The traffic in free love and other crises: Space, pace, sex and shock in the city of late modernity

Parallax

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 69-89

  Chisholm, Dianne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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EID: 34250775544     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/135346499249614     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (44)

1. In Das Passagenarbeit ['Arcades Project', published as Das Passagen-Werk], Benjamin uses 'dreamhouse' and 'faery grotto' to refer to the Paris arcades and other wonder sites of new nineteenth-century industrial technology. ('Passagen-sie strahlten ins Paris der Empirezeit als Feengrotten ['Arcades - they beamed out into Paris of the Second Empire like fairy grottos'].) Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften V.1 and V.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), V.2, p.700 [T1a, 8].
2. The new species of prostitutes were les hirondelles [swallows] who nested on second floor balconies, les castors [beavers] who strolled the passages of the Palais-Royale and Galerie de Bois and les clandestines, saleswomen who used their boutiques as props for their sex trade. Patrice de Moncan, Les passages couverts de Paris (Paris: Editions du Mécène, 1995), pp.53-5.
3. Passages constructed during this time include Passages de l'Opéra (1822), Pont Neuf (1823), Trocadéro (1824), Grand Cerf (1825), Galéries Vivienne, Véro Dodat, Colbert, Fer, Passages de Pondeau, Sainte-Anne, l'Industrie Française (1829), Galeries Sainte-Marc (1834), Passage Puteaux (1839), Passages de Havre, Jouffroy (1845), Passage Verdeau, Galerie de la Sorbonne (1846). De Moncan, Les passages couverts de Paris, p.88.
4. 'In the 1970s, the Everard Baths refurbished the premises after a fire and became an openly gay bathhouse, ending decades of clandestine activity. The East Side Sauna, Man's Country, Beacon Baths, Odyssey Baths, Apollo Sauna, Broadway Baths, Wall Street Sauna, Sauna Bath and Health Club, and The Barracks all opened as gay baths in Manhattan in the 1970s'. Allan Bérubé, 'The History of Gay Bathhouses', in Dangerous Bedfellows (eds.) Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1996), pp.187-220, p.200.
5. By 1973, the Club Baths had nearly a half-million members, making it the largest national gay organization. See Ira Tattelman, 'The Meaning at the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse' in Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolande Reiter (eds.) Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), pp.391-406, p.400.
6. In 1985, there were 'approximately 200 gay bathhouses in the United States, from Great Falls, Montana, and Toledo, Ohio to New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco' (Bérubé, 'History of Gay Bathhouses', p.191).
7. 'In New York City alone, a total of sixteen gay bathhouses operated. Today, six have been torn down. Five have been converted to other uses, including a restaurant, a wholesale market, a dance club and a personnel office. Two, although closed, still retain the remnant of the bathhouse. Only three remain open' (Tattelman, 'Meaning at the Wall', p.399). The remaining three are the East Side Club, the Wall Street Sauna and the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem.
8. The 'Circuit' entails 'a string of exclusive parties which rotates around major cities of North America and caters primarily to wealthy gay tourists'. The better known include New York's 'The Saint', Miami's 'White Party', Atlanta's 'Hotlanta', and Montréal's 'Black and Blue'. Billed as "a bonding experience and rite of passage for gay men", the Circuit has 'become a massive tourist attraction - at once recognized by tourist bureaus and city councils across North America.... Miami Beach officials estimate that $10 million in revenue from sources such as hotels and restaurants was pumped into local coffers by visitors to their White Party week of festivities'. Matthew Hays, 'Bad Boys Boost Montréal Tourism', Toronto Globe and Mail (28 February 1997), pp.A16-7.
9. 'By the end of the nineteenth-century, arcades had become the hallmark of a 'modern' metropolis (as well as Western imperial domination), and had been imitated throughout the world, from Cleveland to Istanbul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne' Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp.39-40.
10. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, V.1, p.83 (A1,1).
11. On opening, the Continental Baths at West 74th Street offered 'a disco dance floor, a Saturday night cabaret, a pool, and clean, spacious facilities that could serve 1,000 men... 'a unique, total gay environment" (Bérubé, 'History of Gay Bathhouses', p.200).
12. Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997), pp.163-4.
13. Chauncey, Gay New York, pp.217-20.
14. Tattelman, 'Meaning at the Wall', p.400.
15. B. Peters cited in Tattelman, 'Meaning at the Wall', p.399.
16. For a Benjaminian critique of gay bathhouse historiography see my forthcoming article 'Love at Last Sight, or the Dialectics of Seeing in the Wake of Gay Bathhouse', Textual Practice 13.2 (Summer 1999).
17. 'While making my way back towards these boulevards, I find myself crossing the entrance, to my right, of the first corridor connecting the far ends of the passage's two arcades, and manage to avoid becoming engulfed in these black slopes that lead gently down towards the Théâtre Moderne. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Picador, 1971), p.63.
18. 'A strong bond exists in men's minds between Baths and sensual pleasure: this immemorial notion contributes to the mystery of these public establishments which many people would never venture to visit, so great is the superstition of contagious diseases, and so widespread the conviction that the bathtubs prostituted here are dangerous sirens luring visitors to their traps of leprous enamel and stained tin-plate. Thus, the atmosphere of these temples devoted to a dubious cult is partly that of a brothel, partly that of a place where magic rites are performed. No architectural detail permits the inexperienced passer-by to confirm his suspicions about the irregularity of such a building: BATHS is all the façade says, and this word conceals an infinite range of truthful signs, but who knows?' (Aragon, Paris Peasant, p.63-4).
19. Aragon, Paris Peasant, p.66.
20. Betsky, Queer Space, p.162.
21. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, p.81.
22. 'If bars, baths, and other institutions brought gays together, that much was certainly to the good, a stage of socialization that contrasts strongly with the largely isolated or individual experience of gay men in the pre-war period. But these same institutions also exploited gay men both financially and sexually. And most important of all, gay men characteristically interiorized the commodity relation thus given as the defining meaning of sexuality itself. Thus promiscuity, self-rejection, and reification of the sexual experience as a series of 'numbers' or 'tricks' - expressions whose referent is clearly the language of prostitution - often brought the commodity relation to the center of gay self-experience'. Bruce Boone, 'Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara', Social Text 1.1 (1979), pp.59-92, pp.79-80.
23. 'Since class peels off with clothing you might think a democracy of nakedness and need would develop. But here in the cubes [bathhouse cubicles] a new hierarchy took place among these lawyers, artists, grocery clerks, stockbrokers, movement activists, professors, and cab drivers. Rank now came through size of penis, condition of body, and age. The pretty young thing reigns, a sexual prima donna. Experience, intellect, talent, compassion mean nothing.... Here the great American principle of competition and performance keep those on the make hungry, frightened, and slightly savage'. Rita Mae Brown, 'Queen for a Day: Stranger in Paradise' Lavender Culture, eds. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: Jove, 1978), pp.69-76, pp.73-74.
24. See also Tom Savage, 'The St. Mark's Baths', Portable Lower East Side 1.2 (Winter 1984), p. 18.
25. Walter Benjamin, 'N: Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress', in Gary Smith (ed.) Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago, 1983), pp.43-83; pp.44-5.
26. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk V.1, p.414
27. cited in Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, p. 182.
28. Walter Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp.155-94, p.169.
29. Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', p.169.
30. Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist (New York: Serpent's Tale, 1985), p.9. Page references will hereafter be cited in the text.
31. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk V.2, p.1010
32. cited in Sigrid Weigel, Body-and Space-Image: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1996), p.20.
33. 'When Benjamin resumed work on the Arcades project in exile in 1934, he abandoned the title of 'A Dialectical Faery Scene' because it was impermissably poetic... [However] motifs of 'dream world' and 'dream image' and the understanding of dialectics as 'awakening' from a dream were not given up' (Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, pp.49, 54).
34. Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', p.262.
35. 'The concept of progress should be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things 'just keep going' is the catastrophe' (Benjamin, 'N', p.64).
36. 'In the gym-sized room were sixteen rows of beds, four to a rank, or sixty-four altogether. I couldn't see any of the beds themselves, though, because there were three times that many people (maybe a hundred and twenty-five) in the room. Perhaps a dozen of them were standing'. Samuel Delany, Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1960-1965 (New York: Richard Kasak, 1993), p.267.
37. Delany, Motion of Light in Water, p.268.
38. 'If I may indulge in my one piece of science fiction for this memoir, it is my firm suspicion, my conviction, and my hope that once the AIDS crisis is brought under control, the West will see a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock of any social movement that till now has born the name.... Now that a significant range of people have begun to get a clearer idea of what has been possible among the varieties of human pleasure in the past, heterosexuals and homosexuals, females and males will insist on exploring them further' (Delany, Motion of Light on Water, pp.269-70).
39. Gary Indiana, Rent Boy (New York: Serpent's Tale, 1994), p.117.
40. Robert Fitch, Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993).
41. 'The reason for the internalization of production', Fitch explains, 'was simply that the new economic classes precipitated out of the industrialized manufacturing process needed to be close to their work - the direct exploitation of labor. Cities grew because mass production required masses of people concentrated in one place. As they grew outward, and as the different functions of management became more specialized, the functions which were housed within a single factory building, were redistributed in specialized districts. These functions - manufacturing, administration, accounting, etc., now had to compete for space in the urbanland market. What should go where.'.. (Fitch, Assassination of New York, p.236).
42. Fitch, Assassination of New York, p.235.
43. Indiana, Rent Boy, pp. 118-9.
44. Walter Benjamin, Zentralpark, Gesammelte Schriften 1, p.681