Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79

Abstract

289the commercial sexual revolution ultimately emerged as an imperative for thoseincluding both liberal and conservative politicians, city officials, business interests and legions of citizens -who wished to 'save' and 'revitalise' Hollywood, one of the city's most venerable, and profitable, districts. That imperative produced a larger battle over the terms on which sexual pleasure, straight or gay, could be made visible and the degree to which that visibility should be afforded protection by public measures. A new generation of urban liberals faced a decidedly difficult challenge: to respond to their constituents' increasingly libertarian views of sex and sexuality while not appearing to endorse civic disorder and economic decline. They had to defend both privacy rights and property rights. 3 Since the 1920s, American values had been moving, albeit haltingly and with recurrent opposition, in the direction of what historians John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman have called 'sexual liberalism'. Sexual liberalism detached sex from procreation, affirmed heterosexual pleasure as a 'value in itself' and defined 'sexual satisfaction as a critical component of personal happiness and successful marriage'. Like other liberalisms, the sexual version made individual liberty its governing trope. Defining sexual pleasure as a value in itself, however, raised concerns that sex could be unbuckled from larger moral frameworks. Many Americans believed that the distance between sexual liberalism and total sexual licence was a short one and that slippage from one to the other led to several unhappy results: market relations and commerce, rather than morality, determining sexual values; a broad increase in crime, especially violent acts of rape and forms of sexual deviance, which for most ordinary people included homosexuality; and the corruption and exploitation of children. Over the course of the twentieth century this unease periodically erupted into episodes of public alarm and even moral panic about the threats of sexual liberalism. 4 These unhappy results and the public alarm over their possibility were intimately connected to fears of unsettled gender relations and the erosion of patriarchal visions of heterosexuality. Moral reformers worried about the 'hard' masculinity that pornography was said to promote. Men (or boys), detached from the 'soft', feminine influences of family and home, turned to sadism, violence and deviancy, a road that could lead away from women altogether, toward homosexuality. Inside the heterosexual family, male sexuality could be restrained and properly directed. Outside those bounds, as in pornographic fantasies and/or homosexuality, lay a treacherous slide toward sexual excess and violent crime. Gay-focused sexual panics could function to obscure or excuse heterosexual sexual excess, but they were also linked to broader discourses of deviancy and immorality. For many who claimed the mantle of moral traditionalist, topless (heterosexual) bars, 'adult' bookstores, porn theatres, gay bars and gay cruisin...

Taking back the night? Gender and the contestation of sexual entertainment in England and Wales

“…Since the first protest in Philadelphia in 1973, related attempts to reclaim the night spread rapidly, first across North America, but also to Belgium, France, Italy, Australia and Britain, where the 1977 Leeds 'Reclaim the Night' marches were a response to the 'Yorkshire Ripper' murders and the police's advice that women should stay at home at night (Bronstein, 2011). In many cases 'Taking Back the Night' marches targeted the emerging 'red light' districts where adult bookstores, peep shows and sex cinemas clustered (Self, 2008). Reflecting on US attempts to reclaim red light districts, Hickey (2011) suggests adult businesses were perceived to have significant impacts on the surrounding streetscape, changing its ambience and normalising retrogressive attitudes towards women which encouraged sexual harassment.…”

“…In many cases ‘Taking Back the Night’ marches targeted the emerging ‘red light’ districts where adult bookstores, peep shows and sex cinemas clustered (Self, 2008). Reflecting on US attempts to reclaim red light districts, Hickey (2011) suggests adult businesses were perceived to have significant impacts on the surrounding streetscape, changing its ambience and normalising retrogressive attitudes towards women which encouraged sexual harassment.…”

“…Reflecting on US attempts to reclaim red light districts, Hickey (2011) suggests adult businesses were perceived to have significant impacts on the surrounding streetscape, changing its ambience and normalising retrogressive attitudes towards women which encouraged sexual harassment. Here, moral panics about the availability of pornography clearly fuelled women’s anxieties, given that the pursuit of sexual pleasure by men uncoupled from the ‘moral discipline’ of family and religion was widely described as something that could lead to criminal acts of sexual violence (Sides, 2006; Self, 2008). For those protesting against pornography in society, the rhetoric of ‘Taking Back the Night’ hence became an important rallying cry that enabled connections to be drawn between the decline of particular communities as they became ‘over-run’ by vice and the apparent rise of (sexual) violence against women on the street: one of the initial protests in the 1970s was in the North Beach district in San Francisco, with 3000 women marching with candles and torches through streets lined with adult bookstores and sex theatres, exhorted by speaker Andrea Dworkin to destroy pornography to loosen the “claims that men made on women’s lives” (Bronstein, 2011, p. 165).…”

Tracing lines of horizontal hostility: How sex workers and gay activists battled for space, voice, and belonging in Vancouver, 1975–1985

“…The substantial in-migration of gay professionals and service workers to an enclave on the border of the downtown business core prepared the ground for the maturation of gay residential, political, cultural, and commercial interests and investments. In fact, these traits were characteristic of gay neighbourhoods across the West, including Church Street in Toronto, the Village in Montreal, the Castro in San Francisco, Boys Town in Chicago, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, Capital Hill in Seattle, Marigny in New Orleans, Soho in London, Canal Street in Manchester, and Hillbrow in Johannesburg (see Castells, 1983; Conway, 2009; Knopp, 2008; Ryan and Fitzpatrick, 1996; Self, 2008; Whowell, 2010).…”

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

“…The books discussed here direct attention to the so‐called sexual revolution in the high courts of the 1960s, to immigration law, military practices, veterans' benefits, and the domestic welfare state (Stein 2010; Canaday 2009). This work “queers” the history of marriage law, of urban vice squads, prisons, the relationship between religion and law reform, and military courts‐martial (Chauncey 2004; Hillman 2005; Self 2008; Kunzel 2008; Gordon 2010).…”