In
Wide Open Town, Nan Boyd argues that
San Francisco’s bar-based queer culture was just as important to the
development of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement there as were the
city’s more mainstream activist groups. The
book relies primarily on some 40 oral histories with San Francisco bargoers,
owners, and LGBT rights activists, as well as tourist guides, periodicals,
clippings, photographs, and public records to construct (in often meticulous
detail) a narrative of how the development of San Francisco’s gay scene swelled
into a fight for civil rights. Although
the writing style is a bit heavy-handed at times, Boyd’s innovative research
and methodology create a narrative that is anything but closed or canonical. Rather, by limiting her scope to San
Francisco before 1965 and structuring the book in terms of community formation
rather than strict chronology, Boyd is able to open up the development of San
Francisco’s gay civil rights movement and analyze (or characterize) it in terms
of a variety of local contextual factors.
As she moves through topics as diverse as the gay male community,
tourism, and female impersonation; the lesbian community, prostitution, and the
female body; policing and the construction of homosexuality as behavior- versus
desire-based; homophile activism and class-based differences over separatism
and assimilation; and coalition-building, she explores the relationships
between economics, use of space, police and media oppression, and the development
of a community into a class-for-itself.
The result is a narrative that characterizes San Francisco’s gay civil
rights movement as a multi-class, space- and place-dependent grassroots
movement. Boyd’s work thus argues that,
for this movement in this place and time, “the politics of everyday life were
every bit as important as the politics of organized social movement activism.”
(242)
