in remon-strating with the faithful for frequenting
prostitutes, but sodomy was never mentioned (Roodenburg 1990). In provincial meetings the topic
came up not in Holland but in the northern district of Drenthe. Dutch Calvinists were liltle exercised
about sodorny until 1730 and even after that date the state was much more active in combating it than
the Reformed Church.
What about homoeroticism that was not sodomitical? Clearly men lived in homosocial worlds in
their workplaces, aboard ships, in army camps, and close friendships were highly valued. Lower-class
men of all ages often siept together because of lack of space and money. In homes, hosteis and on
ships they shared beds with nephews, uneles, apprentices, friends or strangers whom they perhaps
never saw again after a night of secret delights. However there is a dearth of factual evidence about
those practices.
Amsterdam was, relatively speaking, littie affected by the 1730 persecutions. The authorities in
Utrecht accidentally uncovered a small network of sodomites. After they arrested Zach arias Wiisma, a
soldier and hustler who had sexual relations with rich and poor men all over the Republic the
prosecution became nation-
65

wide. Of ninety-four death penalties for sodomy during the period 1730-2 six were pronounced in
Amsterdam. Thirty men were sentenced in their absence. They probably escaped because rumors of
the persecutions reached Amsterdam before arrests took place. The authorities started the prosecution
after they had asked the learned advice of three jurists on the lawfulness of arresting an individual on
the basis of a single denunciation by an accomplice, and whether social class made a difference. On
the first point the answer was negative and on the second positive. An allegation of a suspect had to be
confirmed by other evidence certainly if he was of a higher social class.
The court was prudent. The first man accused of sodomy was a merchant who on 19 May 1730
firinly denied Wilsmas denunciations against him and he was released on bail. Five days later he had
left his home for an unknown desti-nation. The second man, lower class, also denied all allegations
even when put to the torture and confronted by Wiisma, who was cooperating with the authorities. He
finally confessed with two others only about a month later; all three were executed on the 24 of June.
A fifth accused, a footman named Maurits Schuuring had confessed immediately and was executed
with them. He said he had been introduced to sodomy by Jurriaan Bakbandt, the inn-keeper of the
Serpent, which was the main meeting place of sodomites in Amsterdam. Bakbandt had already fled the
city but his wife was arrested and banished in m the city. The inn seems to have had two rooms where
sodomites gathered in a semi-public arena. Bakbandt never permitted his wife to serve the clients in
rooms, doing so himself (Van der Meer 1984, 1995; Boon 1997).
One of the convicted men implicated an other thirty-eight men four days before his execution but
the Amsterdam court slowed down its proceedings. In September a fifth execution occurre d; in 1731
an accused man committed suicide while in prison. The extent of the Amsterdam sodomitical
subculture was small for a city of 200,000 inhabitants. There was an other inn be side the Serpent
where sodomites foregathered. They met in public spaces like privies, the walls of the city and the
ground floor of the City Hall on the Dam Square (at present the Royal Palace). Ironically this was the
very place where sodomites were imprisoned after arrest, where they were judged and finally executed
on a wooden scaffold built in front of the first floor of the edifice.
All the executed men in Amsterdam were lower class. This was a clear trend towards a class-based
justice. Although many patricians and aristocrats were implicated by their footmen none of them were
arrested. Some went into exile although the principal noble of the province of Utrecht, in spite of many
accu-sations, was not even indicted. Another Utrechtenaar (since these persecutions, synonymous
with sodomite) Jan van Lennep, a prebendary (bought title of honor) from a merchant family, was the
highest placed sodomite to face the death penalty. William III, stadtholder of the Republic and King of
Britain, was in 1730 already twenty-eight years dead. His fame as a male lover of Count Bentinck and
Lord Keppel certainly lingered on much longer but was never evoked in the 1730s.
More prosecutions of sodomy in eighteenth-century Amsterdam: in 1741
66


Figure 3.2 A print representing 1. a meeting of sodomites, 2. who abandon theirwives, 3. are
arrested, 4. in prison 5. hung and burnt, and 6. drowned in a barrel. The last scene shows the
scaffold placed in cases of corporal punishment before the Amsterdam City Hall, now the Royal
Palace. Sodomites met for pleasure on the ground floor of the same building. From 1730.
three orphans were sentenced to long prison terms; in 1743 another two received the death penalty. In
1762 the man who was the city executioner for many years, and who may have tortured imprisoned
sodomites, was banished on grounds of sodomy. He told the court about the cruising at the City Hall
and the authorities decided to install lamps there to prevent such activities. Subsequently they orga-
nized entrapments in well-known meeting places. The policies changed in enlightened times from
reactive to active, from punishing to preventing.
Another wave of persecutions hit the city in 1764-5 with eight death penal-ties and sixty-four men
exiled from the city. It began with the arrest of a soldier for theft who, condemned to death, confessed
before his hanging to relieve his conscience his terrible sins of sodomy, active as well as passive
with a variety of partners. The court proceeded captiously. The soldier was hanged two weeks later for
his theft and not strangled as was common in sodomy cases. Thejudges wanted to avoid giving the
alarm as had happened in 1730 when suspected sodomites got away. Notwithstanding their caution,
few Amsterdam men were arrested and sentenced.
In 1776-7 a more widespread network of sodomites originating from Amsterdam was revealed.
Two individuals accused of fraud had in their luggage letters of an unmistakably sodomitical nature.
The two men did not confess anal intercourse and received long prison sentences but not death.
However their love letters led to persecutions throughout the Dutch Republic. Hermanus Kioek, leader
of the Amsterdam soapboilers guild, had written one of the letters. He
67

confessed to mutual masturbation but no more than that, but, more embarrass-ingly to the city elite, he
implicated a reigning patrician of Amsterdam, George Clifford. The authorities now sought to hush up
the case, did not prosecute Clifford and exiled Kioek. Other men had been sentenced to long prison
terms for the same activities and the blatantly class-biased judgments were unpopular with the
population. When warrants calling for the arrest of fugitive sodomites were posted they were painted
black by unknown members of the public, prob-ably as a gesture of protest.
The type of meeting places of sodomites revealed by the eighteenth-century trials continued to
exist. Public toilets until the 1970s were favored cruising grounds. In the eighteenth-century these
toilets were wooden structures under the citys many bridges. They offered an early-warning system of
new arrivals since most lower-class people walked with wooden clogs so an individual descending the
stairs was easily audible to persons in the latrines. In the mid nineteenth century street-level urinals
were installed and these were heavily frequented by men wanting sex with other men. They had soon
to be redesigned to make homosexual activity impossible but however clever the new design may have
been, the new model has been employed by gay men until the 1970s. After the walls were pulled
down, the parks that came in their place were another venue for sarne-sex encounters.
Inns and bars were a salient feature first of the sodornitical underworld and later of the gay
upperworld. The inns mentioned in 1730 were not exclusively sodornitical. About bars mentioned in
later court proceedings no details are given. Two bars in the Egelantierstraat (Jordaan) are designated
in 1764 as places where Holders (sodornites) congregated and in the 1790s the Rondeel on the
Heiligeweg is mentioned several times. Sodomites met also at private homes. Both in 1809 and 1881
houses were raided and wrong lovers arrested. Nothing is known about bars or inns for most of the
nineteenth century. At the end of the century a list of bordellos made by a reform society mentions half
a dozen bars and houses as sodomitical meeting places.
The question has often been debated if these men who had sex with other men had a sense of
homosexual identity. The historians Noordam (1995) and Van der Meer (1995) assume, following
Trumbach, that such an identity existed since the late seventeenth century. Further questions arise
from that assumption: what did that identity involve, how did it affect sodomites and their surround-
ings, and what place did the identity hold in the cultural context? A subculture of sodomites was
developing in Amsterdam from the late seventeenth century. As a reaction to their persecution some
sodomites started to defend their inclinations and to claim in the mid-eighteenth century that their
desires were innate. These whispers became outspoken only in 1883 when the first self-conscious
homosexual was published. The development of a homosexual identity should be seen as a process of
stages where other same-sex practices existed concurrent with this identity such as romantic
friendship, boy-love or males seeking sex with adult males in homosocial arrangements or on the
streets. My view of the Dutch situation is that most men who had sex with other men did not self-
consciously
68

embrace a homosexual identity until the 1950s. Most homosexual acts till that time were perpetrated
by men who sought sexual pleasure and did not care much about the gender of their partner (compare
Everard 1994 and Van de Pol 1996 for female sexuality).
Modern times
In 1795 Dutch radicals, with the backing of French troops, chased out the patricians and the
Stadtholder of the Oranges who held power in the Republic and founded the revolutionary Batavian
Republic. After many political perturbations in 1806 Napoleon made his brother Louis King of
Holland and, in 1810, included the kingdom in his empire. In 1813 the Netherlands again became
independent, after Napoleons Russian defeats. After the Congress of Vienna Belgium and the former
Republic were united in the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1830 when the two parts became
separate kingdoms.
After the revolutionary changes of 1795 the persecutions of sodomy surpris-ingly increased. More
men were arrested and also some women. The range of sexual acts considered criminal was extended.
The tentamina sodomitica included touching another male intimately. On the other hand the
punishments were less severe. The net result was that littie progress was made under the new regime.
In Amsterdam two of the leading police chiefs seem to have been at odds, one being eager to prosecute
sodomy while the other was alleged to be a sodomite in several cases. After the first officer left his
position the persecutions abated but did not stop altogether.
Legal opinion about sodomy was evolving somewhat. In 1777 a lawyer close to the Stadtholder,
Abraham Perrenot, wrote in the spirit of the Enlightenment a tract which called for prevention rather
than harsh punishments of sodomy. He still expressed vehement repulsion for sodomites. In 1795 G.J.
Gales, another lawyer, discussed whether the sin of sodomy should be decriminalized because of the
separation of church and state in the Batavian Republic. His conclusion was that sodomy should
remain a crime because the law was introduced by the state.
New criminal law proposals of the Batavian Republic did not propose to decriminalize sodomy
although capital punishment was now reserved only for cases when it occurred under conditions of
force, seduction or mi su se of authority. These proposals were not enacted in law. When Holland was
incorpo-rated into Napoleons Empire the French Code Penal was introduced in 1811. This law had no
provisions against sodomy, only against public indecency. After the defeat of the French the law
remained in force and was replaced only in 1886. Some Dutch legal officials in the Kingdom of the
Netherlands like the long-serving Minister ofJustice C.E van Maanen had wanted to reintroduce the
crime of sodomy to the law. The 1840s saw a lively discussion among lawyers mostly in favor of
recriminalizing sodomy. However, in 1880, the majority in parliament supported the idea of privacy
and resisted the insertion of articles against sodomy. To prevent seduction of youngsters the legal age
of consent was raised initially to 14, but after a case of homosexual seduction of somewhat
69

oider youths came to the public attention it was finally raised to 16 years of age in the law that
replaced the Code Penal in 1886.
The nineteenth century was a liberal age in the Netherlands but towards the end of the century
other political groups, especially Protestant and Catholic, gained in force. They made moral and sexual
issues prominent in politics and campaigned for a stricter sex law that was discussed and accepted in
parliament in 1911. This law outlawed same-sex acts between adults and minors under 21 years, as
well as public exposure of pornography and contraceptives, abortion and pimping. This new sex law
was the outcome of a long struggle focused mainly on medical regulation of prostitution. The ill-
assorted coalition of Christian fundamentalists, feminists, progressive liberals and socialists that, for a
variety of reasons, supported the struggle against prostitution, extended its field of interest in 1898 to
other sexual topics like male homosexuality and pornography which were both widely held in
disregard.
The political struggle around prostitution was a result of its medical regulation. Since Napoleon
introduced this me asure to police prostitutes more effectively, regulation had spread over Europe. The
nineteenth century was the age of progress. Physicians believed in and struggled for a stronger medical
hold in the state. They had deeply socialized medicine by introducing a specialization called medical
police or, more neutrally, public hygiene, that broadened the field of medical interest towards social
issues such as the quality of food, labor circumstances, housing conditions, public festivities. The lewd
and drunken behavior of the lower classes was curtailed and more healthy alternatives of sport and
music were propagated.
Prostitutes were given a weekly medical inspection. Christians opposed this regulation because it
legalized vice, feminists because it degraded women, socialists be cause capitalists could in that way
legally and with impunity abuse working-class women. As the medical control was not effective even
physicians started to oppose it. In the end this struggle was successful and most Dutch cities abrogated
the regulation and forbade bordellos. After this victory abolitionists found other targets in the struggle
against pornography, homosexuality, abortion, child abuse and other forms of immorality (de Vries
1997).
Amsterdam had never had medical regulation although an unofficial system existed. At the end of
the century the city council appointed a committee to research the social conditions of prostitution. Its
conclusions were straightfor-ward. Bordellos were not so much used by young and unmarried men for
whom they were intended but by older married men. Those men were less interested in normal
copulation than in counternatural sex. Among the prostitutes tribadism was common. Instead of
damming dangerous desires of youngsters prostitution promoted perversions among everyone. The
regulatory system was put into question and never recovered from this final blow. In its stead free
clinics for the treatment of venereal diseases were introduced.
70
Wrong lovers
Discussion of prostitution made homosexuality visible. A strongly voiced opinion among doctors
was the argument that if the state forbade prostitution worse vices would become general, like
masturbation or seeking sexual relations with others of the same sex. One strong supporter of the
system had been a naval surgeon and he confirmed that thousands of men succumbed to these vices in
the absence of women. His Christian opponents sustained the possibility of chastity and found a
captain of the merchant marine who said that sailors could live chastely during their long sailing trips.
The discussion on prostitution brought homosexuality into the limelight of public discussion. Books
andpamphiets on prostitution frequently had chapters devoted to same-sex behavior by men and
women.
A new kind of yellow press with strong social ist or left-wing antecedents started around 1890.
These journals railed against capitalism, the church and the aristocracy, whose main faults were of
course sexual. The Red Devil attacked men of higher classes and of religious ranks for all kinds of
social and sexual misbehavior. The Amsterdam Lantern edited by Abraham Cornelisse did so
fervently. It opened its first issue in 1897 with a verbal assault on a sodomitical meeting place and
produced a pamphiet against this bar of George Hermans. In the few copies of thejournal that have
survived, gay bashing is a regular feature. Cornelisse not only cried out in his paper against sodomites
but went so far as to smash the Windows of Hermans bar. He was arrested and sentenced for this. He
produced at least one more pamphiet against pederasts who were said to interfere with young patients
in the city hospital.
His articles offer an interesting insight on the gay bars of those times. Hermans was a strong
supporter of the royal family whose portraits decorated his bar. This infuriated the anti-royal ist
Cornelisse. Flowers, an uncommon feature of bars in those days, added to the atmosphere. Hermans
was more than a bartender since his denouncer claimed he was a quack purporting to cure venereal
diseases. He was also said to place young men for work as man-servants or as nurses in psychiatric
asylums. This employment service gave him ampie opportunity to give free rein to his debauched
desires.
Similar information is not available on the other places that catered to sodomites. Those on the list
of bordellos probably did not offer rent boys. One man who figured on the list was arrested for public
indecency and apparently had pictures of nude males in his home. Perhaps the pictures were of male
whores for inspection by poten ti al clients, but it seems more likely that the man so Id or collected
male pornography. Probably the meetings places changed regularly because of harassments by the
police, annoyed neighbors or Cornelisse and his like.
The main meeting places were not bars and bordellos, however, but parks, public toilets and
streets. Judicial archives give abundant material on those places as public indecencies persecuted in
Dutch courts generally concerned men involved in same-sex activities. The number of arrested men
grew rapidly as Table 3.1 shows:
71


Figure 3.3 Map of Amsterdam, indicating the meeting places of wrong lovers in the late
nineteenth century, numbers 1-4 cruising places; 5-10 houses mentioned on a bordello list as
sodomitical locations; 11-17 bars that operated around the turn of the century at some stage as
meeting places for sodomites.
Source: From Spiegel Histonael 17: 10 (October 1982)

Table 3.1 Number of arrests and convictions for homosexual acts in the Amsterdam district
(public indecency and seduction of minors)

Year Arrests Convictions
1830-9 12 10
1840-9 8 7
1850-9 14 7
1860-9 27 12
1870-9 51 27
1880-9 73 23
1890-9 97 48
1900-9 187 87
Source: From Hekma (1987)
Note: Most cases concern Amsterdam city; during the two last decades one and five of the arrested men respectively were sent to
psychiatric asylum without a conviction.

72

An obvious explanation for the rapid rise in numbers of arrests is the growth of the Amsterdam
police force from 56 to 686 men between 1838 and 1878. The less effective system of night watchmen
had been abolished. There were more prisons, asylums and public toilets; there were more efforts to
discipline social behavior but also more possibilities to escape control.
Convicted men had practiced consensual sex in all kinds of places: in horse carriages, trains,
hospitals, swimming pools, on boats, markets, in bars, bedrooms, the poorhouse and, most often, in
parks and public toilets. Sometimes the police took a long time to arrest their victims. Two men who
had once been observed kissing on a street corner were followed for a fortnight before they were
caught having sex in the same public place. In another instance two men spent an hour and a half in an
old-style public toilet under a bridge where they were fucking each other. A woman vendor of eggs
and pickies testified that one of the pair had bought two eggs from her before going down to the toilet
where he was joined by his partner a littie later. She said the couple had been in that toilet before, and
remained there until the night watch took up their post at 9:30 p.m. Their arrest was the work of a man
who had staked out the toilet for hours. A volunteer constable in the Vondelpark was very zealous and
made several

Figure 3.4 Public toilet, specifically designed to prevent homosexual acts in the 1880s and still
present in contemporary Amsterdam. The two pissholes are spatially segregated to prevent
indecent gazing, and the underside of the walls is open to make it possible for police officers to
see from the outside what is happening inside.
73

arrests there of men engaged in sexual acts. Some other citizens of Amsterdam were less vigilant, like
the cabman who drove around while two men had sex in his carriage, until the policeman who had
ascertained their behavior arrested them.
The arrested men were nearly without exception from the lower classes. Of course they had less
access to private space for sexual activity than the well to do. The handful of upper middle-class men
arrested for public indecencies took effective me asures to escape condemnation by employing a
lawyer to defend them or by appealing against an unfavorable sentence. They could also leave the
country before the trial because there was no preventive imprisonment once the charge of public
indecency had been laid.
The convicted men were of all ages, the youngest in Amsterdam being 15 years old. Convictions
for having sex with boys were rare before 1886 when the new law set the age of consent at 16.
Between 1886 and 1909 there were twenty-four convictions for this crime, whereas in the preceding
period of 1830 to 1885 only five men were convicted of having forcible sexual relations with boys in
that age group. In fact force was rarely an element in the cases researched, including those in the
Haarlem Military Court which is astonishing because (sexual) violence was until recently widespread
in the army.
Charges of public indecencies raised the question in court of what was to be considered public. In
general, wards in hospitals, army barra cks and places clearly visible from a public place were
considered to be public. If men had sex in a bedroom without closing the curtains their activities could
become a public indecency. A court in Appingedam near the Germn frontier acquitted two men who
had sex behind a hedge, which meant they were not seen by the witness but heard. However the court
ruled that the sounds of their love-making did not make their behavior public. A lawyer published a
comment in ajournal in which he argued that their acts should have been punished since the garden did
not belong to either man. The 1886 law countered such problems by adding the proviso that there was
public indecency if other persons were involuntary witnesses to such acts. Dutch law-makers never
went as far as the British who regarded all sexual situations in which more than two persons were
present as public indecencies.
Medical theories, emancipatory efforts
In the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and uranians started to discuss the bio-medical aspects
of homosexuality. The first author was the psychiatrist N.B. Donkersioot, editor of the weekly
Geneeskundige Courant (Medical Journal). In 1852 he summarized J.L. Caspers findings on the signs
of sodomy, but did not mention Caspers suggestion that pederasty might be innate. In a review of
K.H. Ulrichs work on uranism he concluded that it was better to talk the topic to death than to
condemn its devotees to death. He did not succeed in banishing the topic into silence as an anonymous
colleague wrote him a long letter in which he defended his desires. Donkersioot published this letter as
the first
74

Dutch case study of man who wrote I am a uranian, not a pederast. This fasci-nating first gay
autobiography in Dutch was the apotheosis of a long article of Donkersioot on the Clinical-forensic
significance of the perverse sexual drive which appeared in several installments in 1883, the first
major article on the topic in Dutch.
This first uranian claimed that there were 50,000 uranians like him in the Netherlands, with male
genitals, body-hair, voice, build and habitus but female from the inside. From his earliest days he
desired men and abhorred women. For him, having sex with uranians and dionings (heterosexual men)
was natural, while sex with women was counternatural. His sexual activity was not anal as he was not
a pederast, and neither, he went on, were 199 of each 200 of his ilk. This man claimed to be a well
respected doctor who wanted to speak out about uranism like the courageous Ulrichs because he
believed that already in the same century uranism would be accepted on an equal footing with
dionism.
More ambivalent was the second apology for uranians by Schoondermark who spoke as if he held
a professorate and a doctorate but who had neither. He had been a medical student and a collaborator
on the Geneeskundige Courant. He made his living by writing tracts on medical subjects from
dentistry and hygiene to sexology and birth control. Most of his very many works were simply
translations of foreign books under his own name. In 1894 he published a small book Van de
verkeerde richng (Of the wrong direction) which was mainly a translation of Norbert Grabowskis
Die verkehrte Geschiechtsempfindung (1894). It ended with an emotional appeal: one should have
strong compassion with, not contempt for homosexuals. Later he would translate Nicolo Baruccos
work on Neurcisthenia sexuaiis (1901) which had a much more negative tone. Schoondermark did this
work probably for financial rather than emotional reasons as he was not homosexual himself.
Notwithstanding his active publishing he twice went bankrupt and was denounced in the
Geneeskundige Courant as a quack.
Schoondermarks books appeared with Amsterdam-based publishers such as Van Klaveren,
Moransard and Graauw who started to produce erotic and sexo-logical books with great success in the
late 1880s. Van Klaveren published the first full-length book on homosexuality, the aforementioned
Van de verkeerde richng. After 1894 many other original and translated works would appear like
Ambroise Tardieus Msdrijven tegen de zeden (1896), Richard von Krafft-Ebings Leerboek der
zielsziekten van het geslachtsleven (1896), Edward Carpenters De homogene lie/de (1896), Magnus
Hirschfelds Sapho en Socrates (1902) and Havelock Elliss Het contraire geslachtsgevoel (1901). It
was a popular genre. Many translations were compilations of the originals, fabricated to satisfy the
sexual curiosity of the public. Van Klaveren sold these books in series, for example the Teoples
library for sexual life. This sexological literature promulgated for the first time in Dutch history quite
positive ideas of sexual variations. It offered modeis for homosexual and other sexual identities and
stimulated their development. In a court case it was used against a man arrested for public indecencies
that he had spoken approvingly about Schoondermarks work to his tobacconist.
The two main Dutch authors in the field were Arnold Aletrino and Lucien
75

S.A.M. von Romer. They were both medical doctors living in Amsterdam, Aletrino teaching criminal
anthropology and Romer becoming a highly regarded collaborator of Hirschfeid and a productive
contributor to his Jahrbuch fr sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Aletrino was already famous as a realist
author of somber novels about nurses when he published in 1897 his first article on uranism. It was a
long and positive review of Marc-Andr Raffalovichs Uranismo et unisexu-aiit (1896) whose thesis
of the masculine and chaste uranian he supported. In his later publications he was more inclined to
Hirschfelds ideas on sexual interme-diaries. In 1901 Aletrino provoked a scandal when he defended
the rights of uranians at the fifth conference of Criminal Anthropology in Amsterdam, facing an
audience of staunch opponents, among them the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In 1904 the
Calvinist Dutch Prime Minister attacked both Aletrino and the University of Amsterdam for teaching
the sins of Sodom. Both Aletrino and Romer belonged to the Dutch section of Hirschfelds
Wissenschaftiich-humanitre Komitee (NWHK) founded in 1912 in The Hague.
Romer held already the post of Obmann (leader) in the Germn WHK. He wrote major essays on
the persecution of sodomites in the eighteenth century, on androgyny and on the nature of
homosexuality for the Jahrbuch. He carried out the first Dutch sex survey with 308 male student
respondents in which he found that 2 per cent admitted homosexual and a further 4 per cent bisexual
feelings. A total of 21 per cent reported sex with other males during puberty and 85 per cent had
masturbated. He later helped Hirschfeid carry out a similar inquiry in Germany. In a lecture for the
Christian-Socialist organization Rein-Leven (Pure Life) he defended not only the natural essence of
homosexuality- but also the right to gay sex within a loving relationship. Nobody else endorsed this
position, not even Aletrino, who held the opinion that uranians should remain chaste. Romer took up
polemical positions against professors of the Medical Faculty This would have influenced his
supervisor, professor of psychiatry Cees Winkier, to reject his dissertation. Official grounds were that
the manuscript was written in Germn, contained lewd pictures of naked men and included
genealogies of sexual perversions in royal families. Although he never got his degree, some of the
material was published in his work The uranian family which was published in both Dutch and
Germn editions (1905 and 1906 respectively). Romer became a member of the NWHK but after the
rejection of his outstanding work on homosexuality he withdrew from that area of investigation. He
emigrated to the Dutch East Indies where he worked as a medical practitioner, married a woman and
had two sons.
Aletrino, also a married man, helped his friendJacob Israel de Haan to come to terms with
homosexual feelings. The year 1904 saw the publication by De Haan of the first gay novel in Dutch,
Pijpelijntjes. The title is derived from the then new Amsterdam neighborhood. De Pijp. The novel is a
quite explicit description of the sadistic relationship between two students who lived in that district,
who occasionally fought and who had other lovers on the side. The two principal characters had the
nicknames of Sam andJoop - names also known to many as the nicknames of Aletrino and De Haan. In
doing this. De Haan
76

implied a homosexual relationship with his friend, although Aletrino always maintained that writers
like Hirschfeid or himself who wrote on uranism were not necessarily themselves homosexual. The
novel caused a major scandal. However Aletrino and De Haans fiancee together bought up all the
copies of the book soon after it was printed. De Haan was fired from hisjob as ajournalist at the
Socialist daily newspaper as well as losing his post as a schoolteacher. The furore underlined how
ferocious was the opposition to homosexuality in the Netherlands in the decade before World War I.
The novel described two men sharing a room in a boarding house and having lovers spats. At the
same time they are portrayed going into the city looking for sexual partners. Joop pursued working-
class boys aged 13 years and over who were ready to share sexual pleasures for a drink or for some
money. The novel contained graphic scenes of everyday life in De Pijp. De Haans second novel
Palhologieen published in 1908 portrayed a sadomasochistic relationship between a student and his
cruel lover who was a painter. It contained sex scenes that were quite explicit by the standards of the
times. The Flemish writer George Eekhoud wrote a complimentary introduction. This novel did not
provoke the same scandal as the first. Later De Haan became famous for his pederast andJewish
poetry. After the Great War he emigrated to Palestine as a Zionist but then joined forces with the Anti-
ZionistJews, defended their case in London and was murdered by Zionists in 1924. A line in Dutch
from one of his poems Such a boundless desire for friendship decorales the Homomonument in
Amsterdam.
De Haan was not alone in his choice of topic. The Amsterdam-based artistic circle of the Eighties
whose leader was the poet Willem Kioos and whose main paragons were Baudelaire, Verlaine and
Huysmans had done so earlier. Kioos was a passionate person and a drunkard who fell in love with a
succession of artistic friends for whom he wrote thinly veiled love poetry. Albert Verwey, himself a
poet and later a professor of literary history, responded with a famous cycle Of the love named
friendship. Lodewijk van Deyssel, another member of this group, published in 1889 a novel on
boarding school life De kleine republiek (The littie republic). The main character falls in love with
another boy, has sex with him and is subsequently sent away. The story followed quite closely Van
DeyssePs own experiences in the elite Catholic school of Rolduc. The male circle once staged a
tribunal that had to decide on the lesbianism of two female artists on the margins of their dique who
had rejected the advances of a male member. Thejudges, advised by Aletrino, acquitted the two
women who for sure had an intimate relationship.
Before the sex law of 1911 was enacted, parliament had discussed the declining sexual morality of
the nation on several occasions. The rise of pornog-raphy and apologies for uranians awakened the
rage of several Christian politicians but they had to face some opposition. A lawyer of aristocratic
descent, squire Jacob Anton Schorer, and HJ. Schouten, who was from a family of cler-gymen and
used the pseudonym of G. Helpman, wrote several leaflets against the impending sex laws. Their voice
was heard but had too littie weight in a parliament dominated by Christian parties. Article 248bis, that
forbade sexual
77

relations between adults and minors under 21 years, was accepted after extensive discussion. The law
remained in force till 1971 and has been used in about 5,000 cases against homosexual men and in
forty-eight cases against lesbians. Half of the cases resulted in a sentence, most often a prison term.
Schorer founded the first homosexual rights movement in the Netherlands in 1912. Schorer had
been an Obmann in the Germn WHK, like Von Romer. The NWHK was, till the Great War, a chapter
of the Germn organization and from the beginning of the war, in which the Netherlands remained
neutral, an independen! group. Although Aletrino, Von Romer and the gay novelists M.J.J. Exier
andJ.H. Francois were nominal members of this group, Schorer shoul-dered most of the work alone.
He published a Dutch version of the WHK leaflet Wat iedereen behoort te weten omtrent uranisme
(1912) that included a peti-tion against article 248bis. This was abundantly signed by luminaries of
Dutch culture and left-wing parties. He edited annual reports for the NWHK in 1915-20 and 1933-40,
established a major gay library, helped homosexual men and brought them into contact with each
other. In the years between the wars he was the main spokesperson of the homosexual movement.
The two other members of the NWHK, Exier and Francois, both wrote gay novels. Francois two
novels had The Hague as a background, Anders 1918. Different) and Het Masker (1922, The Mask).
Exier wrote Levensleed (1911. Lifes Grief) on the homosexual awakening of an Amsterdam young
man who was lectured by his br other on the theories of Hirschfeid (who contributed the preface). The
youngster committed suicide when he learned of the agonies of the not so gay life of uranians. Several
other mediocre gay novels and some more interesting books of poetry were published but they never
described Amsterdam (Hekma 1987; Van Lieshout and Hafkamp 1988).
From twilight to floodlight
The homosexual movement was based in The Hague which was also the site of the major gay
scandals in those years: a police raid on a male bordello visited by men from the upper classes in 1919
and the arrest because of article 248bis of the chief treasurer of the government Mr L.A. Ries in 1936.
The subculture in both The Hague and Amsterdam was of the same small size. Apart from some bars,
circles of friends who met in private homes formed a mainstay of gay life. For same-sex contacts men
chiefly depended on a public circuit of toilets and parks. At least forty of these all over the city were
sites of gay activity till the 196 Os. The Vondelpark, toilets on the Rembrandtpiein and under the Mint
Tower, on the square in front of the Central Station, around the Rijksmuseum, and also news centers in
the Kalverstraat where one could read the latest news-papers and rub up against other clients attracted
men. Both male and female prostitutes were found on Kalverstraat (Duyves 1992).
Bars and houses were irregularly raided by the police. In 1922 the bar of a certain Krakebeen
(crack-leg) on the Singel was raided and, in 1932, the Empire in the Nes near Dam Square. This was
the most long-standing homosexual bar
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of the period between the wars, in existence from 1911 to 1935 with some intervals. A group of
homosexual men had produced from this bar the first gay journal Wij (We) and intended to found a
Dutch Society for Human Rights following earlier Germn examples. Just a week before the
founding meeting the police raided the bar and arrested sixty-one persons. Because no one had
committed a legal offense the arrests had few immediate consequences. But the journal and the society
evaporated as many men felt threatened by this kind of harassment.
The Amsterdam vice squad, founded in 1931, soon numbered twenty-five officers who regularly
visited bars where they expected to find depravity. As soon as the police officers saw too many
homosexuals or lesbians, they obliged bar-owners to remove them. Managers always protested their
earnest intention to be rid of such customers although the police did not believe their sincerity. One
subversive gay barman asked once why he should not allow homosexuals in his bar. This made him
only more suspect in the eyes of the police officers who then kept track of all his activities. The
policemen faced two problems. They could not determine who was homosexual and there were no
legal provisions against the existence of a gay bar. But they could always withdraw drinking or music
licenses or simply harass the pub by raiding it to make the owners bend to their wishes. Based on
arrests and other information, the Amsterdam vice squad had in the late 1930s a list of about 4,800
homosexuals, an amazing 1.7 per cent of Amsterdam males over 18 years of age (Koenders 1996;
Tielman 1982).
Before World War II there were several homosexual bars that mostly existed for short periods of
time. Some of them were quite successful like the Empire or the Volendam better known as Aunt
Annie in the Watersteeg. Those cafes took preventive measures against unwanted visitors like officers
of the vice-squad. Often they had a doorman who warned the public in the bar with a signal that owls
(straights) or Russians (officers) were entering. This signal could be a elec-tric bell or a light bu Ib.
Those measures were only necessary in the more homosexual places while mixed bars did not need
them. Especially in the red light district there existed pubs tended by lesbians, often former prostitutes,
for a public of whores, sailors, Johns and fairies. The most famous example was Bet van Beerens t
Mandje (The Basket) on the Zeedijk that opened in 1927 and closed fifty years later. It got its gay
reputation because the gin-drinking, cigar-smoking and motorbike-driving dyke Bet allowed same-sex
couples to dance on the Queens birthday, an occasion for festive transgressions (van Kooten Niekerk
and Wijmer 1985).
The bars that existed before 1940 were replaced during the war by others. Amazingly, given the
Nazi persecution of homosexuals in Germany, several cafs started up during the war: the Rigo and
the Thorbecke near the Rembrandtpiein and the Monico or Blonde Saar in the red light district that
opened in 1941. This last bar still exists and is nowadays the bar with the longest uninterrupted
tradition, with Blonde Saar still the owner in 1998. During the war it was raided by the police at least
once and also denounced in a Nazi weekly as a meeting place of the weakiings of society that should
have been
79

exterminated long since. Notwithstanding the introduction of the harsher Germn legislation regarding
unnatural lewdness in the Netherlands there was less persecution of homosexuals than before the war
because the police had other priorities.
Until the 1950s the red light district was an ideal cruising area for homosexual men and lesbian
women. Straight men came there for sex and prostitutes made thernselves available. But the men did
not always succeed in bedding a woman because of lack of money or drunkenness. These lonely,
horny men were easy prey for nichten (queens) hunting for sex with normal men whorn they called
tule. In exchange for a bed, a drink, a dinner or a guilder tules were often willing to fuck queens.
Efferninate homosexuals were the passive sex partners of masculine, active heterosexuals. Cruising
tules posed dangers but offered great pleasures for nichten. Of course not everybody lived the idea of
being nicht to the point of being a caricature of the ferninine male but it was commonplace in
shaping a social structure of desires. The sexual pattern closely reflected the relation between whore
and John, although the financial exchange went mostly in the opposite direction. The ideal place for
such contacts was of course a place where all groups mixed and not an exclusively gay bar. Gay and
lesbian sexual life was integrated with straight sexual life in a way that has becorne unthinkable in
conternporary queer cornrnunities.
The sexual ideal of homosexuals was often a normal man and their object choice was reflected in
medical theories on homosexuality that emphasized that sexual desire needed opposites of male and
female to get going. Thus the feminine homosexual needed a masculine heterosexual, although some
experts like Von Romer had the feeling that homosexual men could also ignite in passion for each
other. The same was true for lesbians where dykes fell in love with femmes. Both tules and femmes
were of course unfaithful to their homosexual lovers as they always returned to their real passion.
Dykes and queens had a homosexual identity, while their partners did not. Of course, some lesbian
femmes and homosexual tuleswi\\ have used the charms of normalcy to seduce same-sex partners.
This system of opposites floundered after World War II. There were four changes that went hand in
hand. In the first place, tules had more options to get straight sex because they had more money and
because virginity became less important for girls due to the easy availability and the quality of
contraceptive methods. Second, gay men redefined their gender identity and could be masculine as
well as feminine. A new leather culture even stressed the virility of its habitues. This was closely
related to the third change: that gay men no longer looked for sex among normal men, but mostly
among themselves. Their relational model was no longer a copy of transactions in prostitution but
aspired to the marriage-model. Steady friendships (vaste vriendschap) became the ideal, with
interchangeable sexual positions no longer fixed along lines of gender opposi-tion. To find such
friends one went to a gay bar or dance-hall where no heterosexuals would be welcome or would they
dar to go there. The fourth change was the development of an exclusively gay subculture that
replaced the older mixed places like the urinals and the pubs of the red light district.
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Figure 3.5 American drawing by Teg, seized by Dutch police. The image represents very nicely
the unequal relation between tule and nicht, trade and queen, the queen serving both the
sailor and himself.
Source. Gert Hekma collection
Only in the 1950s did Amsterdam become a gay capital. It offered bars with male prostitutes for
the affiuent. In 1952 the first leather bar, forerunner of the still famous Argos, started in a hotel. Two
large dance-halls established Amsterdams reputation beyond doubt. The gay movement COC (Center
for Culture and Recreation) that was founded on 7 December 1946 in Amsterdam had organized
lectures and weekly parties from the beginning. In 1952 it opened its first dance-hall, the DOK, on the
Singel near the flower market, and also near the place on this canal where male hustlers offered their
services. It was four times as large as the normal bar in Amsterdam. Being one of the very few dance-
halls with a night license it could stay open during the week until 2 and at the weekend until 4. The
financial administrator of the local COC succeeded in
81


Figure 3.6 The first leathermen on Amsterdams streets, .1955.
Source: Colleche Hartiand, Nederlands Foto Archief, Rotterdam
getting the license in his name in 1955 and the COG was forced to find another place. It opened in
1955 De Schakel (The Link) just off the Leidseplein. Both dance-halls were hugely successful and
because homosexuals visited both places the Leidsestraat that connected them became in the late hours
a major cruising street known as ru de Vaseline. Soon, the Kerkstraat, halfway in between, also
acquired its gay bars and, another innovation, gay hotels. In 1962 the first sauna The Athletic
opened.
The police developed in the 1950s the policy that queens could be better left among them se Ivs in
the ir bars and dance-halls than on the streets cruising normal men and boys and creating nuisances for
the public. Bars were left alone but public toilets were controlled more strictly The police patrolled
toilets about twice a week and picked up often more than 100 men each year for public indecencies.
The range of their anti-gay activities was broadened in 1955 when the city council of Amsterdam,
following the example of other cities and on the request of the police, introduced a regulation that
forbade men to be in urinals
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Figure 3.7 Party in the dancing DOK, c. 1955. The presence of a person in Dutch army uniform
is remarkable. Very few pictures have been made in gay venues with the obvious aim of
protecting the anonymity of clients.
more than 5 minutes. It was already forbidden to solicit for sexual purposes in public. This article was
primarily aimed against prostitutes but was also used against homosexual cruising. The year 1955
marked a change in the anti-gay policies in the city. Before, all homosexual meeting places had been
repressed but from 1955 on semi-public locations like bars and dance-halls were left alone, while
public indecencies were more strictly combated. This hampered the sexual border traffic between gay
and straight men. A separate gay world came into existence that now started to intgrate on a political
level. The homosexual movement, the GOC, became a major forc in this battie (Hekma 1992).
Before the war the NWHK had been bearing the flag of homosexual emanci-pation with littie
success and in 1932 there was the ill-fated effort to start a gay magazine and movement that was
raided away. But in 1940 some courageous men started a new monthly Levensrecht (Right to Life). Its
publication was inter-rupted after the Germn invasion of the Netherlands. After the war the same men
started theirjournal again and the COC that began as Shakespeare-club. The monthly soon got the
new name Vriendschap. The movement was based in the ground-floor apartment at the Keizersgracht
of its chairperson Bob Angelo, pseudonym of Nico En geis chinan. It collaborated with the
Amsterdam vice squad which was ready to grant licenses for lectures and parties. Earnest discussions
with clergymen and psychiatrists of all denominations led to a growing acceptance of homosexuals.
Opinions of highly regarded mental health-specialists in the polarized Dutch environment did indeed
change. Catholic and Calvinist psychiatrists and clergymen who had in some cases compared
homosexuality
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with dunge (shit) and irresponsibility in the early 1950s a decade later began to accept homosexuals
as normal human beings whose steady friendships were an important contribution to their social well-
being (Oosterhuis 1992). The COG was also the initiator of the International Committee for Sexual
Equality the first postwar worldwide homosexual association. Its main activity was organizing
conferences, the first in Amsterdam in 1951.
En geis chinan had always worked behind the scenes using a pseudonym. Under the new chair
Benno Premsela the COC went public and from 1965 on published a novel journal Diaioog (between
homo- and heterosexuals clearly). Premsela made the first out television appearance in 1964.
Although the COC made much money from bar revenues it was disapproving of the subculture till the
late 1970s, as, instead of helping homosexuals to intgrate, it only strengthened the distinct queeny
habits that were the object of social opprobrium. The COC wanted integration at the cost of a
normalization of homosexuals and lesbians. Although the COC had earlier endorsed Hirschfelds
theories of a third sex, from the 1960s it argued for the normal homosexual who was no different from
others apart from his sexual preference (Warmerdam and Koenders 1987).
Aiso, thanks to the continuous scandals provoked by the novelist Gerard Rev, social integration
succeeded quite well. Rev, from a communist family, joined the Catholic Church in the late 1960s but
not after many scandals, the most famous being the so-called donkey case. Rev published in the
Diaioog a letter in which he described his relation to God. He himself fucked, as an expression of his
divine love, the Lord who had taken the mundane form of a donkey. A right-wing Calvinist member of
parliament took offense and requested a formal prosecution on grounds of blasphemy. All three times
that the case went to court were major media events. Ultimately the case was reviewed by the Supreme
Court of the Netherlands and, in the end. Rev was acquitted be cause the textwas considered to be his
private expression of religion and so could not be blasphemous.
Reves novels were openly homosexual and expressed his favorite sexual scheme, the so-called
revism: he himself being the adoring helper of a beloved young man who tortured an adolescent.
This sadomasochistic triangle that is nearly always a fantasy scene ending up in (mutual) masturbation
is repeated over and over in Reves novels from the 1960s on. Other themes are his alco-holism, his
hatred of communism and the working class, and his love for Catholicism, especially for the Madonna.
In 1968 Rev won the major Dutch literary prize. To celbrate this prize, a kind of festive mock
marriage of Rev with his lover Tiger was celebrated in a Catholic church and broadcast on
television. Early on in his career a Catholic minister had refused him a literary grant because of a
masturbation scene in one of his novels. Sweet was Reves revenge when he became in the 1970s the
lover of this ministers son, the painterJoseph Cals (Hekma 1989).
In the 1960s Amsterdam became one of the magic cities of the sexual revolution. In 1967 the chair
of the Dutch Society for Sexual Reformation (NVSH), Mary Zeldenrust-Noordanus, set a series of
goals for sexual politics. Among them were the decriminalization of abortion, pornography,
prostitution, homosexuality,
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and the legalization of contraceptives and divorce. The NVSH was at that moment
amassmovementwith 200,000 members, many of whom hadbecome adher-ents because of the fact that
the NVSH was allowed to distribute contraceptives. Amazingly most points the NVSHs program had
been realized ten years later. In 1971 homosexuality was decriminalized and in 1973 gays and lesbians
were allowed into the army while the COG won legal status. COC andNVSHjoined forces in the 1960s
to propgate civil sexual liberties and helped establish in 1967 an institute that offered help to gays and
lesbians, the Schorer Foundation (Hekma 1990a).
To the left of the COC other gay and lesbian movements began, first of all homosexual students
action groups like the AJAH in Amsterdam. They danced in straight discos with same-sex couples and
organized integrated parties specifically for homosexual minors who were not allowed to enter gay
dance-halls. They staged the first demonstrations, in 1969 in The Hague, against antihomosexual
legislation and, in 1971, at the official 4 May commemoration of the dead of World War II for the
inclusion of the homosexual victims of the Nazis. In the 1960s the general feeling had been that
homosexuals should learn to accept themselves, while the student groups were more political and
requested that society should also change and make integration of homosexuality possible.
A new vibrant gay world
The AJAH disappeared into the COC in the early 1970s inducing a name change from Dutch
Society of Homophiles (since 1964) to Dutch Society for the Integration of Homosexuality in 1971.
Separatist groups would contest this policy of integration from 1973 on. Taarse (purple) September,
the first inde-pendent lesbian group in Holland, criticized the homophobia of feminism and the sexism
of homosexual movements. In 1977, its successor Lesbian Nation came up with the first demonstration
copied from the New York Christopher Street Day Parade. Frorn 1975 radical faggot groups inspired
by French activist Guy Hocquenghern began to criticize the COC for its norrnalizing policy asking the
question what difference homosexuality made and answering that it made not only a difference in bed.
These groups defended and practiced gay pleasures from gender-fuck and sadornasochisrn to
pedophilia. They paved the way for separate gay and lesbian organizations within political parties,
trade unions, health institutes and education. The COC, which had always wanted to be the mother-
church and representative of all homosexuals, lost its central position. The Gay Krant took its place as
the unofficial mouthpiece of the gay movement.
The development of gay groups in different institutions meant a major break-through, especially in
politics. In 1978 the first openly gay mernber was elected to the city council. He resisted with some
success the destruction of gay cruising places and with more success police raids on those places. He
came up with the idea of the Homomonument (Koenders 1987). Arnsterdarn was the first city to have
a report on the state and airns of gay and lesbian emancipation. This has now becorne a perrnanent part
of city politics and the responsibility of one of
85

the citys aldermen. Many more gay and lesbian council members have come out of the closet or were
elected. Their number was in 1998 around the 10 per cent that is also the number of gays in the male
population according to the citys only sex survey
The gay and lesbian movement has se en many successes in the 19 80s and 1990s. The growing
acceptance of homosexuality has materialized in the development of local and national programs to
combat discrimination, an anti-discrimination law, parliamentary support for same-sex marriages,
inclusion of gays and lesbians in the ranks of army and police, subventions for gay and
lesbian
A
nitiatives, support for gay and lesbian street parties on Queens Day and around Amsterdam
Pride during the first weekend of August and on other occasions. These successes are at the same time
sapping the foundations of the movement because it has no attractive aims left. Many gays and
lesbians and even more straight people have the feeling that homosexual emancipation is entering its
end-phase because its goals have been reached. Often, people say emancipation may be needed among
disadvantaged groups in far-away countries or among Christian and Muslim fundamentalist groups but
no longer in Amsterdam, city of sexual tolerance.
Meanwhile the gay world of Amsterdam has only expanded further. Halfway through the 1960s the
city authorities responded angrily to reports that planeloads of gay men came from England and
Gerrnany to Arnsterdarn and considered restraining the expansion of the gay world. But the sexual
revolution overtook them and this world only sweiled further. Liberation might mean to the COC that
gays should dissolve into a tolerant society, for gay men it offered the possi-bility to embrace the gay
world and to find there sexual partners and lovers. The on-going growth of the gay world and the
increasing acceptance of homosexuality made Amsterdam into a very attractive city for gay men from
everywhere.
When AIDS hit the world, Amsterdam had the distinct advantage that the epidemic struck the city
with a certain delay, that gay health groups were active, and that health and gay authorities made a
cooperative effort to combat the disease and prevent its spread. Measures were not repressive and no
discos or saunas were closed but it was hoped that information would induce gay men to change their
sexual behavior. This strategy was as elsewhere largely effective. A clear mistake was that gay
campaigns tried to dissuade men from anal sex rather than promoting the use of condoms. AIDS has
struck Amsterdam harshly. Half of all Dutch cases have been reported from the city although it
harbors some 5 per cent of the countrys population. Health care was offered to all patients often under
conditions of social security, and a buddy system was set up immediately. Notwithstanding all
measures, AIDS became a disaster for the gay world as many of its outstanding figures died of the
disease, especially those from the leather scene and cultural life.
Since the start of the AIDS epidemic the size of the gay world has remained more or less stable.
The leather bars that opened in the late 1970s in the vicinity of the famous Argos and the red light
district did not disappear although many of their clients died. The leather parties that started in the
1970s withered away
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before AIDS but were taken up again in the 1990s as kinky parties were held in abandoned
warehouses, attracting gay men in their thousands for wiid dancing and sieazy sex. The old dance-hall
of the COC closed in the 1970s and the DOK in the 1980s but other discos replaced them. Great fame
has be en bestowed upon Trut, Roxy and It, the trendy discos of the 1990s for their outra-geous parties
of drag extravaganza and other niceties.
Nowadays the city hosts at least 150 different gay and lesbian institutions: bars, discos, restaurants,
hoteis, health centers, book shops, sports clubs, archives, gay and lesbian studies, sex cinemas, shops
for leather, rubber and underwear. Clubs have been founded for dancing, s/m, safe sex, horsemen and
knights, the affiuent, for men interested in gardens, sailing, literature or old cars. Anglo-Saxons,
Arabs, Surinamese and Turks have their own special events. Travel, legal, medical and many other
services are offered to a gay public. Two or three free monthlies are available in the bar scene. The
city is a vibrant spot for gays also because many general public places have become highly
homosexualized.
Since the late 1970s, other cities in Europe have seen a similar expansion and opening up of the
gay scene that Amsterdam had experienced earlier. The progress Amsterdam had made in the 1960s
can nowadays also be witnessed in other major European cities. The number and sometimes also the
quality of gay institutions is higher nowadays in Paris, London or Berlin. The advantages the center of
Amsterdam still has are its compact urban structure, its architectural beauty and its cosmopolitan,
tolerant and easy-going atmosphere that has no equivalent elsewhere.
A round 1985, inste ad of raiding gay cruising places, the police began protecting them. Important
incentives were the fag- and dyke-bashing at the national gay and lesbian demonstration in Amersfoort
in 1982, and the murder of a gay man at a urinal in Amsterdam in 1985. Amersfoort was a watershed
as both the gay and lesbian movement and the authorities started to develop policies to combat or
prevent discrimination and violence. After Amersfoort self-defense groups were founded that
developed into gay and lesbian sports organizations such as Tijgertje (small tiger) in Amsterdam. After
the murder of a married and closeted gay man at a pissoir the mayor of Amsterdam came to the COC
to express his outrage. Since that time, the Amsterdam police have, with so me ups and downs,
enacted a pro-gay and lesbian policy protecting gay meeting places and encouraging gays and lesbians
tojoin the police forc.
But not all violence was combated in the same spirit. During the 1980s two men were killed each
year in the twilight world of male prostitution. The police always defined these murders as cases of
robbery although their homophobic content was quite clear because of the excessive violence used.
Neither the police or the gay and lesbian movement paid much attention to these regular killings of
mostly older gay men by hustlers who were highly unsure of their sexual preference and behavior.
While in straight prostitution clients sometimes murder whores, in the gay scene hustlers murder their
patrons, indicating the lack of self-consciousness regarding homosexuality in Holland both among
hustlers and clients (van Gemert 1994).
87

Queer were the demands the police made for the Europride held in Amsterdam in 1995. This
largest gay and lesbian demonstration ever in the Netherlands with about 50,000 participants was
ordered by the police not to show sexual acts or representations of such acts, particularly forbidding
images of pedophilia and bestiality. This outrageously formulated demand showed the polices lack of
familiarity with gays and lesbians, and the persistence of theories of perversion which equate all
sexual variations.
In recent years the Amsterdam vice squad has staged several raids on sex shops because of the
alleged presence of kiddy porn and has succeeded, after active campaigning, in broadening the
definition of forbidden material and raising the penalties. Erotic postcards that were for a long time a
major tourist trap were removed from the streets on the orders of the police and mayor, using an
outdated criminal provision against offensive images, because they feared for the reputation of the
city. Both gay and straight bordellos and hustler bars have been raided because of the alleged presence
of illegal prostitutes while violent transgender hustlers from Latin Amrica working for a straight
clientele were removed by the police with unnecessary harshness. City officials showed littie
enthusiasm for the evident economic input of gay tourism in their city, instead deploring the negative
reputation of Amsterdam as being a city of sex and drugs.
Most straightforward discrimination may have disappeared, but acceptance is no more than skin-
deep. General culture, in Amsterdam as elsewhere, is heterosexual, with few visible signs of
homosexuality Expectations of someones sexual preference will always be in a heterosexual, rarely
homosexual direction. Explicit manifestations of gays and lesbians are always frowned upon and so
the main question with regard to the Gay Games in Amsterdam in 1998 was whether it was not
unnecessary to have such an event. Few people would dar to ask such a question about similar events
for Chinese, Turks orJews. Gay and lesbian groups are deemed to be past it, left without essential
goals in contemporary society. The most clear example of this unsatisfactory situation is the difficulty
young men and women who are on the verge of coming out face in finding safe places for homosexual
pleasure and information because Amsterdam and the Netherlands are generally speaking still a
straight ghetto. An amazing half of male adolescents say in surveys without hesitation that they
disapprove of gay sex.
Since the sexual revolution gay men have developed a rich culture of erotic and social pie asures.
Their culture has remained marginal, however, because straights and lesbians on the other hand have
not succeeded in putting into prac-tice the expectations of the sexual revolution. The main changes in
the straight world between 1965 and 1995 are the development from monogamy to serial monogamy
and the rise of self-stimulation. No free-floating sexual culture emerged like that developed among gay
men. A sexual breakthrough has failed among straights and lesbians. The most significant reasons for
this in my view derive from the differentiation of male and female sexuality in culture and education
which inhibits easy sexual communication between men and women. The pressure to combine sex and
love thwarts both loving and sexual relations,
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as does the idea that sexuality belongs to nature and needs littie cultivation, or the belief in sexual
privacy while repudiating the public forms of sexuality like the coming out of gays and lesbians. These
views still hinder the emergence of a rich and free sexual culture in Amsterdam and block the
development of erotic pleasured beyond homo- and heterosexuality. Amsterdam has long been a
vestige of the 1960s but it seems to refuse to become a vibrant heraid of the next millennium.
89
4 London
Randolph Trumbach
By 1700 the City of London, urban Middles ex andWestminster had grown together into a single
city of 500,000, and by 1800 Londons population had nearly doubled to 1 million, making it the
largest city in Europe. Culturally the city was divided between a fashionable West End and a
commercial East End. There were pockets of poor to be found in the West End, many of whom were
tied to the service economy that catered to gentlemen and their families, but most of the laboring poor
lived and worked in the East End in industries like weaving or in various activities connected with the
port. Londons population had to be sustained by immigration from the countryside, especially in the
early eighteenth century when the level of mortality in the city was quite high. The steady flow of
people in and out of the city meant that at any one moment at least one person in six in the country as a
whole had spent some part of life in London. Londons influence therefore permeated the rest of the
country but not simply because it was the seat of the national government to which the gentry and the
aristocracy regularly came each year for several months. This yearly visitation by the elite facilitated
the flow of common fashions among them, not only in their clothes but also in their deepest feelings,
so that over the course of a single generation in the middle of the century, they gave up the arranged
marriage and the wet-nurse that for centuries had set the tone of life in their families, and began
instead to marry for love and to nurse their infants themselves.
In the first generation after 1700 London also became the site of a profound revolution in gender
relations and sexual behavior. It affected all social classes and was to be found not only in England but
in all the modernizing societies of north-western Europe. By 1730 all men were divided into what by
the late nine-teenth century came to be called a homosexual minority and a heterosexual majority, but
the male majority enacted their new sexual identity with women who did not yet share their ideal of an
exclusive heterosexuality. Among women a homosexual minority only appeared in the generation after
1770. This sapphist minority did not have the impact on women that the sodomite minority had had on
men two generations earlier, for the majority of women continued to define their sexual identities
through their relations with men. Male heterosexual desire in eighteenth-century London sought its
fulfillment whether men were married or not, and it is in fact easiest to document and to locate
physically this desire in
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illicit sexual relations outside of marriage. In these relations a majority of men pursued various
minorities of women. Some of these women were streetwalking prostitutes; some were seduced either
at home or at work or in the street, and occasionally with promises of marriage; and some women
(both married and single) were raped either at home or in the streets. Prostitution and seduction were
to be found in different locations, but violence could occur anywhere. Prostitution was organized
around the great thoroughfare that ran through the town andjoined East End to West End. Seduction
had a distinctive local pattern and varied according to the economy of the parish. Illicit heterosexual
desire in the majority of men therefore reflected the spatial differentiation throughout the city between
its fashionable center and the local neighborhoods, a differentiation which endured through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as London grew to 4 million people by 1900 and 6 million by 1940.
But illicit sexual desire in the majority of women (instead of being regulated by the standard of
heterosexu-ality) came to be organized through the romantic love that was inculcated after 1750 in
women living in London. This was the case for the women of the upper and middle classes in the
second half of the eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century it was true for all women. A
married woman was most likely to fall in love with a man she met at horne or in her dornestic circle.
Shejustified herself by appealing to a higher standard of love and was not likely to think herself driven
by the inexorable desire that heterosexual men supposed thern-selves to feel as an essential part of
their masculine identity (Trurnbach 1978, 1994a, 1994b, 1998).
1

The efferninate homosexual minority of sodomites who made their appear-ance in the first
generation of the eighteenth century have to be located in the city in the same alternations between
center and neighborhood, and between driving desire and domestic romance, that contained the sexual
lives of the majority of men and women. The coming into existence of this effeminate male minority
produced in the rest of the century a revolutionary new system of three genders composed of men,
women and sodomites. Modern European society had shifted from a system in which sexual relations
between males were regulated by differences in age to one in which a third gender of biological males
combined aspects of both male and female behavior. In traditional European society all adult males
had desired both women and adolescent males. This is now best documented for Renaissance
Florence. By the age of 40 two-thirds of all Florentine men had been legally implicated in sodomy.
But their passive sexual partners were all adolescents between the ages of 15, when puberty began,
and 19, when secondary male characteristics appeared. Between the ages of 19 and 23, boys could be
either passive with someone older or active with someone younger. After this men were always active.
They also went to female prostitutes and at 30 the majority married and had children. Statistical
evidence of this kind cannot be produced for England before 1700, but the anecdotal evidence fits
entirely into this pattern. Every example given in Alan Brays book, for example, is of relations
between an adult and an adolescent, and I have published a number of examples of the gentlemanly
rake who was attracted to
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both adolescent boys and women. In that world all boys passed through a period of sexual passivity
when they were objects of mens desire before they made the transition in their early twenties from the
passive to the active role. But whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in medieval Christian society,
there was always a minority of males who found it difficult or impossible to make this transition and
were mocked consequently for their adult effeminate passivity (Bray, 1995; Rocke 1996; Trumbach
1989a, 1989b, 1990).
After 1700 under the new system, the majority of males were supposed to be sexually active at
every stage of life from adolescence to old age. But a minority of males were socialized as children
into a role that was both male and female. Some of these males were effeminate as children, and
played with girls and with dolls. As men they displayed varying degrees of effeminacy. A few lived an
openly transvestite life and were usually referred to as she and her. Others were unable to conceal an
effeminate manner in speech or movement. And a third group seemed to display no obvious
effeminacy at all. But in the enclosed space of the molly-house or their private rooms many men used
female names and were ocasionally transvestite. These men found their sexual partners among men
like themselves (and in this they differed from third-gender males outside the European world), but
they also had relations with both adolescent and adult males who were not sodomites. It was even the
case that for some sodomites (or homosexuals) their preferred sexual partners were males who were
not sodomites, and this was true until at least the 1950s. Some other men who sought heterosexual
partners preferred adolescents and wished to dominate them; they were likely to deny effeminacy in
themselves. But other more effeminate men sought partners who would dominate them and whom they
wished to believe were really attracted only to women. In some sexual venues a sodomite was likely to
find only other sodomites, but in others he would also encounter men who were not sodomites. In the
latter places a sodomite risked violence, blackmail and arrest, but this may have added an erotic charge
to such encounters. In all places, however, the sodomites sexual behavior was likely to approximate
that of the female prostitute since if a sodomite were like a woman, he was taken by himself and others
to be the most abandoned kind of a woman. The domesticated contexts in which heterosexual men
seduced unmarried girls and other mens wives was therefore less likely to overlap with the sodomites
world than those places in which a man pursued a streetwalking whore (Trumbach 1988, 1997).
In the first generation of the new system of three genders, sodomites met each other either in the
relatively safe enclosed spaces of their own rooms or of a molly-house that catered only to them, or
they picked up in the streets, the public gardens or the arcades of shops in Covent Garden, London
Bridge or the Exchange, men and boys who were often not sodomites, and invited them to the more
enclosed space of a public toilet or private room in a tavern. There are descriptions of molly-houses in
1709, 1714 and 1729. In 1709 a soldier called Skelthorp, who was executed for sodomy, confessed the
location of some of the houses. A footboy to a duke revealed another meeting place which led to
arrests. A brandy shop inJermyn Street was one location, the person who kept the shop
92

being one of the gang. The evidence for what occurred inside these houses in 1709 comes from Ned
Ward. Ward wrote that men in these houses called them-selves mol lies. Molly was a term originally
used for female prostitutes. Its application to adult effeminate male sodomites began a linguistic
practice that has been maintained for three centuries in which many of the popular terms once used for
female prostitutes were subsequently used to categorize effeminate men. (Some later examples in
English language usage: queen, punk, gay, faggot, fairy, and fruit.) According to Ward the men
speak, walk, tattie, curtsy, cry, and seo Id to mimic women, and the ir manners were the indecencies
of lewd women. The mollies entertained themselves with an enactment of a groaning woman (or a
woman in labor) who was delivered of a jointed baby or a wooden doll. The man who played the
mother was dressed in a womans night-gown, sarsnet-hood, and nightrale; the man who was the
country midwife wore a high crowned hat and an old beldams pinner; and there was a nurse in a
hussifes coif When the labor was done, the child was dressed, presented to its father and christened.
A feast was laid and the women sat and talked about their husbands and children. But when the play
was over, all these men had sex with one another. Ward protested that they profaned a holy sacrament
as a diversion for profligates. Their sexual acts were those of men sunk into a state of devilism and
their club was a diabolical society These libertines mocked true religion and worshipped the devil. It
is a description that intriguingly ties them to the devil clubs of the male libertines who went with
women [Full 1709; Ward, 1709: 284-98).
The mollies were certainly irreverent, but it seems unlikely that they were self-consciously
libertine. Their mock groaning and christening were probably based on popular traditions that used
such public enactments to express disapproval of sexual irregularities. An incident sevenyears later, in
1716, in a rural Gloucestershire village of eighty inhabitants, helps to make the point. George
Andrews, a tenant farmer, met a young farm laborer, Walter Lingsey, as he lay at midnight on a
bridge. Andrews took Lingseys hand, fondied it, complimented the softness of his skin, and put his
hand into Lingseys breeches. Andrews then said they would be more comfortable in his house. Once
there, they got into bed, and Andrews sodomized the young man. The story came out when Lingsey
explained to another laborer where he had spent the night. Andrews was an overbearing and unpopular
man. He had also been infamous for these practices formerly But no one had ever denounced him,
and in this case, no one at first brought him to the magistrate. Instead, a group of local men planned a
mock groaning. One of them was a tenant farmer; another was a blacksmith who had helped organize
a groaning in another village; a third was a churchwarden, who was probably encouraged by his wife.
A fiddier was hired, food and drink were prepared, and a hundred people from neighboring villages
came to see the show (Rollison 1981: 70-97).
Lingsey was dressed in a mantua petticoat, white apron, and headclothes to look like a woman.
Another man played the midwife who delivered Lingsey of a child in the forrn of a wad of straw
dressed in babys clothes. Another man was
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appointed the parson. He christened the child saying as much of the Prayerbook ritual as he could
remember. The two godfathers gave the child the name of George, since his father was George
Andrews. They then feasted and sent for some women to wait with the lying-in woman as they
termed Lingsey This groaning was a scandal to some. It was reported to the absentee landiord who
was a Chancery master in London. He was shocked that the sacrament had been profaned and that a
riot had been tolerated. Andrews was eventually charged with sodomy, brought to trial and found not
guilty.
It is apparent that both the villagers in Gloucestershire and the mollies in London saw sodomy as
an inversion of sexual relations between men and women. When one male sodomized another, he
treated him as man was supposed to treat a woman. The passive male indeed became a woman. But
the purpose of the sexual act between men and women was to crate children and by baptism make
them Christians and heirs to heaven. This sodomy could not do, and it was the intention of the
villagers to make that point. It is doubtful that they meant to mock religion. They much more likely
saw them se Ivs as its upholders, though perhaps in not so reverent a way as the gentry. But what did
the London sodomites mean by their ceremony? It differed in a number of significant details from the
rural one. In London there were, of course, no female participants. The men played all the roles. In
Gloucestershire, one man acted the midwife, but they sent for actual women to sit with the lying-in
woman and talk with him as his gossips. In London, the men were the gossips. They enjoyed the
sociability of womens lives. In Gloucestershire the man who played the midwife could see his role
not as social but as sexual. Midwives fingered womens sexual parts and men read midwifery books
for sexual stimulation. But to be a gossip was to be interested in the things women spoke about, and
with all that the Gloucester men wished to have nothing to do.
There is in the Gloucester story not much evidence or interest in male effeminacy. For the
sodomites in London, it was the center of their world. This makes it unlikely that the Gloucester story
shows that concern about the mollys role had already made its way into this rural backwater. It was
instead that both groups of men drew on the satirical tradition of the charivari to make their points.
The men in Gloucestershire wished to disapprove of a sexuality which was unnatural because it was
not reproductive. It is more difficult to say what the mollies meant to satirize. Ward was certain that
they wished to express their hatred for women. There was no doubt some of that. But the mollies also
liked womens ways, and that to them was the rub. Men were not supposed to like womens ways.
They tolerated them. As Ward said, these were all the littie vanities that custom has reconciled to the
female sex. The molly, therefore, could express his fondness for what he in part desired to be only by
mocking it. He both loved and hated the female part of his role. He could indulge it in the privacy of
the molly-house. But if his taste was exposed in public, his shame could be so intense that he might
take his life.
The molly-house from 1714 was documented byJonathan Wiid, the leader of the thieves
underground. He did not describe anything like the mock groaning
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but he confirmed the effeminacy of speech and gesture and provided the first clear description of
group transvestism. It was part of his controversywith Charles Hitchen, the corrupt Under Marshall of
the City. Hitchen was a sodomite who seems to have preferred the streets and a room in a public house
for himself, but he was familiar with the group activity of the molly-house. In 1727 the Societies for
the Re formal ion of Manners who had long tried to pro se cu te Hitchen, successfully brought a case
for attempted sodomy against him. Hitchen had frequently picked up soldiers and taken them to a
public house. There he would call for a private room and this made one of the servants suspect that he
was a sodomite. But Hitchen for years had been confident that no one would move against him.
Accordingly on a night in 1714 he told Wiid that he would introduce him to a company of he-
whores. Wiid did not understand the word, and asked if they were hermaphrodites: No ye fool, said
the M[arsh]l, they are sodomites, such as deal with their sex instead of females. The two men then
went to a public house where Wiid found that the men addressed Hitchen as Madam and Ladyship.
The men called one another my dear, hugged and kissed, tickiing and feeling each other as if they
were a mixture of wanton males and females, that is, some took the male role and some the female.
Their voices and their manner were effeminate. They were witty, some telling others that they ought
to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently (Wiid, 1718:30-2, reprinted in Lyons 1936:
278-81).
Hitchen, however, had not received the attention from some of the younger men that he expected
and so he decided to be revenged. He would arrest them when they held a ball. Hitchen explained that
there was a noted house in Holborn to which [they] used to repair and dress themselves in womens
apparel for the entertainment of others of the same inclinations in dancing and the like in imitation of
the fair sex. When the ball broke up, Hitchen arrested the men and took them tojail in their finery.
The next day they appeared before the Lord Mayor still in their womens clothes. The Mayor ordered
them to be taken through the streets in these clothes as part of their punishment. They were also
sentenced to the work-house and stayed there until one of them threatened to reveal some of Hitchens
own adventures. There were similar balls in the next decade. The keeper of an inn in 1723 was
arrested with several other men dressed in womens apparel veryin decent and unseemly,
accompanied with lewd actions and behavior. Two years later, twenty-five men in masquerade
habits were arrested in a house near Covent Garden. These displays, however, were not for the public
eye, and some men could not easily deal with the public exposure. One of the young men in 1714
found the public trial, parade and imprisonment so mortifying that he died a few days after his
relase.
The best evidence in the entire century for life in the molly-house comes from the arrests and trials
that the Societies for the Reformation of Manners inspired in 1726. In the last few months of 1725, a
group of at least four agents of the Societies (Samuel Stevens, William Davison, Thomas Willis
andJoseph Sellers) began to visit the molly-houses in order to gather evidence. They were led by a
young sodomite named Mark (or Martin) Partridge who in the end did not
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appear in any of the actual trials, perhaps because his fellow sodomites had become suspicious of him
before the investigation was completed. Partridge had quarreled with another sodomite named William
Harrington. In revenge he began to inform against the entire world of his fellows. On one occasion
Partridge was nearly mobbed in a molly-house when some men called him a treacherous, blowing-up,
mollying bitch, and swore theyd mas sacre anybody that should betray them. Partridge was saved by
the unsuspecting man who kept the molly-house who six months later was hanged for sodomy. In
February 1726, Partridge bound himself to give evidence against eleven men and one woman for
keeping molly-houses and against sixteen other men (including Charles Hitchen) for going to these
houses and for acting sodomitical practices there and elsewhere. The government intervened at some
point early in 1726, and the prosecutions were directed by the Treasury Solicitors deputy. The
evidence of actual sodomy for which four men were condemned and three executed was in the end
given by two young sodomites, Thomas Newton and Edward Courtney. They had been the passive
partners and because of their evidence, presumably, they were not tried themselves. But a much larger
number of men than the four condemned to death were arrested in 1726. There were at least (one of
the quarter-sessions rolls is decayed) twenty-one in the City and twenty-three in Westminster. A
further twelve men whom Partridge accused seem not to have been arrested. This makes a total of
fifty-six men charged or arrested for sodomy or sodomitical practices. Partridge accused twelve people
of keeping molly-houses in Westminster, and one more man was arrested on that charge. Three
married couples and two men were also charged in the City with keeping molly-houses. Since two of
the Westminster men kept a house together, this makes a total of seventeen houses.
1

The London Joumcd was therefore not much off when it reported in May 1726 that twenty houses
have been discovered which entertained sodomitical clubs. The paper added that these monsters also
met each other at what they call the markets; they were the Royal Exchange and the piazzas of
Covent Garden, the Lincolns Inn bog-houses, and Moorfields and the south side of StJamess Park.
The first two were arcades of shops, the last two were public parks, in all of which one might saunter,
catch an interested partys eye, and consummate the act nearby. In these markets, unlike the molly-
houses, a sodomite could meet men who were not sodomites. But these venues were used as much by
female whores and their male customers as by sodomites. This must have confirmed the public
identification of sodomites with whores. Women were not likely, on the other hand, to be found
lingering in mens toilets, but even there the occasional whore was found with her man. The Societies,
with the aid of disaffected sodomites, had laid open the topography of Londons Sodom.1
The specific location was given for a dozen molly-houses: nine in 1726 and three more in 1727 and
1728. They spread themselves across all of London, but were concentrated in three reas, going from
east to west. Three of them were close to Moorfields, which was itself the site of one of the sexual
markets. There was a second concentration of three houses in Holborn. Two of them were near each
other in Field Lae and Pye Corner near Smithfield Market. Between these
96

two houses and the third in Drury Lae were the Lincolns Inn bog-houses and Snow Hill, both used
for making pick-ups. The third concentration of houses radiated in a circle from the hub of Charing
Cross. There was one at Charing Cross and two in the courts at the top of Hedge Lae, where they
must have mingled with Soho bawdy-houses. There was a house in StJamess Square and one down
Whitehall in King Street, Westminster. All but one of these were discovered in 1726. The two
remaining houses were found in Whitechapel and Maryiebone in 1727 and 1728, at the opposite ends
of the thoroughfare that the female prostitutes used, and on either side of the three main concentrations
of houses. It apparently had taken longer to reach them because of their relative isolation.
The molly-house came in different kinds. Most of them were alehouses. Some of them may have
been open to the general public with a more private room or two at the back for mollies. This seems to
have been the case with the houses kept by Thomas Orme and George Whitle. But Whitle and his
servants denied that his back rooms were used by mollies. He said that what Drake Stoneman had seen
(Stoneman had been arrested for being in Margaret Claps molly-house) were surgeons examining
their patients. Margaret Clap and her husband kept a coffeehouse. In the manuscript records the house
is described a number of times as being John Claps coffeehouse. But only Margaret was arrested,
tried and sentenced to the pillory where she was treated severely by the mob. She protested at her trial
that since she was a woman it cannot be thought that I would ever be concerned in such prcticos.
But Samuel Stevens, one of the undercover agents, said that she had appeared to be wonderfully
pleased with the obscene conversation of the men. On Sunday nights (the busiest night of the week
for the molly-houses) there usually had been from twelve to forty men in her house. At least two other
houses were run by married couples. One of the husbands, Samuel Roper, was clearly a molly. He was
charged with sodomy as well as with keeping a disorderly house and was known as Plump Nelly. He
died in prison awaiting trial. Two men, Robert Whale and York Horner, were mollies who together
kept a house in King Street, Westminster. Whale was known as Margaret or Peggy and Horner was
Pru. John To wie ton who was Mary Magdalen and Thomas Mugg who was Judith also kept houses.
But a molly-house could be a very modest affair. Thomas Wright kept two different rooms around
Moorfields. He went out to fetch drink from alehouses, and the men allowed him a profit out of it.
The life inside five of the molly-houses was described in 1726. There was, however, no mock birth
or groaning like those in Edward Wards description or the Gloucestershire case. It may simply have
been that the agents of the Societies were not present on the night that this occurred in 1725. It
certainly continued to occur throughout the century. Robert Holloway claimed that around 1790 in a
house in Clemenfs Lae near the Strand, a group of men were arrested in the very act of giving caudie
to their lying-in women [with] the new-born infants personated by large dolls. What was described in
1726 were the effeminacy, the sexual flirtations and their consummations. Three of the trials described
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Margaret Claps house. It may have drawn the largest crowd. Thomas Newton, the 30-year-old
sodomite who led the agents to the house, said that she had beds in every room of the house for the
more convenient entertainment of her customers. Samuel Stevens saw men in a group of twenty or
thirty, hugging and kissing and sitting in each others laps in one room, and making love (as they
called it) in a very indecent manner. Couples then went into another room, and when they returned,
they would tell what they had been doing, which, in their dialect, they called marrymg Stevens said
that William Griffin had kissed everyone around, and had then thrown his arms around Stevens neck,
hugged and squeezed him, and tried to put his hands into his breeches. Men got up to dance and made
curtsies. They mimicked womens voices: O fie, sir! - Pray, sir -Dear, sir - Lord, how can you serve
me so? - I swear Ill cry out - Youre a wicked devil - and youre a bold face - Eh, ye littie dear Toad!
Come buss!
8

When Mark Partridge agreed to take Joseph Sellers to the house in Drury Lae, it was arranged
that Sellers should pass as Partridges husband, to prevent my being too far attacked by any of the
company Martin Mackintosh who like many of the men took a maiden or womans name: his
was Orange Deb - came up to Sellers nonetheless and thrust his hand into my breeches and his tongue
into my mouth. He swore he would go 40 miles to enjoy him and begged him to go backwards and
let him. When Sellers refused, Mackintosh offered to be passive himself and pulled down his own
breeches and tried to sit naked in Sellers lap. Partridge chased him off with a hot poker from the fire
and th re atened to run it into his arse. (Samuel Stevens who was al so present confirmed this story)
Mackintosh, like most of the men in the house, had adopted some feminine characteristics, but in the
sexual act he was prepared to be either active or passive. This sexual versatility, according to The
Wandering Whore in 1660, had once been a characteristic only of a minority of adult sodomites in the
days when desire between males was organized by differences in age. It is likely that by 1726 it was
widespread among all sodomites. Joseph Sellers and William Davison gave similar descriptions of the
men in Thomas Wrighfs room for mollies near Moorfields after they were taken there by Mark
Partridge. There was a fiddier for music and dancing and bawdy songs were sung (Come let us [fuck]
finely) accompanied with sexual gestures. There was a second smaller room with a bed where some
of the eight men went. They sometimes closed the door, but they sometimes left it open so that part of
what occurred could be seen.
The evidence for the remaining two houses came from an 18-year-old boy called Ned Courtney
who, when things were hard, seerns to have sold hirnself to his fellow sodornites. In his actual
prostitution, he was probably exceptional, since although the molly copied the mannerisrns of the
fernale whore, most of the sexual acts in the molly-houses seern to have occurred without one mans
paying the other. Courtney ordinarily worked as a servant in public houses: the Yorkshire Grey in
Bloornsbury Market, the Cardigans Head in Charing Cross, a cooks shop in St Martins Lae, and
finally at Torn Orrnes Red Lyon in Crown Court, Knaves Acre, which was a molly-house. He was
something of an upstart
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and had been put three times in Brideweil for insolence towards his betters. He abused one masters
mother when he came horne drunk. He was saucy to a constable who stopped him in the night as he
helped Torn Orine to carry off his goods to avoid the creditors of the molly-house. On the third
occasion, Courtney was arrested because he was making a scene in Covent Garden over a rnollying-
cull, that is one of his male sodornite custorners. Courtney could be threatening. George Kedger, who
was convicted for sodorny with Courtney, said that once when Courtney met him he told him that all
he had to live on was what he got from prostitution, that he wanted money, and that if Kedger would
not help hirn, he would swear my life away Kedger was found guilty of sodorny but later reprieved,
probably because Courtney made a poor witness. More certainly, the jury did not believe what he had
to say about the molly-house that he clairned George Whitle kept at the Royal Oak at the corner of
StJarness Square since thejury acquitted Whitle.
The description of Whitles supposed house is nonetheless interesting. It is possible that the house
had in fact harbored mollies, for men could arge their way out of real evidence. John Derwin, for
instance, was accused of sodorny with a link-boy (link-boys carried torches at night). But he was heard
boasting in Margaret Claps molly-house that he had baffied the boys evidence before the
magistrate, and that the testimonial that Clap gave as to his good character had gone a long way in
bringing him off. It therefore may have been that the two women servants that Whitle brought to
court to swear that they had seen neither mollies or Ned Courtney in his house were being as helpful
as Clap had been to Derwin. Whitle was married and had children like some of the other men accused
of sodorny. He said that the story of the molly-house was spread by a neighbor who owed him rent and
whose wife used to call him a sodornite dog. (It was common for women to call other women whore
as a result of such disputes.) Some of his neighbors agreed that it was from this couple that they had
heard the rumors of sodorny in Whitles house. But a male neighbor did say that Edward Courtney had
frequented Whitles house and had told him that he quarreled with Whitle when he would not let
Courtney have a pint of beer when it was time to close. Whitle was a peace-rnaker and rerninded his
custorners to go horne to their wives. On the other hand, at least one man believed the story and said
that his fellow neighbors had stopped going to Whitles when they heard that he kept a molly-house.
Finally, Drake Stoneman, one of the men who was arrested and charged for being in Margaret Claps
molly-house, supported Courtneys statement as to what had occurred in Whitles house.
Courtney testified that behind the regular room for his neighborhood custorners, Whitle kept a back
room for mollies to drink in. Between this room and the kitchen, there was still another private roorn.
There was a bed in the middle of this last room for men to go in couples and be married, and for this
reason they called it the chapel. Courtney said that Whitle had helped him to find two or three
husbands there. Whitle had once asked him to give... a wedding night to a country gentleman who
would pay handsomely. Courtney stayed till midnight, but the gentleman never carne. Since it was too
99

late to go home, he shared Whitles bed who promised him a great deal of money if he would let
Whitle have him. Courtney agreed, but the next morning he got no more than six-pence. Whitle,
Courtney said, had put the bite upon me. If it was true, it was probably to revenge this rather than the
pint of beer he had been refused, that Courtney gave his evidence. Drake Stoneman added to
Courtneys story that he had known Whitles house for two or three years. He had se en men expose
themselves to each other (Whitle said it was surgeons examining venereal patients) and had heard
them say Mine is best. Yours has been battersead. He also knew of a room called the Chapel, but he
claimed not to know what the men did who went into it.
Sodomites socialized and had sex with fellow sodomites not only in the molly houses. They
sometimes did so as well in their lodgings, though they had to be careful of the neighbors. Thomas
Baker in his play, Tunbridge- Wcdks or the Yeoman of Kent, (1703), has Maiden meet his friends in
his chambers in the Temple, where they play with fans and mimick the women, scream, hold up
your tails, make curtsies, and call one another Madame. Thomas Wright, one of the men tried in
1726 admitted at his execution that he had followed these abominable courses, but when he
attempted at his trial to save his life, the two women who lived above his room swore that while they
had heard music and merry-making from below, they had never known of any sodomitical practices
and that Wright himself behaved like a sober man and was a very good Churchman. Wright and his
friends were aware that their effeminate mannerisms could be displayed only once their doors were
safely shut (Senelick 1990: 33-67).
Sodomites also met each other in two kinds of public or semi-public environ-ments. There were the
arcades and the gardens or parks like the Exchange, London Bridge and Moorfields, and there were
the bog-houses in the Temple and the Savoy, in which one lingered to show interest. There was a
standard sexual opening. One man displayed his penis and tried to put it in the others hand. After this
he would reach into the others breeches for his penis. If this opening was accepted, they then
proceeded to negotiate the act to be performed. The sexual acts themselves (usually either
masturbation or sodomy with fellatio a poor third) were then consummated on the spot or in a nearby
lae or tavern. But these places were especially dangerous since many of the men encountered in them
were not sodomites. The likelihood of being arrested or blackmailed was much higher than if one used
a molly-house. For those men, however, who wished to have sex with men who were not sodomites,
these dangers had to be risked.
Thomas Vaughan who was accused of blackmailing Edward Barker, said in 1706 that he had met
Barker (an apothecary in the Strand) in the piazzas of Covent Garden, a place where it was common
enough for men to meet female prostitutes and for sodomites to saunter. Barker asked Vaughan to go
with him to the Savoy bog-house and when they were there, Barker asked Vaughan to bugger him.
Vaughan did not say whether he did. A few months later Vaughan saw Barker going down to the bog-
house in the Temple. (Vaughan clearly spent a lot of his time in or near the bog-houses.) He followed
him in and sat on the seat
100



Figure 4.1 A 1707 London broadsheet of verse mocking suicides of men accused for unnatural
dispising the Fair Sex and set to the tune Ye pretty sailors all.
Source: Guildh all Libra ry, Corporation ofLondon
101

next to Barker. There were partitions between the seats, and this one had a hole in it which probably
had been made deliberately. Barker put his penis through the hole into the other mans side where
Vaughan caught hold of it. Vaughan claimed that he then ran out to get help to seize Barker, but
Barker was gone when Vaughan returned.
Vaughan was also accused of blackmailing William Guilham who had charn-bers in the Temple.
Vaughan had been told that Guilham committed frigging or masturbation. His preference was
evidently for boys since when Vaughan saw him enter the Temple bog-house he told a boy named
Edward Knight to follow him in. Vaughan remained at a distance, presumably to allow time for
something to happen. When he heard the boy cry out, he went in to seize Guilham who escaped. But
Vaughan knew where to find his man. At the Anchor Tavern in Butcher Row, Guilham admitted to
Vaughan what he had done. He asked him not to prosecute and to arrange that the two others involved,
namely Edward Knight and Thomas Davis (who was probably a second boy), should not reveal to the
snior lawyers or Benchers of the Temple what had occurred. He offered Vaughan money. Vaughan
said he refused, and told him instead that if he made him a loan of 40 shillings, he would speak to the
others. Guilham agreed and gave him 20 shillings in money and a promissory note to pay 20 more in
three months time. Vaughan must have thought he had covered his tracks. But Guilham decided on
another course of action. He knew Edward Barker whom Vaughan and his gang were also
blackmailing. Together Guilham and Barker brought a case against Vaughan, Knight, Davis and a
fourth member of the gang, Thomas Penny. They, of course, charged the gang with intending to swear
sodomy falsely. But the circumstantial detail of Vaughans statement arges against Guilham and
Barker.
In 1709 in Moorfields, a public garden fll of people, Hyems Harte, a Jew, came up to John
Sanders and asked him how many women he had knocked. Harte said he hirnself had knocked
several a few nights before. He invited Sanders to drink with hirn. When they were seated Harte asked
Sanders to show his prick. Sanders would not, so Harte took out his own and reaching for Sanders
hand made him touch his. Harte now thrust his hand into Sanders breeches and tore them as he pulled
out Sanders penis. At this point Sanders rescued hirnself from hirn and ran away. But Harte was
persistent. He came up to Sanders the very next day in Moorfields. He started the same conversation
and tried to put his hand into Sanders breeches. Sanders took him by the collar, but Harte shook free
and ran, only to be stopped by another m an .
The locations of those places where sodornites met heterosexual men were interrningled with those
where sodornites met each other. But the molly-houses were able to guard thernselves against the
unsuspecting visitor, and it is clear that one could enter them only if guided by a sodornite. Groups of
men seern to have met occasionally in each others lodgings, but since very few cases show up, this
either did not happen very frequently or the se meetings were even more protected from the outsiders
gaze, which seerns unlikely given the inquisitiveness of London neighbors. Heterosexual men very
seldorn took prostitutes horne and
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were much more likely to have sex with them in a public house or out of doors. It is likely that
sodomitical encounters operated by the same rule. This reinforces the point that the sodomites sexual
life was not very domesticated and in both its promiscuous behavior and location overlapped with the
world of female prosti-tution. By contrast when heterosexual men seduced unmarried women they did
so in the context of the local economy of their parishes rather than in the city-wide organization of
prostitution. Male servants seduced their fellow workers in their masters houses in affiuent Chelsea.
Soldiers picked up women in the streets of St Margarefs where they were stationed. Weavers seduced
the maids of all work in the industrial parishes north of the City wall, and sailors, poor Irishmen and
common labourers lived with their long-term mates in the poor parishes east of the City.
But sodomites do not seem to have clustered in any neighborhood or occupation. It is true that
early in the eighteenth century itwas suggested that sodomites congregated in the various trades that
dealt with womens ha ir and clothes because they could there display an interest in such things and be
licensed to behave with an elegance that verged on effeminacy. Thomas Baker in The Femole Taller in
1709 described the assistants in the millinery shops on Ludgate Hill as the sweetest, fairest, nicest,
dished out creatures; and by their elegant address and soft speeches, you would guess them to be
Italians - when Italian could be synonymous with sodomite. But from the printed trials and the
manuscript criminal records (the bonds and the recognizances, not the indictments which are
unreliable), it is possible to recover the occupations of thirty-one men in the four years from 1726 to
1729. These were two perriwig makers, a tailor and a wire-drawer: these might have worked on
womens clothes. But among the rest there were servants (3), yeomen (3) and gentlemen (4) (both of
these were vague cate-gories); carpenters (2) and a cabinetmaker; two cloth-workers; a milkman, a
grocer and a coal-seller. Men who ran public houses and were classified variously as a cook, a
fruiterer, an alehouse keeper, a vintner, or as victuallers, were the largest category (7). At least three of
these certainly kept molly-houses, and the other four may have aiso. It may be that molly-house
keepers (many of whom used womens names and were sodomites) were the most publicly known
mollies and therefore very likely to be come the targets of denunciations. But most mollies passed
their lives as husbands and fathers or as single men who liked women. They were usually employed
injobs where they could show nothing of their sexual tastes. It was only in the molly-house that they
came alive.
The kinds of meeting places used by sodornites and the nature of the relations displayed in them
remained relatively constant over the next 250 years. This can be demonstrated by looking at three
generations of men over that span of time. There were, however, three important changes. First,
executions for sodomy ceased after 1835. Men convicted of actual (as opposed to attempted) sodomy
were still condemned to death, but the sentences were no longer carried out, and in 1861 the penalty
was reduced to life imprisonment (Harvey 1978; Crompton 1983). In the second half of the nineteenth
century middle-class men began the
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long slow process of publiclyjustifying their sodomitical desires. They often did this by appealing to a
historical tradition that ran from ancient Greece and Rome and continued through the Renaissance in
men like Michelngelo and Shakespeare. But there were also less happy attempts by medical men (and
some-times by sodomites themselves) to explain their desires in terms of physical or psychological
debility (Weeks 1977; Dowling 1994). Finally, in the early twentieth century it becomes possible to
document long-term domestic relations between two men (Porter and Weeks 1991). These may have
existed before, but they cannot be found easily in the legal sources. But it may be that it had taken that
length of time (as well as changes in housing patterns) for the mid-eighteenth-century ideal of a happy
romantic domesticity to be become a reality among some homosexual men. It certainly took a second
revolution in gender relations after 1950 to produce in the second half of the twentieth century a gay
liberation movement with its demands for the legalization of homosexual relations and the legitimation
of marriage and families among gays and lesbians.
The arrests of sodomites in the early nineteenth century document the subculture of that generation
and establish the real continuities with the men of the first generation of the modern homosexual
identity in the early eighteenth century. In 1810 a number of public houses that catered to sodomites
were raided. Thirty men were arrested on a Sunday evening at the Swan in Ver Street. In this house
one room had four beds in it. Another was arranged as a ladies dressing-room with pots of rouge and
all the rest of a toilette. A third room was called the Chapel, and he re marriages with bridesmaids and
bridesmen in attendance were solemnized and consummated by two or more couples in the same room
and in sight of each other. Upstairs there were rooms for male prostitutes and their more casual
partners. Here it was safer to consum-mate an affair than in a mans lodgings as a 16-year-old
drummer boy from a Guards Regiment explained to the Ensign who had reckiessly proposed dinner
and sex at his place in St Martins Churchyard. Many of the men, even those with large athletic bodies,
were effeminate and called themselves Miss Selina, or Pretty Harriet, or the Duchess of Devonshire.
Some of the men had wives at home. There were other houses in the Strand; in Blackman Street in
Southwark; near the Obelisk in St Georges Fields; in Bishopsgate Street; in Eagle Street, Red Lion
Square; at White Hart Yard, Drury Lae; and at the Star and Crown in the Broadway, Westminster.
Men were also arrested for using the arcade of shops on London Bridge, and for picking up each other
in the parks: in Moorfields, St Jamess Park, and Hyde Park. The parks were such a well-known
rendezvous that two years before the Home Secretary had proposed locking them at night. But the
parks and places like the Strand and Drury Lae and the Broadway were also used by female
prostitutes who in a familiar pattern must have mingled with the sodomites (Holloway 1813 (with the
newspaper clipping attached);Harvey 1978: 942).
The policing of sodomy seems to have grown more severe in this first generation of the nineteenth
century. Only three men, for example, had been hanged for sodomy in the second half of the
eighteenth century, but there were ten such
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hangings between 1804 and 1816. In all of England and Wales, fifty-four men were executed between
1806 and the last executions in 1835. And many more were sentenced to death than were executed:
forty-two as opposed to twenty-eight between 1805 and 1815. The arrests for attempted sodomy in
London by 1830 came to at least one in a week, but most arrests did not lead to convictions. Between
1810 and 1818, out of 102 men committed for sodomy in England, only 58 were brought to trial, and
only 30 of these were convicted. In most of the arrests there were usually only two men involved. The
raid on the Barley Mow in the Strand in 1825 is the only public house that has so far surfaced in the
twenty years after the raids on the houses in 1810. There were attempts in the early 1830s to remove
the death penalty for sodomy, but they failed (Harvey 1978; Clark 1987: 186-96; Crompton 1983),
This early nineteenth-century severity may be accounted for by the appearance of the first
explanations of sodomitical desire as a form of mental disease. Certainly Robert Holloway in his
account of the trials in 1810 thought sodomy to be the effect of a dreadful malignant malady that
assumes such an irresistible dominion over the faculties that neither religion, philosophy, or the fear of
death can resist. He knew of a man who ended in a mad-house after frequently spending periods of
several days at the Ver Street house when he had from eight to a dozen different men and boys. This
temporary insanity needed to be restrained by castration or some other cogent preventative
(Holloway 1813: 16-17).
The historiography of sodomy in the last three decades of the nineteenth century has been
dominated by the four scandals in 1870, 1884, 1889 and 1895 that were extensively reported in the
newspapers (Montgomery Hyde 1962, 1970, 1976). But those trials unfortunately only document the
interaction between men from the professional and landed classes (who were less than a quarter of
Londons population) and the upper reaches of the citys male prosti-tution. The sexual lives of the
majority of sodomites in the citys streets, parks, lavatories, public houses, theaters and churches, and
in their private lodgings, have not been considered because the more quotidian trials that are the
principal source for the history of the subculture in the early eighteenth or the early nineteenth century
remain to be studied. The sexual consciousness of these ordinary men was certainly influenced by the
more sophisticated who figure in the famous trials. The young, effeminate shop-boys of 19 or 20 (the
lineal descendants of the previous centurys male milliners) who flocked to the ritual and aesthetic
extravagances of the Anglo-Catholic churches in Holborn or Stoke Newington were following in the
footsteps of Walter Pater and Osear Wilde (Hilliard 1982:188-9).
The male prostitution that surfaces in the great scandals shows a homosexual world that was
organized by differences in gender, age and class, and in which domesticity and license coexisted.
Elements of this system were already present in the eighteenth century and the system as a whole
probably survived through World War II. The male prostitute was often an adolescent. The Post Office
messenger boys whom Charles Hammond provided for his clients in Cleveland Street in 1889 were
usually 15 or 16 years old (Simpson et ai. 1976). The boys
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Alfred Taylor provided for Osear Wilde, or whom Wilde picked up for himself, were usually aged
between 16 and 20. Wilde liked these boys to be pretty and effeminate. Charles Parker said that Wilde
had asked him to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover... ! used to sit on his knees
and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a giri The prosecutors in
Wildes trials repeatedly noticed that it was extraordinary that Wilde should take such young men to
dinner and suggested that this kind of socializing across the age divide could only have had a sexual
purpose. The prosecutors also made the same point about the differences in social class between Wilde
and the boys. But the differences in age were not treated as any more startiing that those in class
(Montgomery Hyde 1962). There was, in short, no suggestion made (as there might well have been
after World War II that Wilde or Lord Arthur Somerset were pedophiles even though a boy of 15 in
the late nineteenth century would probablyjust have entered puberty. But it was also true that the
majority of female prostitutes whom heterosexual men picked up in the streets were between 15 and
20 and that many of them would have experienced menarche very recently. The desire to separate
rigidly men from boys in homosexual relations did not become prominent until after World War II.
The boys who walked the street in Piccadilly were notably effeminate, and the effeminate
prostitute sometimes entered into a male marriage and domesticity with his lover. Alfred Taylor
pointed out the Piccadilly boys to Charles Parker when he recruited him for his house in Littie College
Street, remarking that he did not understand sensible men wasting their money on painted trash like
that. Many do though. But when Taylor and Parker were arrested with sixteen other men in a raid on a
house in Fitzroy Street in the year before Wildes trials, two of the men were dressed as women.
Taylor also had in his rooms womens clothes which he claimed were for masquerades. Parker even
said that Taylor had told him that he had gone through a form of marriage with a youth named Charles
Mason. Mason had dressed as a woman and the ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast.
Taylor denied the marriage; but Wilde himself wrote to Mason that I hope marriage had not made you
too serious? It has never had that effect on me; and Mason asked Taylor to come home soon, dear,
and let us go out sometimes together (Montgomery Hyde 1962: 131, 170, 173, 205, 228-9). Ernest
Boulton and Frederick Park in the 1860s dressed as women to go to the theater or to mingle with the
female prostitutes in the shopping arcades where the two forms of prostitution overlapped as they had
since the eighteenth century and continued to do until the legalization of female prostitution after
World War II removed the streetwalkers from public view. Boulton married his lover Lord Arthur
Clinton and had calling cards printed that styled him as Lady Arthur Clinton. But poor Boulton after
his arrest in 1870 was caught up in the new medicalization of the homosexual identity and had the
folds of his anus examined by a doctor who was convinced that sodomy produced unmistakable
physical evidence. Lord Arthur ended his role in the scandal by committing suicide (Upchurch 1996).
These late nineteenth-century scandals do not provide much evidence for a male homosexual identity
that was not tied to prostitution.
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But the evidence for homosexual marriages in the 1920s and 1930s, and their certain presence in the
Paris of the 1870s (Peniston 1997) makes it likely that they can be found in London for the generation
after 1870.
From the middle of the nineteenth century and for another hundred years thereafter, sex between
men was probably regulated less by either marriage or prostitution than by the public, free, and
voluntary sexual relations that occurred in the public toilet or cottage. Cottaging brought together men
across the divides of age, class and effeminacy, and it fcil itated sex between homosexual and
heterosexual men. A certain amount of sex had occurred in the eighteenth century in the few bog-
houses where one sat to defcate. But men otherwise pissed against the wall where they could be
approached by sodomites and by female prostitutes. The sight of public urination became increasingly
shocking to respectable women, and by 1850 there were seventy-four urinals in the City of London,
forty erected by the keepers of public houses and most of the rest by the City government. Most
urinals were for one, but the largest held six men. By the 1870s the City had rebuilt its urinals to
accommodate four men on average and had located them away from residences and in the center of
roadways or in disused churchyards. In 1885 the City opened its first underground lavatory in which
6,000 men used the urinals in a day. The size and location of the urinals must have increased their
sexual use since the City made room for two atten-dants to see that no improper conduct occurred
and to call a policeman if necessary (Andrews 1995: 5). In such a urinal the 33-year-old painter
Simeon Solomon was arrested in 1873 for having sex with a 61-year-old laborer. This se and al his
family managed to keep out of the newspapers and they saved Solomon fromjail as well; but the same
network through which Solomon met his patrons now spread the word, ostracized him and destroyed
his career for the remainder of his life. Solomon must have gone to Paris in the next year in the hope
that the scandal would abate, but there instead he was arrested in zpissoir with a young Parisian who
had a subsequent career blackmailing and robbing older, richer homosexual men (Seymour 1985 and a
personal communication; Peniston 1997: 127-31). This was a constantly recurring tale until the
cottages were shut down a hundred years later.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the public male sociability and sexual promiscuity of
homosexual men in London continued to appear in very much the forms they had taken in the
subculture since the early eighteenth century. But it al so be comes easier to document from interviews
enduring domestic relations among men of all social classes. A young man like Norman, who at 19
came to London from Yorkshire during World War I, learned to pick up men in theaters, at the ballet
and in the parks. Some men used the terrace below the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square which
was called the meat rack. Others went to the cinema where in the dark they could lie on top of each
other with their trousers down or go home together. A poor native Londoner like Roy started out in the
local cinemas and then moved on to pubs and cottages and the back of the theater galleries where men
milled about together, sometimes having sex. But men could dance with each other only at private
parties or in private
107

clubs, either of which might occasionally be raided by the police even though no sexual acts had
occurred. The clubs cost half a crown a year to be a member and were mostly in Soho. Some pubs
drew a mainly gay clientele, but in the East End mums and dads mixed with homosexual men whom
they called by their camp names (Porter and Weeks 1991: 24-6, 31-2, 134, 11, 73-7, 138, 140, 129-
30).
Public effeminacy was taken furthest by the young male prostitutes who strolled up and down
Piccadilly, with dyed hair, walking like women, and calling themselves Lucy or Annette. But some
men were occasionally transvestite at private drag parties or at public annual events like Lady
Malcolms servanfs ball in the Albert Hall, or at the Chelsea Arts Ball. But drag could be in the
wearers mind since a middle-class man who wore a camel hair coat and suede shoes might feel that
he was publicly declaring his homosexuality. Drag could bless domesticity when one man at a party
dressed as a bride and was married to another (Porter and Weeks 1991: 140, 148, 111, 139).
Male prostitutes were arranged in a hierarchy according to the places or the means by which they
met their customers. They usually entered the life at 15 or 16, shortly after they had escaped to
London. The street boys in Piccadilly were the most effeminate, the least educated, and the most likely
to be arrested and taken off the streets in a Black Maria. More educated boys, some of whom danced
in the theatrical choruses, used bars in Piccadilly and in Leicester Square as well as the bar in the Ritz.
There were boys who worked through a pimp like Tommy who invited gentlemen to tea to meet the
boys whose photographs he kept in an lbum. The men paid Tommy and he paid the boys. (These tea
parties sound rather like those Osear Wilde attended.) Some boys eventually lived with an older man
in a relationship very much like marriage and constructed a social circle of similar boys who visited
but did not sieep with each other - a circle somewhat like the traditional demi-monde of fashionable
female prostitutes. Some very striking boys simply ran into men in the street and passed from one
keeper to another. As they aged this life came to an end and the kept boy became suburban or
respectable, going to an office in Waterloo or serving in the civil service (Porter and Weeks 1991:
117-24, 137-50).
The dornesticity of the prostitute could only exist when there was enough money to finance it and
tended to last only as long as the more youthful partner kept his beauty. But enduring relationships that
were reg arded as marriages existed between men of the same age and social class. Partners might be
faithful or not. The union might last several years or be lifelong, and might be acknowl-edged by
families or by fellow workers. Working-class men like Geraid and Phil lived together for seven years
in the 1920s. They shared the cooking and the household tasks. They were sexually faithful to each
other but though one of them was the butch and the other was the bitch, Geraid detested drag
because it was not natural. Geraid also disapproved of sex in public places like cottages or cinemas.
But the lovers did not reveal their relationship to their families who probably realized the nature of
theirfriendship. The marriage ended when Phil met aformerboyfriend. Amarriage between two men
could receive parental approval
108

as Gregorys did when his lovers father suggested that Gregory should live with his son. At family
dinners Gregory was treated as a son-in-law. But Gregorys own father was horrified when his son
revealed his homosexuality, and he asked him not to tell his mother. There was room in this
relationship for sex with others. Gregory disliked clubs and bars because he did not drink, but he did
meet men in galleries and cottages. His sexual life was carefully sep arate d, however, from his work
as a consulting engineer. After World War II it may have become easier to live openly as a couple.
Stephen and Bob met in 1946. Before this Stephen had had wide experience in the subculture in the
1930s going to clubs, pubs and private parties. For the first ten years the lovers kept separate
residences, but for twenty years after they lived together. They never openly spoke to their parents
about their relationship, but they were always given a room together when they stayed with Stephens
parents. In his work as a civil servant Stephen found it prudent to be less reserved. He carefully
informed his superiors about his homosexuality and avoided any scandal, but as a result he was never
promoted to the highest rank. His colleagues, however, always invited the two men to dinner as a
couple. And as they aged, their social circle came to be cornposed of other men who were rnarried
couples (Porter and Weeks 1991: 6-11,36-9, 110-16).
Most gay men used cottages or public toilets at some point in their lives, though a few studiously
avoided thern. For most men cottaging was integrated into the rest of their homosexual world whether
they had steady lovers or not. But a man could use cottages because of a psychological isolation that
prevented him from becorning part of a homosexual network. One such man tried psycho-analysis to
control his desires but went cottaging whenever he became depressed. Another man who tended not to
know men who lived together, and who could not imagine doing so himself, found men in many
locales but really always hoped to find men who were heterosexual. Some men eventually could have
sex only with men who were married, or bisexual, or had gone out with girls and done them. But it
may be that for many the lure of the cottage was that it might be possible there to satisfy their desire
for sex with a heterosexual man. The cottages however were the places most likely to be patrolled by
the police. And an arrest in one of them could wreck the most successful of careers (Porter and Weeks
1991: 49-54, 22-34, 97-108, 65-71).
The spatial arrangements produced in the first generation of the eighteenth century by the
revolution in gender and sexual relations that occurred in north-western Europe around 1700 probably
endured through the next 250 years. They were intensified by the fourfold growth of London in the
nineteenth century and by the emergence at the end of that century of the concepts of homosexuality
and heterosexuality. After 1950 there was another marked shift in gender and sexual relations which
was not so great as that around 1700, but it is likely that it significantly modified the spatial
arrangements of Londons homosexual world. By way of a conclusion I therefore wish to suggest the
nature of the changes in gender and sexuality after 1950 (which like those around 1700 occurred
throughout the Western world) and to ask how they produced the
109

patterns of homosexual life that I observed in London over thirteen months of residence from 1977 to
1982 when in the summers and sometimes inJanuary I collected my eighteenth-century material in the
archives during the day and observed gay London at night and on the weekends.
The majority of women after 1950 acquired a heterosexual identity more nearly like that which
men had had for the previous two and a half centuries. Women in greater numbers began to masturbate
before marriage. Their sexual relations with men became easier as the taboo against pre-marital
sexuality was eased and birth control became entirely acceptable and widespread. They were more
likely consciously to separate themselves from lesbian women and consequently the feminine partner
in a lesbian relationship was more likely to consider herself as much a lesbian as her more masculine
companion. But it is probable that masturbation and homosexuality did not become as important in
defining female heterosexuality as they were for male heterosexuality. Sexual experience was for
women (more than for men) still tied to social interaction and less a matter of individual self-
consciousness. Among men at the same time the sexual interaction of the heterosexual majority and
the homosexual minority became more limited. Most gay men no longer desired sex with a straight
man, and straight men were less inclined to accept the sexual attention of gay men. But straight men
were also less likely to go to female prostitutes and sexual relations with their girifriends became
easier because pregnancy could be prevented more easily and marriage was not necessarily the goal of
these relations.
As a consequence of these reformulated identities the geography and nature of male homosexual
relations by the late 1970s had changed dramatically in three respects from the patterns established in
the first generation of the eigh-teenth century First there was no longer any overlap between the gay
world and the world of streetwalking prostitution since prostitutes had finally been removed from
Londons streets by changes in the law that were certainly the result of a modified male heterosexual
identity. Streetwalking prostitution had shocked opinion since the eighteenth century because it
violated the ideals of romance and domesticity. But the fear that men would turn to sodomy if it was
entirely eliminated was always stronger, and as a consequence the streetwalkers remained until the
heterosexual male majority felt that they were no longer needed to establish their own sexual identity.
The reform in prostitution also produced the legalization of homosexual relations between consenting
adults in private. But this was accompanied by a determined effort to separate homosexual men from
sexual interactions with heterosexual men and adolescent boys. Whereas in 1900 only 10 per cent of
prosecutions had been for sexual relations between men and boys under 16, this grew to 75 per cent of
all cases by the 1950s. And the bars and toilets where gay men met heterosexual ones, especially those
in the army or the navy, were prosecuted vigorously or simply closed (Higgins 1996: 45-8, 61-80, 153-
4, 161-5). A particularly famous north London cottage that Joe Orton had described vividly in his
diary was shown to me in 1978 by the men whose flat I had rented as a relie from a former world that
no longer existed. Gay men still in those days before AIDS had promiscuous sex. They met each
110

other in saunas though they were not allowed to have sex on the premises as they did in those which I
knew in New York. They met each other late at night in central London in places like Russell Square
where they sometimes had sex in the bushes but from which more usually they went home together.
The owner of another flat I used one summer guided me by the footpaths to the place on Hampstead
Heath where late at night men had orgiastic sex under the trees. But all these acts occurred between
men who were all gay. The gay man was still promiscuous but he was no longer a he-whore as the
early eighteenth century had classified him. He did not service straight men or mingle with female
prosti-tutes. Instead he lived in various north London neighborhoods, sometimes alone, sometimes
with a lover, sometimes with a group of friends. These neighborhoods did not have the density of gay
inhabitants that could be found in some American neighborhoods like the Castro or the West Village.
But those more integrated London neighborhoods produced sooner than the American ones the
demand that children be taught in school that gay men and lesbian women could form families.
Sodomites no longer gave birth to wooden dolls in molly-houses. The domestication of gay sex had
begun, though there was far more public resistance to it among both the general public and the
parliamentary elite than there had been to the legalization of sexual relations between consenting
adults in private (Jeffrey-Poulter 1991).
Notes
1 Donoghue (1993) puts all affection between women into the lesbian category, rejects all
comparisons with the history of sodomites, and denies any chronological change, even though
she admits that women who exclusively desired women were classified as hermaphrodites early
in the century but described as sapphists after 1770.
2 Select Trials cu the oldBailey, London, 1742, III, 745 (or Proceedings... c the oldBailey,
hereafter SP (12-15 April 1727), pp. 5-6; StJamess Evening Post (15-18 April 1727); for Wiid
andHitchen, see Howson (1970).
3 Wiid, An Answer, CLRO (Corporation of London Record Office): SR (February 1722/3), R. 37;
The British Journal, 2 and 23 January 1725.
4 For Partridge: SP (13-16 July 1726), p. 6; GLRO (or London Metropolitan Archive): MJ/SR/2458,
Bond 82. The Select Trials do notprint Partridges name, giving onLyP-. The cases brought to
trial may be found conveniently in Select Trials, II, 362-72, III, 36-40. The sessions rolls, with
material for 1726, are in GLRO: MJ/SR/2458-2475 (2473 is too decayed to consult); CLRO: SR
(April 1726 to January 1726/7). Norton (1992 chs 3-5) used some of the printed materials for
1726 and 1727 but did not consult the quarter-sessions rolls from which a more systematic
picture can be constructed than from the printed trials and newspapers alone. Our interpretations
vary considerably, however, because he believes in the existence across time of a continuous
homosexual minority. He claims that a subculture was brought into existence by the attacks of
the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, and does not consider the possibility of a
revolution in gender and sexual relations. But the emer-gence in France and the Netherlands at
the same time of similar patterns of behavior makes the purely English phenomenon of the
Societies an unlikely cause, and urban reforming societies had been part of English
Protestantism since the late sixteenth century. Norton (1992) also tries to downplay the crucial
role of effeminacy (it is not acceptable to his gay liberationist perspective) and does not raise
systematically the
111


issue of sex between sodomites and the heterosexual majority. His geography does not
distinguish between places for sodomites alone, and places where sodomites and the male
majority intermingled. In addition he uses the cases of men who seduced adolescents to establish
a gay geography despite the fact that these men were usually operating outside the world of the
molly-house. I discuss these cases in Trumbach, Sodomitical Assaults; and review Nortons
book in the Joumcd of the History of SexualityS (1995): 637-40.
5 The London Joumcd (7 May 1726), p. 2.
6 Royal Oak alehouse, corner StJamess Square (Select Trials, III, 369; London Joumcd (30 April
1726); King Street, Westminster (London Joumcd ofJuly 1726); Beech Lae (GLRO:
MJ/SR/2461: New Prison List; Select Trials, II, 367); Christopher Alley, Moorfields (Select
Trials, II, 367); Charing Cross (MJ/SR/2464, Recog. of John Torelton); Maryiebone Fields
(London Joumcd, 5 August 1727; GLRO: MJ/SR/2488, Recog. 433, 120, 108, MJ/SR/2490, R.
181); Hay Court (GLRO: MJ/SR/2502, R. 135); Whitechapel (GLRO: MJ/SRT/2509A, R. 144);
the Kings Head, St Peter le Poor, Broad Street (CLRO: SR July 1726), R. 36); Pye Corner, St
Sepulchre (CLRO: SR July 1726), Bond 9, SR (December 1726), R. 21); Drury Lae (Select
Trials, III, 36); FieldLane (Select Trials, II, 363, II, 37; CLRO: SR (April 1726): Poultry
Compter list, # 3); Red Lion, Crown Court, Knaves Acre (Select Trials, II, 366).
7 Select Trials, II, 366-7, 370-2: Orme and Wright; Stoneham for boasting of his having committed
sodomitical practices in the house of John Clapp: CLRO: SR (April 1726), R. 17; in the house
of Margaret Clap: CLRO: SR (May 1726), Bonds 5, 8; Claps coffeehouse: CLRO: SR
(December 1726): April Poultry Compter: #3, May Poultry Compter, #1; Margaret Claps arrest,
trial, and pillorying: CLRO: SR (April 1726), R. 40, R. 19, R. 8, SR July 1726) calendar
ofWood Street Compter, 28 February, SR (December 1726), April, Wood Street Compter, Select
Trials, III, 37-8, London Joumcd (23, 30 July 1726); Plump Nelly Roper: London Journcd (17
December 1726), CLRO: SR July 1726), bond #9, SR (December 1726), R. 21; Robert Whale
and York Horner: London Joumcd (23 April, 9 July, 3 December 1726), GLRO: MJ/SR/2458,
bond 82, MJ/SR/2459, Newgate calendar, #57; Towleton and Mugg: GLRO: MJ/SR/2459,
Newgate calendar, #s 58, 59; Wright: Select Trials, II, 367.
8 [Holloway] (1813: 28); Select Trials, II, 362-3, 365, III, 37. Newtons age: GLRO: MJ/SR/2462,
indictment 53. Newton also accused Gregory Turner, Thomas Turner and John Howard of
having sodomized him, but they do not seem to have been brought to trial (GLRO: MJ/SR/2462,
indictments 52, 53, 49). Newton was described as awire-drawer by trade who lived in Grub
Street (GLRO: MJ/SR/2464, Newtons bond). A wire-drawer worked in the gold lace trade
(Campbell 1747: 148). Another man, John Grace, was probably also a sodomite who accused
two men, Richard Gardner and Samuel Edmonds. His evidence does not seem to have been
used(GLRO: MJ/SR/2463, bond #25, MJ/SR/2464, indictments 49, 50).
9 Select Trials, III, 36, II, 368. The Wcmdering Whore (London, 1660), part 4, p. 5. Mark Partridge
was identified as a coal-seller who lived in Creed Lae, St Martin within Ludgate (CLRO: SR
(April 1726), Recog. 19).
10 Select Tricds, II, 366-7, 369-72.
11 Ibid.,111, 37,11, 370-72.
12 Ibid., II, 370. Courtney also accused William Goldsmith of sodomy with himself (GLRO:
MJ/SR/2464, Recog. of Goldsmith). Courtneys age is given in GLRO:
MJ/SR/2462, indictment #50. Drake Stoneman was a groom who gave two different addresses in
Stroops Court in April and Union Court in May (CLRO: SR (May 1726), bonds 5, 8).
13 Select Tricds, III, 3 6-40.
14 GLRO: MJ/SP/17 (September 1707), Thomas Vaughan; MJ/SR/2096, Recog. 88, 89; CLRO: SR
(September 1707), Newgate calendar: 3 September 1707.
15 GLRO: MJ/SP/58 July 1709).
112
5 Lisbon
David Higgs
Approached from the south by ferry at night across the Tagus River, Lisbon appears as mounds of
lights festooned over seven hills that are reflected in the waters that lap around the jetties. The
sheltered waters of the Straw Sea (so-called for the windmills that ground wheat on the southern
shore) make one of the finest natural harbors in the world. Although most foreign visitors now reach
Lisbon by air or car the city for millennia was a bride of the Atlantic, and thence linked to the oceans
of the globe. The oldest human habitation of the site dates back almost 3,000 years in legend to the
Phoenicians, c. 1200 BGE.
Before the 1755 earthquake the royal palace stood at the side of the River Tagus and the ships that
brought the riches of empire to Portugal could be seen by the kings and courtiers from its Windows.
The palace overlooked a big open space, shallower than the Commerce Square constructed after the
devastation of 1755, but longer in extent. That rectangle, with one side open to the Tagus and the
estuary, was also a market, a meeting place and the site of important public rituals. The Acts of Faith
(Autos-da-Fe) ceremonies of the Inquisition which existed from 1536 to 1821 were frequently held
there.
After the 1755 earthquake the core of the city lying on lower ground between hills was rebuilt on a
rectilinear plan with the main streets running north from the waterfront. This was a shift of emphasis
towards the hinterland. The royal palace was not rebuilt at waters edge but inland at Queluz, and in
the French style. Future development in the nineteenth century progressed inland, particu-larly after
the opening of Liberty Avenue in imitation of the Grands Boulevards of Paris. The focus of new
suburban growth and installations was more often at right-angles to the river, rather than like the
medieval city which hugged the river bank. In a sense the modern city with its new avenues
constructed during the fascist era turned its back on the Tagus (Fernandes 1989).
The Inquisition and the sodomites
The most informative documents on male homosexual behaviors in Early Modern Portugal are
those in the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition preserved in the National Archives in Lisbon. The
Inquisition trials for the abominable sin (mjavh pecado) resulting from denunciations were focused
on
113

anal intercourse: sodomy. As a result the discussion of other male same-sex sexual practices figures in
the documentation primarily as an evasive strategy:
the accused sometimes admitted to masturbation or frottage and much more rarely to oral sex as they
tried to downplay any suggestion that they had been receptive or worse still had permitted a partner to
ejaculate in their anus. The Inquisition Bye-laws and Edicts of the Faith specified sinful activities by
those under religious vows and the laity that concerned the Church including sodomy. In the
Inquisition Bye-laws of 1774 punishments for sodomy were less severe than those enunciated in 1613.
The Inquisition was to seek out these sinners and to correct or eradicate them. The archives of the
Portuguese Inquisition are the most complete of any in Europe, having survived both the Lisbon
Earthquake of 1755 and Liberal disapproval that led to the suppression of the institution at the start of
the nineteenth century.
1
They are open for consultation in the National Archives of Portugal in Lisbon
(Farinha 1990).
In theory any person accused of sodomy, including prisoners already in a secularjail, should be
transferred to the cells of the Holy Office. All Inquisition documentation was theoretically secret.
Every individual interrogated by the Inquisition was bound to swear to keep secret all aspects of the
trial or inquiry upon its conclusion. All documentation about investigations was to be sent to Lisbon so
that it could be preserved in the archives. The obsessive secrecy of the Inquisition on the one hand and
the precise nature of the interrogations on the other mean that a richly detailed archive about male
homosexual behaviors has been preserved. Unlike individual love letters or recollections of sexual
partners, which were almost always destroyed by relatives if discovered after the death of the owner,
the Inquisition documents were numbered and cared for. Only a part of the inquisitorial records dealt
with sex matters; by far the largest category in Portugal were those which dealt with Judaizing by
baptized Christians usually of Jewish ancestry. These and other sins to be denounced like slippages
into Islam or Protestantism, or freemasonry, blasphemy, witchcraft and so forth were enumerated
annually at the reading in each parish church of the Edict of the Faith.
In some of the macabr public daylight ceremonies of the Inquisition sodomites processed among
the victims. The numbers of male sodomites who appeared per de cade in these rituals of punishment
during the se vente en th century is shown in Table 5.1.
Thirty sodomites were burned by the riverside during the existence of the Portuguese Inquisition
(1536-1821). As the numbers of convictions show, repres-sion of the abominable sin was much
sharper in the twenty years 1640 to 1660, years at the heart of what has been called the General Crisis
of the Seventeenth Century, than before or afterwards. The number of full trials leading to lesser
punishments for sodomites, like whippings, confiscations of property, exile from the kingdom for
periods of time or life was approximately 400 over the existence of the tribunals responsible for
continental Portugal, the Atlantic islands and Brazil.
The grand total number of names listed in the registers of denunciations of sodomites, the Cademos
do Nefando, was over 5,000. The majority of them were
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Table 5.1 Numbers of male sodomites per decade in Autos-da-F in seventeenth-century Lisbon

1600-10 3
1611-20 15
1621-30 4 (1 woman sodomite also)
1631-40 7
1641-50 66
1651-60 34
1661-70 3
1671-80 0
1681-90 10
Source: Codices 197-200 National Library, Lisbon (note suspension of Inquisition activities 167482 by papal decision).

not acted upon. What emerged in the trials and other documentation was the high incidence of priests
as participants and as observers. What is of interest is rather the degree of detail in the documentation
that enables us to reconstruct the outlines of past sexual lives in Lisbon. There are examples of the
nefando from all regions of Portugal but it can be deduced from the documentation that sodomy was
overwhelmingly an urban offense rather than a rural one. It was most frequently denounced in the
bigger cities, and especially in Lisbon. In short the micro-historical approach is much more
informative than the laborious, and ultimately flawed efforts to establish a statistical profile from
respondents seeking to evade punishment.
One individual whose homosexuality linked Lisbon and Rio, two of the cities in this volume, was
Antonio Soares from a prosperous family who at age 14 was a postulan! to enter the Dominican order
at their Lisbon convent in Benfica. He went to the Carmelites after his rejection as an unsuitable
candidate for the Dominicans because of homosexual behavior. Soares lived his sexuality in a reli-
gious setting. However his confessions in Portugal before his exile to Brazil were unusual in his
insistence in his confession that he was both insertive and receptive in anal sexual activity with the
same individuals. Many of his partners were novices or inside the plus or mi us range of five years of
his own age. One witness used the interesting turn of phrase that Soares most frequent sex partner in
Lisbon among the novices was so dear to him that it was said in the convent that the two were
amancebados - a word meaning in heterosexual usage cohabiting with a paramour or concubine, and
that when the partner had a skin rash it was because of the seed that Soares left in his backside.
Soares was exiled to Brazil.
As Lisbon expanded after 1600 it remained always the capital (until the inde-pendence of Brazil in
1822) and the largest city of the Portuguese-speaking world. It had perhaps 150,000 residents in 1600
and grew slowly to some 200,000 in 1800. Lisbon always attracted migrants from the hinterland many
of whom went elsewhere in due course. Ambitious peasant youths and younger
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sons from families too large for their country resources constantly arrived in the city with the hope of
bettering themselves. Many of them arrived from the rural zones that were a days walk from the city,
but others came from the more distant north of the country, Minho and Trs-os-Montes. The city was
the interface between the World on the Move and the ambitious youths and men of inland Portugal.
The city council was aware of many lazy youths as a problem in July 1642 when it petitioned the
king that those who were usually hanging around the quay-side, the slaughter-house and the [Palace]
Square and pilfering should be shipped out to serve in the navy and in the overseas possessions (Freir
de Oliveira 1889 IV: 468). One distinctive group in this street youth culture was unmarried male
migrants from Galicia in Spain who often worked in Lisbon as water-carriers or porters. They sought
work in the urban economy as apprentices or errand boys, as stone breakers or bakers help, or
servants and dock workers. Foreigners often noted that there was a glut of servants in Lisbon who
were poorly paid but also under-employed.
If they were well recommended, youths might find a job as a lackey or page to a member of the
nobility. Sometimes they provided sexual gratification. A saying of 1651 was that There is no hen
that doesnt lay eggs or lackey that wont participate in sodomy: this is the service that is wanted of
them (Mott 1988: 125). Some youths might be fortunate enough to have family members to provide
lodgings; many more were in a bachelor subculture of the economy of makeshifts. One currency in
that economy was male prostitution.
Girls and women in early modern Portugal were closely controlled and kept at home. There were
many nunneries although not all of their inhabitants felt a strong vocation for the religious life.
Relations between the sexes throughout Iberia were perhaps less free than in Europe beyond the
Pyrenees, at least in the opinion of many foreign travelers prior to the twentieth century. Unmarried
sexually mature females were strictly chaperoned in the urban upper classes. Among the working class
girls were exhorted not to lose their honor for if they did so they would be much less likely to find a
worthy husband than a virgin. Lower-class males, particularly adolescents without money or power,
who could not afford the services of a prostitute found scant opportunity to enjoy heterosexual sex.
Adults who had taken a vow of chastity however were presumably of a different nature. It has been
calculated that there was a big increase in the number of Portuguese monsteries from the fifteenth to
the seventeenth centuries. Around 1650 there were more than 25,000 regulars and nuns and more than
30,000 secular priests. For every thirty-six Portuguese one was under vows. Lisbon was the biggest
center of clergy in Portugal, both seculars and regulars. The medieval cathedral was built along a
military design so that it could be defended against sudden raids by enemies sailing up the Tagus. The
city landscape was punctuated with the spires and roofs of churches and convents. The cassocked
priests were much in evidence in the streets as the mendicants solicited alms or the clergy went about
their daily business.
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Not all of the male clergy and perhaps not all nuns kept their vows of chastity Just as in modern
times there was a far higher proportion of homosexual men among the Catholic priesthood than in the
Portuguese male population at large. The Church provided a niche for homosexual males - a place
where they might acquire social respectability, even power, and be relieved of the pressures to marry.
In a way the Church offered a means of dealing with troubling issues of sexuality. Priests who could
not keep their vows of chastity often controlled spaces for the commission of sexuality with other
males. In the denunciations and trials of sodomites in seventeenth-century Lisbon there is abundant
evidence of clerical homosexual activityJust as the registers of solicitation show many thousands of
women being used sexually by priests.
In the shifting conditions of life stages it might well be said of early modern Lisbon as it has of
Renaissance Florence that for most males sodomy was a temporary and occasional transgression. If
not sodomy at least mutual mastur-bation was common among youths. Participants in same-sex genital
activities in the age cohort of adolescents and youths before marriage did not categorize themselves as
a sexual orientation. However the son of the bailiff of the Inquisition in 1620 seemed to do just that
when he spoke of many people of that type who went to the house of a great nobleman where they
met in the room of his lackey. He entered into detail about sexual practices. Among the individuals
was a priest, David Cardose, accused of organizing a ring of youths for male prostitution. Another
witness said that the priest Cardose was very persistent both in sodomy and providing youths and a
place to have sex, and that he procured them for money, and that many youths were urged to go to his
house. In Lisbon there was in 1620 a masculine society of lackeys and priests enticing younger males
(mocos) to be sexually available for money.
A leading figure in that society was a mulatto dancer, son of a black female slave and an unknown
white father, who was called Domingos of the Dance. The dances were known as being those of
fairies Ponchonos - and obviously attracted spectators. They were also called dances of the women,
which stressed the gender switch of male participants. Domingos would be put to death and burned in
1621 aged 26. His trial took evidence from seven of his sexual part-ners: two priests, two married men
and two lay bachelors plus a free mulatto. The sexual acts dated back as far as ten years previ ously,
from the time Domingos was 15. In stating the sexual practices involved in his sexual curriculum a
married man of 40 revealed that Domingos had started to sodomize him but that he could not stand it,
and he the married man had not sodomized Domingos. The free mulatto said that when he was 62 he
had once sodomized Domingos and Domingos had twice sodomized him. The other men all
sodomized Domingos: one mentioned that he was then beardless (desbarbeado). This sexual activity
took place in houses, significantly, save for the married man of 40 who said their sex acts took place
outside a convent at Odivelas, some 10 kilometers inland, where he had gone to watch the Dance of
the Ponchonos. The sixth man noted that he had first sodomized Domingos in 1614 in a house
belonging to a priest. Two and a half years later he had sexual commerce with
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him in a house that Domingos had (nha) on the rua dos Cavaleiros, an old street that still survives in
Lisbon with this name, leading up towards the Sao Jorge castie and the Graca church where some
neighbors testified that Domingos worshipped. This testimony also implied that Domingos was
notoriously femi-nine in mannerism and mostly receptive in sodomy, but that he was also sometimes
insertive with older men. Domingos never confessed during his trial. In his genealogy he explained
that his name was really Domingos Rodrigues but that he was called Rocha which was the name of his
owner, and that he earned his living as a dancer, that he was unmarried, had been baptized in Sao
Julio church in Lisbon but did not know the Commandments of the Church.
Priests evidently controlled spaces to which young males could go. An August-inian monk who
lived in Lisbon at the College of Saint Anthony the Old confessed in 1644 to having, c. 1635,
entertained a barbers boy in his cell, whose sumame he remembered but not his given name, who was
then a bachelor learning from his unele and who was then 17, thin and light-skinned with green eyes,
and that he then did not hoye a beard (my emphasis). He added that he now did. They had some sex
but he could not remember details about ejaculations. The barber it transpired in other testimony from
a second priest was married in 1644 with a place of business. The second priest said that ten months
earlier the married man had been on the point of committing sodomy but there had not been
penetration. The apprentice barber with the green eyes at 17 was having two-way sodomy with a 36-
year-old priest; and as a married man of 25 was ready to sodomize a 41-year-old priest. Antonio
Alvares Palhaco, 66 in 1644 who had been in trouble previously for sodomy in 1630, said that he did
masturbation and was sodomized by the married barber Machado. He added that Machado had had a
lot of sodomy with Antonio de Azevedo, who was responsible for the altar in the Cathedral (altareiro
da S). This man actually confessed that Machado had been sodomizing him for eight years and as
recently as eight months before his testimony in 1645, noting that it was once in the barbers house but
also in the latrines (necessrias) of the Cathedral, and that he always gave the barber money.
The barbers sexual services to priests extended to providing them with a member of his wifes
family, a bachelor who was 20 years old when arrested. The younger man recalled that ten years
earlierJoo Machado was engaged to his sister and the two boys regularly siept together in a bakery on
rua da D. Mafaldo. Sixteen-year-old Joo touched his anus with his penis and asked him if he wanted
to be sodomized: 10-year-old Luis declined and nothing else happened. An alternative version of the
bed in the bakery was given by Joo who claimed that Luis had sodomized him but there was no
spilling of seed because he was then only about 12 years of age. What seems indubitable is that long-
term sieeping together of the two boys in the same bed had led to sexual intimacy and complicity
which continued after the marriage of the older one to the sister of the younger. The barber when
married seems to have pimped for the still bachelor Luis who had a Job as a valet to the conde da
Torre to customers like Padre Luis da Costa three years before. When Luis was 17 the
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priest asked the barber if he could Tool around with the youth, using a word that the notary explained
as being a synonym for sodomy. The barber answered yes. The priest went off with his brother-in-law.
The barber explicitly said he did not know what happened between them, but that it was for money.7
When the barber was attending to the beard of Sanches de Almeida, a priest aged over 60, he told him
that his brother in law was n/anchono and had done fairy stuff (fanchonices) with him. The barber
sent Luis to the house of Sanches who fellated him on from fifteen to twenty occasions while himself
masturbating with the nature of the youth in his mouth. It was because of this that the word for pimp
aicovitf-e figured in the barbers sentence in the Auto-da-F, since having siept with Luis as a young
boy he subsequently was setting up the teenager for paid sex with his clients.
The Early Modern paradigm of adult-youth sexual systems was, it has been argued, a small part of
male-female relations where youths were an acceptable sexual choice for an older man in the absence
of, or prior to, sustained sexual commerce with a wife. Youths might provide an ancillary sexual
satisfaction. In that paradigm littie or no emphasis was placed on the sexual pie asure or response of
the younger partner. Neither participant thought of themselves as definitively homosexual or gay
Youths as much as women and girls were subordinate objects to dominant males in the sexual arena,
just as lord and vassal shared reciprocal obligations under feudalism.
We find in seventeenth-century Lisbon clear signs of the tension between the feudal model and that
of a sub culture identity The count of Vi la Franca engaged in a full repertoire of sexual acts with
younger partners ranging from manual and Inter-crural masturbation, fellatio, and sodomy in receptive
and insertive roles. He was also married and had a son, the latter of whom appeared before the
Inquisitors to say his father had masturbated and sodomized him. All of these partners said they had
been forced to sin by the count. Even when admitting to repeated orgasms over long periods of time
they denied any plea-sure in these activities. The word/anchono is used nowhere in the trial.
8

By contrast in other trials of a street society of hustlers, priests and laymen there was reference to a
way of talking among homosexual men and to a social life. The /anchonos of Lisbon shared a
complicity and an identity in homosexual practices at least from the sixteenth century. They called
themselves and were called by others/anchonos. Many of them were married, or married when older.
They were males who habitually and repeatedly engaged in sodomy with other males as well as other
sexual practices. They seem to have recognized themselves as a group with shared sexual activities
even if it was not a fixed social identity. It was a behavior which the Church taught was a sin, but
some of th e/anchonos remained exclusively oriented to other men. The exclusively male-oriented
/anchonos who never married did not perhaps formulate any ideas of a right to do what they pleased,
and perhaps they were burdened by a sense of guilt over repeated sin, but they defied social and
religious constraints.
Seventy-eight years later, in 1698, an other priest was picking up males younger than him but with
no hint that he associated with other men who
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shared his desires. He was a loner in his efforts to satisfy his personal sexual crav-ings. In the trial of
one of his calamites, a cavalryman of 16 whom he met by calling to him from the window as the youth
passed the house next to the Saint Nicholas Church on horseback when returning to his barracks, we
have the succinct version recounted by the priest followed by the more detailed discussion of what
happened in the words of the young man. The priest said simply that when alone together, and after
some dishonest touchings, he persuaded the youth to take down his breeches and to lie face down on
the bed and that he mounted him twice and both times deposited seed in his rear vase. The
cavalryman was more expansive in giving the details of a homosexual encounter in late seventeenth-
century Lisbon:
He said that about a month ago more or less he the confessant was on horseback, passing in front
of the house of a priest and he does not know his name or where he was born, but he was young
and a bit more than 25 years old, tall body, not very fat, with a round pal face, and he goes about
dressed in the Romn style in a cassock, and he lives next to the Church of Saint Nicholas... the
priest called out to him from the window of his house to he the confessant as he passed by going
on horseback to his barracks... going to the house of the priest at nightfall and going into his house
without having any previous knowledge of him the priest asked him if he had gone back to the
barracks already and he said yes. The said priest gave him sweets and wine of which he the
confessant drank two big cups and became drunk, and in that sort the said priest took him to the
bed which in this house was in an inner room and threw him down on it kissing him and taking
hold of his virile member and ordered him to turn over with his breeches down, and putting
himself on top of the confessant he put his virile member in the back vase of he the confessant,
and penetrating him all the way in he scattered seed inside him and in the course of an hour more
or less that he the confessant was with the said priest on the said bed they consummated three
times one with another the sin of sodomy in the above-mentioned form, scattering always the said
priesfs seed in the rear vase of him the confessant and that in all of this the said [priest] was agent
while he was receptive, and after this nothing more happened with the said priest.
Later in the trial he added that as well as the cakes and wine which brought him to bed that after
the sex was over he wns paid, thus establishing a hustler-client relationship between the priest whose
clerical costume, house, interior bed all marked his place in the world. He claimed the priest had paid
more than another priest with whom he had confined his activities to masturbation. His sodomizer paid
him a silver coin called Apalaca, while the other client preferred only a copper tosido, worth less than
a seventh of the payment for anal sex.
The priest Sanches de Almeida in the 1630s provided both food and lodgings for male sexual
partners, and he also permitted the use of his premises for others to have sex together. This point was
specifically made by a 17-year-old, Francisco
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Pacheco, who said that in the house of the royal chaplain Sanches de Almeida together with a 21-year-
old valet (moco da cmara) the priest gave them a light lunch and then whispered in the ear of the
older youth who then took the younger boy to the bed of the priest. There they both had an orgasm
from frot-tage. In his confession Francisco explicitly said the priest was not present, but that his
partner had told him that the priest permitted youths who were his friends to use his house for such
things. Other youths confirmed that they found refuge in the house where the priest helped them but
also expected to fellate them. References to the priesfs same-sex activities fell from c. 1624 to the
1640s. The house on the calcada de Sao Crispim near the Colegio of the Irish fathers - approximately
where the present Ese a din has are - gave shelter to adolescents in the 15 to 20 years age range,
including runaways like Manuel Gomes of 1640. Sanches de Almeida in 1630, when he was 50 years
old, was often providing a bed for a 15-year-old as he did for another and repeatedly fellated them.
They both gave the impression of a welcoming household for young boys, and that he knew perfectly
well that they were masturbating each other, although they did not know if he knew of worse acts,
meaning sodomy. More information about the house was provided when a search party looked for a
runaway slave cook with a bad reputation as a fairy (again using the word fanchono). They burst
into the priesfs house and found Almeida with one boy who seemed to be preparing supper, but inside
another room with a locked door which they forced and went in with a candie they found a blonde
white youth with some light beard getting out of the bed in his shirt and another boy also not fully
dressed whose clothes were on a sideboard, and they deduced that it was clear that they all in the
house siept in the single bed. Sanches de Almeida was chaplain of the royal chapel of Santa Barbara
which was further up the hill inside the parameter of the Castelo of Sao Jorge (Castilho 1936: iv, 39).
The chapel contained a remarkable statue of Our Lady of Poverty of which the French Theatine
Bluteau said in 1707 that the rust on her crown symbolized perfectly her love of the needy. It seems
that Almeida was protected in some way since his proclivities seem to have been well known to his
neighbors.
What was the gay way of talking in Portugal that might sign or mark space? Certainly from the
sixteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth the word used in a third sex sense of an effeminate
man or fairy, wns fanchono. This meant someone whose preferred role was receptive in sodomy -
paciente - or perhaps more accurately was an individual known to be available for receptive anal sex.
That is, he was a man who wanted to take the womans part in a phal-locratie culture. A notoriously
effeminate (but fully bearded) Madeiran told the Inquisitors in 1570: The /anchonos are the patients,
and never does a fanchono sin with a fanchono in committing this sin (Dias 1989: 157). Literary
scholars identified this usage offanchono as an effeminate male in the sixteenth-century theater which
suggests that it was not only a term used by effeminate homosexuals to describe others like themselves
but also had this meaning to the larger heterosexual public (Teyssier 1982: 65-78).
Mott found the usage of menino puto for a younger boy who could be sodom-
121

ized. The word for a female whore -puta - is easily masculinized by changing the last letter toputo, and
thus makes a simple and obvious vehicle for describing a vulnerable or needy boy who agreed or was
coerced as much as an adolescent who liked receptive anal sex. Street boys in general, ragamuffins on
the look-out for a coin for an errand or other minor services, were also sometimes cn\\ed putos with no
obvious sexual meaning. In the 1891 novel discussed below when the baron finds that his catamite was
sieeping with his wife as well as with him he calis the youth - Puto indecente! (Botelho 1979: 195). This
wandering semantic field could thus mean either a calamite or a street urchin depending on context
and speech situation. At another point in the story the youth Eugenio describes another noble who
propositioned him in the street as a gajo which, as in the exchange from earlier in the book, is the
street-boys term for a client.
In a testimony of 1643 by a 16-year-old boy we find a remarkable short description of suggestive
talk among men who are on the look-out for homosexual acts:
all of these men continued to meet in the house ofJoo Mendonca, and when they are there they
talk of these filthinesses, saying that such a queer (bobija) takes pleasure of this bobija, and that so-
and-so was good in his time, and when a youth passed by in the street some of them say to the
others that this is a good piece, the bugger, and that of these names and these words he the witness
thought ill, and that they were directed always towards dishonest acts of the crime of sodomy...
The notary made the odd observation that because of his youth the boy did not confess well but for the
modern reader at least the adolescent was keenly aware of the difference between suggestive campy
talk between /anchonos and accepted normal speech of macho men outside of the sodomites house.
The Auto da Fe was the locus classicus of the representative public sphere, to use the concept
ofJurgen Habermas, of the absolutist monarchy consecrated by the Church. What would be called
today the gay subculture of baroque Lisbon was surely rocked by the Auto of 25 June 1645. The event
had all the elements of ceremony in the heart of the capital (Bethencourt 1994).
The sentences of eight sodomites and three judaizers who were to die were proclaimed in June on
the square in front of the royal palace:
in the presence of the King Our Lord, the Queen, crown prince and princes, the Most Reverend
Senhor Bishop Inquisitor General, the members of the Council [of the Inquisition] Inquisitors,
Deputies, Prosecutor, notaries, other ministers, familiars and officials of the Holy Office and a
great many of the nobility of this kingdom and the people of this city of Lisbon.
(Higgs 1993: 19)
122


Figure 5.1 Early eighteenth century print showing a Lisbon Auto da Fe procession of those
condemned by the Inquisition, and clergy, and officials.
The fire that in the Old Testament punished those who sinned against nature in Sodom now consumed
six laymen and two priests noted as incorrigible (devasso), that is to say, persistent homosexuals.
To my knowledge there is no eyewitness account of those proceedings. In a quaint instance of
priestly hypocrisy the secularjustices were always asked in the formulae of the sentences to treat the
prisoner with care, and not to proceed to the death penalty or the spilling of blood. What this meant in
fact was described by a British resident of Portugal recounting the punishment inflicted on two
obdurate judaizers at the start of the eighteenth century. A letter of 15 January 1706 [sic but in fact
1707] written to Dr Gilbert Burnet by the minister to the English factory Wilcox, afterwards bishop of
Rochester:
My Lord, In obedience to your lordships commands, of the lOth ult. I have here sent all that was
printed concerning the last Auto da Fe [of 12 September 1706]. I saw the whole process, which
was agreeable to what is published by Limborch [1633-1712] and others upon that subject. Of the
five persons condemned there were but four burnt: Antonio Tavanes, [i.e. Tavares] by an unusual
reprieve, being saved after the procession. Heytor Dias [da Paz] [Trial number 9776 of the Lisbon
Inquisition], and Maria Pinteyra [i.e. Pinheira (Trial number 1537] were burnt alive, and the other
two first strangled. The execution was very cruel. The woman was alive in the flames half an
hour, and the man above an hour. The present king [Joo y 1706-50] and his brothers were seated
at a window so near, as to
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be addressed to a considerable time, in very moving terms, by the man as he was burning. But
though the favour he begged was only a few more faggots, yet he was not able to obtain it. Those
which are burnt alive here, are seated on a bench twelve feet high, fastened to a pole, and above
six feet higher than the faggots. The wind being a littie fresh, the mans hinder parts were
perfectly wasted; and as he turned himself, his ribs opened before he left speaking, the fire being
recruited as it wasted to keep himjust in the same degree of heat. But all his entreaties could not
procure him a larger allowance of wood to shorten his misery and despatch him.
(Wright 1816: 247-8)
The significance of this description is that the Auto took place with the individuals named whose
complete trials are available for inspection in Lisbon. In the bound collection of printed lists of
participants in that particular Auto there is a manuscript annotation by the two names which reads
queimado vivo - burnt alive. This would seem to suggest that this did not always take place. It also
accords with the English spectators description.
Sodomites were perhaps put to death in the same fashion without the prior strangulation, but I have
not yet located a precise description of the burning of a sodomite. As the Englishman noted, the issue
of prior strangulation, and the rapidity with which death was induced when the garotte was refused,
were elements in the theatricality of the punishment. Given the popular hatred of sodomites they may
well have been burned alive. The engraving by Bernard Picart (1673-1733) on the Terreiro do Paco
depicts only male spectators although there is also a coach, and the Windows of the royal palace are
not depicted with spectators. Whether this was artistic economy by the engraver or an accurate
analysis of a primarily male crowd is not easily decided. He also did not depict the bench or elbow
chair mentioned by British observers. We do not now know if the burnings, floggings and other
humiliation rituals of sodomites brought about a public catharsis in baroque Lisbon for those who
thought male homosexuality an offense to God. The last sodomite to parade in a Lisbon Auto da Fe
with the death sentence was in 1740: he was a straw-mat maker brought up as a foundiing at the royal
hospital in Lisbon who had been found guilty of sodomizing a 4-year-old infant boy. In fact his
execution was commuted to a life sentence to the galleys. In 1745 two men in their fifties, a surgeon
and a priest, appeared in the public Auto, and in 1748 a Brazilian mulatto and a black slave, both in
their forties, processed in Lisbon. In an Auto in Lisbon of September 1754 a bachelor merchant who
had emigrated from Minho to Mariana, M.G. in Brazil paraded before the scornful public.
Although the documentation on sodomy cases has existed for centuries, many earlier historians
found them too distasteful to do more than mention them in passing. Mott used the material most
intensively and militantly. For him the men arrested for sodomy in the past are the historical
antecedents of the gay move-ment of the 1980s on. He brings to his views the special authority of
someone who studied for eight years in a Dominican seminary, was married and fathered
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two daughters, founded the Atheist Group of Latin Amrica, set up the Bahian Anti-AIDS Group, and
enjoyed in 1994 a same-sex union with an Afro-Brazilian some twenty years his junior which had
been recognized by his University as eligible for benefits coverage. Motfs work is sprinkied with
mockery of Catholic clergy and rituals. He has perhaps not sufficiently stressed changes in the
altitudes of the tribunal over time.
One of the most remarkable sodomy cases of late seventeenth century Lisbon has already been
cited in the adventures of the cavalryman: the Azorean priest Father Machado and his thirteen
catamites over a period of eight and a half years. The priest was insistent in his confession that once he
had the boy in his house and bed he was always insertive. He dweit next to the church where he
officiated. He repeated in each description of his numerous sex acts that he was always the agent
while the boy was exclusively the patient.
The circumstance of his confession on 13 February 1698 showed how care-fully he planned to give
the information without raising the alarm. He went out of his way to denounce them, even traveling
from Lisbon to the city of Evora in the Alentejo to do so. The spatial significance of that is
extraordinary: his church was located at no more than 10 minutes walk from the main door of the
Lisbon Estaus palace of the Holy Inquisition. His house was adjacent to his Lisbon church: that was
the house from which he sent his manservant out on errands while he sodomized his catamites. Evora,
by contrast, is 115 kilometers away from Lisbon. This was his small, special and penitent part of what
Jean Delumeau has called the Western guilt culture (Delumeau, 1990). One can only speculate about
his feelings, presumably of clerical compassion and unction, over the punishments, ruin and
humiliations that would overtake his thirteen sexual partners. By traveling to Evora he was taking
careful precautions that they should not be forewarned or able to flee from capture and punishment.
On 9 November 1698 some ten months after their arrests ten youths and young men out of thirteen
who had been sodomized in his Lisbon house by the Azorean priest were whipped through the streets
of the Portuguese capital, sentenced to the galleys for various terms (and subsequently exiled for life).
One of the thirteen, who came from a middle-class merchant background and had refused to confess
even under torture, was sentenced in private (na Mesa) so that his farnily was not publicly disgraced.
Two others, one a student of Latin and the other an apprentice silversrnith, in the forrner case had been
sodornized once long ago and the apprentice was no longer in the city. The boy the priest had
sodornized most, he clairned a hundred times, had been seduced by him at age 14. At the time of his
trial in 1698 this person was a married man with two daughters. After the Auto each of the convicted
appealed for mercy in letters that often gave details of their family situation. They were exiled for life.
The seducer and insertive sodomizer of the adolescents, being a priest was not whipped or tortured,
was not in the public humiliation ritual at the Auto, but was subsequently secretly exiled from the
kingdom.
The average age of the youths when they started being receptive in anal sex with this priest was a
littie over 16. (It is interesting to note that the median age
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of a sample of receptive partners in male sodomy in fifteenth-century Florence was also 16 (see Rocke
1996: 116). The youngest had been 14 when initiated, and the oldest 19. Clearly the priest was having
sex with some of them concur-rently on different days over the same time period. Of his occasional
partners (with whom he had sex fewer than ten times), the professions were tailor, artillery soldier,
cavalry soldier, post-office worker and three students. His repeat partners of between eleven to fifty
acts each were a surgeon, a tailor, an apprentice silver-smith and a grammar student. His most
persistent partners, both with a score of between 51 to 100 receptive acts of sodomy, were a wax
worker and an employee in a bookshop.
What is most striking is the relative inversion of the sentencing pattern from modern usage. A
priest who sodomized thirteen teenagers while making use of his own premises, gradually extending
the complicity with each from masturbations to sodomizing them, sometimes giving them money and
bringing them back for more of the same, clearly in a calculating and predatory type of sexual activity
might be expected to be punished more severely than his sexual prey. However that was not the
assumption of the seventeenth-century Inquisitors. The priest was exiled to be sure, but without the
public shaming that would cast light on his failings to his clerical vows of chastity. Another priest,
Father Ascenco, was also not in the Auto although young men whom he had solicited to sodomize
him were.
In fact the sentencing does not seem to fit with the number of sexual acts, or the age at initial
seduction or the sexual role taken. Thus Joo Nunes Soares, who in his confession claimed to have
been active with another partner, but paciente for Father Machado got a flogging and ten years in the
galleys: he was 18 at the time of the Auto. The married man aged 23 with three daughters at the time
of the Auto (the third of whom was born while he was in the Inquisition prison), had been seduced
when 14. He had not had sex with Father Machado for years and said he had changed his sexual ways
and was contrite. Nevertheless for this his propertywas confiscated, he was flogged through the streets,
and was sentenced to eight years in the galleys. Doubtless he felt a littie bemused at the workings of
Father Machados conscience, and that of the Inquisitors. We also cannot perhaps ever know if he felt
any fellowship with the other convicted sodomites in the 1698 Auto as they processed before the
church of Saint Dominic before ajeering mob, or whether he knew that they too had been used by the
parish priest of Saint Ni cholas.
Yet itis perhaps true that the se grim ceremonials designed by priests to warn the spectators of the
consequences of the unspeakable sin and the other offenses enumerated in the Edict of Faith had
another result: they displayed in the heart of the city that there were individuals who could be their
husbands, neighbors, fathers, brothers, their sons or their nephews who participated in this form of
sexuality.
A century later in Lisbon there had been a big shift in praxis. In 1753 a priest who asked errand
boys and casual laborers during confessions at the cathedral and elsewhere about their penis size,
whether they masturbated and whether in the houses which they often shared in large numbers they
played sexually when
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undressed for sieeping, was sentenced to eight years of exile. However various people petitioned the
Inquisition on his behalf and he was excused much of his punishment.li The 1777-1807 Inquisition
documentation in eludes a fll case and sentence of a rural pedophile rapist accused of the nefando, an
incomplete extra-judicial inquiry into a village butcher who as a widower propositioned the local
bachelors, and a variety of denunciations and some voluntary confessions from Lisbon. This represents
no more than 1 per cent of the business of the late Inquisition which manifestly was not greatly
concerned with policing this particular activity in Lisbon or following up on denunciations.
Were those arrested for the nefando men who thought of themselves as homosexuals in the sense
meant in the postmodern usage of gay men? We have a voluntary self-accusation in 1799 in Lisbon
made by a Brazilian sailor over 40 for disorders in religious matters, but he added his confession of
innumerable complete sodomitic acts with persons of the same sex in the back passage most recently
with a boy in Oporto.
neither could he specify, because of the multiplicity of places, times and the diversity of persons
who were passive [paciente] with him in this fault, however the slackness of his conscience was
such that he used all and every occasion convenient to this end... 11
The sailor made no reference to sodomizing women.
Canon Antonio de Queiros Camacho Botelho, interrogated by the Inquisition as a freemason,
confessed on 23 February 1792 to his enormous faults in places and with men he could not name:
knaves have no name... He said that he was prey to the shameful and most degraded vice of sodomy
where he was usually receptive for anonymous accomplices, but that he would provide those names
and places he could remember. As a priest his sexual encounters were generally nameless, furtive and
brief and outdoors in Lisbon, and all those he admitted were recruited among his social inferiors.
However it was not his homosexual activities but his Freemasonry that caused his arrest.
In the later eighteenth century in Portugal sodomy or homoerotic practices were prosecuted rarely
by the Inquisition save in cases of child abuse, or sexual solicitation of male penitents by priests. Lay
adults were left alone, or merely warned to mend their ways. Denunciations were not even investigated
save for priests and in some matters of religious scandal. In short, during the post-Pombal period there
was an end to the make an example policy of earlier times. Inquisition records provide other
examples of sodomites over the course of the eighteenth century. In 1790 a married surgeon from
Lisbon aged 33 revealed that he had had sodomitic acts twice with some male nurses (unspralicantes
do Hospital) some four to five years ago."
Self-denunciations might also provide information on the location of sex acts. It was in his own
house and marital bed that the husband of a D. Margarida in the 1790s blamed too much wine with his
dinner for his abominable advances to his wife. She wrote that he had been so insistent
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that he made me violate my own will in letting him serve himself of me by the back passage, and
reminding him the next day of how much this had cost me he said that he only remembered in part
and that he wished to see how it was, and once again he asked that I should consent to satisfy him
in the same fashion, but now [July 1795] that I am informed that this offense belongs to the Holy
Office I come to it to denounce myself so that by the love of God I shall be pardoned...
The same husband wrote a revealing confession in the same month in which he added to the offense
against his wife further details of a drunken nocturnal promenade when outdoors, in the Lisbon night,
he met three soldiers, and propositioned them to agree to the same fault (delicio) as that which his wife
denounced. He claimed that one soldier was agreeable to his request but that he could not achieve his
desire. With the other two he achieved what he wanted. His language contrasted desire and wish, with
what he called fault and guilt (culpa) but not a sin, both in his own house and out of doors.
The most prominent name in the cademos do nefando of the late Inquisition was a leading
member of the Academy of Sciences Jos Francisco Correa da Serra. He found himself sometimes
present in elite space in company with a member of the royal family, the duque de Lafoes. At other
times he was in more plebeian circumstances when he had three or four times made a sin against
nature with Faustina, a woman from the Praca das Flores and had done the same with Ana Joaquina
some years earlier. He said his most recent acts of sodomy in 1792-3 had been with unknown persons
in the darkness of night outdoors, and in particular five or six times with a youth (moco) whose name
he gives and whom he had admitted into his own house [my emphasis]. The docu-ment was not
annotated with any call for further inquiries.
It is possible that police records in Lisbon will yield information about homosexuality in the city
after the abolition of the Inquisition in 1821. Something can also be gleaned from imaginative
literature and also satire, prose, poetry and song on the feelings and activities of lesbians and gay men.
Such writing was often oblique in its statement of meanings. Few things are more difficult for the
historian to capture than irony on the part of the long dead.
The literary echoes of male homosexuality in Portugal in the seventeenth century were sparse and
generally contemptuous in tone. They pointed often to the relations of adolescents and adults.
TheJesuit Antonio Vieiras comment on the presence of harpies among the varieties of thieves is
followed by observations about the rich house of a man whom he had first known yesterday as the
shameless page of a rich minister - (pagem safado de um ministro opulento). The connection here of
a loaded word, safado, in context of a page whose proximity to a rich minister leads on to an
expensively furnished house points to the toy-boy/sugar Daddy duo which is one of the constants of
the gay male European and American imagination of possible relationships. Vieiras description of the
domestic interior in Lisbon of the ex-page provides a seventeenth-century version of the Queens
Nest:
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I saw that he had wall-hangings and pictures, writing desks and chairs, monkeys at the Windows
and parrots in ivory cages, mirrors of cristal in the salon, docks of mother-of-peari and other
furnishings such as are not owned by the king of China.
(Vieira 1937: 321-2)
There is a clear implication of the rewards amassed by a now superannuated catamite for sexual
services.
Relations between male adolescents and older men reappeared in literature in the nineteenth
century. Some theories of morbidity and degenerative sexuality found among doctors at the end of the
nineteenth century inspired a novel published in 1891 at Oporto: O Bardo de Lavas (the Baron from
Lavos). Born in 1855, the author Abel Acacio de Almeida Botelho used his first and last names on his
novels. He died in Argentina in 1917 where he was a Portuguese diplomat. He had a distinguished
career as a military officer, journalist, politician, poet and novelist. O Bardo is perhaps the first
sustained book-length word portrait of a homosexual in Portuguese literature. In the case of the
Portuguese and Brazilian world this was not a common subject at any time, despite the fairly high
incidence of homosexual activity. Lisbon and Oporto in the nineteenth century certainly had hustlers
(putos) available as a cheaper and ancillary form to heterosexual prostitution. Like many Portuguese
men with strong homosexual inclinations in the past and present the baron married - a state he entered
into after the death of his own parents.
O Bardo raised a great hue and cry among the reading public. There were calis for its suppression
on the grounds that a novel about a pederast was obscene. It was also a great commercial success and
the first edition sold out in a fortnight. It was often reprinted in later editions as part of the set of
social-realist novels which Botelho entitled Social Pathology O Bardo was written between March
1888 and May 1889. To the best of my knowledge it was never trans-lated.
Botelho was, on the face of it, a heterosexual married man. His marriage was childless. There is
little likelihood of knowing now whether Botelho had any participant ob serverknowledge of juvenile
male homosexual prostitution in Lisbon. If he was himself bisexual he sought to conceal this from his
public by his repeated expressions of disgust for the character he created. At the same time the reader
received precise indications about where to look for hustlers in the Portuguese capital.
In the story the baron finds the major youth character, an orphan of 16 who is a street vendor called
Eugenio, on the central avenue of Lisbon, that of Liberty. He meets the boy at night and persuades the
boy to meet him at a rented apartment in another district, the Bairro Alto. There he makes him pose
naked. The baron examines him, sketches him, and then takes him to bed and sodomizes him.
Lisbons gay geography in the late nineteenth century is the backdrop to the unfolding of the story.
The novel starts at rua do Salitre as people arrive for the
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circus with the night-time street pick-up of Eugenio. The novel ends with a scene near the rua dos
Condes theater, a zone which was still listed in gay guides a century later as a cruising ground. These
streets are on opposite sides of the wide Liberty Avenue which was laid out in its modern form at the
end of the nineteenth century. There is an account of how the baron in 1867 (aged 32) scoured the
streets for boys:
It had to be a boy that he was looking for because the eyes of this tall dry man sought out the
beardless faces, with a light fuzz, of adolescents. He stared at them for an instant with a greedy
and dark fixation, and then quickly went elsewhere. It was possible to see after some minutes of
observation that he did not look for anyone in particular. On the contrary, he seemed to compare,
contrast, choose. If there were kids he rapidly walked past them after a furtive glance. There were
others at whose discovery his face showed the most pungent sensuality. Then, with them, there
was no means that he did not use to try to capture their attention. He lightly brushed them with his
arm, he touched their thigh with his walking stick as if absent minded, he stood by their side
giving them a dry, glassy and persistent look, and he blew a cloud of smoke at the nape of their
necks as he passed by.
His attempt to pick up a 15-year-old who sold cakes is described; when the boy understood the
barons sexual intent he says rudely to the nobleman that he is mistaken.

Figure 5.2 Amap of Lisbon, 1785, showing the central districtwith rectangular layout
constructed after the earthquake.
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If the baron lived with his wife on the largo Sao Cristovo not far from the Saint George Castie
with a view over the city, his apartment for assignations on the other side of the city was in the Bairro
Alto on rua da Rosa, the name of an actual street. (This was a fairly obvious reference to the scandal of
the Travessa da Espera in the same district which took place c. 1880 when a nobleman, the marqus de
Vallada, was caught by the police having sex with a soldier.) Eugenio of the novel is lodged there. One
night when the baron cannot find his kept catamite Eugenio he goes to the Arco da Bandeira and finds
a scruffy boy for quick sex in the first squalid nook of a narrow alleyway he could discover. Eugenio
is gradually introduced into the main household and in due course he cuckolds the baron. After the
baron returns from foreign travel six months after the scandal when he had discovered his wife and
Eugenio in flagrante delicio, he is to be seen every night in the theater staring through opera glasses at
Eugenio, now on stage wearing tights. When the baron dropped still further in his world because of the
scandal and his extravagant debauchery he sought out male pick-ups near the waterfront. His hunting
ground was near the Tagus and the cheap wine bars. These tascas for drinking were on the Calcada do
Garcia, beco do Forno and that of Ricarda. There the baron met sailors, soldiers and coachmen who
were muscular and strong and to whom he wished to be receptive in anal sex.
Botelho explains the barons sexual drive as a result of a flawed genetic inheritance (from his
decadent noble family) and his education in aJesuit school where he masturbated a lot. If the alleys of
Lisbon are the outdoor backdrop to the barons pick-ups for sex there is the indoor symbolism of a
Ganymede print which hangs on the barons wall. The baron is particularly fond of this picture. It
provides the opportunity for his discussion with some other male guests of how male bodies are much
better looking than those of women. Later in the story, after the scandal, one of his guests
inadvertently brings him the Rembrandt caricature of Ganymede (from Dresden) where the young boy
being lifted up by the Eagle is urinating in fright. Later, even when in poverty and completely outcast
from polite society, the baron still has the print on the wall in the room provided for him out of
compassion by an old society associate. At the end of the novel he has finally sold it so that he can buy
a hat to attend the wedding of a virginal daughter of his compassionate benefactor. In other words he
kept his picture of the abduction of the beautiful youth after he had lost his wife, his palace, his social
position and even his failed attempt to be a photographer. It was a remnant of a coded gay interior
decoration of his living space as much as a metaphor for the passionate homoerotic ideal of his
existence.
The Bardo de Laxos thus reads as a classic account of the punishments visited upon the insertive
pederast who gradually evolves into a receptive sodomite, and whose lineage ends with him. Like the
Presidente of the Liaisons Dangereuses of Lacios he is disfigured by disease when he finally dies. On
the other hand the book was relatively informative about how youths could be picked up by cruising
on the main Liberty Avenue in Lisbon and on certain streets in the downtown core, that cheap hoteis
existed where no questions were asked, and that a discreet flat or room for special adventures could be
rented in the Bairro Alto of Lisbon.
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Figure 5.3 Early nineteenth-century neo-classical statue ofthe Love of Virtue from the Ajuda
Palace, Lisbon.
The baron pursued obsessively another child labeled only as the boy in the vest, a particularly
attractive youngster whom he finally succeeds in picking up at night on the west side of rua Augusta,
the main street of the business district. They go to a hotel and the baron fellates the boy who tells him
that a black priest had done the same thing to him the day before. This surprises the baron but also
makes him think that this sort of thing is commonplace and should not be the cause of a guilt complex.
This long novel was very much of its period in that nobody is portrayed as exclusively homosexual
with long-term partners of the same sex or age group. The barons search for gay sex may be
compulsive for him, and the feasting with
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panthers riveting, but it is not given a separate existence from that of heterosexuals. Like Osear Wilde
he had a wife and a place in heterosexual society. However, there are descriptions of the complicities
and friendiiness of feminine-acting men to be found in the streets of Lisbon:
In the dark spot in the middle of the squares he began, lightly brushing against the effeminate
beings that came to cross his path, with salient buttocks and a provocative look, an indecent
nudging of the hips, hand in pocket, arching the back. Usually they were inferior types, kyphosis
[?], irregular, with plastered locks of hair over the ears and a fur beret on the head, jacket, closely
shaven, suspicious and skilled, swirling on the mosaic sidewalk, one eye on the loiterers and the
other on the police.
The baron spoke to them with some banal phrase to strike up a conversation: how the weather
was, or a light for a cigarette, or were they taking a walk? - The crisis of abnormal excitement that
racked the pederast at the first words of these unnameable beings was extraordinary. From thence
it did not take long for them to understand each other, to become confident associates, friends.
And the reveis were launched. Afterwards, frolicking with one and the others as long as the cash
held out, the night flew by in an instant. There were amatory preliminaries on public benches, they
tippled in the wine shops, and they mounted arm in arm to the gods of the theaters, going to hide
the satisfaction of monstrous appetites in the shadows of debauched dens of vice.
The novelette of Mario de S-Garneiro, The Confession of Lucio, written in 1916 shortly before the
poefs suicide, contains at least a homosexual implication of the affection of the narrator for his friend,
who is involved with a woman. It can be read as a discussion of same-sex affection but with the
inevitable presence of women, that is, the angle of vision is never that of exclusively homosexual men.
The novel is absorbed with the relationship between young men of bourgeois background and says
almost nothing of setting. Family control meant that same-sex sustained affairs between school friends
were problematic and at all times furtive and concealed. Death was the literary device for closing off
the extension of an unimaginable love.
Antonio Botto (1897-1959) was a dapper, clean-shaven poet whose unapolo-getic homosexuality
was patent in his 1920 book of poetry entitled Songs. This led to a Church-encouraged student
manifesto in 1923 calling for withdrawai of the book from sale as well as another volume which
showed homosexual sympathies. Botto be came an icon for the Lisbon anticlerical literati and often
appeared in the cafes where they gathered. Jokes circulated about him like that told by the poet
Fernando Pessoa in which a friend teased Botto for prorne-nading arrn-in-arrn with a sailor on Good
Friday Antonio, you are irnpossible. Eating meat on Good Friday! to which Botto replied in his nelly
voice But a Jack Tar [Maruja] is not meat. Its fish."
In the last third of the nineteenth century the French influence on Portuguese
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medical-social thinking was perhaps stronger than the Germn. Various investi-gations by Portuguese
doctors and others echoed the kind of investigations which were beginning at that time in the French-
and the German-speaking empires. Arlindo Camillo Monteiro referred to a study by Maximiliano de
Lemos of the Medical Faculty in Oporto for an erudite monograph (Monteiro 1922: 154-5). Forty
years later the Secretary General of the Lisbon Police, Alexandre Morgado, distinguished between
kept fancy boys and those who hustled because unemployed or homeless and on the streets. He noted
that the latter were to be found late at night on public squares waiting for persons who come out of
the urinals (Monteiro 1922: 201). He said the majority of them were drawn from man servants,
persons who had be en in controlled institutions (intrnalos) meaning orphanages, colleges, prisons and
barracks. What they might learn in such places was suggested by a news report of the 1870s about a
refor-matory forjuvenile delinquents housed in the former convent of the Monicas in Lisbon. Seventy-
one naked boys were locked up in the dormitory each night: their clothes were left outside so that they
did not smell near the beds and because nobody flees in the nude. Poor boys and youths who
hustled in the street were often drawn from trumpeters, soldiers and others in an age range of 15 to 30
years of age, and were mostly found in Lisbon and Oporto, according to Monteiro.
Much male prostitution was not the work of transvestites but of youths and young men who
continued the puto tradition of the Portuguese capital which existed for centuries. Some were to be
found near the River Tagus-side area of the executions of sodomites in the seventeenth century. It was
an active cruising area as the Bardo de Laxos novel said of the 1860s, and as did post 1960s gay
guides to the city. Further along the river the area around the Casa Pia school for orphans and
disadvantaged youths was known in the 1940s until the 1970s for two kinds of encounters: one with
some of the adolescent male pupils (known as casapianos) but also with artillery men from a barracks
situated up the hill. They loitered in the park in front of the Jeronimos monastery. A 1994 report on
youths who worked as prostitutes in the Edward VII Park in central Lisbon described the way in which
they were picked up by car drivers, the high incidence of drug use among them, the occasional scenes
of violence and their ages, ranging from mid teens to early twenties.
Some men on military service participated in prostitution on an occasional basis. Sailors loitered
and displayed in the underground male urinals on Commerce Square hoping to meet a partner who
would pay for sex. The river front along to the electric train station at Cais Sodr, and the urinals
inside that station, were also a notorious venue for pick-ups, especially of conscripts, in the 1960s and
1970s. Teenaged marines, the Marinheiros-Fusileiros, would cross over from the south bank of the
Tagus where their barracks were located to cruise in their white summer uniforms in the Baixa, on
Rossio and as far as the Edward VII Park for same-sex encounters with paying civilians during the era
of the colonial wars that ended in 1974. At the same time all these locations might have gays who
sought egalitarian, non-venal sexual encounters. Indeed the last
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electric trains after midnight that ran along the bank of the Tagus to serve outlying dormitory towns
were often heavily traveled in-bound to the capital by gay men on weekend nights as they arrived
hoping for sexual adventure. The first train to make the outward bound trip in the morning, at around
5:30 a.m., carried its contingent of gay men, either sated or not, back to their homes outside the
capital.
For those without a place to entertain sexual partners or city dweilers who were cautious about
introducing strangers into their home the best-known cheap pensions for sex in Lisbon in 1994 were
one on a square near the Cais do Sodr, another up the hill near the Chiado and a third on the
Escadinhas do Duque stairways. All three were in the historie core of the city. (A room and bed fee of
1,000 escudos for half an hour was at that time effectively the same multiple Daniel Gurin once noted
for street hustlers in Pigalle in Paris: twice the room rental as the price for a brief sexual encounter.)
In Lisbon better-dressed, better-educated male sex escorts who worked for guests from the five star
hoteis would expect much more money than the minimum for the park putos who accepted lifts and
who lived in shacks or abandoned cars. Not only was the geog-raphy of pick-ups variegated but so too
was the behavior and bargaining of the sexual actors in the arena at any given moment.
In modern Lisbon public urinals served as meeting places for non-commercial sexual relations
between men. In the nineteenth century there were some cast-iron vespasiennes in central Lisbon in
imitation of those found in Paris, like that on the Square outside the Misericordia. Under the
authoritarian government (192674) such male urinals both outdoors or indoors were relatively
unsuper-vised. That was especially true for underground toilets near the river on the Praca do
Comercio or those in the station at Cais do Sodr. Many public male urinals in Lisbon were
demolished or closed after the 1974 Revolution of the Carnations. One of the first to be closed to the
public was the large underground urinal with some thirty stands in a semicircular arrangement located
on the main square of Lisbon, Rossio. Under fascism prior to 1974 this remained open long after
midnight and was always very busy with an eiderly attendant who saw nothing as long as behavior had
a faint semblance of propriety. It served as a display cabinet both for sailors and street-boys looking
for paying contacts with whom they went to cheap, nearby pensions as well as some egali-tarian
cruising. The masonry structures on the Campo Grande in Lisbon served a less urban public in a
suburban park near the university, but those urinals were walled in with the advent of democracy to
prevent their unsupervised nocturnal frequentation. As a result they be came arid and irnpregnable
stone box es, menhirs of past masturbations and other forrns of sexual expression, with no utility for
conternporary promenaders by day or night. Subway urinals were closed at some stations. The
washroorns in shopping malls were increasingly under surveillance by security staff.
As the toilet culture declined - was asphyxiated - as the principal site of furtive, silent and
anonyrnous encounters for male sarne-sex activities in Lisbon there was a corresponding development
of comine reial and overt meeting
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places. Modern Lisbon inaugurated since the 1970s a series of gay bars and clubs in the Bairro
Alto district in particular. This was strongly influenced by the tourist trade. police patrols were
discreetly posted near some of the bars most popular with tourists in order to ensure that they were not
at risk in the streets. These bars operated late at night and sometimes included sections for dancing.
The Erica Bar situated on a street in that district was for long a secretive and expensive bar with a
middle-aged woman door-keeper who was an implacable barrier to low class or unsuitable individuals.
However in Lisbon as in Paris during the 1980s bars became more open and accessible and the price
of drinks fell. This was perceived by some Portuguese as the Americanization of the homosexual
subculture in Lisbon. Many other bars were opened from 1974 on, for longer or shorter periods of
time. One bar particularly patronized by foreigners looking for hustlers was owned by an Englishman.
Various steam-baths with a gay clientele existed. Certain cafes flourished which, while not explicitly
gay establishments, were known to enjoy the patron age of men looking for sexual partners. The
tendency after 1974 was for a diminution of the number of such large mixed cafes as the Palladium
on Restauradores Square which was remodeled into boutiques, or the Monumental near Saldanha
Square which was demolished.
By the 1990s there were also increasing numbers of same sex co-resident adult couples in the city
without large age discrepancies, some previously married. Typically both men work. Middle-class
couples in Portugal often remain integrated in their family networks. Others, especially those partners
of working-class origin from small towns, are sometimes rejected by their kin. Such couples
confronted Iberian familialism and refused to defer to the lingering macho disapproval of a modern
gay identity. In Portugal 50 per cent of the respondents to a survey taken in 1990 objected to
homosexuals living next door to them. That contrasted with the average for fourteen European
countries in which 28 per cent opposed homosexuals. Notwithstanding the concentration of gay bars
in the Bairro Alto there is nowhere in Lisbon as sharp a division between gay and straight districts as
that found in some North American ghettos. In November 1994 a bourgeois newspaper like Publico
could carry advertisements in its classified section aimed at men who hoped to make sexual contacts
with other men by telephone rather than in bars, baths or the streets. One company subdi-vided an
advertisement for contact telephone numbers in Lisbon and five other regions of Portugal with the
headings (in English) of Big Bananas followed by Man to Man followed by Gay Dating. The
choice of different categories in the advertisements as much as the use of the International gay lingua
franca showed that the envisaged public did not have identical tastes.
In 1997 the Portuguese gay movement showed its presence in daylight in the heart of Lisbon with
an AIDS awareness march down Liberty Avenue in May and a Pride festival in June on a square in the
Bairro Alto. A Portuguese language gay magazine (Korpus) was on sale in a few kiosks. In October a
Gay and Lesbian Community Center opened in the presence of the Mayor in space provided by the
City Council in the historie heart of Lisbon.
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Conclusion
The Inquisition records showed that priests houses or the cells of regulars were privileged sites for
homosexual encounters in the se vente enth and eighteenth centuries. The alternatives were outdoor ill-
lit locations, like the shrubs at the foot of the battiements of the Castie of Sao Jorge, or fields beyond
the built-up limits of the city. During the nineteenth century the French style urinal in front of the
Misericordia in the Bairro Alto was notorious as were some others in the lower part of the city and on
Restauradores Square. As a result the Bairro Alto had a reputation, echoed in the novel Bardo de
Lavas, as a district where homosexual encounters could be made in the interstices of urban
heterosexual prostitution. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a cafe culture, primarily
male in the case of its clients, in which literary bohemia rubbed shoul-ders with some bourgeois
homosexuals. There was a lower-class matrix of wine-shops and outdoor cruising by the Tagus and in
the urinals of the center of the city. In the post-1974 era, following the restoration of democratic
govern-ment in Portugal, it was the Bairro Alto which emerged as the center for a nocturnal but overt
culture of bars, cafes and restaurants for gays and lesbians in Lisbon.
Notes
1 Greenberg is misleading in his statement Napoleon struck a blow against religious repression by
destroying the records of the Inquisition, thereby depriving us of records documenting the
persecution of sodomites in early modern Europe (Greenberg 1988:19). Much Inquisition
documentation has been lost in different countries, especially in Italy where it was looted at the
time of the French invasions. In 1998 the Vatican Archives opened more inquisitorial documents
to scholars although it is not yet known if any of these concern sexual offenses.
2 National Archives of Portugal, Lisbon. Lisbon Inquisition, trial no. (henceforth IL) 6919.
3 IL 9467.
4 IL 9467.
5 IL 9469.
6 IL 8843.
7 ... perguntando-lhe se podia bobijar com ele que era o mesmo que cometer com ele o pecado
nefando, IL 3925.
8 IL 3529. Thanks to Prof. Alberto Vieiva for a photocopy of his transcription of the trial.
9 IL 939.
10 IL 17024.
11 This word is common Portuguese slang in the 1990s for a man, like guy in American English,
without any sexual connotations.
12 IL 6554.
13 IL 209.
14 IL 13638.
15 IL 13388 citedinLoja (1986: 343-4).
16 IL Livro 146.
17 IL Livro 145. fol. 364.
137

18 There is a gap in the documentation from 1778 to 1793 which may reflect the loss or even
discarding of documentation. Possibly it may reflect consideration for the sensi-bilities of the
royal council when Queen Maria ruled prior to her mental incapacity in 1792. See IL Caderno
do Nefando 145.
19 IL Cadernos do Nefando 145.
20 See the introduction by Justino Mendes de Almeida to Botelho (1979). That edition has
modernized spelling and a study of linguistic neologisms in volume one, pp. I-lix. References to
the Bardo de Lavas are translated by David Higgs from that edition.
21 Jornal de Letras, vol. XVII, no. 699, 30July-12 August 1997 had a dossier on Botto.
22 Jornal daNoite, 11 May 1874, quotedinLeal (1875, vol. 5: 406).
23 Tereza Coelho, A prostituico masculina no Parque Eduardo VII, Publico 15 March 1994, 18-
19.
24 Daniel Gurin, Chez Mado, Gai PiedHebdo (5-11 July 1986) 227: 39-40
25 GlobeandMaiKToronto) 11 July 1992, p. Al 1.
138
6 Rio deJaneiro
David Higgs
The earliest evidence of same-sex genital activity in sixteenth-century Brazil is scarce as a result of
the disapproval of those who could record it. When Pero Vaz Caminha in 1500 wrote the famous letter
which described the first contacts between the natives of Brazil and the bearded Portuguese sailors
who made landfall on the coast of Bahia he was very attentive to the bodies of the Amerindian men
and boys as well as the women who came out of the forest. He noticed that neither sex made any effort
to cover their shaines and that the penises were not circumcised. He commented on the good bodies
and smooth skins and affectionate disposition of the native peoples. While King Manuel was informed
of the celebration of the First Mass in the new land his correspondent said nothing about when the first
sexual interaction took place between sailors and Amerindians (Caminha 1985).
On 1 January 1502 a Portuguese fleet entered the bay of Guanabara, and, as it had the appearance
of an estuary and a certain flow of tide, the commanding admiral misnamed the harbor River of
January - Rio deJaneiro. The historie core of the present city was a mangrove swamp. The Europeans
who came ashore soon had extensive contact with the Arnerindians. Jean de Lry, a Huguenot who
spent most of 1557 on the site of what is now Rio, recorded an insulting word in Tupi, tyvire, which he
said meant bugger, from which he said one could conjecture that the abominable sin was committed
among the native people (Lry 1992: 153). Lry was a devout Calvinist who showed a limited but
explicit ethnographical curiosity about sexuality. In 1565 the city of Saint Sebastian was formally
established as a Portuguese municipality. In 1587 Soares de Souza said of the Amerindians who lived
in the same general area that they were addicted to sodomy and do not consider it a shame... In the
bush some offer themselves to all who want them (Murray 1995: 268). In parts of Brazil the custom
of the pubescent Amerindian youths living and sieeping together in an all-male house meant that forms
of adolescent sexuality between males before marriage existed. As late as the 1930s among the
remnants of a nomadic tribe in Mato Grosso studied by a French anthropologist some unmarried
young bache-lors openly caressed each other by the camp fire. This behavior was restricted to
adolescents who were brothers of girls who would later marry the youth from the other lineage. Lvi-
Strauss claimed that even when adults it was not unusual to
139

see two or three married men with children walking around in the evening tenderly entwined (Lvi-
Strauss 1974: 313-14). If Christian shame and secrecy about physical pie asures did not inhibit the
Nambikwara youths under the bespectacled gaze of a foreign anthropologist and their fellow band-
members, we can reasonably conclude there were similar practices in the sixteenth century.
Some males functionally lived as Amerindian women. In general variations in gender behavior
among Amerindians might al so impinge on religious powers (Trexier 1995: 102-17). As so often in
studies of the Amerindian past the history of their sexuality can only be known in the records of those
who brought to them disease, exile and an alien religion.
Early European settiers imported many African slaves to work on sugar plantations in the area of
Rio as well as at other suitable locations. Many of these slaves both female and male were used
sexually by their masters. inter-racial sodomy was encountered in Brazil by 1600 in the slave-owning
colonial economy and this was primarily male same-sex. Given the great sexual imbalance among
African slaves there may also have been sexual activities between males in the slave quarters.
By 1600 Rio had a population of some 2,000 with almost no European women, by 1700 it was no
more than 10,000 and by 1800 the population had risen to 44,000. The nickname for a person born in
Rio came to be carioca: a word derived from the Tupi expression for House of the Whites. The city
housed religious institutions but also those of the government when the colonial capital moved south
from Salvador in 1763. There was a constant movement from the port of Rio to the hinterland with the
arrival of Portuguese immigrants and also of African slaves. The city had a large, indeed
predominantly, slave population of African descent but also free blacks as well as people of
Amerindian, European and mixed descents.
The main sources of written information on homosexuality in Brazil and in Rio during the colonial
period are the papers of the Inquisition. These were always housed in Portugal since the monarchy
never set up a sitting tribunal in Portuguese America. They permit some micro-biography of the
lives of individuals of no social or political prominence. The Portuguese Inquisition exiled some
convicted sodomites to Brazil: the first known was a surgeon from Evora in Alentejo in 1553. The
misfortunes of one of these men, Antonio Soares, was referred to in the chapter about Lisbon.
Sentenced to exile to Brazil when under 20 for repeated acts of the abominable crime with a variety of
partners he later lived at the Carmelite monastery in Rio from the 1630s for eighteen years. That
building is today the university Faculdade Cndido Mendes and was close to the main square (now
Praca XV de Novembro) and the principal thoroughfare of colonial Rio, the rua Direita. There he
reverted to his homosexual activities:
The truth is that he is known to carry on filthinesses with youths, and in respect to the same type
of sin for which he came in exile [to Brazil] there are violent presuppositions against him with
three accornplices with whorn he shuts hirnself away for a long time, sometirnes outside the
Convent and
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sometimes in the Convent, and being reproved never wished to correct himself, and those who
complain of being propositioned by him are a further three or four...
We know that the Catholic clergy provided a cover in the pastjust as in the present for more male
homosexuals than in the male population at large, and therefore space control led by priests is often
sexualized: Antonio So ares in the Rio Carme lite Convent near the docks in the 1630s and 1640s was
said to be corrupting moqos a choice of word that suggested that as he aged the man convicted in
Portugal as an adolescent for both insertive and receptive sodomy with other novices both in the
Lisbon convent and at his fathers house continued to seek out young partners under 20. Soares
repeated partnerships perhaps fell into the paradigm of the older man and younger ephebe which has
so long exer-cised those who seek to establish the chronology of the idea of the homosexual as an
orientation distinct from that of heterosexual males. Brother Antonio Soares trial documentation
contains pathetic reports of his condition after long imprison-ment once he had reached Brazil, exiled
for sodomy, covered with sores and bleeding ulcers. However, bound into the same documentation is a
report by the Carmelite later sent to reform the monasteries of the Order in Brazil, which gave a
radically different picture of what had happened to the monk after his exile. Soares had become very
influential in the Rio convent because of his skill at busi-ness (and we can notice that the Carmo was
literally steps from the docks where ships arrived and departed for other markets), and that he seems to
have received protection from other members of the order against the rigors of the Inquisition, going
as far as to solicit pardons and reinstatements directly from Rom e.
Inquisition documents permit us to trace in detail the life of another seven-teenth-century
Portuguese sodomite, a violin player who later became a tobceo merchant, who lived in Rio during
the second half of the seventeenth century. The city was then already more than a hundred years old.
The initial brush with the Inquisition of this violin player, Luiz Delgado, occurred in Evora,
Portugal, when he was 21 years of age. He was denounced by another prisoner for his sexual relations
when in prison with a putative future brother-in-law, aged 12, who squeezed through the bars to visit
him. Delgado was found guilty of sodomizing the child and was exiled to Brazil. Delgado and a
brother had been put in the secular prison in the first place because of involve-ment in thefts.
Upon arrival in Portuguese America Delgado first lived in Bahia, and was married there. However
he was also involved with several white adolescent boys with whom he was passionately in lo ve. The
scandal about his behavior in Salvador da Bahia was such that he left for Rio in the company of a
Portuguese-born Latin student named Jos Goncalves who was not yet 18 when he first met the violin
player who now traded in tobceo. Delgado left a previous flame with his wife to share the house he
owned in Salvador, abandoning then both his domestic and sometimes gay space, and the public one
of the streets of the colonial city where he was notorious.
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He arrived in Rio, part of the movement of not only Portuguese migrants but also of sexual
refugees. He set up a tobceo shop behind the Carmo Convent. A 26-year-old priest watched Delgado
and his boyfriend from a first-floor window in the convent and testified that Delgado treated the
student with great affection. He combed the youths hair and tied ribbons on the sieeves of his shirt
and on his small fans (abanicos), fans considered a part of a womans dress, before the youth left the
house. The prying eyes of the priest saw that Delgado had in effect at last created a gay domestic space
where he could act as he wished with his beloved, including an encouragement of womanish behavior.
A goldsmith aged 38 described the domestic living arrangements of Delgado with an emphasis on his
bed:
many times Luiz Delgado made accusations against Joseph Goncalves who was a youth whom he
called his nephew and treated with a great deal of friendship in his own house on the second floor
where he lived [my emphasis] and not in the shop [where apprentices or assistants would normally
sieep] and on the second floor he never saw more than one bed, but that it was certain that the
youth Joseph Goncalves did not sieep in the shop but rather on the second floor and he knew this
because he often had dinner with the said Luiz Delgado and went to his house late at night, and
left the said youth with him on the second floor...
This youth obviously provoked the more conventional males in the city by his costume. An official
in Rio noted that he walked around with dishonest colored silk britches, presumably meaning ones
that were tightly revealing of his buttocks and penis, decorated with red and yellow ribbons, which he
showed off when he pulled up his cassock. The bailiff noted that this costume scandalized the inhabi-
tants. It was a disgraceful example to other students who behaved themselves, and in 1686 thejudge
ordered the beribboned tail of his costume to be cut since it caused scandal and was noted. The
flamboyant feminine-acting student was arrested and only released with the intervention of
Benedictine fathers, doubtless his teachers.
Some months later however young Goncalves decided to return to Portugal and went to thejudge
claiming that Delgado had hidden his clothes and books in order to prevent his departure. Delgado
retorted that when he had first met Goncalves the youth was dressed in rags and was hungry - in
essence then claiming to own the property of the student - but thejudge upheid the right of the young
man to leave with his own things and some money. According to the Peeping Tom priest. Delgado
wept copiously as he sought to persuade Goncalves not to leave him, and even went so far as to try to
enter the skiff which carried passengers out to ocean-going ships in a last frantic effort to persuade the
youth to change his mind. Again Delgado was indifferent to public scandal and paid for it, since he
was imprisoned for a time as a warning to change his behavior. Delgado was so affected by the
departure of Goncalves that he did not change the linens on the bed where they had siept together in
their love nest. Delgado
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said he would not have them washed until the youth again returned to him. At this stage in his life he
was 42, and notoriously a sodomite who liked somewhat feminine white youths.
He quickly found consolation in a public space, the theater, when on a summer night in 1686 he
saw a 16-year-old boy playing the part of a woman. Delgado was passionate in his declarations to the
boy and persuaded the young actor to leave the house of his father and to live in his shop with him.
The father of this cross-dressing youth was a Portuguese immigrant grocer whose wife. Rio born, was
already dead. Whether the conditions at home in the paternal house were uncomfortable for a
theatrical son is unclear, but either because of paternal rejection or in response to a passionate admirer
he moved in with Delgado and remained hidden for three months. In due course he moved freely
around the house. A servant testified that he found the pair in the shop section of the house seated on a
bench kissing and embracing. A law officer said that he had seen the boy walking around the house
wearing merely a light undergarment and a shirt, that is, he noted the body language of a semi-dressed
feminine-acting boy in an all-male domestic space. The father of the runaway lad turned to the law
officer to investigate and the two accused. Delgado and his calamite, went to the Carmo convent to
seek refuge. In due course they fled north to the town of Vitoria in Espirito Santo accompanied by a
servant and a fugitive soldier. An order for their arrest followed them. The servant would later testify
that the adult and the youth always siept together in Rio, and also during thejourney to Vitoria either
on land or in the boat, they were together in a bunk, or a hammock or sometimes entwined under a
coverlet on the ground. The soldier mentioned he had seen them caressing each other and suspected
that this was some filthinesses of fairies [/anchonos] and sodomites. Later the couple traveled on
to Salvador da Bahia and caused much scandal by their behavior leading to their arrest there on 5
February 1689. They were then shipped to Lisbon to stand trial before the Inquisition on the
accusation of sodomy: Delgado was then 45 while his beloved Doroteu was 18 years of age.
They were described as sodomites who lived indoors like a husband and wife with general and
public scandal [sendo vox el/ama que ambos eram sodomitas, vivendo de portas a dentro como
marido e muiher, com geral e publico escndalo].
The Inquisitors were well aware of the importance of a private and secure space to an expression of
homosexuality. Indeed, Inquisition regulations made it an offense to provide space for the commission
of the act of sodomy, so that a complaisant innkeeper or householder could not escape censure for
what went on in a building for which he or she was responsible.
The testimony of Doroteu insisted that there was no ejaculation of semen inside his anus when
Delgado, tempted by the Demon penetrated him. This bizarre technical precision was a recognition
that without ejaculation the Inquisition considered that the sinful wastage of semen had not taken
place. He could not thus be found guilty of the sin which was punishable with the penalty of burning.
In 1690 Doroteu was sentenced to the fairly mild punishment of
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three years exile to the Algarve in southern Portugal where he disappeared from the historical record.
Delgado wasjailed in Lisbon in the Inquisition prison for three years. His trial was drawn out. He
denied wrongdoing and alleged the malice of various individuals who lied about him, including
Doroteu and the boys father. This was a standard evasive procedure since the accused was, of course,
never informed about the content of depositions against him. He was sentenced to ten years of exile in
Angola.
Professor Luiz Motfs research allows us to deduce that Delgado, despite various punishments,
continued to be involved in pederasty from his early twenties to the time when he vanished from the
historical record in his early fifties. Throughout his life he looked for white partners who were more
than a decade younger than him, who were only receptive in sodomy with him and who had somewhat
femi-nine mannerisms. In Rio he finally achieved his aim of a gay domestic space, living with white
boyfriends and a servant, whereas in Salvador he endured the presence of his wife. In his extravagant
affections and in the ostentation of his catamites when in the public spaces of the colonial city.
Delgado lived in a way that adumbrated a sustained male-male autonomy from heterosexist values.
While Mott was not particularly concerned with the spatial elements in his account he mentioned that
other students visited the house in Rio, and to that extent Delgado was an example of what was
possible in a domestic sexual relationship with the same sex (Mott 1988: 75-129).
Eighteenth-century Rio did not offer a great many diversions. As in Portugal respectable women
were largely confined to their houses and much street socia-bility was exclusively masculine. The
principal excursions for white women were trips to church. Many white men were unmarried, or found
sexual release with slave women with whom they did not associate in any public space. In the
interstices of this largely masculine public world individuals might find homosexual satisfactions.
Scraps of information are found dispersed in denunciations, but some offer more detailed accounts
of individual whites accused of sodomy. A phonetic denunciation (c. 1781) from a detainee in prison
in Rio professed horror at a homosexual love affair between two other prisoners, sharing friendship as
if they were women and committing acts with each other by the back way. Denunciations provide
clues about the sense of sinful sexuality in relation to sodomy in late colonial Brazil.
In 1790 one of the resident monks of the Carmelite convent in Rio was investigated for sodomizing
young slaves. Although he crossed the racial line he retained the classic adult-ephebe balance,
searching out adolescents for his sexual purposes. He was Father Tom de Madre de Deus, a Brazilian
born in Minas Gerais. There is a strong likelihood that the case was actually the result of a clerical
squabble (the legendary briga dejrades), since the accused was a brutal and peremptory member of the
congregation and also the provincial president. However the inquiries appeared well founded. The
witnesses were young: first was a slave born near Rio then aged 18. He described how two years
earlier
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Father Tom had callee! him to his cell, locked the door, laid down on his bed without his habit while
instructing the boy to rub his legs and then made him also lie on the bed on his side whereupon the
priest sodomized him: and spilled inside the semen, consummating in this manner the horrendous and
abominable sin of sodomy... He noted that he had been used in the same fashion on three other
occasions but then he was sent back to a country estate that belonged to the convent. The nextwitness
was al so a black slave boy, learning to be a carpenter, and he did not know how old he was although
the scribe thought him about 15 to 16 years of age. This boy tried to deny that he had any complete
experi-ence of what the other boys of the same convent were saying that the priest did to another slave
boy called Raimundo. He said he had often been to the house of the priesfs mother with messages. He
admitted that in his cell Father Tom locked the door and made him take down his breeches but he
added that he never consented to anything. Even so, he lamented, the other boys spread it about that
the priest used him for bad ends. As a result his own father had beaten him. Like the first witness the
erstwhile carpenter was sent back to the country estate. Raimundo was the third and last witness and
he said that two years earlier, when he was about 17, he too had been called to the cell of the priest, the
door was locked once he was inside, and there was the same outcome. He admitted to having been
sodomized seven times on different occasions by Father Tom. He too was sent back to the country
estate which, of course, was a demotion from urban domestic slave to rural laboring slave. The use of
his cell for sexual relations with slave boys who belonged to the convent can be contrasted with the
sending of them back to the country with its much quieter life. When the comissrio made his wrap-up
statement on the accusation he not only noted the professional failings of Tom who avoided saying
masses but added he was an enemy of the cloisters who constantly went about outside the convent.
He had lived for two months with a Protestant naval captain called Thomas Stephens in a chcara
(country house often with an orchard). As so often in Inquisition cases we have only the information
in the inquiry and nothing with which to compare it. Certainly monks were accused of sexual abuse of
black youths, as Pires de Almeida did in his book published a century later (Pires de Almeida 1906:
62-3). No further action was ordered against the priest, prob-ably in order to prevent aggravating the
scandal which, as Raimundo said: is notorious in the convent because he the witness made it known
to some boys of the same Convent...
As well as the trials and denunciations of sodomites as such, there is also scat-tered information
where same-sex activities in Rio figured in documental ion about individuals investigated for other
reasons. Sometimes these fragments of historical information lend themselves to bricolage and link to
each other. An example would be the young apothecary Jos Luis Mendes who was investigated for
permitting gatherings of men in the shop where he worked as the cashier. This was a place known for
irreligious conversations. This shop was on the rua Direita, steps away from the Carmo Convent from
whose Windows a priestly voyeur had spied on Delgado a century earlier as he showed his affection to
his
145

boyfriend. An apothecarys shop was not open to the public like a stall in the hot and dusty street with
its noisy house slave customers. Neither was it private like an individual house. Individuals often
foregathered when awaiting the grinding of drugs for a prescription or simply used the premises as a
meeting place. Mendes was investigated for his sacrilegious talk but it also transpired, as one accuser
put it, he does not have dealings with women but with men. Two of the se were mentioned, one a
Brazilian-born black, and the other a pardo (mulatto) so his sexual dealings were interracial. A married
apothecary who lived nearby on the same street, the rua Direita, said that Mendes was guilty of molicies
- which could mean fellatio and masturbation but not sodomy. He paid for his partner to go to the
opera. Another individual said the sexual tastes of Mendes were notorious in the city. His own unele
said that Mendes talked a lot about Voltaire and his works, and had retorted that he heard from the
Carmelite monks that Father Tom owned the works of the sage of Ferney. Tom was said to attend
services in the choir where instead of reading his breviary he read Voltaire. There is here at least some
circumstantial congruence between two individuals who were noted for same-sex genital activities
with young non-whites, and both interested in prohibited foreign literary works, and who both lived
within close walking distance. The Inquisition ordered no further inquiries into his sexual activities
although Mendes was required to swear that he would cease to permit or to frequent the scandalous
conversations in the apothecarys shop.
7
Almost a decade later Mendes briefly reappeared in the Rio
historical records when he asked for exemption from the confiscation of the apartment in the house
where he lived with his aged father and his numerous family.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century Rio de Janeiro had a public garden laid out exclusively
for strolling, that pleasure derived from the southern European custom of the family promenade, the
passegica or the paseo, which permitted inspection of other families. In a sense it was an
institutionalized heterosexual cruising that might lead on to marriage, but it could also provide a cover
for gay glances. The Viceroy Vasconcellos had ordered the draining of a fetid lagoon that was
unsightly and suspected of causing illness. An architect who had studied in Europe designed a formal
garden with French-style walkways and symmetrical plantings to put on the site. The French-inspired
design would last until the middle of the nineteenth century (1862) when it was replaced by the more
undisciplined layout of the English garden, characterized by curving path-ways and uneven clusterings
of vegetation (Delson 1979: 155). Whether French formal or English curvaceous the Passeio Publico
became a place of promenading which extended by analogy to street cruising by men looking for
homosexual adventures. Within the space marked on one side by the eighteenth-century aqueduct
which later became a track for travesti prostitution, the Passeio beyond which one reached the sea
shore, and in another direction over to the Convent of the Carmelites near the main docks, this was a
city zone of sexual-ized spaces.
As French troops under MarshaIJunot marched into the outer suburbs of the Portuguese capital in
November 1807 a great fleet set sail for Brazil carrying as
146

many as 15,000 souis including the lunatic queen Maria I, her son the Prince Regent, courtiers, priests,
diplomals and servants. After a stormy passage across the Atlantic and an unplanned stay in Salvador
da Bahia the royal family and their entourage reached Rio deJaneiro in March 1808. This exodus was
of great consequence to the city and to its homosexual spaces. Rio in 1800 numbered some 44,000 but
when the Regent, now KingJohn VI, returned to Portugal in 1821 the city had 100,000 residents. The
French constituted the largest foreign component of Rio population and included shopkeepers, tailors,
hairdressers and other completely urban occupations. There were also Germn and Irish mercenaries,
Swiss colonists in transit, sailors and merchants from North America and elsewhere. With Br azi lianin
dependence in 1822 proclaimed by Prince Pedro, the rapid increase in city size continued. There were
perhaps 150,000 cariocas in 1830. Already the city had a reputation for amusements, luxury and
pleasure.
The Portuguese Inquisition was suppressed in 1821 and its documentation ceased. Written
evidence about nineteenth-century homosexuality in Rio became very scattered and concealed by
shame and furtiveness. Some literary evidence subsists, and perhaps more can be unearthed in
newspapers of the time, but documenting where male homosexuals sought each other is necessarily
characterized by much bricolage among mere fragments of information.
The colonial city in 1800 was primarily composed of a slave population of blacks and mulattos but
during the nineteenth century as a result of European immigration and the marriage strategies in
mulatto families the Rio population became steadily whiterjust as people of mixed racial origins
were ever more numerous. By 1850 the old colonial city, the vrzea flat area between Castelo, Sao
Bento, Santo Antonio, Conceico, was gradually superseded by more desirable living in the suburbs.
In the colonial city social segregation had been more vertical than horizontal, with white families
living on the upper floors, and servants, slaves and shops at street level. Increasingly, however, the
better-off and established families made use of the street car, a system that first emerged in France at
Nantes in 1826. By 1837 Rio had horse-drawn public carriages which passed at regular intervals, and
while these were expensive they adumbrated a system of public transport which made the city grow.
The slave sedan chair porters became a rarity. In 1849 80,000 blacks lived in Rio out of a total
population of perhaps 200,000. There was a higher percentage of slaves in the urban population of Rio
than any other city of the Americas c. 1850.
Homosexual activities across the divide of race and slavery and with a strong inequity between
partners had been perhaps the most typical paradigm of colonial Rio. Under the Brazilian Empire
(1822-89) homosexuality as the simple matter of sexual practices between consenting adults of the
same sex in private was not a crime. If the re was any scandal, however, individuals could be arrested.
This happened in 1855 when the crioulo (Brazilian-born black) Jos Athanasso, was detained because
he caused intrigues in two convents where he was known as the servant (criado) of pederasts. Jos
had a host of protectors whose representations caused the Minister ofJustice to order his release in
order
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to be free of impertinencies and disagreeableness. They made a huge fuss to prevent his recruitment
for military service.
8

The inter-racial paradigm of same-sex practices was not destined to remain the predominant one in
a modernizing city. Foreign immigrants appeared in increasing numbers. Portuguese immigrants were
the largest single category and many of them were young men and boys without families who lived in
the crowded conditions of the vrzea and who tried to save as much money as possible. More than half
of the total of Portuguese immigrants to Rio in the years from 1820 to 1842 were from 10 to 20 years
of age, and 87 per cent of them declared themselves to be unmarried. This age profile differed
significantly in the case of other nationalities. Quite a few Portuguese youths, in the words of the
consul in 1849, possessed no capacity or aptness to employ themselves in any kind of application.
A sample of 170 wills made by Portuguese immigrants during the 1830s and 1840s showed that more
than half were unmarried, although of those bachelors more than half left bequests to women and
children (Nunes 1998).
The literales who arrived in greater numbers before 1850 often found work as cashiers or shop
assistants, while the large-scale arrivals later in the centurywere landless illiterate peasants who found
employment in the initial manufactories of the city which at that time were home to one-third of
Brazilian industrial produc-tion. Others siept in the shops where theyworked. Since many of these
bachelors planned to return to Portugal with their earnings they lived in cheap and crowded boarding
houses called cortiqos, a kind of housing which gave the title to the famous novel by Aluisio Azevedo
(1890). In that book there is a reference to an old man (Botelho) who sexually touches a male student,
a feminine youth who likes being with washerwomen (Albino) and a lesbian prostitute who is after the
girls (Lonie). There were real-life equival ents of these characters in Sao Jos parish where many
Portuguese lived. The number of residents there in each household rose from 9.7 in 1890 to 19.2 in
1906. In those streets there was a de facto street familiarity between slaves, freedmen and the new
arrivals. Among this floating population of men there were those who knew about the puto traditions
of Oporto and Lisbon where adolescent boys sometimes hustled for instant sex with men. If the
suburbs were becoming more desirable with the new sewage works and gas lines the central city was
crowded, promiscuous and other. In Rio the square known as Rossio (Tiradentes) was a notorious
place for cruising and pick-ups. Benches offered a place to sit and smoke, the statue in the middle of
the square was a rendezvous point, and there was a public lavatory for men which, in the 1930s at
least, required a modest payment for usage. The district of Botafogo had already gained the cachet of
being the most aristocratic suburb of Rio by the 1890s. Sometimes a better-off male residents of
Botafogo might go to the center to find a male immigrant for sex. Conversely immigrants might travel
from northern working-class suburbs to find sexual contacts. An 18-year-old literate gaiego who dweit
in a house with a garden and who worked as a pharmacy cashier was expelled as an undesirable alien
condemned for being a thief and a passive pederast. He left on the steamship Clyde destined for Vigo
in 1907. In 1912 two
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Uruguayan bachelors who lived together on rua da Constituico in the center city, one of whom saidhe
was a shop assistant while the other, aged 31, said he was a tailor, were expelled from Rio accused of
being vagabonds and guilty of passive pederasty. In the same year a pornographic publication called
Naked Rio contained a story about a youth who was picked up on a bench in Tiradentes square and
taken to a room in Lapa where he was sodomized.
By 1900 class and ethnic barriers in Rio society were evident. New forms of transportation and
entertainment existed, and perhaps altitudes towards sexu-ality evolved. Slavery was abolished in
Brazil when the princess regent Isabel signed the Gold en Law on 13 May 1888 and the remaining
population of 700,000 Brazilian slaves of full African descent were declared free. At the same time the
upper classes in Rio had a long tradition of house servants who resided either under the same roof or in
close proximity to the ir residen ees. The frequent use of blackwomen as wet-nurses, the ama de leite,
and as nursemaids, led to the kind of Inter-racial heterosexual experimentation by employers and their
sons which has been exalted by Gilberto Freyre and many other authors who stress the Inter-racial
eroticism of Brazil. Rapid increase in the Rio population continued during the second half of the
nineteenth century: in 1870 Rio had 235,000 inhabitants and by 1890 this had more than doubled to
522,000.
In 1895, the year of Osear Wildes trial and conviction, the novel of Adolfo Caminha, Bom-
Crioulo, was published in Rio deJaneiro by an impecunious young writer who died before he was 30
(Caminha n.d.).11 Contemporary critics accused him of imitating the Portuguese naturalist novel of
Botelho discussed in the Lisbon chapter abo ve. Caminha certainly was well informed about the milieu
he described. A doctor writing in 1872 commented on the high incidence of sodomy among the
Brazilian military. Superiors demanded (does not solicit but orders) this sexual service of those under
their authority. Another doctor in the 1890s reported on the high incidence of anal venereal sores
among military apprentices, most of whom were orphans subjected to humiliating sexual violation
(Beattie 1996: 442-3). Caminha had attended the naval school in Rio and served as a midshipman and
officer in the Brazilian navy before being forced out of the service as a result of heterosexual scandal.
Trevisan, a gay Brazilian critic, wrote that in his courageous treatment of homosexuality as a specific
and irrefutable fact, Caminha was much ahead of his time and his work was banned formanyyears
(Trevisan 1986 104-5).
Adolfo Caminhas novel about the strong black ex-slave Bom-Crioulo who fell passionately in love
with the blonde cabin boy was set in Rio and its port. It presents the adult-adolescent paradigm of
same-sex relationships, but here it is a 30-year-old ex-slave who is insertive and a white, European-
looking 15-year-old adolescent boy who is receptive. Bom-Crioulo (Caminha n.d) possesses Aleixo
for the first time on the navy ship - that is, in a place where there is only occasional privacy for sexual
acts and where discovery can lead to a flogging - but subsequently establishes on land in Rio a love
nest in a house belonging to a Portuguese woman who had seen better days when she was younger and
slimmer and had many admirers.
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Dona Carolina was Portuguese and rented out rooms on Misericordia Street only to persons of a
certain type, people who werent haughty or pretentious but all the same lads that could be
trusted, good tenants, compatriots, old friends... She wasnt concerned about color or class or
profession of the individual. Sailor, soldier, ferryman, cashier from a corner store were all the
same to her: she treated them all alike and affably.
This house where Dona Caroline rents rooms, by the month or by the hour was of the type known
in Rio as casas de comodos rather than the better accommodations offered in estaiagens.
The Portuguese woman is beholden to Bom-Crioulo who had helped her when a robbery was
attempted and was friendly but without any sexual overtones: she knew that the black man was not a
man for women. He asks her for a room:
Just a littie room without any frills for when we come ashore.
One bed or two? asked the fortyish Carolina with a sinile... They laughed, in mutual
understanding, while Aleixo, leaning over the windowsill, spat down into the small back yard of
the Africans.
Caminha evokes the pleasure of Bom-Crioulo in his beloved refuge in the room and he spends
money on it:
All the money he could get was to buy furniture and littie rococo objects of fantasy, figurines,
decorations, things of no value, often brought from on board ship. Littie by littie the small room
started to look like aJewish bazaar as it filled up with bric--brac, and accumulated empty box es,
vulgar seashells and other ornamental accessories. The bed was an already much used camp bed
over which Bom-Crioulo was careful to spread when he got up every morning, a thick red blanket
to hide the stains.
Caminha describes the two sailors in the ir room in the ir underwear on the canvas bed which was
cool in the hot weather with a bottie of white rum, feeling completely free and independent and with
the door double locked as a precaution against being disturbed.
Only one thing vexed the cabin-boy - the black mans libertine caprices. Because Bom-Crioulo
was not satisfied merely with possessing him sexually at any hour of the day or night. He wanted
much more; he obliged the boy to go to extremes. He made him a slave, a whore, suggesting to
him what-ever extravagance came to his imagination. Right from the first night he insisted that the
cabin boy strip, completely naked: he wanted to examine his body. Aleixo became sullen: this was
not something that you asked a man to do!
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But he submits and strips completely Sodom was now resurgent in a sad and desolate rooming
house on Misericordia Street where at this time of night all was in the soft quietness of a distant
desert.
They are very domesticated for a year and Dona Carolina would tease them saying that they would
end up having children, but then Bom-Crioulo is reassigned and cannot come ashore with Aleixo: he is
worried that the boy will become infatuated with some handsome young officer while Aleixo thinks of
perhaps meeting some wealthy man with a position:
He was already accustomed to doing that stuff. Bom-Crioulo himself said that nobody paid
attention to those things in Rio de Janeiro. And what could he ever hope for from Bom-Crioulo?
Nothing, and meanwhile he was sacrificing his health, his body, his youth to him... .Certainly
itwasntworth it!
The Portuguese woman Carolina finds the adolescent very attractive, makes up to him and seduces
him, and he in turn comes to dislike Bom-Crioulo. This involves a statement about the room where
they had been a sexual couple:
The attic, the mysterious littie attic, was abandoned now. Aleixo didnt want to know about it. He
hated it, because it was there that he had become a slave to Bom-Crioulo; it was there that he had
lost all shame. The poor room was like a cursed place, always locked with a key, lugubrious and
dusty. Dona Carolina scarcely opened it - only when she had to stow away some old utensil or
some formless Item of furniture. The emperors portrait, the canvas folding bed, the old household
goods of Bom-Crioulo and the cabin-boy, everything that before was the delight of the two
friends, had long since disappeared. Nothing remained now of the life they lived in common.
Bom-Crioulo is hospitalized after a flogging, and he tries to contad Aleixo but his letter is
destroyed by Dona Carolina. He then learns that Aleixo has become the lover of the Portuguese
woman. He confronts the youth who is very handsome in his tight fitting white and blue sailors
uniform and grips him by the arm. When Aleixo asks him to let him go or he will cry out Bom-Crioulo
tells him to call for the cow Carolina. In the denoueinent, Bom-Crioulo stabs and kills Aleixo: the
description of the dead body even suggests perhaps sexual mutilation: His dark blue shirt and his
white trousers bore great red stains... everyone wanted to see the corpse, to analyse the scar, to stick
his nose in the wound.
The story is thus an account of an Inter-racial gay love affair in Rio that turns to tragedy, of an
encounter between a strong black man and a white ephebe who as he matures is attracted to
heterosexuality. It provides an imaginative rendition of the type of living arrangements and port zone
tolerance that existed in the working-class areas of the city of Rio before its modernization.
The great dividing point between the old colonial city and the new urbanization inspired by the
remodeling of Paris by Baron Haussmann came in 1902-6
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with the plans prepared by Pereira Passos. In 1904 Olavo Bilac rejoiced at the noise of the falling
masonry when old housing was cleared to make way for the new Avenida Central in Rio deJaneiro:
It was the sad and lamenting groan of the Past, of Backwardness, of Shame. The colonial city,
filthy, backward, obstinate in its old traditions, was weeping with the sobs of those rotten
materials falling apart.
(Needell 1987:48)
In 1903 a Toronto-based company, the Rio deJaneiro Tramway Light and Power Company
Limited, proposed to unify existing streetcar networks that served the vrzea but also the northern
suburbs. That proposal was made effective by 1907. The average vehicle carried 30 passengers and
covered 8 to 10 kilome-ters an hour with a mule for traction, while electric trams ran at 15 to 20
kilometers per hour. By 1895 they already provided 82 million rides per year and no decline took
place until the trams were gradually replaced by buses.
At the start of the twentieth century Rio had a new tramway system and a new democratic form of
entertainment, the cinema. The streetcar to Copacabana was part of the rapid build-up of the beach
suburb. The growth of Rio deJaneiro into a major tourist center brought many visitors to the city who
in turn stimulated prostitution of both sexes. The separation of two major gay cruising tracks and
hustiing locales into Cinelndia in the center, near the Opera House and the National Library on the
one hand, and on the other in parts of Copacabana near the beach was already incipient before World
War II. Cinelndia had the reputation in a 1994 guide as being one of the oldest pick-up (pegando)
areas in Rio where large numbers of male prostitutes went looking for clients on the streets. The toilet
of the Bar Amarelinho was famous in legend although the same guide noted that it was not really very
active. Instead it suggested the toilets in a nearby department store (Mesbla), the toilets at the station
for the Santa Teresa streetcars and those in McDonalds. The square called largo do Machado in a
mixed residential-commercial area in Flamengo became cruisy on Sunday afternoons when in-
migrants from the Northeast were found paying attention.
Rio acquired a world-famous sexual aura from its carnival (Parker 1991:136-64). It gradually
developed from an earlier celebration in which men and women threw water bombs at each other. The
procession (Desfile) was the annual culmination of the festivities. The sweaty bodies of the dancers of
both sexes and the travestis among the costumed sambistas proclaim eroticism. The carnival makes a
street theater of the inversion of the roles of authority beginning on the Friday night when the keys of
the city are given to King Momo. After 1888 and the end of slavery, and with increasing elaboration,
the carnival celebrated reversals of the everyday black-white, male-female, rich-poor dyads of Brazil.
The first Rio samba school was founded in 1928 with the name Let them Talk (Deixa Faiar) in the
Estcio district.
This coincided with the development of radio stations in Brazil which broad-
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cast music written and performed by Brazilians as well as foreigners. One composer assumed by at
least part of his audience in the 1930s to be gay was the Rio-based Assis Valente. His song Striped
Shirt (Camisa Listrada) could be taken as addressed to a male companion/lover, and at least by some
listeners was understood to be so. Other singers, like Gauby Peixoto in due course, would be identified
as being gay even if, in the interests of larger sales, their publicity agents never propagated such
identifications. By the 1980s the singer Cazuza, however, would not only flaunt his sexuality but he
mediatized his own resistance to his oncoming death from AIDS. The radio and the gramophone made
it possible to play music in a variety of urban spaces, both indoors and outdoors, and when the music
was congenial to male homosexuals it might eroticize either discreetly or blatantly the location in
which it was played.
Particularly from the 1930s the carnival fed on the imagery of Brazilian films which were giddy
comedies of manners with a lot of popular songs. These films were known as chanchadas and the Rio
Atlantida studios made about forty by 1943. No actress icon more encapsulated this genre than
Carmen Miranda, with her headdress of tropical fruit. Made for domestic consumption the se films
contained a Brazilian mimicry-caricature of the Hollywood productions which circulated at that time.
These giggly kitsch productions often indirectly satirized Brazil but in a way that was inherently
carioca and which entered the popular culture of the times. The chanchadas stopped production
around 1960, at roughly the time when the television had made deep inroads into the leisure space of
even the lower classes in Brazil.
The overacted heroines of the chanchadas provided a series of modeis for the symbolic vamping of
the drag queens (travestis) of the carnival. The films and the escolas de samba won an impregnable
public space for the transvestite man in a land famous for its machismo and its hyper-masculine men.
Men who behaved in a feminine way were called bicha (faggot). The stand-out figure (destaque)
who parades between sections (alas) of the procession is frequently a travesti with silicone implants to
produce a caricature of breast development. The macho is known in Brazilian homosexual slang as
bofe, (cf. butch in North American English of the 1990s). Much of the oral culture of Brazilian men
drawn to same-sex encounters revolved around the role playing of bicha-bofe discourses.
Significantly, the emergent egalitarian couples to be found in Rio and some of the larger cities of
Brazil attempted, from the 1960s on, to emulate the clones of North America, where both partners for
instance would sport facial hair. In the popular imagination, however, it was the image of the bicha
which predominated in ideas about gay identity.
A marked increase in the explicit gayness of carnival performers was a development of the 1980s.
Since the 1960s a dance baile dos enxutos had been held in a cinema on Praca Tiradentes in the
business district despite a pro-forma threat by the police to close it for indecency. By the late 1970s it
was a major event which drew a large crowd to watch arrivals in drag, lesbians and others. By the
1980s it was held in a much larger space near the Rio Sul shopping center, closer to the Copacabana
district. The publicity was blatant and obvious. This was a process
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whereby what had formerly been presented as playful gender-bending by straight men who hilariously
vamped and camped as women, was now turned into part of an affirmative gay identity
Rio be came the world capital of male transvestites from the 1960s on. Of course men have dressed
as women and women have dressed as men in many places and for many reasons, as the chevalier
dEon and SaintJoan of Are among others remind us. However, Rio has developed a culture of
exuberant transvestites which commands evena modicum of social respect in certain spheres. Men go
to Rio from all over Brazil in order that they may begin cross-dressing. Thanks to the television and to
various referen ees in tabloids the bohemian area called Lapa near the majestic aqueduct built in 1723
to bring water to the central city from the Carioca River is known as their particular domain. Lapa was
from the late nineteenth century the district associated with rascals - a particular Rio type, called in
Portuguese molondro - who was a petty criminal, pimp, gambler and player of the street game
porrinha. The molondro was to Rio what the apache was to the 1920s in Paris: imagined at least as
young, sensual and even creative in his disobedience to the rules of the conventional citizen. The
molondro also rejected the desire of the nineteenth-century Rio bour-geoisie to appear as European
as possible. He wore garishly colored clothes. An ethnographer who interviewed many travestis put
forward the hypothesis that the slightly menacing unconventionality of a district favored by molondros
also stimu-lated the transgressions of gender rules that lie at the core of the transvestite enterprise
(Silva 1993). Between the 1940s and the 1960s the travesti themes of the carnival became a feature of
some specialized shows in bars with musical accompaniment. A few travestis could work in the
shadows of more conventional heterosexual prostitution; sometimes they loitered in the lamp-light,
risking arrest for the crime of offending public decency Sometimes they twirled and danced in the
lower-class gafieiras - dance-halls - without exciting the hostility of the (heterosexual) working-class
couples around them.
During the 1960s there had been a defacto den out of female prostitutes from Lapa by violence
and threats. This was a conquest of a travesti space. The women had moved away: the relatively
cheap, industrialized heterosexual prostitutes worked at the Vila Mimosa close to the avenida Vargas
which was the oldest red light district in the city. In the first days ofJanuary 1996 bulldozers knocked
down the Vila Mimosa installations which had been used by prostitutes for more than a century. The
1,800 women who worked those beds were to be re-housed in Duque de Caxias district, although the
municipality there was opposed to the move. Instead some of them managed to find a new site some
500 meters from the old where they could install them sel ves. Lower-priced heterosexual prostitutes
were found on certain streets and al so at the main railway station. Central. Sex workers who wanted
higher returns advertised in the newspapers or were organized by pimps to service hoteis, or to attend
particular nightclubs in the search for business. There was always something of a working acceptance
between travestis, male hustlers and heterosexual prostitution. Two men might rent a room to have sex
with each other in a primarily hetero-
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sexual hot pillow hotel without difficulty. However the ethnographer particu-larly stressed the
nervousness and shame of the clients of travestis compared with men using conventional women
prostitutes.
Lapa was a section of Rio that became notorious throughout Brazil as the low end of the travesti
life, just as the visibility of travestis on Brazilian television and in certain clubs was the high end.
There were other strolls for travestis from the 1970s on, like Quinta de Boa Vista, Madureira,
Realengo, Avenida Atlntica and even places in Nova Iguacu but Lapa was the most obvious. Many
new travestis were young in-migrants from the Northeast, men with a low life expectancy as a result
of drug-taking, violence, adverse reactions to sil icon implants, unhygienic depilations, sexual
mutilations and poor diet and living conditions. There were travestis of all races. For the youth who
began cross-dressing the streets of Lapa and the denizens of that district were immediately accessible.
From the arches of the eighteenth-century aqueduct of Lapa might come the contacts which lead to the
fantastic world of elaborate clothes, luxu-rious living, international travel and money. Artistes like the
witty Argentinian transvestite Patricio Bisso performed in shows at Copacabana and elsewhere in the
198 Os, and appeared in the pages of news magazines. This publicity accorded to some travestis also
bestowed a legitimation of sorts upon a career. Between the street and the tv screen was the world of
the bars and pick-ups. Many travestis avoided places where there were many egalitarian male
homosexuals who dressed like men: individuals they disdainfully called bicha-homem, i.e. fairy man
or bicha de bigode - fairy with a moustache, or maricdo -big faggot.
Lapa and the travesti beat was not far from the region known as Via Appia where young, athletic
and masculine men displayed themselves along the pave-ment. They wore sports clothes and at night
often showed their erect penis as they stood at the roadside hoping to attract the motorized potential
clients who drove around the circuit. There is a sequence filmed in this zone in the Germn film
(1992) Via Appia The Via Appia men were more bofe (butch) than the younger adolescents who
worked around Cinelndia, and also at Posto Seis in Copacabana. The adolescents, in particular, hoped
to meet foreign tourists who paid a higher rate than Brazilians. Indeed the Brazilian clients of travestis,
bofes and adolescents (menores de rua who provoked international concern over the
widespreadjuvenile prostitution of both sexes in the 1990s) would often bargain hard. Much of this
bargaining would be about sexual acts, especially for adoles-cent boys to be receptive in sodomy, or
for travestis to sodomize apparently masculine clients. (One travesti gave up her husband when the
man asked to be sodomized (Silva 1993). There was a circuit of relationships between minors,
thieves, policemen, travestis, drug dealers, informal peddiers of various items from clothes to cigarette
lighters along the streets and store fronts of Lapa.
Non-monetized sexual acts between males of similar ages especially among whites are the most
hidden by discretion and reticence. Such activities could go on in known cinemas, either with sex acts
on the premises or immediately after leaving. Indeed a psychology dissertation in 1989 carried the
intriguing title: In the cinema twilight... orgiastic society on carioca afternoons."
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During the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth Brazilian bourgeois males wore formal
European clothes as a sign of status. Under slavery blacks did not wear shoes but freemen and whites
did. Costume carried a message about social authority. That was true for young and old. The Rio
bourgeoisie was small - never more than 5 per cent of the population before 1940 - and so for much of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the social labeling of an individual was obvious from his
costume. It was a kind of social revolution when the middle-class young and aspirants to enter that
class began to wear casual clothes, particularly blue jeans, and sports shirts. This was really an
innovation of the 1960s.
The center of the city developed locales for gay meetings at night when the population of business
people left the rea. A classic illustration of this would be the vegetarian restaurant called Bomio
which at lunch-time served meals to office workers and at night became a place for flamboyant
transvestites. One of the most striking was a university teacher of geography who changed his appear-
ance totally in the evening and vamped at the restaurant. A video was made of his transformation in
the 1980s. Tigresa on rua Riachuelo had transvestite clients.
The sexual culture of Brazil was always flamboyantly heterosexual as in the poetry of Carlos
Drummond de Andrade. It was also perverse in its cult of the buttocks, as in that heterosexual authors
poem playing with the slang word for buttocks, bum - bunda:
Bumhoney, buinlily, bumcolor, buinlove
Buinlaw, buinlore, bumaniseed, bumbread Bum of a thousand versions, pluribum,
Bum of a thousand versions, pluribum, unibum
unibum Bum in flower, bum somewhere else.
(Andrade 1992: 50)
The stress on physical appearance was part of the modern Brazilian identity. This could easily link
to a fluidity between genders and appearances. The development in the twentieth century of the
fondness for beaches provided opportunities for display.
The re was a widespread knowledge among carioca men and youths of a sexual economy for
genital activity between males that was particularly complex in racial, age and class terms. What
seems to have been rare prior to the post-World War II era was an on-going, egalitarian, sexual liaison
between cohabiting adults of the same social background. The strong familialism of Brazilian life
meant that late-night escapades could not easily be turned into the public and stable forms of a
cohabiting gay couple in the modern sense. The announce-ment of a gay marriage between a 29-
year-old man and another of 23, one from Sao Paulo and the other from Bahia, who shared an
apartment in Copacabana was sufficiently newsworthy to merit a picture of the couple in a news
magazine in 1994.1< The ceremony was to be officialized with the partici-pation of an ex-seminarist.
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Brazilian modernization accelerated during the 1930s and especially after World War II. With the
development of Rios financial and commercial impor-tance there were increasing numbers of office
workers in the city core. A modern model of cruising differed from the older forms of street
loitering. The down-town time for cruising was from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. when employees left work, as
one Portuguese visitor noted in the 1970s contrasting it with Lisbon where serious homosexual
cruising started at 11 p.m. He explained it by saying men who lived in the distant suburbs sought
release before going back to their wives and dweilings (Gomes n.d.: 172).
By the 1960s there was a whole series of bars in Copacabana that were social centers as well as
being pick-up places for sexual encounters. There were thus semi-private but obviously gay locations
other than the outdoor cruising grounds of the city
Another commercial institution which flourished in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s was the
steam-bath which was obviously intended for a gay clientele. Since it was necessary to pay to go in,
this immediately separated out much of the danger and uncertainty of pick-ups on the streets or in the
parks of the city. The proximity of employees and other clients meant that the risk of theft or violence
was reduced. Middle-class gay men were particularly drawn to these aspects of discretion, cleanliness
and security. A number of steam-baths were in operation. One in the suburb of Gvea, for example,
was in a residential street. Some registered hustlers among the bathers wore a distinctive towel to
indicate who was a sex worker if their services were required. Other clients might prefer to eye their
fellows disposed to intimacy without additional expenditure. While the notion of such a steam-bath
was a copy of a North American institution, its functioning in Rio had a Brazilian touch in background
music and body types.
The growth of the gay movement in Brazil in the 1970s was affected by greater openness of
intellectuals. Gasparino Damata (1917- ) published in 1967 a collection of short extracts from other
writers called stories of the accursed love. Damata followed this with other works with homosexual
themes.11 The well-known painter Darcy Penteado made a positive proclamation of his homosexuality
in an illustrated magazine. Falos e Fotos and also in a 1976 book entitled The Goal. He followed this
up with several other books on explicitly homosexual themes, with publicity photographs on the cover
showing himself as a healthy, bare-chested bearded man over 50 noted as fond of surfing. His later
death from AIDS was widely reported.
Lampiao, named for a legendary Robin Hood Brazilian bandit, was an explicitly self-identifying
gay monthly newspaper which had a difficult birth. It was published in Rio for the first time in April
of 1978 in a tabloid formal. The 25 May 1978 issue of Lampiao carried a picture of a hustler who had
killed a client on the front page under the headline Cinelndia, Alaska, SoJoo [refer-ences to the
two most notorious cruising grounds in Rio, and the last to an avenue in Sao Paulo]: dangerous
relationships. It also announced that it would deal with the church and homosexuals, poems and a
play, and a revelation about the carnival in Rio. The bottom of the page carried the legend: How to
operate
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in the carioca night. This was exactly the unself-conscious type of wide-ranging public discussions that
the military government of the day disliked. The mainline newsmagazine Isto had already been
prosecuted under the Press Law for a 1977 report on homosexuality in Brazil. Lampio was also to be
accused of offense to morals and good behavior. This produced a widespread commentary in other
newspapers. Even more to the point, the distribution map of thejournal showed how a gay voice was
read in Brazil. After three years it was, reported an editor, distributed from Oiapoque to Chui: that is,
from the Uruguayan border to the Amazon, and there was a map of the nation in the editorial rooms.
What was particularly striking was that the distribution was carried out through an informal network
since the commercial distributors of newspapers refused to accept it. Thus the kiosk that sold the paper
was itself defined as distributing louche materials, sometimes in conjunction with magazines of male
nudes as well as similar heterosexual publications. The editor proclaimed himself sympathetic to
feminism and the black movement and sought to draw together a national coalition of the excluded,
and notjust male homosexuals. He also made the traditional carioca claim to be light-hearted and not the
producer of a rigid and crotchety officiai bulletin of homosexual activism. Lampido ceased publication
after four years, partly because of political disputes among the editorial staff and partly for financial
reasons due to the chronic inflation of the time (Trevisan 1986: 131-54). Throughout the 1980s and
1990s picture books of nude modeis destined for a homosexual male public were produced in Brazil
and sold in Rio just as in other large cities. In 1995 Sui Generis a glossy magazine in color based in Rio,
with many pictures of young male modeis, lesbians, figures from popular culture and transvestites,
began publication. Nelson Feitosa, the editor, wrote of the production team that they were chic,
showing their faces, and that their main aim was to amuse and inform the readers with a lot of good
humor.18
A newspaper reader in Rio in June 1993 perusing the story of a municipal politician in Coqueiro
Seco, a small town in the northern state of Alagoas, who was shot dead after he publicly admitted his
homosexuality and his body dismembered and strewn about the place as a warning to others, would
have a reinforced sense of sexual geography. Gay activists were reminded of the fact that figures in
public office in much of rural Brazil still dare not come out openly for fear of negative consequences
at the ballot boxes and even physical attack. A broadly based opinion survey in Brazil of 1993 found
that 56 per cent of the respondents did not agree that a homosexual could be voted president of the
Republic, 47 per cent would change their vote if it came out that their candi-date in an election was
homosexual, and 45 per cent would change doctor if they found out that he was gay.
The 1980s brought the onset of the AIDS crisis in Brazil which stimulated a more systematic study
of male prostitution and of sexual practices with a view to warning sex workers and clients about
dangerous behavior. A 1990 newspaper reported that 68.9 per cent of the male prostitutes in Rio were
infected with AIDS. It added that Rio had ten areas of male prostitution where 500 youths mostly
between 15 to 23 years of age each serviced on average 25 clients per month.
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A 1994 article on Brazilianjuvenile prostitution noted that Rio had probably the largest population
of male prostitutes (nuches) in the country serving an exten-sive pornoturismo. The number ranged
from 1,000 in the low season to 4,000 in the high. The vast majoritywere adolescents under 20 who
did not at all dress in a feminine way Many took the receptive role in sodomy for a paying client,
despite affecting an exaggeratedly macho discourse among their fellows. They often came from poor
and disadvantaged backgrounds. They accepted the tradi-tional role of a younger male before marriage
without the strongly masculine body characteristics of heavy beards who served as an acceptable
sexual object for an older male. They did not identify themselves as having a homosexual identity
even if they engaged in prostitution with other men.
The article described a 17-year-old boy from the interior state of Minas Gerais who worked as the
ticket seller on a bus until he was laid off because he had reached the age of his military service. He
was the son of a carpenter and a house maid. He had initial sexual encounters with other males without
asking for money. He then went to Rio at the invitation of a friend and for some months at Cinelndia
was a prostitute for older Br azi lian men (SUS 8.00 for each encounter or if for a foreign client met on
the street in Copacabana, SUS 20.00). At the time of the article he had be en working for two months
and was concerned that his mother should not know that he was sodomized by his clients. He had been
identified as at risk by an association which specialized in surveil-lance of male hustlers at the Central
do Brasil railway station in and near the main urinal. That was a site of proletarian prostitution and
very poor payment, sometimes nothing more than some bread and a boiled egg for sexual acts.
Generally in Brazil in many towns there were no public lavatories. Rio had none until the start of the
twentieth century and of six public toilets opened during the remodeling constructions only one, by
then with a user fee, survived in 1997. Men seeking anonymous sex made less use of such sites than in
North America and Western Europe. However the washroom at Central was an exception for decades
in Rio. A Portuguese tourist described it in the 1970s as two large rooms which held troughs against
the walls without divisions. It was often busy from 6 a.m. in the morning. No feminine-acting men
went there and there were often ten or twenty men looking at those who displayed an erect penis.
There was an attendant; the police occasionally asked youths for their identity papers (Gomes n.d.
172-3).
A guide for 1994 noted that Central was the place to find very young poor boys on the hustle
among large numbers of female prostitutes and street kids. Just as at the Gare du Nord urinal in Paris,
a user fee was introduced at Central in the 1990s to discourage homosexual activity.
A retired official of the fire brigade from Brasilia and previously married gave his negative views
of Cinelndia, the Via Appia and Galeria Alaska, the three most notorious outdoor Rio cruising
grounds. (He said nothing about the cruising area of Ipanema which was more bourgeois and
egalitarian.) He thought that the Central railway station was much better for sexual encounters. Aged
65 he used a feminine nickname - Tonia Carrero Gay - and told thejour-
159

nalist that he could Tuck all night in the receptive role of anal sex. His prefer-ence ran to youths
between 15 to 22 years of age, and he added that he especially liked workers who are occasional
hustlers and not professionals. After the separation from his wife, his son lived with him when
twenty years earlier, at age 45, he accepted his receptive sexual role with younger men. Before
marriage he had experimented with another male taking the insertive part, but then he stopped and was
married for ten years. He gave this interview about the stages of his sexual development to a
newspaper particularly active in the anti-AIDS campaign.
The intersection of developing forms of capitalism also affected Rio gay space. Modern notorious
cruising grounds like Cinelndia in the old center of the city, the Galeria Alaska at Posto Seis in
Copacabana, Farme beach near Posto Nove in Ipanema and the Central Railway Station off Presidente
Vargas Avenue, did not exist before 1900. Cinelndia took its name from the cinemas which only
opened in the first decade of the twentieth century. Posto Seis was no more than some beach houses,
and what had formerly been the Pedro II railway station was completely rebuilt in 1934. In 1995 a
commercial guide described the Galeria Alaska as the oidest area of [male] prostitution in Rio
deJaneiro. In 1970 a Portuguese-speaking visitor calculated that there were some twenty homosexual
nightclubs in Rio, none of which were lesbian, twenty seedy cinemas where sexual acts took place on
the balconies and thirty famous outdoor cruising places. This shows a rather suspect fondness for
round numbers but was made by contrast with a larger city. Sao Paulo, said to have only six gay
nightclubs and four cinemas known for sex. The Brazilian newspaper of record, the Jornal do Brasil,
regularly published during the 1980s advertisements for male escorts who would visit prospective
clients for gay sex in their homes or hotel rooms.
In Rio the more theatrical side of homosexual males could be commercial-ized for an ostensibly
heterosexual audience. One instance inJanuary 1981 was the show Gay Fantasy in the large theater in
the Galeria Alaska in Copacabana with numerous transvestite and beefcake performances. Located in
the theater near the beach and presented as a form of ribaid camp excess, male homosexual ity be
came comic and diverting. Writing at the start of the 1980s Guy Hocquenhern said of the dancing bar
Soto in the Alaska arcade that it was the headquarters of Rio homosexual youth: It was situated in
the Alaska arcade, a promenade for picturesque old fairies, hustlers and transvestites who performed in
the theater under the arches (Hocquenghem 1980: 158).
Littie had changed by the time of the show called The Leopards in the same theater at the end of
the decade, which involved hilarious and risque stand-up transvestite comics and culminated with a
procession across the stage of stark naked, muscular young men sporting fll erections. The audience
included heterosexual couples and the atmosphere was one of much camp hilarity and knowing
toleration rather than sexual titillation. However, by the late 1990s aggressive real-estate purchases by
a fundamentalist Protestant church had stopped most of the gay cruising in the environs of the Galeria
Alaska.
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The beach and sea were already homoerotic in nineteenth-century Rio. From the quay-side around
1880 small dinghies left to row out to the Floating Palace, a large flatboat anchored in the middle of
the Bay with tanks for sea baths and a bar service. This was something like a precursor of a modern
swimming pool. On hot summer nights hundreds of bathers would congregate, mostly single men.
Families at that time preferred to bathe on the beach of Santa Luzia or at Flamengo (Gerson n.d.: 35).
The later beach display in Copacabana in front of the Palace Hotel was a known concentration of
[possibly] available young men, some for money and others for looks or lust depending on social
class, circum-stance and behavior. Because of the variability of supply and demand it was known in
gay slang as the Stock Exchange (Bolsa de valores)?-^ The swimming and beaches of Rio always
provided opportunities to watch attractive young men and to meet them. From the late 1970s another
beach area in the Ipanema suburb became increasingly a magnet for gay sunbathers. The well-known
Brazilian theater director Luiz Antonio Martinez Correa (1950-87) brought a 26-year-old man with
curly blonde hair and a variety of tattoos on his muscular body from a beach to his small apartment in
Ipanema in December 1987. This transfer from public eroticized shoreline to a private theater of desire
proved fatal. There, when he was naked on his bed, his guest, perhaps with the help of an accom-plice,
murdered him for his video-cassette, a telephone answering machine and some cash. The accused
man and a fellow surfer had previously attacked a 38-year-old French male tourist with a knife but the
latter escaped. The assailants were arrested and interrogated, and this facilitated the identification of
the young man who was last seen with the director. The murdered theater director was popular and his
brother was also well known in theatrical circles. A small but vociferous demonstration of men and
women, primarily from the Rio arts community, demonstrated outside the Ipanema police station
against what they saw as deliberate foot-dragging by the police in following up cases of the murders of
homosexual men. In Rio as in Sao Paulo and Bahia it was believed by many gay men that the police,
particularly since the start of the AIDS epidemic, were not assiduous in tracking down the killers of
those gays they believed to be passive sodomites who were said to be vectors of the spread of the
disease (Venciguerra 1988).
Of the photographs showing homosexual men in Brazil illustrating a big article in a magazine on
What it is to be gay in Brazil there was a clean-shaven Englishman aged 35 and his bearded white
Brazilian companion aged 28, a 39-year-old mulatto den shaven, a cohabiting couple respectively 36
and 34 both bearded, and a 37-year-old white with a Groucho-style mustache. A collec-tive photo of
beach boys of Ipanema, which includes one giri in a skimpy bathing costume, shows one muscular
figure with designer facial stubble but the other men, apparently in their twenties, are muscular and
den shaven. One Sao Paulo clean-shaven white designer of 29 is shown with his mother. The
widespread cultivation of facial hair by Brazilian homosexual men over 30 is part of a strategy of
passing as they age. That is, as men leave the 15 to 30 stage where their unmarried status does not
perhaps demand explanation they add facial hair
161

to keep a butch bofe image so that they will not appear fairy (bicha). One obvious exception is
transvestites who seek facial and bodily depilation.
The fear of appearing effeminate can be noted among gay men who accept a domestic arrangement
of living together. Various commentators on homosexual ity in South America have stressed the
inhibiting effect of familialism on relationships. To live together in broad daylight as a family unit
with domestic routines in a way that became fairly banal in North American big-city gay districts and
even the suburbs from the 1960s on is still unusual and reproved in much of Brazil in the 1990s. The
article stressed that in 1993 there was a great deal of discrimination and social pressure against
homosexual men and lesbians in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is the most tolerant urban site in the nation in
the opinion of Brazilian homosexuals. For them Rio is more than the Marvellous City of its official
slogan, it is Our City in the same way that gay Americans recognize the special quality of San
Francisco. Much Brazilian gay slang -Tortugayese as Wayne R. Dynes called it in a compilation -
derived from carioca wits (Murray 1995: 256-63). Like many North American cities. Rio de Janeiro
has been reworked over time. Public spaces changed with the rebuilding of the old colonial city.
Warehouse and market districts relocated, and inter-urban and intra-urban transportation nodes were
built and rebuilt, from tramways to the bus station for long-distance travelers. Indeed, even the
landscape was reworked with the flattening of some of the morros or small hills on the city site: that of
the Castie was demolished between 1920 and 1922. Formerly it had been home to many poor residents
and latterly its site served as an airport. By 1920 Rio de Janeiro exceeded 1 million in population, of
whom almost a fifth were foreign-born.
Rio attracted gay pornographers like the Englishman who used the profes-sional name Kristen
Bjorn. His Carnaval in Rio (1989) showed men being cruised from an open sports car, views of co pac
aban a Beach, male dancers in the carnival who subsequently make love on camera, pick-ups at a
street market and sex sequences in luxurious houses. The film-maker described the sexual altitudes of
the local Brazilian modeis who were not gay but who participated in a full range of sexual acts with
other male modeis in his film because of high pay Jamoo 1997: 19-20). The film Via Appia (1992)
with Peter Senner and Guilherme de Padua directed by Andreas Schreitmtter andJochen Hick was in
the form of docudrama about an infected Germn looking for the Mario in Rio whom he believes gave
him AIDS on a previous visit. It showed many gay meeting places of Rio deJaneiro at that time.
As for the domestic space of gays and lesbians, there is by the 1990s nothing like the gay ghettos
which enable some North American and European gays to feel safe from societal disapproval and even
violence. Some Rio districts have prosperous gay couples who live in apartment blocks in Leme, Santa
Teresa or in Copacabana but this is scarcely in a visible concentration of gay residents and services.
They are less likely to employ servants than heterosexuals although well able to afford to pay them.
Rio in many ways is still in the 1950s holding pattern where discreet, mostly white, prosperous gays
could survive on the margins of
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bourgeois propriety by avoiding any challenge to the heterosexist ascendancy. Co-resident gay couples
are virtually unknown in the favelas (semi-slum housing of the poor). Only the travesti can openly
defy the traditional family model - and it is a defiance which is either ajoke or an imitation which by
definition can never reach its goal.
North Atlantic sexual groupings who eroticize painful sexual ity with a panoply of whips, chains,
studded collars and instruments of torture, the sado-masochists, have littie resonance in Rio gay
society where suffering and cruelty scream out from every crime tabloid. Yet there is a paradox here
which is the core of the Rio gay experience. Rio offers a circuit of spaces for exuberant sensual sexual
release which finds its greatest public unity with the cityscape in the annual carnival. Rio is aiso, in the
1990s, one of the most violent large cities in the world with around 7,000 homicides annually for a
population of some 5.6 million, most of the deaths occurring among young black males in the 15 to 20
age bracket. There are many more lesser attacks, stray bulleis, and hold-ups on the streets and by-
ways.
8
The Marvellous City -A Cidade Maravilhosa - of sexuality and sun is aiso, and
simultaneously, the city of fear and shadow.

Figure 6.1 Carnival on Rio, 1978. Photo by Pedro Lobo.
163

Notes
1 Pieroni (1996: 288) says 65 per cent of the known exiles to Brazil for sodomy were under 25 years
of age.
2 IL (Lisbon Inquisition trial no.) 6919.
3 Luiz Mott drew his information from three trials: IL 4769 and 4230; Inquisition of Evora Trial no.
4995.
4 IL Liv. 146, undated, unnumbered, denunciation Antonio Coelho de Carvalho in the same prison.
5 IL 16888.
6 IL 16177.
7 IL411.
8 Chief of police to Minister of Justice 2 April 1855, Novas Latas of the IHGB Arquivo de Nabuco. I
am indebted to Roderick Barman for this reference.
9 Ex inf. Prof. Lena Medeiros de Menezes.
10 Ex inf. James N. Green, see Beyond CofTOva/forthcoming University of Chicago Press.
11 The following translations are by David Higgs from the Portuguese edition. An American
translation was produced in California in 1981.
12 LeMonde, 8 January 1996, 1.
13 Veriano de Souza Terto Junior, No escurinho do cinema... sociedade orgistica as tardes
cariocas, Psychology Dissertation, Rio de Janeiro, PUCRJ, 1989.
14 Veja, 6 April 1994, p. 91.
15 Gasparino Damata, Historias do amor maldito (Rio de Janeiro, Record 1967); with Walmir
Ayala, Poemas do amor maldito (1969). See also As sobras do mar, 1958, on homo-erotic life in
the navy, and Os solteiroes (Rio de Janeiro, Pallas, 1976) about sexual encounters between men
with youths set in Rio during the 1950s and 1960s. He also produced an Antologia da Lapa Vida
boinia no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, Leitura, 1965) which discussed the marginal world of
prostitutes, pimps, thieves and homosexuals.
16 Number O of the newspaper appeared in April 1978.
17 Isto.No. 53, 28Dec. 1977.
18 Sui Generis, No. 8, December 1995, 3.
19 Veja, 12Mayl993,53.
20 Jornal do Brasil, 2 February 1990.
21 Veja 16March 1994, 70-2.
22 Beijo daRuaYeas- 1, No. 2 July-August 1989), p. 7.
23 GuiaGoy-.Rio, 1994-5, p. 61.
24 Guia Gay: Rio, 1994-5, noted that it was called the Stock Exchange because of the large quantity
of boys on the game (rapazes de programa) who frequented it.
25 Jornal do Brasil, 26 December 1987, Bl.
26 The Washington Blade, 17 May 1996, p. 12 carried anews report that Mari a Conceico Muller
dos Reis, the mother of the Brazilian man, had agreed to marry the Englishman so that he might
legally reside with her son in Brazil.
27 Veja, 12May 1993,52-9.
28 LeMonde, 30 November 1995, p. 2.
164
7 San Francisco
Les Wright
San Francisco is a peninsula. Its surrounded on three sides by water and on one side by reality.
Joseph Torchia, As If After Sex
The San Francisco of legend, myth and nostalgic remembrance has been far better documented
than the day-to-day realities of most of its historical develop-ment. The only antidote to these
romanticized visions of San Francisco is to live there. San Franciscans have been embellishing,
exaggerating and eschewing the circumstances of their city since the Gold Rush days of 1848-9 to
such a degree that the citys uncanny ability to reinvent itself is perhaps its most remarkable feature.
Gay men not least have been happening upon this happy accident of San Francisco, inscribing their
own queer visions on the palimpsest of this very young city for the past century and a half.
San Franciscos appeal has always been as a rough-and-tumble, morally wide-open frontier town.
The first Anglo-American migrants, predominan tly from Puritan New England, engaged in
homosexual activity and created homosocial spaces within the liminal moral and social spaces created
by San Franciscos vast geographic remove from the structured moral spaces of the urban and even
rural communities of mid-nineteenth-century America.
True to the gold diggers, Utopians, philosophers of Manifest Destiny, oppor-tunists of every stripe
and many a young man escaping dubious or intolerable personal situations, each arrived in San
Francisco with distinctly preconceived notions of the place which rarely had the slightest
correspondence with reality. The earliest Anglo-American migrants were, for all practical purposes,
oblivious to the presence of the californios, the Spanish gentleman ranchers who settied Mexican Alta
California following the Spanish missionaries conversion of the native peoples. There had been
Russian fur trappersjust to the north and only a handful of Anglo-American settiers in the region when
Mxico ceded California and Texas to the United States in 1848. Chinese miners, who also came in
search of gold, found themselves relegated to second-class status, barred from most social spaces and
sequestered in Chinatown, which sprang up next to the original Portsmouth Square.
No records of homoerotic dynamics from this founding era have come to
165

light. Mid-century Americans were reticent to express any matters of a sexual nature. As George
Ghauncey (1994) documented through the case of New York City, a very different notion of sexual
matters existed at this time. The phallo-centric sexual economy of Gold Rush era San Francisco
suggests that we distinguish between penetrative-masculine and receptive-feminine roles in male-male
sexual encounters, and that sexual adventurism carried very different meanings to practitioners of the
time than they do in American society today.
John DEmilio (1983) employed a materialist model to articulate the shift to modern social classes
and concomitant social and economic freedom. Men and women could live andwork in the new
industrial-era cities outside the social and economic unit of the extended family. When gold fever
swept the nation, men were able to mobilize easily to head West to prospect. When gold was
discovered at Sutters Mili setting off the stampede of would-be prospectors in 1848-9, Californias
promise seemed fulfilled and San Francisco became a boom town. Bachelors and family men alike left
by land and by sea for California, most intending to return home once they had made their fortunes.
Some fled ruinous domestic or financial situations, some went for the adventure of it, some to cater to
the needs of - or make their fortunes from - the 49ers. The earliest gold-miners, of the 1848 season,
encountered a uni que egalitarian camaraderie among their fellows in the gold fields. In the second
season, of 1849, the gold fields grew crowded, competitive, dangerous, and vigilante rule took over in
the mining camps and in San Francisco.
The city quickly transformed from a sieepy backwater to international port and cultural capital of
the American West. For a while it was lawless. Gold Rush era San Francisco was an estimated 92 per
cent (or higher) male, and the men mostly in their twenties. The men came from not only all over
America, but many other parts of the world as well, especially Europe and China. The familiar
comforts of home, hearth and womenfolk were virtually nonexistent, familiar social mores temporarily
suspended. Dweilings were in short supply, and most men rented housing in leaky tents, wooden or
muslin shanties, even table tops or planks laid across two chairs. In boarding houses and even in some
of the hoteis men siept in barracks-like conditions, a row of bunks along a wall or a row of cots on the
floor. Boarding houses, public baths, sailors and workingmens clubs lent themselves to male-male
socio-sexual meeting places.
The most popular pastimes were gambling, drinking and prostitution. During the Gold Rush days
men would go to dances on Friday night. Sometimes some of the men would wear dresses, and
sometimes a bandanna would be worn on the arm to indicate a man who would dance the womans
part (Pennington n.d.). Up to a thousand gambling places, including the legendary El Dorado,
operated in the early years, centered on and around Portsmouth Square - San Franciscos notorious
Barbary Coast district, at that time adjacent to the water-front. (Years later land and rubble from the
1906 earthquake were used as landfill, displacing the waterfront several blocks to the north.)
Gambling, drinking, and sex could be and were pursued twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
(Enforceable anti-gambling laws did not succeed until 1873.) Herbert
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Ashbury reports the legendary San Francisco gambler as one of the queerest mixture in human nature
(Ashbury 1933: 23), stereotypically mercurial but with self-control, impulsive yet coolly cunning, ever
ready with the pistol, able to go days without sieep and studiously neat, with a tendency toward the
foppish.
Most inhabitants of the time, however, were lower- and working-class men: miners, ex-miners,
odd-job workers, sailors. Desertion of sailors from ships began as soon as Americans took over San
Francisco in 1846. The Gold Rush only made the problem worse. Sailors became unwilling chatteis
the practice of shanghaiing sailors is virtually synonymous with San Francisco. As there was much
easy money to be made in the practice, crimps (the procurers) and respectable citizens (businessmen
and politicians) made it into a common and unregulated practice which flourished there between 1850
and 1910.
A crimp was often a boardinghouse proprietor or the agent of a local business-man. Politicians
were, in turn, bought off. Crimps would often lure their victim with promises, get him drunk, drug him
or send out their runners to meet and illegally board arriving ships, lure or threaten or render the
sailor unconscious and drag him off ship. It is remarkable the numbers of sailors who knowingly put
themselves in dangerous situations, where they could be victimized.
Keeping in mind Chaunceys concept of a ph al loe en trie economy, several preliminary
deductions may be drawn: male-male sexual activities, male-male affectional bondings (with and
without a sexual component) undoubtedly occurred with some frequency. Waterfronts were well
known as cruising areas to meet sailors and female prostitutes. A few records exist of the arrests of
men dressed in female attire selling sexual services along the waterfront. One man fellating or
manually masturbating another man, whether for money or love or lack of female companionship,
would not have been perceived as a perversion. Chauncey describes an array of relationships in late
nineteenth-century New York City among wolves (working-class men who identified themselves as
conventionally masculine) and fairies (effeminate men who wore womens clothing) and punks
(younger male in a subordinate role to another man). Similar dynamics no doubt existed in San
Francisco.
Wait Whitman, poet of the common man, articulated his vision of an American democracy at mid
nineteenth century, based, in part, on the comradely love of men for each other. For Whitman, who
drew so copiously upon his own sexual experiences among predominantly working-class men he met,
homogenic [male-male] love was explicitly sexual in nature, the expres-sion of a working-class
ethos, and the cement that would glue together a truly democratic union among the citizens of the
United States and among the states of the newly restored Union.
Most of the men arriving at San Francisco would not have read Whitman or have been aware of
the homoerotic content of his poetry. Among them, however, would have been men drawn to the
exclusive company of other men (such as sailors), men encountering male-male sexual activities
(away from home and family) while working in Eastern cities, men given to romantic attachment
(anecdotal reports of later de cades suggest the likelihood of coupled, if unacknowl-
167

edged, male pairings), most of whom would not have found their activities worthy of or appropriate to
social acknowledgment. Given the density of the city and the boom town populations overwhelming
proportion of men in their teens and twenties, it is very likely that men with such desires - wolves,
fairies, punks, sailors, prospectors, adventurers - could and did easily and frequently encounter each
other in San Francisco, and in greater numbers than anywhere else along the waterfront, in the
saloons and gambling houses, on the thronging streets, in the overcrowded boarding houses. The
prevalence of alcohol and drugs, the free-wheeling lifestyle of a frontier town would be conducive to
such encounters and even to attracting those who might desire them. The frequency with which sailors
and other rooming house boarders put themselves in situations to be shanghaied suggests that, at least
in some cases, homoerotic allure may have been the precipitating factor.
Significantly, cross-gender expression was not a homosexually marked activity. Indeed, it was a
frequent, if relatively unremarkable feature in many para des, costume balls, vaudeville routines... and
part of Sunday afternoon socializing with friends and family (Stryker and Buskirk 1996: 17) in
nineteenth-century America. San Francisco saloons often featured men in womens clothing as a
staged entertainment. Vaudevillian Paul Vernon, for example, who often performed in female attire,
was a celebrity in 1870s San Francisco.
During San Franciscos Gilded Age (1880-1906), reliable records of homosexual activity and
homosocial arrangement emerge through bourgeois prisms. George Mosse (1985) pointed to the rise
of the European cult of middle-class respectability, buitres sed by the development of public
hygiene, medical doctrines of psychopathology, class- and race-based biologism, and the oft-cited
Foucauldian observation of the medicalization of homosexuality and the creation of a distinct
homosexual social type, among other tenets. San Francisco flowered as the United States port to the
Orient and cultural and financial capital on the Pacific. The city established a literary and journalistic
bohemian culture, including the likes of Samuel Clemens. Along the Barbary Coast literary bohemia
rubbed shoulders with the stage performers, prostitutes and saloon patrons of high and low station. It
must be kept in mind that, although situated along the margin of middle-class respectability, when a
literary bohemian milieu takes root in an established and prospering middle class - cultural bohemia is
by definition an insiders revolt against prevalent middle-class mores or values.
While lower- and working-class San Francisco men were not minded to record their homoerotic
experiences, the bohemian outsiders to proper society reveal their insider knowledge in circumspect
manner. Osear Wilde who uttered his memorable if cryptic pronouncement, that everyone who
disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attrac-
tions of the next world, visited the city in 1882. In 1896, a local San Franciscan wrote to Edward
carpen te r, the English Utopian socialist who championed Whitmanesque democracy and homogenic
love, to tell him really you have quite a following in San Francisco alone (Katz 1983: 254; Stryker
and Buskirk 1996: 19). The new science of sexology was coming into being toward the
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centurys end. Charles Warren Stoddards late autobiographical San Francisco novel For the Pleasure of
His Company: An Affair of the Msty City (1903) offered the first glimpse of a respectably middle-class gay life
among the new genteel society in Gilded Age San Francisco. Stoddards protagonist. Paul Clitheroe, is
a young writer, the homoerotic nature of the friendship with his two closest male friends is alluded to
by Stoddard, girl-boys are discussed with a female friend, and the novel ends with Pauljumping ship
in pursuit of three naked Pacific Island chiefs. Stoddards South Sea Islanders were related to
Melvilles Typee (1846), a romanticizing literary trope for projecting his own sexual difference onto
exotic queer others. (It would take the middle class to commit such fantasy and desire to paper and
discreetly displace it on to absent inferior races.)
In San Francisco the repercussions of the new sexological views led to profound changes in social
perceptions and the organization of gay male social spaces, as occurred elsewhere in the United States
and Western Europe. Even as respectable people withdrew into social closets, politically radical
individuals and small groups rose up to counter every move to isolate and stigmatize individuals now
labeled sexually deviant. The promulgation of third sex theory, positing male homosexuals as
psychological hermaphrodites, stigmatized effeminate males and cast a new homosexual pallor on
cross-dressing. Among the middle class, distinction between the roles of the masculine-penetrator and
feminine-receptor or young/mature male-male sexual couplings would be replaced with a more rigidly
drawn distinction between homosexual persons and adventuring heterosexuals. Among San
Franciscos middle classes, passing (as heterosexual) became a necessary camouflage. Identifiably
effeminate men could take refuge among the bohemian class as cross-dressers and dandies. Another
consequence of the nascent gender identity formation of the time may be noted in the
hypermasculinity cultivated by San Francisco-based writer Frank Norris and Oakiand-native Jack
London, who portrayed his days of youthful drinking and carousing among the sailors and fisherman
along the Oakiand waterfront in vociferously heterosexual terms.
Experimentation in Utopian communities was at its height, and free love was often one of its
components. Numerous intentional communities were founded in California at this time. The
colonizing Spaniards vision of California as El Dorado gave way to Utopian Yankee visions of
Arcadia. Free thinkers, often with nonconformist sexual philosophies, migrated to northern California
and established nu mero us intentional communities during this period, among them Fountaingrove
(founded 1875) in Santa Rosa (Sonoma County), Icaria Speranza (founded 1881) in Cloverdale
(Sonoma County), or the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth (founded 1885) in what is now
Sequoia National Park in the high Sierras. With the social gaze upon knowable homosexuals, an
elaborate, complex homosexual subculture emerged. Men continued to meet in the Barbary Coast
saloons; the Dash, a dance hall and saloon which featured female impersonation, became San
Franciscos first identifiably gay bar, opening and closing its doors in 1908. The Dash probably took
its name as an open joke making fun of the Dashaways, the most prominent of San Franciscos
temper-
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anee organizations in pre-Prohibition times. But an increasingly powerful, conservative middle class
desired to rid their fair city of the low-class and debauched Barbary Coast. Trauma and confusion
among San Franciscans following the 1906 earthquake was exacerbated by political scandal, a Red
Light Abatement Act was passed in 1914 and was upheid by the California Supreme Court in 1917,
dealing the Barbary Coast its final death blow. The passage of Prohibition in 1919 shut down
completely legal drinking establishments. Vice, -alcohol, gambling, prostitution - came under the
control of the newly organized criminal class, old social habits be came dirty, immoral,
outrageous - and illegal, and a new criminal class was born, the sexual deviant. (No wonder much
of Americas and San Franciscos bohemian literati moved to Paris in the 1920s, including Bay Area
notables Gertrude Stein and Alice Tokias, to ride out this wave of Puritanism.)
Designers in tended Market Street to be the Champs Elyses of San Francisco. It was lavishly
developed following the earthquake of 1906 as the main artery for commerce, business and
government. Market Street originally was anchored by Rincon Hill, the original exclusive enclave of
the city, adjacent to the waterfront ferry terminals at the Embarcadero. Market Street ran, and still
runs, in a northeast-southwesterly direction from there past the Pacific Stock Exchange and financial
center, the elegant Union Square at the bottom of Nob Hill and connectors to North Beach and
Chinatown, the theater district, the bars, pool halls and transient hoteis of the Tenderloin, the
monumental, post-quake beaux-arts Civic Center, one of the few City Beautiful projects of the early
century completed in the US. Past Van Ness Street trolley lines continued on to the summer residences
of upper Haight Street and Golden Gate Park, Eureka Valley and other points West.
From the Gilded Age through post-quake San Francisco, men would find each other for sexual
encounters along the new public transit routes. The trans-portation hub along the Embarcadero at the
bottom of Market Street became a major complex sociosexual space of men to meet each other at this
time. Most of the original waterfront was filled in between the 1860s and 1900s, and especially
following the Earthquake of 1906, with the first Embarcadero Ferry Terminal completed in 1896.
(Until the construction of the Golden Gate and OakIand-San Francisco Bay Bridges in 1933, ferries
were the only way to reach Oakiand and other points in the east and north Bay.) Lower Market Street
was very popular for street cruising. The newly constructed Embarcadero YMCA ser ved as a
convenient meeting place and transient residence. Waterfront bars catering to a rough clientele of
sailors, longshoremen and others were also nearby.
Trolleys departing the Ferry Building connected every major site along and on either side of
Market Street. Sites for malemale encounters along this route included the open space of Union
Square, public bath-houses and public toilets (an innovation of the hygienically minded middle class)
in various spots, and - at the end of the Geary Street trolley line - the seaside attractions clustered at
the far end of Golden Gate Park along Ocean Beach: the Sutro Baths, the Cliff House, Lands End and
at the amusement park Playland-by-the-Sea. Lower- and
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working-class men, and their families, continued to live in the Tenderloin, South of Market and other
locations within walking distance of Market Street. The higher classes lived in districts which
overlapped, such as Nob Hill, or which were adjacent, such as Van Ness and South Van Ness Streets
and the Western Addition, or connected by trolley. Rincon Hill was leveled and most of the Nob Hill
mansions burned down as a firewail following the earthquake of 1906, and many of San Franciscos
poshest residents relocated to Pacific Heights. The upper Fillmore, the commercial strip atop Pacific
Heights, eventually became home to upscale gay bars, the still extant Lions Pub being the one with
greatest longevity.
As San Francisco grew into a modern American metropolis it did so organically, such that helero
and homo spaces, public and private spaces, upper- and lower-class spaces intermingled, invisible to
the tourisfs eye but assuredly known by the habitues.
A popular meeting place for male-male sexual activity was the bath-houses. During the Gilded
Age, San Franciscos bath-houses began their transformation into distinctly gay male sociosexual
sites. In the 1890s the Sutro Baths (near the Cliff House) was such a meeting place (Pennington). They
offered a safer and more private alternative to the public venues, as the moral crackdown exposed men
to arrest, blackmail, beatings, robbery and murder. Brub recounts the 1918 raid on the Baker Street
Club, which was in fact a pair of flats rented by two men who had met at the Embarcadero Y and who
held parties and rented out rooms for men to have sex in private. (The raid ultimately failed when the
names of prominent citizens appeared among the arrested and charges were dismissed when the
word fellatio could not be found in an English dictionary.) Informal arrangements for such favorite
spots evolved into early gay bath-houses in the 1920s and 1930s in San Francisco when sex between
men became permitted in closed and locked cubicles. The baths remained subject to police raids
(Brub 1984: 16-17).
With the birth of mass culture at centurys start came predicable forms of erotic and semiologically
coded communication among this new and newly invisible class of homosexual men. Homosexual
pornography of this era has been recovered. A number of literary works written, published and
circulated among gay men have been rediscovered. Both high- and low-brow gay male readers and
writers, as Joseph Cady argued, had to be self-relying and self-inventing in finding and learning from
this literature (Summers 1995: 31).
San Franciscos first movie house, the Cinograph, opened its doors in 1905 on Market Street,
between Third and Fourth Streets. Admission was 10 cents. The original novelty quickly wore off, but
technology and artistic innovation developed at a rapid pace and, by the 1920s, the moving pictures
were talking. Early serious film-making included Germn films dealing with the problem of
homosexuality (notably, arguing for social acceptance of homosexuals difference) and in the
United States serious attempts were made in film to deal with a range of social issues of the day,
including vice, prostitution, venereal disease, unmar-ried mothers and the like. In San Francisco,
movie palladiums lined Market
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Street and almost immediately the back rows of the balconies were appropriated for homosexual
meetings and activities.
The expansive optimism of the 1920s gave way to the somber and desperate 1930s and the cheek-
by-jowl proximity of San Franciscos urban districts fostered the development of an unprecedentedly
extensive gay world. Social conservatives had their way - the Motion Picture Production Code (the
infamous Hays Code established by Postmaster General Will H. Hays) of 1930 introduced far-
reaching censorship of film content, building on the precedent established by the Comstock Law of
1873, which gave [the US] post office the power to decide what was obscene (Brownlow 1990: 4)
and which by the 1930s led to the destruction of 160 tons of information on sex and birth control
throughout the US. Magnus Hirschfeid, the Germn leader of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee
for the legal rights of Germn homosexuals, visited San Francisco in 1931, denouncing both Comstock
and Prohibition. Attempts at tighter policing of sexual mores only increased gay cynicism toward
government and found it increasingly easy to question the legitimacy of the established social order
(Stryker and Buskirk 1996:
26). Drinking was no longer illegal, butjobs were scarce, people fell back into poverty, the Dust
Bowl forced many impoverished Midwesterners to migrate to California. In San Francisco organized
labor and the principies of socialism, once bohemian drawing-room conversation, had become the last
hope for the working man. The San Francisco General Strike of 1933 shocked the city and the nation
when police opened fire and killed unarmed longshoremen. (Alien Brubs recent work on the
Maritime Stewards Union attests to the social cohesion among its black, homosexual and left-radical
rank-and-file.)
Gay life flourished in San Francisco. Homosexuals spoke, in a camp manner, of coming out into
the gay world. The coded film language of movies, as a strategy adopted by film directors to
circumvent the Hays Code censorship, uncannily paralleis the discursive closet - the coded language
of camp and gay argot - homosexual men adopted to safeguard their gay world from the prying eyes
of Lilly Law. The first two explicitly gay male bath-houses opened in the 1930s -Jacks Turkish Baths
and the Third Street Baths. Gay bars, catering to self-selected crowds, flourished in the City and some
featured drag queens. As Esther Newton has suggested, the early gay drag queens, especially the
profes-sional ones, served as gay male cultural heroes, in part because they were overt about their
inclinations (Garber 1988: 4).
By the 1930s two major changes influenced the direction of gay life in San Francisco. Prohibition
was repealed - people could drink and congregate in bars openly. San Franciscos legendary
Finocchios opened in 1929 on the Barbary Coast as a speakeasy that featured entertainment by female
impersonators. Finnochios was the symbol of late 1930s and 1940s San Francisco gay life. It catered
to the tourist trade but when it became a legal establishment in 1933 it became one of the citys most
popular sites for homosexual men and women to socialize and featured legendary female
impersonators, such as Rae Bourbon, Walter Hart and Lucian Pheips. Only now the Barbary Coast had
become the Italian North End, popular with the literary bohemian crowd.
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From a birds-eye point of view, we can sketch a gay map of 1930s San Francisco using a dock
whose center is at the top of Nob Hill with Market Street a perpendicular line touching below Union
Square at 6 oclock. Let us begin at the old Barbary Coast/bohemian North Beach district at 2 oclock,
site of Finnochios (first at 406 Stockton Street, moved to 506 Broadway in 1936), Monas (the citys
first lesbian bar) and the legendary Black Cat Cafe. At 4 oclock we find the Embarcadero waterfront,
the immensely popular Embarcadero YMCA and, in 1938, the Sailor Boy Tavern (others followed),
which catered to a rough-trade crowd. The Third Street Baths were within walking distance. At 6
oclock we are in the heart of the bar and street cruising area - Union Square and its elegant hotel bars,
what would become a strip of gay bars (beginning with the Old Crow in 1935). Movie houses, and the
most popular street cruising area in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s along the Market Street (roughly,
Poweil Street to Civic Center). Gay men lived in the neighborhoods straddiing this stretch of Market
Street. South of Market lower- and working-class and transient single men lived in boarding houses.
Residential hoteis and apartment buildings mingled with gay bars in the Tenderloin immediately north
of Market. As the slope of Nob Hill rose, so too did the social class of its gay residents. At about 9
oclock we find Polk Guich and the back side of Nob Hill, which became a bustiing commercial
district and gay residential enclave. Jacks Baths was located here on Post Street between Polk and
Van Ness. At 10 odock we find the more gente el Nob Hill/Pacific Heights junction and the fire side
bar and restauran! (1319 California Street) which opened in 1937. By the end of the 1930s the simu-
lacrum of the modern gay community had taken distinct shape in the urban cauldron of San Francisco.
The universal practice of al fresco cruising adapted itself to the shifting envi-rons of San Francisco,
from the waterfront to city sidewalks, public toilets, city parks and movie balconies. Of the numerous
public baths (Turkish, Finnish, Russian and American-style), always sites of occasional male-male
sexual encounters, some became known by the 1930s to cater to an exclusively homosexual male
clientele. Similarly, the institution of the gay bar emerged from an unbroken tradition of saloons,
dance halls, and speakeasies. The entertainment form of female impersonation and its blurring with
effeminacy and dandyism solidified into one of a series of modern gay typologies. Gay enclaves,
dusters of commercial establishments and residential neighborhoods emerged, again with differing
typologies. A gay dialect, an argot impenetrable by the uninitiated had risen, in keeping with the
increasing censorship of the times, to forge a prototyp-ical bond of community. Public scandal and
cynicism induced by government failure in the face of the Great Depression accelerated a sense of
difference among homosexuals, a sense of outrage at being stereotyped and marginalized, and laid the
groundwork for political response to increasing social repression. Previously visible, in the late 1930s
gays began going underground in keeping with the times.
San Franciscos gay world changed abruptly after the declaration of war on Japan. The US
mobilization for World War II uprooted the entire social order in

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America. Millions of young men, in their late teens and twenties (and older) were suddenly thrown
together. Women were left to take over mens work in their absence. San Francisco was a major
departure and returning point for the Pacific theater of war. Much like the Gold Rush days, men found
themselves thrust into unfamiliar and confusing situations, in all-male company. For the first time, the
US military sought out and dishonorably discharged service members solely on the basis of their
sexuality. Wartime San Francisco became filled with servicemen, dishonorably discharged
homosexuals, and bars and restaurants catering to the wartime population. At this time, elegant hotel
bars, such as the Top of the Mark, became popular as a place to mingle discreetly and to avoid being
caught in raids on known gay bars. Scholars DEmilio (1983) and Brub (1984) posited that the mass
mobilization of World War II led directly to a dawning realization by homosexuals of their numbers,
which in turn led to the formation of the post-war self-conception of gays as a quasi-ethnic minority.
Many homosexual men and women discharged, honorably or dishonorably, chose to remain in San
Francisco at wars end. They were taken by the citys charm, the relatively free gay life, and in many
cases wanting to avoid returning to their hometown in disgrace. The freewheeling gay town of San
Franciscos wartime years, however, did not last long. Both the large numbers of gay men (and
lesbians) transplanted to San Francisco and the established enclaves of homosexual San Francisco
quickly found themselves under renewed siege by the law. The hearings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee, later known as the McCarthy witch hunts, were televised live from
Washington, DC, and quickly turned post-war USA into a paranoid state. Communists and
homosexuals were denounced, careers, families and lives were destroyed, in a dynamic oddly not
unlike the denunciatory practices of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. The 1949 California State
Penal Code proscribed sodomy in its narrow and historical sense (that is, anal sex or male-male sex
of any sort) (Stryker and Buskirk 1996: 33). Raids on bars and public meeting places intensified, and
numerous litigation efforts were pursued in an attempt to shut down San Franciscos gay bars; in 1958
homosexuals won a victory in a ruling on the Black Cat that the commission of illegal or immoral
acts was necessary to close a gay bar (Pennington n.d.).
Homosexuals, like communists and communist sympathizers, became fellow travelers, who
were forced into the proverbial closets where they hid for dear life. The 1939 MGM film The Wizard
of Oz, starring a young Judy Garland, reverberated for post-war gay insiders - Are you a friend of
Dorothys? became a universally recognized code. Bruce Rodgers records usage of Dorothy and
Toto to refer to male couples in which the effeminate partner dominated (Rodgers 1972: 66). Garland
became the most beloved camp idol to several post-war generations of homosexual men. San
Francisco became the land of Oz, the Technicolor world over the rainbow where gays would finally
find a home. Over the next several decades the Oz/San Francisco metaphor took deep root, and no
doubt was in mind when the rainbow flag was designed in 1978 by San Francisco resident Gilbert
Baker.
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Socio-politically, two divergent philosophical stands and political strategies emerged in the 1950s,
the accommodation politics of the homophile movement and the left-radical activism of Harry Hay
and the early Mattachine Society. Both philosophies were bolstered by the 1948 publication of the
Kinsey report, which purported to prove through science and statistics that homosexuality was a
natural and universal expression of human sexuality. In 1951 Donaid Webster Cory published The
Homosexual in America, written from the subjective perspective of twenty-five years of one
homosexuals life experience, describing the hostility gay men encountered, the persecution and
discrimination they faced, the variety of homosexual lifestyles, and the institutions of the gay sub
culture... as a polemic... designed to win acceptance for a new view of the homosexual (DEmilio
1983: 33). Cory was lionized by the homophile movement for this. A decade later he fell into disrepute
when he reversed his position, asserting that homosexuals were ill and in need of professional help.
A small circle of friends, including Harry Hay, formed the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in
1950, and chapters quickly opened elsewhere including San Francisco. Hay was radicalized as a
participant in the San Francisco General Strike of 1934 and became a communist shortly after that.
From a historical materialist perspective. Hay extrapolated that 10 per cent of the population was gay
and from that he argued that gays formed a cultural minority since there was a common language, a
psychological make-up in common, and in the cruise-necessities of the double entendres of CAMP... a
common culture. Most lesbian and gay organizations and culture even now continue to work through
these ideas (Shiveley 1997: 222). The intensifying red-baiting caused Hay and other Marxist-oriented
founders to resign, and the Societys national offices relocated to San Francisco by 1957. Mattachine
itself grew steadily more conservative and asserted itself as a homophile organization. (In 1955 eight
lesbians, including Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founded the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, as
a social and political organization for lesbians.) As in the 1930s, the radical impulse was driven into
oblivion, but the homophile organizations worked quietly with allies within the medical, legal,
religious, political and scientific fields to effect gradual change for the betterment of the homosexual
in society.
In 1950s San Francisco, as elsewhere in America, the white middle class was migrating out of the
urban center to tract housing subdivisions, reachable only by car. Much of San Francisco went into
economic decline during this time. Immigrants began leaving the ir enclaves, including the Italians
from North Beach, the Chinese (for the very first time) from Chinatown, the Irish from Eureka Valley.
North Beach, with its bars, jazz clubs and comedy clubs, attracted a range of anti-establishment,
nomadic individuals, including notables from the Beat general ion. Several key Beat figures, such as
Alien Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, were homosexual or bisexual.
Although they did not stay long in San Francisco, their anarchic and iconoclastic presence took root.
Ginsberg read Howl for the first time in public in San Francisco in 1955. This became an immediate
cause clebre, led to a legal battie
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over obscenity (Ginsberg won), and re-established San Franciscos reputation as a bohemian haven.
Lenny Bruce and other comedians practiced their politically radical craft in North Beach comedy
clubs. From 1957 to 1960:
the medias spotlight glared upon North Beach. A diffuse and di verse literary movement, bound
more by locale and by what it stood against than by anything else, suddenly became beat,
representative of a nationwide generation rebellion against the values of the middle class.
Journalists collapsed the San Francisco renaissance and the beat generation into one and then
outdid each other in casting furious, scornful invective at it.
(DEmilio 1983: 178-9)
The unique visibility of the burgeoning beat subculture in North Beach had a more than incidental
impact upon gay male consciousness in San Francisco. Homosexuality weaved [sic] its way
through descriptions of the North Beach scene as a persistent, albeit minor, leitmotif.
(DEmilio 1983: 179-80)
The sobriquet homosexual was used to denigrate any beat or San Francisco bohemian artist.
Much like the European expressionists of the 192 Os, many avant-garde homosexuals of the era
reveled in their being labeled sick, wearing it as a badge of honor. In the beat era to be sick in the
gay subculture was camp and meant Cool, clever, brash, insulting, and outrageous (Fritscher 1989:
111). Herein lay the birth of the romanticizing self-image of the homosexual as sexual outlaw.
Unlike the East Coast, where political activism remained divorced from the bar culture, rather like
the classic left schism between laborers and intellectuals, in San Francisco a very different
sociosexual-political arrangement took root. Entrapment by police became common practice, as well
as raids on gay bars. Those arrested sometimes found their name, address and profession listed in the
next days newspaper. Nonetheless, numerous gay and lesbian couples lived quietly, gathering socially
at bars, clubs, coffee houses and other commercial venues, and calling lower Nob Hill, Polk Guich, the
Tenderloin and Telegraph Hill (above North Beach) home.
Gay bars remained a fixture in North Beach. And the Black Cat Cafe was the most popular. [A]ll
the gay screaming queens, mixed with, heterosexual gray flannel suit types, the longshoremen
(DEmilio quoting Alien Ginsberg, in Duberman et ai. 1989: 463). Coming from the bottom up,
radical gay political organizing began at the Black Cat when Jos Sarria ran for the public office of
city Supervisor in 1961. Sarria reigned overweekend festivities at the Black Cat, singing camp queered
arias in full costume to adoring fans. Sarria was deemed Empress to legendary Emperor Norton of San
Francisco, declaring herself the Widow Norton, first Empress of the gay imperial court system which
spread to many parts of the United States in the post-war years.
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Gay men organized in reaction to increased police harassment. The extent of official corruption
first became known when, in the 1961 gayola scandal, it was revealed that police and ABC officers
were taking bribes from gay bar owners in exchange for not being raided. In response to this, the
Tavern Guild, an organization of predominantly gay owners of gay bars organized in 1961. The
Tavern Guild, a businessmans association, became the first legal and social agency run by gays for
the benefit of its gay community following closely the model of earlier immigrant agencies for the
political and economic refugees from abroad. In this case, the Tavern Guild spoke gay. They fought
the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the legal arm that raided and shut down bars. They retained a
lawyer, distributed legal information and assisted with posting bond when someone was arrested near
a gay bar. They sponsored popular community events such as the Beaux Arts Ball and the Tavern
Guild Picnic. They worked closely with the Imperial Court of San Francisco to develop reliable
mechanisms for charitable fund-raising and political leveraging within the queer community (Stryker
and Buskirk 1996: 44). The Society for Individual Rights (SIR) led by William Beardemphl, formed in
1964 in response to a police raid on the Tay-Bush, an all-night gay coffee house in the Tenderloin. SIR
opened a gay community center, the first in America, in 1966, located South of Market on Sixth Street.
The Citizens Alert, a 24-hour hot line responded to incidents of police brutality against gays and
lesbians (Stryker and Buskirk 1996), began operating in 1965.
Lije magazines identification of San Francisco as the Gay Capital of the United States in its 26
June 1964 issue was both an observation of the facts of San Francisco as well as fuel to the flames of
official resentment of the visible gay presence in the city The California Hall incident can be
understood as police retaliation for such publicity. The Council on Religion and the Homosexual
formed in 1964. That New Years Eve the CRH sponsored a dance for gays and lesbians at California
Hall, located behind Civic Center near the Tenderloin and Polk Gulch. The police showed up in force
and attempted to intimidate party-goers by photographing them as they entered California Hall. Later
the police attempted entry, but were stopped by three lawyers, on grounds that the police did not have
a search warrant. The police raided the dance anyway. The event received massive coverage in the
local press. The fact that several heterosexuals had been among those intimidated in the crowd fueled
the sense of outrage.
The 26 June issue of Lije in 1964 was a watershed for the leather community of San Francisco. The
lead photo, an interior shot of the Tool Box and the mural of Chuck Arnett, served as be acon to show
the world that in San Francisco there was an alternative homomasculine style (Thompson 1991:
107). Jack Fritscher observed that No longer did men have to use the cruising code one-liner Are
you a friend of Dorothy? to figure out if a masculine man was queer (Thompson 1991: 109). In the
sadomasochist (SM) community work in the 1940s and 1950s became play for the next generation.
Thorn Magister noted:
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In the early 1950s the leather scene in California was a strictly serious business... everything was
passed on by legend and word-of-mouth tradition -just like any other nomad tribe. The world of
S/M, leathermen and leather-bikermen were intertwined. Gay bikers and straight bikers
commingled with littie conflict. Their commonality was leather, Harley-Davidson bikes, and
painful memories of a war that had disfigured them physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This
was not a carefree youth on a spree.
(Thompson 1991: 96-7)
It was 1960s indigenous radical sexual politics in the making.
Sex parties existed before leather bars and were crucial to the development of leather social life.
The first leather bar was the Why Not? in the Tenderloin, and opened in 1958, but closed soon after.
The Tool Box, at 399 Fourth Street at Townsend Street, was the first leather bar South of Market.
Other leather bars followed in the mid-1960s. Gayie Rubin reported Leather establishments flourished
in an area that sprawled between Howard and Bryant streets, from Sixth to Tweifth. At night,
leathermen owned those streets, prowling easily among the bars, sex clubs, bathhouses, and back
alleys(Thompson 1991: 120).
All of these elements taken together, bars, baths, adult bookstores and heavily coded mail order
services, most of which operated on the margins of legality (Gluckman and Reed 1997: 123),
comprised whatJeffrey Escoffier has dubbed the closet economy of the post-war gay culture.
Commercial enterprises began to come together for mutual protection and to extend such legal
protections to the ir customers. A burgeoning political awareness among assimilationist homophiles
led to the development of elementary social, legal and other custodial agencies, creating an economy
parallel to the social mainstream, but still invisible, or downright incomprehensible, to outsiders. The
queer outsiders turned inward collectively. They began to see themselves and each other as a quasi-
ethnic minority and to behave so, rather than as the isolated criminals and mentally ill patients which
society through its agencies had attempted to disarm and destroy. The social rhetoric of 1950s
American society described homosexuality as a scourge not unlike Hitlers caricatures of Jews. On
the other hand a legacy of civil rights and defacto practices by business people to protect their
financial interests caused the post-war tactic of the demonization of homosexuals to backfire both in
the short and the long run. Denigration led directly to practices of resistance among lesbians and gay
men which produced the conscious idea of self-identifying as a member of a quasi-ethnic minority. Let
us be clear: this closet economy and its self-chosen, quasi-ethnic minority members were almost
exclusively white, but originally spanned the middle range social classes, from service industry to
office workers, to professionals and professional celebrities.
The multiple terrains of San Francisco naturally create community (in a valley, on a hilitop, along a
level connecting corridor). Each of those pockets is inhabited by a proliferation of ethnic enclaves of
residence, commerce, political and social agencies. In the mid-1960s distinct gay enclaves shifted
again. Polk
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Street became the commercial center, and included numerous bars, restaurants and businesses which
catered to the white-collar and professional gays settied in the rea. Polk Street runs in a valley
between the west side of Nob Hill and the east side of Pacific Heights. The Tenderloin, geographically
the bottom of Nob Hill, was a mixed neighborhood of bars, restaurants and residential hoteis for the
gay poor and the sexually marginal - transvestites and male hustlers. South of Market had some
residential presence, but was mostly home to bath-houses, sex clubs and the burgeoning leather
subculture.
In the mid-1960s bohemian San Francisco would reinvent itself, spawning the Love Generation of
the Haight-Ashbury district. The once upscale district of the Haight-Ashbury with its summer homes
had gone into decline during the 1930s. It was settied by black armaments factory workers during
World War II, and ended up a black slum after the wartime employment opportunities disappeared. In
this neighborhood in quintessentially 1960s urban de cay two beat coffee houses opened in 1965.
Seminal San Francisco rock bands emerged, Victorian-era clothing from local second-hand shops
became trendy. In 1966 the worlds first psychedelic shop opened on Haight Street (R Rand, 232),
new drugs (such as LSD) became prevalent and the hippies moved in. By the late 1960s queers were a
presence among the new hippie movement, the bohemian reinvention of the Beats combined with, at
least on the surface, a rejection of the post-war values of materialism, rejection of official authorities,
embracing of social differences of all kinds in a Utopian vision of peace, love and harmony.
Experimentation with sex and drugs, and communication through rock music were also key. In early
1967 tens of thousands attended the first human Be-in in Golden Gate Park (adjacent to the Haight),
presided over by Alien Ginsberg and others. The naive phase of this movement peaked with the
Summer of Love in 1967, in which Alien Ginsberg, openly homosexual and reborn as a hippie,
participated. Androgyny became a fashionable look, although some men sported full, flowing beards
as well. Rock music served as advertising and propaganda internationally. A new mythic San
Francisco was invented, drawing another Gold Rush-like wave of immigrants to the city in search of
sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the opportunity to reinvent themselves, for the first time including
homosexuals and bisexuals under their rainbow banner. By August 1967 the Summer of Love had
turned ugly (Richards 1995: 232). In 1968 things got even worse, shop Windows were smashed
following the assassination of Martin Luther King, crime and violence arose due to the drug abuse,
and some store owners installed metal gratings, while many other stores became vacant and were
boarded up. At this time, the gay contingent looked elsewhere for safety and a more stable place to
live. Queer hippies began trekking over the hill to Eureka Valley with its commercial strip along
Castro Street where there was already a small gay presence. (The first gay bar in the Castro, the
Missouri Mule, opened in 1963.) The latest hippie-faggot immigrants were about to meet the
politicized and organized homophile old guard. It would come as news to this old guard that they
were as yet unliberated.
All but forgotten now. Cari Wittmans Refugees from Amerika: A Gay
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Manifesto (published in SF Free Press, 22 Dec. 1969-7 Jan. 1970), callee! the bible of the Gay
Liberation Movement (McCaffrey 1972: 157), would be the first call initiating the most massive gay
immigration San Francisco had ever seen. San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals, wrote
the gay liberationist Wittman:
We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees else-where, we came not
because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there...And we have formed a ghetto, out of
self protection. It is a ghetto, rather than a free territory, because it is still theirs [heterosexuals].
Straight cops patrol us, straight legislators make our laws, straight employers keep us in line,
straight money exploits us.
(McCaffrey 1972: 157)
These ideas reflect the perspective of only one person, and are determined not only by my
homosexuality, but my being white, mal e, and middle class (McCaffrey 1972: 158).
For all its radical rhetoric, gay liberation in the Bay Area relied primarily on picketing, publishing,
and public assembly to advance its causes (Stryker and Buskirk 1996: 54). It was predominantly
middle class in its social values as well, although the hippie movement created space for inclusion of
genderfuck drag as political statement, and out of this tradition came the likes of the Cockettes, the
Angeis of Light and the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. The Imperial Court society combined drag and
leather elements in continuing gay social support, political fundraising and other charitable work. The
Society of Janus formed in SF in 1974 as a pansexual organization for SM, the first on the West
Coast and arguably the second SM organization in the world (Stryker and Buskirk 1996:
62). To a degree the now established homosexual community resented the maverick liberationists,
and for their part, as younger gay men flooded into San Francisco, a migrants camp of often
unemployed or marginally employed full-time gay men moved into the Castro district in particular.
This was the time of gay San Franciscos liberation economy, of proliferating retail businesses - bars,
bookstores, baths and consumer services that emerged from the confines of semi-legality. Political and
other voluntary organizations al so provided previously unavailable public services (Gluckman and
Reed 1997: 123).
The early 1970s witnessed an unparalleled transformation of urban gay life in America and, as a
consequence of San Franciscos lavender gold rush, it would eventually surpass New York City and
Amsterdam as an urban gay center. There was a distinguishable gay minority group with a
geographically definable neigh-borhood and all the appurte nances of a community. The white flight
to suburbs further out in the 1950s led to a dramatic drop in real estate prices and numerous empty
buildings in the Castro, making it increasingly attractive as a cheap area for homosexuals to live in. As
Kath Weston has described this phenomenon:
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countless individuals launched themselves into a quest for community in Benedict Andersons sen
se of the term. As members of an imagined community people feel an attachment to a
necessarily fictional group...[and] interpret themselves through that attachment, so that their
subjectivity becomes inseparable from constructions of we-ness.
(Weston 1995: 257)
The Castro would emerge as a gay city-within-a-city, a phenomenon as strong as ever today, over
twenty-five years later.
In 1970 Rev. Troy Perry founded the San Francisco chapter of Metropolitan Community Church,
the first gay (ecumenical Protestant) church in the Castro; arsonists would burn it in 1972 and 1973.
Gay Sunshine began publishing in 1970 as a hippie-gay liberationist newsletter, in honor of the first
anniversary of Stonewall a gay parade along Polk Street and a gay-in were held which would lead,
after several permutations, to the annual San Francisco Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Pride
Parade, since the late 1970s the single largest-drawing event of the city. Three gay bars opened in the
Castro. Rev. Ray Broshears began gay radio with a gay news program on radio station KSAN.
The following year brought increasing political agitation. Gay men began to gain real political
power working through mainstream and protest avenues. Diane Feinstein and Willie Brown, both
future mayors of San Francisco, worked on behalf of gay interest. Feinstein in particular was later
rewarded by being voted into the office of mayor, in part due to gay block voting patterns. The Alice
B. Tokias Democratic Club, the first of three gay Democratic Party groups in San Francisco, was
founded. Four more gay bars opened in the Castro, and the Boy Area Reporter, arguably the gay
newspaper of record, began publication. The stations KPFA-FM began gay radio programming,
rotating between the Society for Individual Responsibility (SIR), the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Gay
Alliance and Gay Sunshine. The SIR Center (at 83 Sixth Street) was torched by an angry member. The
gay community pursued talks with the San Francisco police Department to deal with anti-gay violence
in the Castro rea. The San Francisco Public Health Department estimated in 1971 the gay population
of the city at 90,000. (By 1977 it was 120,000 and by 1978 about 150,000 out of a total of 750,000.
This constituted 20 per cent of the city.)
In 1973 Pride Foundation was incorporated as a gay service organization, the Community Softball
League was formed and Toad Hall, perhaps the most popular gay bar on Castro Street, was set on fire
by arsonists three times. Aisoin 1973 a serial murderer known as the Doodler began a three-year spree
of murderinggaymen in San Francisco. The American Psychology Association formally voted in the
same year to remo ve homosexuality^ef se from its list of mental illnesses. Among the bars were the
Twin Peaks, the first gay bar with all plate-glass Windows along its two walls facing the street, and the
Midnight Sun, the neighborhoods first video bar. There were numerous restaurants and two sex
venues, the Castro Baths and the Jaguar Bookstore. The Castro Street Fair began in 1974, the first
lesbian club, Full Moon Coffeehouse, operated between 1974 and 1978. A Mardi Gras-like
atmosphere
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prevailed along Castro Street. The late 1970s fulfilled Escoffiers territorial economy phase, although
it might appear to be the beginning of an ideological consumer-capitalist takeover which led the way
to a full-fledged economic appro-priation by national franchises of gay-owned small businesses.
Known worldwide as the premier gay hometown, the Castro is a roughly 34-block neighborhood
in the geographic center of San Francisco. Originally known as Eureka Valley and formally
demarcated by the Most Holy Redeemer Church parish boundaries of Sixteenth, Dolores, Twenty-
Second and Douglass Streets, the Castro took its name from the movie palace which anchored the
commercial corridor of Castro and upper Market Streets. The later 1970s became the phase of
territorial economy, marked by the spread of gentrification and neighborhood developments
(Gluckman and Reed 1997: 124). During the late 1970s the gay community assumed full-fledged
institutional dimensions. The San Francisco Sentinel began in 1974, and Coming Up! (later Boy Times)
in 1979. Gay small presses flourished, Gay Sunshine focused on in-depth literary interviews and
cultural-polit-ical articles. Framelines first annual SFINtILandG Film Festival was held in 1977, and
Theater Rhino staged its first public performances in 1977 as well. Gyms and coffee houses
complemented the bars, bath-houses and discos, for the most part all located in the Castro, Polk Guich
and South of Market reas. Serializing daily life for local residents in hisExaminernewspuper column
Tales of the City Armistead Maupin precipitated another flood of gay immigrants through this open
adver-tisement of an imaginary yet uncannily accurate portrayal of middle-class San Francisco.
Ironically, the new immigrants in search of Maupins gay San Francisco generally found themselves in
the Castro camp. No statistical study has yet been undertaken to determine actual numbers of gay
professionals (i.e. who found appropriate professional-level employment) and professional gays, the
legendary PhD taxi-drivers clan of over-educated and under-employed migrants who moved to San
Francisco intentionally to be gay San Francisco continued to serve as a sort of gay finishing school to
the worlds queer population for much of the last quarter of the twentieth century
In Jane Jacobs highly regarded study of The Dealh and Life of Greal American Cies
(1961/1992), she spelled out necessary elements for workable cities and neighborhoods. Transposing
these terms slightly to a gay context, we find them very much at play in the Castro. Here I invoke the
ethnosemantic analysis of a folk category - San Francisco men, including myself, when referring to
gay community Gay self-identification, remarked Stephen Murray, has been and continues to be
the most important criterion of membership in the native view (Herdt 1982: 107). The first element
Jacobs identified was the role of sidewalks in achieving safety Gay settiers persisted and eventually
succeeded in forcing the SFPD to respond to homophobic violence on the neighborhoods streets. The
political and economic importance of the gay population was established. In day-to-day living. Castro
Street made a safety asset out of the presence of strangers. There are eyes on the street everywhere,
generally eyes which Jacobs dubs natural proprietors of the street Jacobs 1961/1992: 35) - dozens of
small businesses, heavy foot traffic of both neighborhood residents and various kinds of
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visitors (gay residents from other parts of the city elsewhere in the Bay rea, gay friends and friends
of friends and friends of friends of friends) and tourists (gay, straight, sexual), almost around the dock.
The neighborhood is beloved by many different people for many different reasons, even though the tie
to a gay neighborhood is the original and abiding draw.
The sight of people attracts other people Jacobs 1961/1992: 37) andthisis highly significant in the
Castro. The wide-open frontier spirit has by no means completely disappeared in San Francisco. San
Franciscans tend to be warm and open, and to pride themselves on their hospitality. Casual verbal
exchanges can easily become hours-long conversation upon first encounter. Despite the prolif-eration
of designated sexual and sexual contact spaces (bars, sex clubs, parks), meeting someone for on-the-
spot sex or arranging to meet at a later time for sex is a frequent occurrence. Cruising the Castro for
sex, or merely window-shop-ping is one of its hallmark pastimes. Except for the excesses of the late
1970s, sexual intercourse on a public street in the Castro in broad daylight tends to be a rare
occurrence. While the tourist or visitor may feel anonymous on Castro Street, local residents and
visiting former residents tend to recognize each other on sight, and often know a surprising amount of
personal information on many fellow residents whom they have never met. Despite a certain fishbowl
feeling, this does have the effect of increasing the sense of safety. The Castro resident knows his
neighbor is keeping an eye out for him.
The neighborhood is nestied in a small valley, surrounded on three sides by steep hills, dotted with
parks and outcroppings of rocks. Remarks Jacobs:
San Francisco gives an impression of much verdure and relief from city stoni-ness. Yet San
Francisco is a crowded city and littie ground is used to convey this impression. The effect arises
mainlyform small bits of intensive cultivation, and it is multiplied because so much of San
Franciscos greenery is vertical-window boxes, trees, vines, thick ground cover on littie patches of
waste slopes.
Jacobs 1961/1992: 107)
Castro Street is the site of several neighborhood institutions. Hibernia Beach on the northeast
corner of Castro and Eighteenth Streets is local Speakers Corner, where organized and free-thinking
political activism - the ironing boards, cookie sales and ticket sales are staged. The annual lighting of
the community Christmas tree takes place on this site. It contains a bus shelter, rows of ATM
machines, some fenced-in bushes which suggest the ambiance of a park. Its a spot to meet friends, run
into friends, turn a trick, and is at the heart of the Castro, the annual Castro Street Fair and the annual
Halloween street party. This is where revelers rush out into the street at the stroke of midnight on New
Years Eve, and Castro Street is where gay people have headed whenever something of import to the
community has happened. To find out what is happening in the gay community, all anyone needs to do
is to head to Castro and Eighteenth Street and to listen to the word on the street.
Privacy is precious for urban dweilers, Jacobs observes. Castro residents may
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be seemingly ubiquitous on the streets, but never divulge where they live. Most San Franciscans have
unlisted phone numbers. Except at times of extreme housing shortage, gay San Franciscans have
tended to move often. The Castro, at the geographic center of the city, has the unique advantage of
being at the hub of public transit - all five MUI Metro trolley lines serve the Castro, the nearest
BART station is but a half dozen blocks away, and several cross-town bus lines intersect the subway
system and each other.
The denizens of 1970s Castro became known as clones. The term embraces gay-pride, self-
parody and pejorative perspectives. On one level the Castro clone look was an urban street fashion:
of a body-hugging ensemble - plaid shirt or tight-fitting tee shirt, tight-fitting 501 (button-up fly)
bluejeans, sneakers or construction boots, a hat or cap, an earring, and facial hair, usually a
mustache. The uniformity of the look and the fact the look was worn as a uniform... as if every
individual were an exact copy of some original liberated gay man, 59", 29-inch waist, 29 years
old gay white male.
(Wright, forthcoming)
From the point of view of the Castro insiders, this was a new sociosexual gay male archetype - all-
American middle-class male in blue-collar guise, assertively proud and aggressively sexual. From
many an outsiders point of view the look manifested a stultifying group-think culture, an irritating or
antagonizing exclu-siveness or the complete transformation of the homosexual male into consum er-
capitalist sexual object, ironically the exact opposite of gay liberationist ideals. During the 1970s a
handful of bars served as cultural spaces for non-white gay men, among them Esta Noche in the Inner
Mission (for Hispanic Americans) and the Pendulum (for African Americans) in the Castro. Racial
discrimination by white bar owners and patrons against non-white potential patrons remained a social
reality throughout this time. Practices such as subjecting black patrons to the three-photo ID policy
while ignoring it for white patrons or point blank refusing entrance to women and mixed groups of gay
men and women (lesbian or straight), were prevalent. Individual instances some-times provoked
heated letters to the editor in the Boy Area Reporter denouncing these practices and the racism and
sexism behind them, and calis to boycott such establishments. As the tide changed in the multicultural
1980s, such blatant practices were dropped and mixed (catering to an ethnically diversified and co-
gendered crowd) bars, notably the Cafe San Marcos, became trendy among the younger generation.
Social organizations, such as Black and White Men Together (later Men of All Colors Together), Gay
Asian and Pacific Islanders Alliance and Trikone (South Asians), served as alternate social spaces for
non-white gay men and to educate and work for social equality for non-white gay men within the
larger gay community.
There are several novels, slightly to heavily autobiographical, which offer readers varying
perspectives on life in the Castro. Paul Reeds Longing (1988)
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attacked the clone mentality. Joseph Torchias As IfAfter Sex (1983) gave a complex and ambivalent,
although generally sanguine account of a typical Castro Street romance. Jack Fritschers still under-
rated epic novel Same Dance to Remember (1989) described in great detail many neighborhood
personalities, characters and institutions, from the pioneering days to the advent of AIDS. It too is a
Castro Street romance, but one which captured the sexually obsessive environment. Final ly, Mike
Hipplers ... So Littie Time (1990) was a collection of personal-opinion columns written by a kind of
Castro Street gay everyman observing the AIDS epidemic around him as he anticipates his own death.
The Castro itself forms the hub of a continuously spreading gay metropolis within the city of San
Francisco. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, these gay urban suburbs proliferated in a pattern
similar to the 1950s, and include Buena Vista Heights, Corona Heights, Diamond Heights, Twin
Peaks, the Duboce Triangle, as well as surrounding Eureka Valley, Valencia Street/Inner Mission,
Hayes Valley, the upper Haight (Haight-Ashbury), the lower Haight (Haight-Fillmore) and Noe
Valley, with further extensions into the Potrero Hill district and Bernal Heights. Most of these reas,
although identified somewhat differently by Stephen Murrray (1996), had a minimum of 25 per cent
gay-identified population in 1990.
Let us evoke the rise of Harvey Milk, the mayor of Castro Street in the 1970s, who was
instrumental in transforming the burgeoning gay enclave in San Franciscos Eureka Valley into the
unique gay community of the Castro. In 1972, after drifting across America, Milk had moved to Castro
Street and opened a camera shop. Milk was not much of a businessman, but his shop served him well
as he pursued his own version of gay politics. Originally a well-to-do conservative East Coast Jew,
upon arrival in San Francisco:
Milk threw his lot with the radical new gay populace migrating to Castro Street. Milk created the
first alliance between gays and San Franciscos blue-collar unions, organizing a boycott of Coors
Beer. While mingling with Marxist-oriented gay liberationists and using the fiscal conservatism of
the Republican Party of his youth, he mobilized as a coalitionist Democrat.
(Wright, forthcoming)
Milk was elected, on his third try, to the Board of Supervisors in 1977. 11 was the first time district
elections were held in San Francisco, and Milk campaigned for his constituents, both the gay voters of
the Castro as well as the (mostly Irish-Catholic) working men of the old Eureka Valley enclave.
The massive influx of gays was not welcomed in many quarters. By 1976 gay murders accounted
for 10 percent of the citys homicide rate (Stryker and Buskirk 1996: 77) and gay businesses were the
target of arsonists. In 1977 and 1978 arson fires at Ritch Street Baths, Castro Rock Baths, Turkish
Baths left one dead after each blaze. After less than a year in office Milk was felled by an assassins
bullet. Dan White, representing another working-class Irish-Catholic constituency, but acting on his
own, would galvanize the next radical transforma-
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tion of San Franciscos gay community Under the now-infamous twinkie defense (i.e. Whites ability
to control his emotions was compromised by a high blood-sugar level induced from binge eatingjunk
food), White received a very mi Id prison sentence for having murdered Mayor George Moscone and
Supervisor Harvey Milk. Following the announcement of the verdict. San Franciscos gay community
gathered at City Hall in a protest which erupted into the full-fledged White Night Riots, echoing the
race riots of the 1960s. Once again. San Franciscos police retaliated with an impromptu raid on the
Elephant Walk, a bar at the corner of Castro and Eighteenth Streets. This attack went far in generating
a deeper sense of the Castro as a gay community and gay neigh-borhood, and a profound feeling of
violation and lack of safety. Middle-class gay men had more to fear from their legal protectors,
together with poor African Americans and Latinos, than from their natural homophobe enemies
(male youths in general, although Latino males fought a turf war against gay men around Dolores
Park, which during the 1970s was the boundary between the Castro and the Inner Mission).
Milks murder became an icon of martyrdom which was as powerful in San Francisco as the
accounts of the 1969 Stonewall Riots were in New York. An emergent post-GLF, assimilationist gay-
rights iconography found expression in the gay rainbow flag, designed in 1978. Gilbert Baker, a local
San Francisco artist was contacted by a friend and asked to create a community symbol for gay San
Francisco. Bakers original design included eight different colored stripes, was reduced to seven for
commercial production (hot pink could not be reproduced), and by the time the Gay Pride Par a de
adopted it for use in 1979, they had reduced the number of stripes to six. Through a local gay
connection, the first contract to mass produce the flag went to San Franciscos Paramount Flag
Company, and the same contad parlayed this local invention into the officially recognized symbol of
the gay movement by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
By the late 1970s gay pride began taking new shapes. One key development was the realization
that heavy consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs was leading to serious addiction problems.
Alcoholism had be en a serious problem among gay men for many decades, but not until the full
blossoming of the perpetual party that was Castro Street did it get addressed. Gay meetings of
Alcoholics Anonymous began proliferating in the Castro and throughout San Francisco (which is often
cited as the American city with the highest rates of suicide and alcoholism). The growth of the
recovery movement among the gay community led to major transformations within AA itself. Separate
gay meetings started originally because homosexuals were not welcomed, and gay-related social issues
not gladly entertained at regular AA meetings. Aiso, gay men of this generation often sought recovery
forrn a dual addiction to alcohol and drugs. old-tirne AA felt drug-related issues had no place in AA.
Over the next decade, gay AA would grow as part of a national trend. By the early 1980s sobriety
through AA was not only politically corred, it was a social movement everyone wanted to join.
The proliferation of gay AA, Al-Anon, NA and Nar-Anon, CoDA, and
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numerous other TweIve-Step programs created another layer of community network within gay San
Francisco. At the end of the 1970s and in tandem with the advent of the AIDS epidemic, a significant
social regrouping took place. Former bar habitues replaced the bars with AA meetings and other social
gath-erings. Many cut back or abstained from drinking or avoided bars and potential sexual contacts
altogether to stave off infection from HIV For a few years, bars were mostly empty, and only the most
hardened drinkers and alcoholics patron-ized them on a regular basis.
In the spring of 1981 rumors about a mysterious gay cancer began circu-lating on Castro Street
and throughout the gay community By the time GRID came to public attention in 1982, gay San
Francisco was in a state of shock. Nurnerous gay men had died of mysterious gay pneumonias and
gay cancers, more men were falling sick and no treatments seemed to arrest whatever was killing
these men. In the early years of the epidemic fear and panic came to the fore. Some suspected it was a
conspiracy of biological warfare against homosexuals. Many thought it was a result of irnrnune
systerns exhausted by all the sex and drugs and antibiotics. (San Francisco had been nurnber one for
venereal diseases in the 1970s, and the VD clinic, located South of Market, was a popular place to
cruise for sex while waiting to see a doctor. Several bath-houses werejust around the corner.)
San Francisco, along with New York and Los Angeles, became ground zero for the first wave of
the AIDS epidernic. There was the belief that AIDS could eradicate the entire population of
homosexual men and quite likely would destroy the gay community. By 1984 Castro Street was
virtually a ghost town. Businesses boarded up, fear gripped the community as at first hundreds and
then thousands of gay men died. Before efficacious treatments were developed, HIV antibody testing
was held by many San Franciscans, gay and straight, to be counterproductive, very likely to drive
HIV+ people underground.
Erupting in this unique community, AIDS was devastating beyond compre-hension - for sheer
numbers of men struck down, needs (medical, emotional, practical) rising exponentially, faster than
could be met. The Boy Area Reporter, the local newspaper of gay record, began printing obituaries in
the early 1980s. (In 1995, they still filled one to three pages.) The gay community did not disinte-grate
as some had feared, but awareness of the Castro as a traumatized community was inadequate. Being
gay in 1980s San Francisco meant living, working and playing with AIDS.
Initially, numerous community-based organizations were created to deal with the crisis when no
one else was willing to step in. Among them, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) is the
largest such organization, providing many services. The Shanti Project offers practical and emotional
support for terminally ill PWAs. Other groups include the AIDS Fund, the Food Bank, Stop AIDS
Project and Mobilization Against AIDS. The NAMES Projecfs AIDS Quilt, perhaps the worlds
largest folk art, has given a community outlet to collective grief. The NAMES Quilt has emerged as an
early expression of the postmodern eras local/global consciousness.
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The AIDS Office of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, coordi-nating coininunity-
based and governmental agencies, spearheaded a prevention and risk-reduction program between 1982
and 1989 - known as the San Francisco model, which effected fundamental changes in the sexual
behavior of gay men, reducing the spread of HIV Innovative in addressing discrete audiences through
a variety of approaches, they delivered these messages in subcultural-appropriate language. Local
government, and the medical and the gay comm-unities mutual cooperation contributed to the
success. This strategy was subsequently th re atened when state and federal government stepped in to
censor content. By the mid 1990s the initial success of this approach was viewed as a long-term
failure, as the third generation of young gay men reinvented for them-selves a new hedonism
reminiscent of the 1970s.
Outreach to ethnic communities and cultural diversification began in 1986. Community-based
organizations addressed community-specific issues, while organizations such as SFAF expanded and
restructured to become all-inclusive. ACT-UP activism and its spin-off Queer Nationalism revitalized,
if only briefly, political activism, albeit in a decidedly middle-of-the-road, collaborationist manner.
ACT-UP blamed the federal government and its bureaucracy for the consequences of the epidemic and
demanded from the government either as privileged offspring of a paternalistic society or as highly
dissatisfied consumers that money and legislation be mobilized to deal with AIDS.
San Francisco Queer Nationalism realigned sexual identity politics with a philosophy of
multiculturalism and a version of queer theory, which fore-grounded the role of sexual desire and the
ability to reinvent oneself, to pursue a classically San Francisco style of rainbow coalition sexual
politics. By 1991, when the Gay Pride Parade Committee proclaimed the Year of the Queer, the
make-up of the gay community has changed profoundly once again. The new queer coalition
embraced All sexual queers (except, as always, the pedophiles) and all colors, creeds and races
(though, by and large, middle-class).
In the 1980s the clone look was rejected by the younger generation as it came to syrnbolize a
tainted, self-absorbed urban gay white male subculture, which some blarned for the epidernic. The
look would re-ernerge in a modified ACT UP version - shaved head, goatee, gyrn-toned body,
baseball cap worn backwards, tattoos and/or body piercings. While a street-wise gay San Francisco
look tended toward a sexually scruffy and traditionally blue-collar masculino more than in other urban
area of the United States, it also witnessed the sieek and angular Chelsea (New York City spawned)
look of the 1990s, without the accompanying rigid group-think clone mentality of, for ex ampie, 1990s
Boston or Los Angeles.
The AIDS crisis led to three significant changes in the gay landscape. In 1984, the bath-house
controversy deeply divided the gay community and the City. Eventually, the bath-houses closed for
want of business and, by the early 1990s, the ban on gay bath-houses had been thoroughly
circumvented with the establishment of a new system of private and private sex clubs. Membership
fees were nominal, the practice of phoning in reservations was adumbrated with lists
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of paid club members at the door or the mere formality of collecting a (forged) signature and entry fee,
much as the old bath-houses had done in the time before AIDS. New bars opened and a new club
scene started up, several dance clubs gathering at the same site but each having its own night of the
week. By the late 1990s a sexual culture, with concomitant public debate over circuit parties and
barebacking (anal intercourse without a condom), emerged, which bore striking similarities to its
1970s precursor.
Along with the collapse of the commercial sex spaces south-of-Market, the once burgeoning
leather community collapsed. The leather community suffered proportionately the greatest numbers of
AIDS deaths. Most leather bars and sex clubs South of Market, such as Febes, the Anvil, the
Catacombs, the Cauldron folded in the early 1980s. For a time, the district was the nightclub district
for heterosexual suburbia. San Franciscan Geoff Mains argued in the early 1980s that the gay male SM
or leathersex scene was about transcendence:
leatherspace is a movement that is both tribal and magical... Although [SM] experiences are
usually sexual and intimate, they are far more than that. These activities share strong social,
intellectual and emotional mean-ings, and common knowledge of both activities and meanings is
freely shared within the tribe.
(Mains 1984: 40)
Of the dozens of leather bars along or near the Folsom Street corridor, only a few among them,
including the San Francisco Eagle, at the corner of Tweifth and harrisen Streets, survived. The leather
community never died out completely. For a few years during the 1980s the Folsom Street Fair
attempted to shift its focus from the leather community exclusively to be inclusive of all south-of-
Market residents. In 1985 Up Your Alley established a leathersex street fair on Ringold Alley, and
moved in 1987 to Dore Alley. The Folsom Fair returned to its leather roots. According to Gayie Rubin
(Levine Nardi Gagnon 1997: 130-1), as the leather community grew smaller in number, it grew more
cohesive and socially integrated, gay men and lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals and racial
diversity became apparent as well. In the 1990s the Folsom Street Fair expanded into a full Leather
Pride Week, drawing tens of thousands of leather friends from around the world to its events.
A new masculine culture of gay bears emerged during the mid 1980s. Four elements came
together to create this new social space in San Francisco - Bear magazine (as a local sex contad
resource), Bear Hug play parties (as part of the ernergent private sex party scene), the ernergence of
cyberspace (and the preva-lence of self-identifying bears who used electronic bulletin boards or
worked in the Silicon Valley cornputer technology industry) and a new kind of bar South of Market.
Billing itself as a bear bar, the Lone Star Saloon opened its doors in 1989, only to be destroyed a few
months later in the Prieta Loma Earthquake of 1989. The Lone Star re-opened in a new location on
Tweifth Street, and went on to become the anchor bar of a nascent bear zone. During the 1990s. South-
189

of-Market was established as the core commercial space for bear-related socia-bility and the bear
culture, of self-identifying individuals, commercial sites and sexual activities, overlapped with a re-
emergent leather and S/M community, as well as with the girth-and-mirth community.
In the late 1980s, as if following an all-out nuclear attack, gay San Francisco began coming out
again, as the survivors of AIDS, perhaps the worst epidemic of the twentieth century as it affected gay
men. Along with the new radicals came a new class of gay neo-conservatives. Left-oriented gays were
momentarily pressured into silence in the afterrnath of the collapse of Soviet cornrnunisrn. Personal
and political fashion, in a forrn of niche marketing emerged, among them the piercing and tattooing
fashion of queer modern primitives, lipstick lesbians and daddy dykes, boy toys and bears. The
hyper-commodification economy of consumer capitalism boomed.
As the 1990s come to a close. San Francisco is the most expensive city in the United States in
which to live. It is experiencing the tightest housing market ever, and real estate prices have not
stopped spiraling since the 1973-4 boom. Gay men are moving out to relatively more affordable
housing in the Bay Area suburbs, while other gays of all ages continue to immigrate, though in smaller
numbers. The young and unaffiuent are making their home in the Valencia Street/Inner Mission,
Tenderloin, and other pockets. The Castro has become one of the most affiuent residential areas of the
city, but the neighborhood is still home to queers of every description. Sexual spaces of many sorts,
from various kinds of socialization, continue to flourish, from the cruising grounds in Golden Gate
Park and Lands End to the Eros Club and numerous other sex clubs in the Castro. A reinaugurated F
trolley-car line now shutties tourists to Fishermans Wharf and Pier 39 from Union Square and the
Embarcadero right to Castro Street, along a newly beautified Market Street resplendent with mature
royal palm trees. Polk Guich is no longer gay, South of Market is not as great as it once was but
thriving after dark as always. In the Castro, even as the locally owned gay small businesses are
replaced by national franchises and gimmicky tourist traps, a certain feeling of nostalgia for its gay
heyday remains. As author Frank Browning commented, We know as good postmodernists that we
are all performers and viewers, foreground and background, subjects and objects (Browning 1996:
22). Every day the San Francisco gay man lives is another day he takes part in creating an urban gay
history.
Notes
1 Clemens, incidentally, recorded sharing a room and bed in his early California days with a male
companion. Whether this was of practical necessity or erotic desire is not now clear.
190
Some suggestions for further reading

The literature on lesbian and gay historical studies grew by leaps and bounds from the 1970s on.
An interested reader should consult an up-to-date bibliog-raphy. For books in print as this volume goes
to press the bibliographies in Rudi G. Bleys, The Geography o/Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual
Behaviour Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imaginalion, 1750-1918, London, Cassell, 1996;
HenningBech, When Men Meet: Homosexuaiity and Modemity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
1997, can be recommended.
For insight into the uses made of gay space in a primarily contemporary discus-sion readers should
consult David Bell and Gili Val entine, Mapping Desire;
Geographies of Sexuaiities, London and New York, Routledge, 1995, and its remark-able
bibliography. The articles edited by Gordon Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette and Yolanda Retter,
Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance, Seattie, Bay Press, 1997, are
disparate but stimulating and well illustrated. Aaron Betsky Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex
Desire, New York, William Morrow and Company, 1997, is an elegant and highly contemporary
essay.
Perhaps the first overtly sympathetic gay urban portrait was Magnus Hirschfelds short account
of Berlin, first pu blished in German in 1904. This book was a plea for majority tolerance and repeal of
the anti-homosexual article 175 of the German criminal code. The book described Berlin, at that time
about 2.5 mi Ilion in population, but it was cautiously vague in identifying exact locations. A pastry
shop frequented by middle-class Jewish lesbians was noted only as being in north Berlin. The book
pointed out that there were twenty uranian taverns in the city, but did not give their addresses.
Hirschfeid claimed there were 50,000 homosexuals in Berlin which made them approximately 2 per
cent of the urban population there. Later writers also engaged the How many? question which is an
initial step to many forms of social history. Hirschfeid simply left out refer-ences to male public
urinals in Berlin which at the time were, in fact, the busiest of all male same-sex pick-up venues in
the city. He did not want to disgust or displease the heterosexual men and women whose acceptance of
gays he craved. A 1906 book on male prostitution in Berlin was distanced in its subtitle: First
Comprehensive Overview and Lively Description of the Pemicious Phenomenon (Ostwaid 1906). Later
writers evoked the homosexual ambiance of Berlin and its hustlers and photographers between the
wars and afterwards (Persky 1995).
191

The study of the gay urban past beyond living witness was relatively undeveloped in English
language scholarship until the 1990s. Garry Wotherspoons 1991 study of Sydney dealt mainly with
the twentieth century and made use of oral histories. George Chaunceys 1994 book on Gay New York
from 1890 to 1940 relied primarily on documentation prior to 1940 about dead individuals. Michael
Rockes study of Renaissance Florence (1996) made use of a remark-able body of documentation
which survived for more than five centuries. The Officers of the Night kept records of their efforts to
combat sodomy in the city between 1432 and 1502. Rocke consulted additional sources which
permitted him to provide detailed analysis of homosexual activities at a time in the European and
Italian past for which such evidence is extremely rare, or non-existent.
For the contemporary era after World War II studies of homosexual behavior between North
American males reflected changing altitudes. Laud Humphreys made a plea for tolerance of the
frequently married men who during the 1960s sought out impersonal sex in park restrooms in St Louis,
Missouri, although the first edition of the book did not permit identification of the site of his research
(Humphreys 1975).
Such work suggests the question of the difference between attempting to write historical urban
sociology about male homosexuals and the recounting the gay urban history of a particular place. A
kind of abstract gay urban sociology of a generic North American city (metropolis) was produced by
John Alien Lee, Getting Sex, Toronto, Musson Book Company 1978. Shortly before the onset of the
AIDS epidemic Lee pointed out contemporary types of meeting places for sexual interactions: his
subtitle was A New Approach: More Fun Less Guilt. Such a technique is at least suggestive of the
locations to observe to amass information on a city in North America. It is of course quite deaf to the
specific attributes of a city and a historical moment, geography, climate, cultural setting and place as
evoked in these essays.
Readers who themselves wish to investigate aspects of gay urban history over past centuries to the
present will need to consult ecciesiastical and legal records of persecution where those subsist. The
essays in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe,
Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (eds), New York, 1989 (originally published as Joumal of
Homosexuality, volume 16, numbers 1/2, 1988) contain a variety of insights into the problems of
sources and their interpretation. Other written documents with out narrative intent may provide
information on the gay past: one thinks of the use Chauncey made of applications for permits for bars
in New York.
The collective work on Cologne homosexuals under the Third Reich is a modern instance of what
can be learned from extant documentation on a particular city: Verfhrte Mwmer: das leben der
KQlner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Cornelia Limpricht et ai. (eds), Cologne, 1991.
Sometimes documents surviving from the urban past can be supplemented with literary
descriptions of gay life in poetry, novels and the like. The explicit evocation of the gay world in a
particular city was initially more likely to be the
192

work of novelists than historians of urbanism. There is also a genre of historical novels with a sense of
gay space. Novels occasionally provide accounts of coming out in particular cities like that by Michel
Tremblay (1995) set in Montreal, La Nuit des punces charmants.
Much investigation in sparse and unsystematic records is best described as bricolage since in the
more remote past one is inevitably forced to speculate and underline the plausible in the absence of
unambiguous statements. Much collec-tive work needs to be done to identify and make available
sources of lesbian and gay history.
There is also a literature dealing with the use that can be made of pictures of various kinds, ranging
from Old Master renditions of homosexual themes to sketches and caricatures. Some of those pictures
provide clues about Early Modern gay spaces. Something of the same can be said of statuary which in
its rendition of neo-el as sical or homo-ero tic themes provided a vehicle for displaying the kind of
iconography attractive to gay men. Since the invention of photography many individuals have made
collections of erotic photographs and some of these are preserved in gay archives. David Leddick, The
Male Nude, Cologne, Taschen, 1998, published a collection of such photographs arranged by decades
since the nineteenth century.
In the century since the invention of the movies in 1895 there have been explicit film depictions of
homosexuals, starting with Anders ais die Andern (1919) which has partially survived in a copy held
in Eastern Europe. A range of films have been made, in Europe particularly, which provide a
sympathetic rendition of homo-eroticism including the seven cities of this book. There is also a much
larger field of implicit renditions of homosexual stereotypes purveyed by Hollywood. These were
brought to the screen in The Celluloid Closet by R. Epstein and J. Friedman, based on the book by
Vito Russo (1981).
The technology of the videotape made possible from the 1970s the mass consumption of
pornography in a home setting as well as in cinemas which showed such films. The video-porn market
grew at a very rapid rate. Some films were set in the cities discussed in this book.
Finally readers can consult a developing body of first-person lesbian and gay published ego-
documents in which individuals discuss their tastes and experi-ences in same-sex sexuality and its
significance to their lives, outlook and work. There is a first-hand documentary residue of gay life
ranging from personal letters, diaries, to formal memoirs. Those accounts also convey something of
the locations and settings of individual existences: the queer spaces in which lesbians and gay men
recount themselves. These are few indeed before 1970. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds
(1840-93) published in 1984 provide an exceptional insight into initial self-hatred and guilt, followed
by growing self-knowledge, of a married English bisexual, written between 1889 and his death.
Perhaps more unpublished manuscripts await editing and to enter the public domain. One masterpiece
of gay autobiography was by the English critic, J.R. Ackerley (1896-1967), My Falher and Myself
with much informal ion about London life. It was published posthumously in 1968. A collection of
transcribed
193

interviews with men in Great Britain of various social backgrounds shows what can be learned from
oral history: Between the Acts [of the Brish Parliament]: Lives of Homosexual Men I885-I96?, Kevin Porter and Jeffrey
Weeks (eds.), London, 1991.
An amazing specimen of a gay mans self-chronicle in a set of diaries closely associated with a
place, Washington D.C., unfortunately marred by extremely intrusive editing and in-fill writing and
simplification of a text which itself is not open to consultation in a public deposit, dealt with the life of
a civil servant Jeb Alexander and his friends. It appeared in 1993 under the title Jeb and Dash. If this
document was in fact even partially what it is represented as being in its selective and mutilated
publication by its editor and publisher it is perhaps the most remarkable sustained self-description by a
twentieth-century North American gay man prior to 1960 that is now known to exist. It can also be
read as a guide to the use made of queer sites in the US capital in the 1920s and 1930s by one rather
timid and awkward gay man. By the 1990s there was a steady increase in semi-popular accounts of
gay communities in cities in the US and elsewhere. Representative specimens are Michelangelo
Signorile, (1960- ) Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men [in the USA]: Sex, Drugs, Muscles,
and the Passages of Life, New York, Harper Collins, 1997; Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940-
1996, Boston, Houghton Miffiin Company, 1997, put a particular stress on the gay intelligentsia of
New York.
194
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Index

AlarecherchedutempsperciuiProust) 14
Ackerley, J.R. 192
Adonis-Bar (Duplay) 15
Afanasev, Sasha 50
Agapov, Nikolai 46
agegroups 5-6, 68-9, 73, 97
AIDS 22, 35, 85, 109, 152, 156, 158, 160,
186-8
Aleksandrova, Tatiana 38
Aletrino, Arnold 74-5
Alexander.J. 193
Almeida, Sanches de 118, 119
Altinan, Dennis 12
Amsterdam 1,61-88, 179
Anders (Francois) 77
Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 155
Andrews, George 92-3
Angelo, Bobpseud 82
Antinous 16, 55
apache 153
apartments 53-4
apprentices 43-5, 64
Are, Saint Joan of 153
Arcadie 15
Archive sdcmthropologie criminelle 25
Arnett, Chuck 176
As IfAfter Sex (Torchia) 164, 184
Ascenco, Father 125
Ashbury, Herbert 166
Athanasso, Jos 146
Austen, Jane 16
Auto daF 113, 114, 121
Azevedo, Antonio de 117
backrooms 30
baile dosenxutos152
Bakbandt, Jurriaan 65
Baker. Gilbert 173. 185
Baker, Thomas 99, 102
Baldwin, James 12
Sarao de Laxos (Botelho) 121, 128-32, 133
bardaches 23
Barker, Edward 99
bars andtaverns 6, 14, 23-32, 43, 47,
56,65,67, 78, 79,80-1,85,91, 103, 135, 154,
156, 165, 168, 171
Bartiett, Neil 5
Barucco, Nicolo 74
baths 15, 25,40,45,51,52,57,81, 110, 135,
156, 160, 169-71, 175
Baudelaire, Charles 76
Beardemphl, William 176
Beauvoir, Simone de 30
Bech, Henning 190
Beeren, Bet van 78
beggars 47 Bell, David 190
Belousov, V A. 46, 49
Bentinck 65
Berlin, 1,25, 28, 190
Brub, Alien 170, 171, 173
Betsky, Aaron 24, 190
Bezborodov 53
Bictre prison 12
bicha 152, 154
Bilac, Olavo 151 Bjorn, Kristen 161
Bleys, Rudi C. 190 Bob 108
Bochechkarov, Nikolai 46
bofe 152,161
bookstores, gay 33 Borisov, Sasha 38
BosweIl.John 41-2
Botelho, Antonio de Queiros Camacho 126
Botelho, Abel Acacio de Almeida 128
Botto, Antonio 132
Boubal, Paul 30
boulevards 49
Boulton, Ernest 105
Bourbon, Rae 171
Bouthillette, Anne-Marie 190
Brassai, Gyula 27
Bray, Alan 90
Brazil 6
210
Broshears, Ray 180
Brown, W. 180
Browning, Frank 189
Bruce, Lenny 175
Buffalo 3
Burke, Peter 42
Burroughs, William 174
cab-driver 44
Cademos do Nefando 113
CadyJoseph 170
cafs 26
Cals,Joseph 83
Caminha, Pero Vaz 138
Caminha, Adolfo 148
Canad 7
Conloes (Botto) 132
Careo, Francis 14
Cardose, David 116
carnival 151-2
Carpenter, Edward 74, 167
Casper,J L. 73
Cassidy, Neal 174
Cazuza (singer) 152
Champs-Elyses 17
c/;(n"/M(zi(Brazilian films) 152
Chauncey George 165, 166, 191
Chezlesmauvaisgarfons(Cog\ny) 14
Chicago 8
choirboys 42
churches 125
Ciliga, Anton 50
Clap,Molly96, 97
Clap.John 96
Clemens, Samuel 167, 189 n.l
Clifford, George 67
Clinton, Arthur 105
Cocteau, Jean 12, 28
cottage Jeeurinals
Colette 12
Cologne 191
Coming Up 181
commercialism 23, 25-31,
community sense 3, 31, 33-4, 35
Confession of Lucio, The (S-Carneiro) 1
Cornelisse, Abraham 70
Correa, Luiz Antonio Martinez 160
Cortico, O(Azevedo) 147
Cory, Donald Webster pseud. 174
Costa, Luis da 118
courtiers 13
Courtney, Edward 95, 97
DEmilio, John 165, 173
dances 27-9,47,81, 153, 165
Davis, Thomas 101
Davis, Madeline 3
Davison, William 94, 97
Deixa Fcdw 152
Delgado, Luiz 140
Derwin, John 98
desfile 151
Dessous de Paris, les (Delpche) 14
Devaux, Paul 14
Deyssel, Lodewijk van 76
DINKS 8
dionings 74
domesticity 39, 49, 53-5, 91,
Domingos ofthe Dance 116
Donkersioot, N.B. 73, 74
drague 13
Dupetit 23
Duplay, Maurice 15
Duve, Pascal de 22
Dynes, Wayne R. 161
Edict ofthe Faith 113
Eekhoud, George 76
Eisenstein, Sergei 55
Ellis, Havelock 74
Emaer, Fabrice 30, 32
211
encul 11
Engeischman, Nico 82, 83
England 6
Eon, chevalier d 153
Epstein, R. 192
Escoffier, Jeffrey 177
executions 13-14, 102, 113, 121-3
ExIer.M.JJ 77
faggot 4
fanchono 116, 118, 120, 142
Feinstein, Diane 180
Feitosa, Nelson 157
fel latio 99,
Fellalors, Les (Devaux) 14
Femole Taller, r/K(Baker) 102
FHAR 31
Fiacre, Le fiction 14
Florence 63, 90
For the Pleasure of his Company: Affair of
the Misty City (Stoddard) 168
France 7
Francois, J. H. 77
Frankfurt 1
Freyre,
Gilberto 148
Friedman, J. 192
frigging 101
Fritscherjack 176, 184
GaiPieal3
Gales, G.J. 68
Ganymede 63, 130
Garland.Judy 173
Gay Sunshine 181
gender-fuck 84
Geneeskiindige Cowant 7 3,74
Genet.Jean 12, 22, 28
Geraid 107
Gerard, Kent 191
Germiny Charles de 20 ghetto,
gay 4, 11,31, 135
Gide, Andr 12, 27
Ginsberg, Alien 174-5, 178
Giovannis Room (Baldwin) 12
Girard, David 30, 34
Goltzius, Hendrick 63
Gomes, Manuel 120
Goncalves,Jos 140
Graauw publisher 74
Grabowski, Norbert 74
Gregory 108
Griffin, William 97
Gromyko 42
Guersant, Marcel 15
guidebooks 31
Guilham, William 107
Haan, Jacob Israel de 75
Habermas, Jurgen 121
Hadrian, romn Emperor 16
hair, facial 18,40,41, 116, 117, 160-1
Hall, Radclyffe 12
Hammond, Charles 104
Harrington, William 95
Hart, Walter 171
Harte, Hyems 101
Haussman, Georges, baron 151
Hay, Harry 174
Hays.W. H. 171
Heemskerck, Maerten van 63
Heermans, George 70
Hekma, Gert 191
Helpman, G.pseud. 76
Het Masker (Francois) 77
Hippler, Mike 184
Hirschfeid, Magnus 74, 75, 76, 77, 171, 190
Hitchen, Charles 94
Hocquenghem, Guy 31, 84, 159
Holloway Robert 96, 104
Homosexual in Amrica, The (Cory) 174
212
Horner, York 96
hoteis 25
Howl, Ginsberg 174
Huddieston, Sisley 27
Humphreys, Laud 190
Huysmans.Joris-KarI 76
infames 11
Ingram, Gordon 190
inquisition, Portuguese 112-4, 125-7, 139-40
Isherwood, Christopher 6, 29
Iusupov, Feliks Feliksovich prince 47
Ivanov 54
Jacobsjane 7, 181, 182
Jeali-Paul Guersant 15
Jesus- la-Cai lie (Careo) 14
John VI, king of Portugal 146
Kaiser, Charles 193
Kansas City 5-6
Karlinsky, S. 39
Kedger, George 98
Kennedy, Elizabeth 3
Kerouac,Jack 174
Kharitonov, Evgenii 56
Khrushchev, N. 56
King, Martin
Luther 178
Kleine republiek, De (Deyssel) 76
Klimov 52
Kioek,
Hermanus 66
Kioos, Willem 76
Knight, Edward 101
Koziovski 39
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 74
Kuzmin, Mikhail 55
Lacios, Fierre Choderlos de 130
Lafoes, duke of 127
Lampio 156-7
leatherSI, 85, 188
Leddick, David 192
Lee.John Alien 191
Lemos, Maximiliano 133
Lennep, Jan van 65
Lry,Jean de 138
lesbians, 2-4, 11, 27, 29, 33, 49, 57, 76,
77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 110, 127,
136, 147, 174, 176
Levensleed (Exier) 77
Leven srecht 82
Lever, Maurice 13
Lvi-Strauss, Claude 5
Levin 39, 40
Liaisons Dangereuses,
Les (Lacios) 130
Limpricht, Cornelia 191
Lingsey, Walter 92-3
Lisbon 1, 114
Lombroso, Cesare 75
London,Jack 168
London 1,89-111, 192
Lof-clofSof-f-owspumtmg (Heemskerck) 63
Los Angeles 185
Louis Napoleon, king of Holland 68
Lyon, Phyllis 174
Lyons 1
Maanen, C. F. van
MacGrath, Maurice 32
Machado, father 125
Machado,Joo 117
Mackintosh, Martin 97
Madre de Deus, Tom de 143
Magister, Thom 176
Mains, Geoff 188
molondro 153
Mamaev, Petr 46
Manuel, king of Portugal 138
marriage, same-sex 85
Martin, Del 174
213
Mason, Charles 105
masturbation 75, 83, 99, 101, 109, 116,
125,130
Medvedev, Pavel Vasilevich 43-5 Meer, T.
van der 67
meetingplaces 12, 13, 15-20, 22, 27, 30,
38-9, 46-52 Melville, Hermn 168 Mendes,
Jos
Luis 144 Mendonca,Joo 121
Meta, A (Penteado) 156
Michelangelo, Buonarotti 103
migration 12
Milk, Harvey 184
Miranda, Carmen 152
molicies 145
molly house
Monteiro, Arlindo Camilo 133
Montreal 192
Moransard, publisher 74
Morgado, Alexandre 133
Moscone, George 185
Moscow 1, 38-60
Mosse, George 167
movies 26
Mugg, Thomas 96
Muravev 53
Murray, Stephen O. 6, 181, 184
Napoleon, emperor of France 68, 69
Neurathenia Sexuaiis (Barucco) 74
NewYorkCity 10, 31, 179, 186
Newton, Esther 171
Newton, Thomas 95, 97
nichten 79,80
Nikon, Patriarch 41
Noordam, D J 67
Norman 106
Norris, Frank 168
Norton, Emperor 175
Nuremberg 1
NWHK 75
Olearius, Adam 40
OrduresdeParis, ies(UrCoville) 14
Orme, Thomas 96, 98
Orton, Joe 109
OurLadyofthe Flowers (Genet) 18
Pacheco, Francisco 120
Palhaco, Antonio Alvares 117
Palladii, bishop 45
parades 10
Paris 1,2, 5, 10-37
Paris vivcmt: lacofruptionParis
(Coffignon14
Park, Frederick 105
Parker, Charles 105
parks, 16, 21-3,43-4,70, 95, 99, 101,
103-4, 110
Partridge, M. 94, 97
Passos,
Pereira 151
Pater, Walter 104 Pavel 46-50
pede 11
pedophilia 84, 87
pegaco151
Peixoto, Cauby 152
Pelaxi, Fierre 62
Penny, Thomas 101
Perrenot, Abraham 68
Perry Troy 180
Peter, tsar of Russia 42
Pheips, Lucian 171 Phil 107
Pijpelijntes (Haan) 75
pissoirs see urinals
pobratimstvo 41-2 Pokrovskii, Mikhail 38
police 13, 20-21, 38-39, 51, 78, 81, 86
Pompidou Center,
Paris 32
pornography61, 69, 70, 76, 87, 161, 192
portinha 153
Porter, Kevin 193
214
Premsela, Benno 83
privacy 53
prostitutes, female 50, 69, 95, 109 153
prostitutes, male 25, 40, 45, 46, 80, 104, 107,
115, 133-4, 190
Proust, Marcel 12, 14, 27
public space, gay 13, 54, 56
Publico 135
puto 121. 128, 133, 134, 147
Queluz,
palace of 112
Raffalovich, Marc-Andr 10, 75
Rainbowflag6, 35, 173
Reed, Paul 183
Reeves, Tom 54
Rein Leven 75
relationships, duration 7-8
religion, Orthodox 41
Rembrandt, H. van Ryn 63
Retter, Yolanda 190
Rev, Gerard 83
Richter, Sviatoslav 55
Ries.L. A. 77
Rio de Janeiro 1, 5, 138 - 163
riverwalks 15, 16, 18, 22
Rocke, Michael 191
Rodgers, Bruce 173
Rome 5
Romer, Lucien S. A. M. von 75-77, 79
Roper, Samuel 96
Rousselot 23
Roy 106
Rubin, Gayie 177, 188
Russia 6
Russo, Vito 192
S-Carneiro, Mario 132
Saar, Blonde 78
sadomasochism 84, 162
sailors 70
Saint Louis, Mo. 191
Saint Petersburg 5, 42
San Francisco 1, 7, 31,
Sanders,John 101
Sarria,Jos 175
Sartre.Jean Paul 30 Sasha 54
Sotan conduit le bal (Georges-Anqueti\) 14
Schoondermark 74
Schorer Foundation, Amsterdam 84
Schorer, Jacob Anton 76, 77
Schouten, H.J. 76
Schuur, Hendrikje van der 62
Schuuring, Maurits 65
Sellers, Joseph 94, 97
SentinellSl
Serra.Jos Francisco Correa da 127
servants 47, 65
Shakespeare, William 103
shops 19, 24,91
Signorile, Michelangelo 193
Sinitsyn 44
Skelthorp91
Soares, Antonio 114
Soares, Joo Nunes 125
sodomy 13-14, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 51, 56, 61,
62, 63, 66, 68, 85,93, 99, 140, 143, 148
soldiers44, 48, 64, 66
Solomon,
Simeon 106
songs 40
Souza,
Soares de 138
Stein, Gertrude 12, 169
Steinberg, Leo 63 Stephen 108
Stevens,
Samuel 94, 96, 97
Stoddard, Charles Warren 168
Stoneman, Drake 96, 98, 99
Stonewall riots 10
215
strangulation 66, 123
streets 17, 18, 21, 46-7, 49-50, 70, 130,
172, 181-2
subculture 13, 43, 47-9, 55, 57, 67, 103
Sydney 191
Symonds,John Addington 192
Tardieu, Ambroise 74
tasca 130
tata 22
taverns, seebars
Taylor, Alfred 105
Tchaikovsky, Modest 46
Tchaikovsky, Peter 46
terminology 11
theater 26
Timofenko 53
toilets51, 52, 67, 106, 134
Tokias, AliceB. 169
Tonia Carrero Gay 159
Torchia, Joseph 164, 184
Toronto 1, 8
Towleton, John 96
transit locations 21, 169
travesti 151
Tremblay, Michel 192
Trevisan.J S. 148
Trifonov, Gennadii 56
Trijntje 62
Trumbach, Randolph 67
Tulleries gardens, Paris 16
tule 79, 80
Tulp, Nicolaas 62
Tunbridge- Wcuksorthe
YecimaticifKent(Bak.er) 99
Typee (Melville) 168 iyvrel38
Ulrichs.K. H. 73, 74
umilions 11, 73, 74
Uranisme et unisexualit (Raffalovich) 75
urinals 18-21, 22,48, 50-1,67, 70-3, 81-2. 86.
106. 107. 108-9. 134. 169
Valentine, Gili 190
Vallada, marqus de 130
Van Klaveren publisher 74
Van de verkeede richng (S choon derm ark)
74
Vasconcelos e Sousa, L. de 145
Vaughan, Thomas 99
venediktov 54
Verkehrte Geschiectsemfindung, Die
(Grabowski) 74
Verlaine, Paul 76
Vermeer, J 63
Vernon, Paul 167
Verwey Albert 76 vespasienne 19
Vieira, Antonio 77
Vienna 1
Volkov, Ivan 45
Volodia 52
VriendschapSI
Ward, Edward 92, 96
Weeks.Jeffrey 193
Weston, Kath 179
Whale, Robert 96
White, Dan 184
Whitle, George 96, 98
Whitman, Wait 166
WHK75
Wild.Jonathan 93
Wilde, Osear 12, 104, 105, 107, 132, 148,
167
William III 65
Willis, Thomas 94
Wiisma, Zacharias 64-5
Winkier, Cees 75
Wittman, Cari 178
WizardofOz, The 173
women haters47, 51, 100
Wright. Thomas 99
Walente, Assis 152
Zeldenrust-Noordanus, Mary 83