All (Sexual) Things in Moderation—And in Private

In the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, a foundational site in the gay liberation movement, a new debate has become perennial in the weeks leading up to the city's Pride March each June. Should "kink," with its leather gear, nudity, and unapologetic eroticism, be on full display atop the brightly colored floats that roll down Fifth Avenue, or should the event be, as one progressive commented, a "family-friendly… uncontroversial" event where you can "meet with organizers and get cute tee-shirts."¹ Sexually explicit displays of queer identity, he and others argued, were absolutely important parts of the movement, but that didn't mean they should be prominent parts of a daytime celebration. Instead, the argument went, they belonged at the "many, many afterparties and other private venues." To others, the idea that Pride, born of resistance to the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a haven for marginalized queer and trans people, should operate as a G-rated affair, is outrageous—or at least only conceivable because the protest, which attracts LGBTQ+ people and their allies from all over, has in recent years evolved into a parade. Sure enough, the event itself raises little controversy, and enjoys sufficient commercial and cultural currency that not only are rainbow-flag hues stamped on baby onesies and muscle tanks hawked by street vendors, but the symbol is now swirled into the soft-serve logo of the "Big Gay Ice Cream Shop," and for the month of June, in the windows of local bank branches.

This historical trajectory is in some ways a local one derived from the gentrification and liberal culture of New York City. But historian Clayton Howard, in The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California, shows how this sort of cultural acceptance and attendant contestation is actually a product of a national political culture of which negotiation over the relationship between queer sexuality, propriety, and public life has become a hallmark. "The right to privacy is a pivotal concept in the culture wars," Howard writes, chronicling how "the question of homosexuality surfaced again and again" in myriad fights that have played out not only in Pride festivities, but also in school board and city council meetings, museums, and bakeries (p. 3). Yet despite the media's frequent framing of gay rights activists and family-values conservatives as "Perfect Enemies," as one journalistic account styled them in 1996, it is not left-right polarization that drives Howard's narrative, which avoids such too-neat dualisms.² Rather, he traces how a growing consensus about the individual right to privacy helped cultivate and consolidate an oft-overlooked political center. Rigorously defining the ideological and geographical terrain where such moderates reside, Howard charts how their worldview has emerged, and reflected, and reshaped public policy, demographic mobility, educational practice, and pop culture. This moderation, Howard argues, has evolved since the 1940s, operating both to galvanize and impede the advance of LGBTQ+ equality.

The "closet" and the "cul-de-sac" are rich metaphors, evoking spaces significant for the apparently distinct sorts of solitude they afford: the closet isolated by ostracism, the cul-de-sac safe seclusion by choice. At its heart, Howard's book is a history of ideas, explaining how these divergent notions of discretion emerged, and, surprisingly and compellingly, challenging this dichotomy. Commencing before many culture war chronicles, Howard relies on historian Margot Canaday's concept of the straight state policy decisions that constructed the closet by incentivizing marriage, criminalizing gendernonconformism, and pathologizing and generally vilifying same-sex desire as "deviance" (p. 77). This codification of "the closet" still inhibits full recognition of queer Americans, which Howard addresses in the Epilogue. Simultaneously, an ethos of sexual privacy was becoming a more accepted social—if not quite civic—virtue in midcentury America, and this ideology sacralized the heterosexual family by enshrining sex as only legitimately transpiring within its bounds. Yet at the same time, this sensibility also undermined the overt persecution of homosexuality—on the strict condition that it be expressed only in private.

The concept of the suburban cul-de-sac had everything to do with circumscribing this achievement of LGBTQ equality. A major reorganizing force in post-WWII American life, suburbanization—like the quiet, leafy curvilinear roads that were a selling point in their contrast to urban thoroughfares—served to segregate white, heterosexual married couples from single denizens of racially, socioeconomically, and sexually diverse cities, in the process solidifying an ideology that affirmed such social and spatial arrangements. The suburban way of life not only celebrated homogeneity and moral traditionalism as a foil to urban life, as historians from Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1987) to Becky Nicolaides's My Blue Heaven (2011) to Lisa McGirr in Suburban Warriors (2015) have chronicled, but also, privacy in particular. Here, Howard's analysis treads fascinating new ground. That specific celebration of privacy—driven by new jurisprudence, and also an increasing cultural affinity for personal fulfillment—not only made it harder for straight suburbanites to condemn what any adults did consensually behind closed doors, but also became attractive to queer people who craved the protection such discretion afforded, as well as the perks of suburban life that had nothing to do with sexuality: lush lawns, swimming pools, and proximity to nature. Defying the false dichotomy between liberal gay urban enclaves and conservative straight suburbs, Howard argues that suburbanization gave rise to a political moderate milieu and agreeable lifestyle that some queer people sought—and in which they found—solace unavailable in the crowded city.

And not just any city, but San Francisco. Howard writes—in impressive detail, drawing on zoning records and maps, city council minutes, community newspapers, and oral histories—specifically about the Bay Area metropolis and its surrounding suburbs. No historian, myself included, faces much resistance to arguing that while California case studies might be exceptional, they are nationally evocative, and The Closet and The Cul-de-Sac, in part because of its setting, illuminates a broadly significant story. Moreover, in 1979, The New Republic specifically proclaimed the region as a "vanguard…not a mere fluke… in that what happens to the gay population of San Francisco… is a portent of what awaits the nation as a whole" (p. 7). The question of broader applicability settled early in the three-part study, Howard dives into local detail with intellectual gusto that conveys a vivid image of how San Francisco simultaneously nurtured and persecuted one of the most vibrant queer subcultures in the United States, and how suburbanization paradoxically perpetuated both of these dynamics. At the extremes, the sparse rooms furnished only with a mattress and separated by chicken wire memorably contrast with luxuriously appointed master bedroom suites (pp. 153, 85).

Howard enriches and challenges the historiographical tradition that posits California-as-national-political-culture: the Bay Area is commonly chronicled as a site of liberal and radical activism as in Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik's The Free Speech Movement (2002), if tempered by the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley as shown in The Code (2020) by Margaret O'Mara and the self-indulgent seeking on display in Jeffrey Kripal's Esalen (2007), while the Republican Orange County suburbs are presented as the seedbeds of the modern "rise of the Right" fostered by anticommunism and white resentment. Howard further reveals how racial animus, economic inequality, and the endurance of a range of "California dreams" specifically shaped queer experience in the Bay Area and beyond. His unsparing, close-range analysis, including an examination of openly gay politician Harvey Milk's "ideologically mixed" platform opposing the Vietnam War and supporting school funding while encouraging gentrification and cutting taxes, prevents the reader from sliding into easy assumptions about left and right political affinities and the identities of those who embrace them (p. 266).

Sense of place is made by policy, and Howard explores the specific impact of zoning ordinances in the city that constrained where adult businesses could operate, and in the suburbs that only allowed single-family owners to inhabit certain areas (pp. 92, 250). But he goes further: analyzing built environments and architecture and how they shaped ideas about sexual privacy. Confounding commonplaces about urban anonymity, the proximity of shared apartments in San Francisco, as well as single room occupancy hotels, bars, and even beaches and department stores, created a "queer public" that fostered both ostracism and acceptance (p. 150). Meanwhile, suburban realtors marketed homes with sleeping quarters deliberately cordoned off from the public areas of the house, the sort of domestic development first chronicled by feminist historians such as Dolores Hayden, who wrote in The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) about how separate bedrooms for children and parents created new norms around sexual propriety. Howard builds on this tradition, but joins a new generation of scholars such as Sarah Schrank and Lauren Jae Gutterman—whose books Free and Natural (2019) and Her Neighbor's Wife (2019) respectively articulate how suburban architecture enabled the nudist "free and natural" lifestyle and same-sex desire among married women, respectively—to explain how these structures and their surroundings allowed for the expression of sexuality outside the nuclear family. Further confounding simplistic dichotomies, Howard shows how suburbanization was no one-way process, especially for queer people who often found suburban privacy came at the cost of community, which they often returned to San Francisco to find, as did suburban teens seeking a reprieve from stultifying suburban norms in the freer, more anonymous city, if only for a few hours.

The principle of sexual privacy could be so popularly embraced, Howard argues, because it both provided protection for queer people and guaranteed their discretion to others unnerved by overt expressions of their sexuality, if not their existence. Schools were another site where such lessons were imparted, through sex education programs—often deliberately titled less controversially as "family life" curricula—that, despite being attacked as morally debased, were essentially moderate lessons in how conforming to traditional gender roles would culminate in the highest expression of healthy sexuality: heterosexual marriage. Building on the work of Jeffrey Moran in Teaching Sex (2002), Howard is spot-on that the school district officials and sex educators who promoted these programs in the 1960s and 70s often understood such curricula as a bulwark against an ever more expressive sexual culture—a way to safeguard the value system of what Andrew Hartman styles "normative America"—rather than an amplification of it. Despite the pleas of some conservative parents who despaired that "they've taken God out of the schools and put sex in,"³ Howard rightly focuses on the support for sex education from PTAs and many church organizations, hardly bastions of libertinism. This perspective is helpful not only in advancing the core argument of the book—how an ethos of sexual privacy was promoted by multiple interlocking institutions—but in illuminating an era that can feel irretrievably lost, in which relative consensus around public health measures such as sex education, contraception, and even abortion could exist.

Ironically, these moderate sex educators advanced an ethos of sexual privacy by initiating discussions about topics that they argued were unspeakable beyond the home and church, itself a revolution in sexual speech, as historical sociologist Janice Irvine has written in Talk about Sex (2004). In one southern California suburb, a student evaluation of a controversial sex education course offered in 1965 makes clear how palpable this rhetorical shift was: a student complimented the instructor's "frankness" in warning them about the social costs of premarital sexuality and the affliction of same-sex desire. "If we wouldn't of had this [sic], I think I might have been sorry later," one student somberly reflected.⁴ Outright persecution might have been receding into the past, but pity and pathologization—rather than full acceptance—first replaced it. Notably, as sex education curricula evolved in the 1970s to acknowledge homosexuality as an aspect of human experience, it remained—along with masturbation, another sexual behavior decoupled from procreation—one of the topics that most unsettled parents. Celebration of queer identity was a long way off, and these outright lessons largely affirmed what had before mostly left unsaid.

For all this fear about public expressions of queerness, it was anxiety about inconspicuous homosexuals that had coursed through many sex education courses and the broader culture during much of the Cold War era. In Boys Beware,⁵ a filmstrip co-produced by the Inglewood police department and public schools in 1955, but which was in currency for at least a decade after, unsuspecting suburban boys are victimized by a deceptively respectable looking older man in a suit who abuses their trust and destroys their innocence by showing them pornography and luring them to a motel. The danger of such perpetrators, as with the buttoned-up State Department employees persecuted for "perversion" during the "lavender scare," was not their flamboyance, but their undetectability.⁶ Notably, by the 1970s and 1980s, such intense fears about private behavior—and the instinctual association between homosexuality and pedophilia—were primarily espoused by right-wing figures such as orange juice queen Anita Bryant, who in 1978 promoted an unsuccessful measure to prohibit gay and lesbian teachers from the classroom, notably opposed even by conservative Republican ex-Governor Ronald Reagan. Neatly exhibiting how sexual attitudes are often stalking horses for political concerns, Howard shows how once anxieties about covert Soviet operatives were less salient, the surreptitious homosexual became less threatening.

"Tolerance," instead, became a liberal watchword of the 1980s and 1990s, and Howard effectively traces how this ethos that stopped short of endorsement both represented significant progress from persecution and remained a far cry from full acceptance. Certain sorts of queer people—usually affluent, white, and decidedly discreet about their sexuality—became more publicly visible, affirming a narrow archetype of LGBTQ+ identity. Most importantly, many queer people themselves embraced this approach, eschewing more energetic activism that would mean abandoning the always-precarious support of moderates. One gay men's gym in Texas, for example, reminded members in 1981 that "our reputation is built on you," and touted its two locations as destinations for "the professional man at the top, or on his way, [who] cares about his body."⁷ Notably, the gym expressly forbade any sexual activity in its locker rooms for fear of drawing "notoriety" that would confirm homophobic stereotypes. Three years later, in Playboy, fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne disdained the idea that all gay men were "old queens" who "take 12, 13, 14-year-olds who give them money and force them to go around with his friends," but he offered his own stereotype in its place: "homosexuals love to look good… clean, neat…fastidious, well-mannered, and well educated. They like aesthetic things. They like good, firm, tight bodies. Health."⁸ Such examples are from my own research, but illuminate how much Howard's analysis of privacy, propriety, and queer sexuality helps us understand the political culture beyond the specific questions he takes up. The racial and ethnic "multiculturalism" that suffused catalogs and curricula in the same era offered a significant but similarly limited sort of victory. Tolerance is a noble ideal only when invisibility, or outright persecution, is understood to be the alternative. From the perspective of 2022, these limitations are clear and another path appears, if at times dimly, possible.

If many Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with punishing adults engaging in consensual sex behind closed doors, they were—and in many cases, still are—far from embracing unapologetic queer sexuality. This applies not just in debates over the propriety of a kink-and-leather themed float, but in funding comprehensive sex education curricula, siting gay and lesbian bars in downtown commercial zones, building gender-neutral bathrooms, or recognizing the dignity of those who do not fit the profile of the white, socioeconomically upwardly mobile gay person that became a nonthreatening archetype in the 1990s. Counterintuitively, the landmark passage of marriage equality in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case in some ways perpetuated this narrow ideal, and Howard characterizes the unmistakable power and limitations of such victory astutely and helpfully in this volume. A worldview that privileges personal privacy above all resonates beyond the scope of this book and helps explain why anti-vaccine advocates can so seamlessly co-opt the progressive mantra, "my body, my choice," and also why the individualism undergirding entrepreneurship and self-improvement is so enticing across the political spectrum.

It has become politically fashionable to dismiss political moderates from the Right as "RINOs," from the left as accommodationist liberals, and from all quarters to proclaim generally that the "center cannot hold." Such antipathy likely accounts for the countless volumes written on the radical left and right, and the relative few on the center. The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac helps not only to fill that void, but also effectively demonstrates that we cannot fully comprehend our past, and the political possibilities of our present, without understanding the emergence of this ideology, its appeal, and the aversion it inspires.