Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (review)

This book is an important contribution to the growing body of historiographic work on the development of urban gay subcultures. Alongside major works on New York, London, and Berlin, Peniston here provides a detailed analysis of the practices of over eight hundred men who were unlucky enough to fall under police suspicion for the crime of "public offenses against decency" in 1870s Paris.¹ The majority of these men were working class, and while some were clearly engaged in prostitution, many others were seeking sexual partners for short- and long-term relationships. Peniston makes a convincing case that they constituted a distinct subculture that intersected with elite practices and discourses in complex ways.

Peniston's book begins with a concise overview of the legal system and police practices that obtained in nineteenth-century France, providing a welcome introduction to the historical context for readers who are not specialists in French history. Although Old Regime laws against sodomy had been abolished during the Revolution, sexual acts that took place in public remained under legal proscription. Furthermore, contemporary criminologists developed the notion that "pederasts"-a blanket term designating men who engaged in "same-sex sexual activities" (36)-were deviants who were likely to engage in all kinds of criminal behavior such as theft and blackmail. Together with their charge to maintain public order, it was the basis on which Paris police justified their surveillance and harassment of men they suspected of engaging in same-sex contact. Thus, the apparent leniency of the law was circumvented by the regulatory zeal of the police. Between 1873 and 1879 the Paris police scrupulously recorded arrests of such "pederasts and others" in a ledger that forms the backbone of Peniston's research.

In the central section of the book Peniston subjects these police data to rigorous sociological analysis, charting the age, profession, address, and birthplace of all the arrestees. On these criteria alone most of the men in this study were not exceptional: their jobs placed them in the working class or the lowest ranks of the middle; they lived in popular quarters throughout the city. The very banality of their professions and residences demonstrates that they were neither marginal nor isolated from the general population. Yet more distinctive patterns emerge when Peniston compares the ages and professions of men who were arrested together. Notably, although prostitution and cross-class relationships tended to involve mature men with adolescent boys, longer-term couples tended to include men of similar age and social standing. As Peniston notes, this adds weight to the argument that an important transition had taken place at the beginning of the modern era, away from a pattern of adult men having sex with adolescent boys and toward "a new pattern of adult men having sex with other adult men" (112), though obviously both patterns continued to coexist.

It is worth pausing here to note the ambiguity of the phrase "having sex" in the context of Peniston's analysis. Given the limited and imprecise terminology of the police records, this phrase actually covers a range of activities, as Peniston himself notes but does not always emphasize. The perennial problem faced by historians of sexuality who would like to know exactly what people were doing with each other cannot be satisfactorily resolved here. According to a list compiled by the author, the men in his sample were arrested for more than two dozen different offenses, singly or in combination with other deeds, which could be as vague as "obscene acts" or indeed "pederasty" or as specific as "anal intercourse" (93-94). The most numerous cases, however, were of masturbation, and a substantial number of these were of masturbation in the presence of other people. In this era being a voyeur was not criminalized, while being an exhibitionist was. Peniston describes several cases where a group of men gathered on a sidewalk or in a...