In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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

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

Stein also tries to move gay and lesbian history forward in another important way. He positions his work especially in the context of the two other great books of lesbian and gay male history. First, he sees the focus on political movements of John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983) as inadequate. Second, George Chauncey Jr. in his 1994 book, Gay New York, argued that “the history of gay resistance must be understood to extend beyond formal political organising to include strategies of everyday resistance.” This is not enough for Stein who intriguingly further develops further Carol Smith Rosenburg’s 1975 work in “The Female World of Love and Ritual” which suggests that 19th century homosocial culture was “political in its own right” (p. 6). In other words everyday relationships among lesbians and gay men are intrinsically political and indeed [End Page 710] therefore every bit as political as more formal movements: “everyday resistance not only inspired, supported and sustained organised movements, but also worked at odds with them.” (p. 6)

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

Part 4 deals with the period of the gay and feminist revolution between 1969 to 1972 and with the impact of the New York Stonewall riots down the road in Philadelphia. Here Stein struggles to convince and fails to pull out the full implications of his evidence, which shows that with the brief onset of the Gay Liberation...

Share