Were'nt all these practices and institutions results of the pariah status of homosexual men. In a free society they would have been impossible because their need could not have arisen. For example, in a social order in which boys dated each other to the high school senior prom, it would be hard to imagine the need for bathhouses and balls.
The history of relegating the erotic to bedrooms is also a bit more complex. After all, up to the 19th century most people lived in dwellings in which there were really no "private places," with innumerable adults and children (including guests, relatives, and in only somewhat wealthier homes, servants) sleeping in the same or adjacent rooms. Even in palaces, until fairly recent times, there were no hallways, so bedrooms were also traffic lanes. Some features of Freud's thought were deeply rooted in a *physical* context in which lack of private space overlapped the development of family structures which presupposed such privacy.
>
> Another reason why many suburbanites fear cities may be that they dislike
> the idea of sexuality _out and about_ in the public sphere.
I don't see the evidence for this. In the fifties it was pretty clear that racism was a major driving force. And various real estate and construction interests employed (white) persons for specific purpose of purchasing homes in white neighborhoods and reselling them to blacks, thus triggering a selling panic, during which home prices plunged, only to rise again sharply as soon as the neighborhood had been turned irreversibly black. The developers gained by buying people out cheaply in the city, selling them new houses in the "subburbs," and then made money as ghetto landlords to boot.
(Racism and sexuality have always been intertwined, of course, but that is another topic.)
Carrol