Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities (review)

In Metropolitan Lovers, Julie Abraham attempts to trace the shared lineage of homosexual subjects and modern Western "great cities," arguing that from the first appearance of each, their development has progressed in tandem through reciprocal articulations. Gay men and lesbians are, she suggests, the model par excellence for what it means to be urban, while homosexuality, by the same token, is a fundamentally "place-bound" identity linked to the space and sensibility of the modern "global city." Moving from Paris and London in the nineteenth century, to Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth, and New York in the years before and after Stonewall, the book traces tropes of legibility and secrecy, urban underworlds as loci for same-sex community, and the possibilities for public and group life made available to sexual minorities in the milieu of the city. It simultaneously maps the preoccupations with the city as threat—to masculine power, to children, to family—which have been articulated through evolving homophobic discourses. Abraham makes no attempt, however, to question conventional assumptions about how and where these "great cities" (of which the homosexual is emblem) are situated in hierarchies of global power, nor indeed to turn critical attention to the paradigmatic nature of the city she presumes. The omission is a notable one, and its implications mar what is an otherwise insightful study.

Abraham notes that the book is "a cultural, not a social, history" (xv), but this does not account for her choice of sources, which are drawn almost entirely from canonical texts by authors already entrenched as cultural elites: Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin. It is a lot to take on faith that this combination of "great" men and women informants with "great" cities will paint an accurate picture of gay subjects at large, or of the range of experiences and understandings of homosexuality at a given historical moment, yet this is a faith that the book expects.

As a result of these shortfalls, the narrative of the city and its homosexuals that Abraham produces, by failing to name its specificity and partiality, claims a falsely totalizing scope: the homosexual identity that she is tracing—largely white, affluent, northern-Atlantic, uniformly urban, focused on tropes of legibility, visibility, "coming out" as liberation strategy, the closet as cultural episteme—is a construction of modern Western subjectivity which, despite its hegemony as an exported identity in the global economy, is recognized in much queer scholarship as threatening to obfuscate and delegitimize non-Western experiences of sexual selfhood and the colonial histories which underpin that hierarchy. By folding a totalizing vision of homosexuality onto a history of urban space in which the only cities worthy of comment are the paradigmatic "great cities" of the nineteenth century, Abraham's book unwittingly extends imperialist hierarchies, rendering cities of the north Atlantic as the site where meanings, knowledge, and identities are made by cultural elites and then disseminated abroad to be picked up by others in locations which don't appear to mandate comment in their own right.

The book does have some notable strengths. It makes valuable contributions, in particular, to illuminating the history of the Chicago School of sociology and the sexual politics that informed its earliest teachings. Placing these in conversation with the Jane Addams' vision of collective urban life, on the one hand, and Radclyffe Hall's tacit ambivalence (and sometimes hostility) towards the city, on the other, marks one of the book's successes. Its failure to be self-reflexive about the hegemony of the narrative of urban gay identity it (re)produces, however, is its key weakness.