The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 November 2015
by Josh Sides
San Francisco is the land of opportunity. Since the 1849 (73 years after the city was actually founded), people have come here seeking gold (even if, now, that is the gold-toned iPhone). The low proportion of women in the city when it was full of men seeking their fortunes on the frontier gave rise to the freewheeling Barbary Coast, with its wild dancers and prostitution, which set the tone for a progressive acceptance of public sexual expression that has had few parallels in American cities. The history of the city is multi-tiered, and in this 2009 book, Josh Sides looks at the city's past through its long held position as progressive trail-blazer for individual expression, freedom and identity. Despite its image, San Francisco has long harbored as many regressive forces as progressive. The story of the first prostitutes and those trying to protect their health, the first strip clubs, sexual violence, gay and lesbian freedom, and the long dark history of the AIDS epidemic, are often counteracted by forces of a moral law-and-order that has long preferred to keep sexual freedom hidden, ignored, and wished-away. But that never works. The most conservative and repressive populations tend to express themselves in the most perverse and destructive ways. Has San Francisco's famed tolerance always worked? Certainly not. The city invites experimentation that is also often narrow-minded in its own way, and self destructive when trying to maintain an extreme kind of freedom. The city has been shaped by these forces, from its Barbary Coast days, to the Summer of Love, to the remarkable story of AIDS, and the millennial porn industry set up in an old armory. Its image as a center for sexual deviance is fairly well earned, but tends to be blown far out of proportion. Even the now-infamous Folsom Street Fair is beginning to look a little staid. The city's physical geography has also been shaped by its collective progressive personality, from SRO residences in the Tenderloin, rising in the gold rush days and still extant today, to the distribution of certain populations, to the development of in-home AIDS care, to the transformation of the western end of Golden Gate Park from a hunting ground of anonymous sex into a hang-out for well-heeled microbrewery customers, to the conversion of strip clubs into housing as porn moves to the internet. It is a fascinating tale of overlapping histories.
Sides's book sprawls across this history, with engrossing ancecdotes and a relevantly even-handed analysis of the various movements of sexual expression in the city's history. Other reviewers have wished Sides had taken a more partisan view on the stories he tells. While the lack of such partisan fervor takes some of the energy out of the narrative, the result is scholarly and analytical, picking up some of the more subtle forces of resistance, both external and internal, that San Francisco's broad experiment in individual freedom has encountered. The book is dense and often insightful. There is a lot of material here, and it is extensively foot-noted (though it may have benefited from a more extensive bibliography). Like many such books, it invites the reader to fill in some gaps and make unlikely connections. There are many untold stories lying beneath the overall story being told here. It is a rare view of the city as both engendering and re-shaping sexual freedom of expression.
See also: [Frog Music by Emma Donoghue]