Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco Book

A workmanlike history of sexual (and to a lesser extent, gender) nonconformism in San Francisco, which makes the case that sexual and political radicalism have always been bedfellows in San Francisco. There has always been a sizable subculture of sexual deviance in the City, but in the 1960s beginning with the hippies a lot of theatre and stigma dropped away, albeit to the face of great resistance by the old school Catholic political establishment, led by the likes of Dianne Feinstein, who campaigned unsuccessfully in the 1970s to prevent open sex work and sex shops along Market and Broadway, and more successfully in the 1980s to close gay bathhouses in the face of the AIDS epidemic. (The sexual revolution, particularly for gays, was also attended by significant interpersonal violence, often perpetrated by working class youth.)

As with many urban histories, the book suffers from a lack of comparative frame: how much was the sexual revolution in San Francisco part of a larger national trend, the leading edge of that trend, or a true outlier? The book never really attends to such questions, preferring to dwell in local anecdote and color.