- “Just When They Seem Engaged in Revolutionizing . . .”
Christina Hanhardt
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. vii + 358 pp.
Christina Hanhardt’s Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence is a richly researched examination of activist organizations and less-organized activist efforts on behalf of LGBT rights in San Francisco and New York over the last fifty years.1 Hanhardt draws on archival materials as well as interviews and participant observation to provide a view that is close to the ground, attentive to the trees, even sometimes the weeds, without losing view of the forest. Yet this is not a conventional historical narrative; instead, Hanhardt takes a step back to the past for each step she takes forward, so that each chapter is a thematically driven case study, summoning its own historical antecedents rather than simply the next set of events unfolding during the next set of years.
Hanhardt focuses on those activist efforts that took violence to be the problem, safety the goal. The violence/safety orientation, she argues, was centrally constitutive of LGBT social movements, identities, communities, and neighborhoods as well as being constitutive of the urban spaces and government policies of which it was a symptom. LGBT community—as place, a neighborhood located in real estate, and as imagined space of belonging—is never portrayed by Hanhardt as discrete, unified, or autochthonous. Rather, she presents contradictory and changing configurations that emerge at the conjunctures of the LGBT activist efforts, urban processes (especially gentrification), and also shifting social scientific theories, which mobilize social groups and social deviance as objects of knowledge and governance—most importantly as victims and agents of violence. For Hanhardt, the term community almost always has quotation marks or a capital C because she is talking about someone else’s deployment of the term, often in the title of an organization or state agency.
While Hanhardt shows the activist organizations to be implicated in social processes, they are not only or necessarily complicit with the most destructive. They are rather endlessly and diversely desiring and strategizing, sometimes in [End Page 450] ways that enhance stratification, dispossession, and the power and reach of the repressive apparatuses of the state. But as Hanhardt makes sure we understand, this is not inevitable. The third chapter, “Counting the Contradictions,” focuses on critiques of gay gentrification and on those activist groups such as Third World Gay Coalition, Lesbians Against Police Violence, and Dykes Against Racism Everywhere that “did not call for the primacy of state protection or empirical enumeration . . . did not see as a solution the effort to make identities visible through a tabulation of violence in the frame of crime-based state recognition” (126).
One of the text’s most interesting components is the central role Hanhardt attributes to social science and social accounting as a determinant of, but also point of contention for, the LGBT formations she examines. In the first chapter, “The White Ghetto,” she traces the efforts in the 1960s of organizations including Mattachine to capture War on Poverty money for San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Specifically, they wanted access to the Community Action Program, manifested locally in the Community Action Agencies, which, informed by social scientific theory, sought to reduce juvenile delinquency by enhancing “legitimate social avenues” (47). Advocates produced “reports” (think “Moynihan Report”)2 that drew on the “culture and personality school” of social analysis (44–45), developed to account for racialized poverty, thus producing an analogy between race and sexuality, which here as always works to produce claims for similarity but also separateness.
In chapter 2, “Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists,” Hanhardt describes the emergence of 1970s safe street patrols as implicated in a merger of urban and gay-affirmative social science, which identifies neighborhoods (e.g., San Francisco’s Castro) as sites for the realization of gay life (83). Meanwhile she notes that street patrols meshed well with the emergent broken windows theory of crime (107), which takes crime as a given (an inevitable product of rational opportunity) and shifts the focus of crime-related policy to the calculation of risk and prevention, to be deterred by quality...