Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 ed. by Matt Cook and Jennifer V. Evans (review)

Queer history is messy. Popular discourse might pedal narratives of tidiness and progress—the increasing acceptance of gay marriage in the Western world as an irrefutable sign of positive change for the LGBTQ community, for example—but historians can be guaranteed to rain on the parade with a skeptical “Yes, but . . . ” This engaging and rewarding collection of essays is no exception. As sixteen scholars trace queer experiences in cities from Istanbul to London, Helsinki to Madrid, the leitmotif is indeed one of messiness: no more simple pieties of success or coming of age, no more stable lesbian and gay identities on a forward march out of ignorance and repression toward liberation/toleration/inclusion/equality; instead, a welcome focus on “complex and intersecting identifications, identities, places and spaces” (10).

Thus, the Londoners that Matt Cook interviews do not recognize “a homogenous, singular and collectively comprehended gay London” (51), as the standard progress narrative would like us to believe, but a much queerer city of memories, regrets, nostalgia, and diverse and diffuse engagements and interactions with it. The same can be said for Dimitris Papanikolaou’s queer Athens, a palimpsest of mapping and unmapping, “the easily mapped city of gay bars and cafés on the one hand, and the city of oral narratives, memories and intense negotiations of queer identity on the other” (153). And for Antu Sorainen’s Helsinki, the liberal and commodified mainstream gay culture of the Punavuori district contrasts with the rougher and queerer vibe of lower-class Kallio. The frisind (liberal-mindedness) in Peter Edelberg’s Copenhagen has walked hand in hand with normalization of some (the creation of an acceptable gay and lesbian subject) and the sidelining of the rest. So, too, in the Spanish cities described by Richard Cleminson, Rosa María Medina Doménech, and Isabel Vélez, triumphalist readings of the recently increasing visibility of gay males (above all), rainbow flags, and gay tourism need to be challenged by refocusing our attention to those on the margins, queer and not, who have been excluded.

Along with a call to curb our optimism about the present, the authors also ask us to note areas of regression. Gert Hekma’s Amsterdam is not so much the gay and lesbian Mecca of the global queer imagination as a queer city in decline, beset by racial and religious antagonisms and not as tolerant as it is purported to be. Amsterdam also features prominently in Fatima El-Tayeb’s discussion of queer Muslims in European cities. Her argument is that queerness is only tolerated when it is compatible with neoliberal demands, and, once defanged and depoliticized, it is then mobilized to produce new forms of exclusion, notably of the Muslim (including queer Muslim) Other. Tom Boellstorff, in his brief coda to this collection, rightly takes her to task for coming close to “a functionalist analytic treatment of an anthropomorphized ‘neoliberalism’ as knowing what it wants” (283), and El-Tayeb herself suggests that the white-assimilationist, neoliberal paradigm is not so all-encompassing and overwhelming as to stifle alternative activist strategies of creolization. Still, her chapter should be required reading for anyone who feels satisfied with the advances that Europe has made on queer issues.

In Roman Kuhar’s Ljubljana and Judit Takács’s Budapest, progress has been faltering. A substantial proportion of Slovenian citizens would still not want a queer as a neighbor, and, however much the mayor might extoll the city as the most beautiful in the world, it isn’t, yet, for LGBTQ people. A fairly sizeable number of queer organizations and places of entertainment have developed in Budapest, but a 2009 poll showed that 80 percent of Hungarians still deprecated public displays of difference, such as pride parades. Even the glittering reputation of Paris, which can boast a much longer, more open, more tolerant queer history than most other European cities, is partially undermined in...