Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (review)

Peter Boag's book, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, is an original and engaging work that expands our understanding of sexuality in turn-of-the-century America. However, like George Chauncey's study, Gay New York, Boag's book treats male homosexuality exclusively and has no significant information on lesbians. The book is divided into three sections: "Working-Class Same-Sex Affairs," "Middle-Class Same-Sex Affairs," and "Progressivism and Same-Sex Affairs." The illustrations, consisting largely of city scenes and head shots of persons discussed in the book, are useful and complement the text.¹

Though Boag draws on material from a broad geographical area, the bulk of his evidence is from Portland, Oregon. In part, this reflects the fact that Portland, also known as the Rose City, was the Pacific Northwest's "economically and culturally dominant" city. On a more practical level, "the Rose City affords more available historical sources regarding same-sex sexuality than do some other major cities of the region." Portland's newspapers, court records, police reports, and the papers of the American Social Hygiene Society all document the history that Boag set out to investigate. Given, for example, that the city's archives contain "detective day books and daily police records [that] . . . stretch almost interrupted from 1870 to 1921," it is not surprising that Boag centers his study on Portland (8).

At the heart of Boag's study are ethnographies of two distinct sets of male homoerotic subcultures, which were constructed by social actors who occupied different places in the region's class and cultural geography. The first was located in the work camps and urban neighborhoods that housed the many thousands of youths and men who labored in the region's large extractive and agricultural industries. The second was located in the urban institutions and private spaces owned and managed by the rapidly growing population of urban, white-collar workers. One of the great strengths of Boag's study is the way in which he maps out the area's sexual subcultures. He shows how the city's neighborhoods each facilitated and were constituted by distinct class, ethnic, sexual, and social relations.

Like Foucault, Weeks, and other historians, Boag argues that homosexual identity emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (He does not engage with the work of historians like H. G. Cocks, R. Trumbach, and others who argue for a different periodization.) In developing his analysis Boag emphasizes the class-inflected nature of this development. While sexual activity between working-class men and youths was fairly common, these relationships were not organized around a distinct homosexual identity. Neither the youths nor the adults with whom they engaged in sex were considered to be homosexual. Their actions were viewed within a "tradition that saw such an individual as a criminal or a transgressor of community standards, without the ascription of any particular sexual identity" (135). By contrast, Boag argues, the representations of same-sex affairs among the area's white-collar workers proved decisive in shaping the cultural understanding of "the modern male homosexual and his location within the middle class" (10). The homosexual, like the "angel of the house" and the "fallen woman," was, according to Same-Sex Affairs, an invention of the middle class.

The "fairy," the central figure of Chauncey's study of New York, is largely absent from the Pacific Northwest. In fact, Boag argues that working-class men in the Pacific Northwest expressed considerable hostility toward the "fairy." Age was the key difference that structured the male homosexuality that occurred among the casual laborers, migrant workers, and "hobos" who lived, worked, and traveled in the region's work camps and cities. Working-class men, known as "jockers," engaged in sexual contact, sometimes in the context of ongoing relationships and sometimes on a casual basis, with "punks," a "younger male . . . commonly in the middle...