>> In this respect, I think that cultural knowledge and social practice of
>> urban gay men--cruising, bathhouses, balls, etc.--may offer a hint of what
>> an alternative future might look like. Though in one sense, cruising, etc.
>> may be interpreted as a sign of urban atomization (with their emphasis on
>> encounters rather than relationships), the ways in which gay men inhabit
>> urban public spaces and use them for their own purposes have always given
>> me hope for a future where the erotic doesn't have to be relegated to +
>> hidden in bedrooms or itemized + compartmentalized into personal ads.
>
>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.
Very true. But just because some practices originate from the fact of oppression + exclusion doesn't mean that those practices are not productive of new knowledge, new kinds of practice worthy of examination and even appreciation. Blues, quilting, etc. were originally responses to oppression (by class, race, gender, etc.), but they have become art forms nonetheless.
>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.
I am not sure about that. Dating + going to proms entail something different (both at the levels of what people do and what they think about it) from going to bathhouses and having balls. The latter is not geared toward exclusive + individualized relationships.
>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.
Thanks for a qualification. What's good to read on the history of development of physical context for '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.)
I agree that racism is a bigger reason, of course, especially considering how developpers made use of racism, but I only spoke of sexuality in the public as 'another' reason which had not been mentioned yet.
I think that the idea that cities are places of 'sins'--sexual as well as racial minglings and deviances--has been an enduring one in American culture.
Yoshie