Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies)

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Examine how a community of support in Nineteenth-Century Paris became a blueprint for modern sexual identity!

A unique social history, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is a valuable addition to the growing field of gay and lesbian studies. The book examines the interaction between the city's male homosexual subculture and Parisian authority figures who attempted to maintain political and social order during the early years of the French Third Republic by using laws against public indecency and sexual assault to treat same-sex sexuality as a crime. Faced with a constant cycle of surveillance, harassment, and arrest, the city's gay men survived the hostile urban environment by forming a community of support that had a widespread and lasting influence on the development of modern sexual identities.

Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is based on a statistical analysis of more than 800 working-class and middle-class men who were arrested or investigated by Parisian police between 1873 and 1879. Their stories, presented through long and short case studies, represent nearly 2,000 names recorded by police in � �Pederasts and Others,� a ledger detailing the arrests of male homosexuals for public offenses against decency and other minor offenses. (The term “pederast �� identified those suspected of same-sex sexual activity, not the modern definition that indicates homosexual relations with a minor.) The ledger entries reveal specific habits, attitudes, values, and characteristics about these men that set them apart� �the same traits that identified them as part of a community based on their behavior and relationships.

Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines:

• the forces of authority
• the laws regarding same-sex sexual behavior
• the role of the police
• the role of the magistrates
• the role of the doctors
• the common characteristics of the city's male homosexual subculture
• the sexual behaviors of the Paris underground
• the geography of the subculture

and takes an expanded look at three case studies:

• �A Decadent Aristocrat and A Delinquent Boy”
• “Pederasts, Prostitutes, and Pickpockets �
• � Love and Death in Gay Paris”

Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris also includes tables, appendices, and maps linked to statistical data. The book is an essential resource for historians, sociologists, sexologists, criminologists, and other scholars working in the fields of gay and lesbian studies, urban studies, social and cultural history, and French history.

Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies) Review

Don't let the title deceive you. There are cross-generational couplings discussed, but this is not a book on man-boy matters. In the 1800s and to this day, Francophones, of various opinions on gay rights, say "pederast" rather than "gay."

Lord Alfred Douglas' comment about "the love that dare not speak its name" really concerned the fin-de-siecle, Anglophone world. But its inapplicability to other countries and times hasn't changed the facts that little is known about other people we would now call "gays." So the author does a great job about letting us know about gay men in Paris more than a century ago. The author almost begins by saying, "This won't discuss elites like Gide and Proust, I'm speaking of the ordinary man." Thus, in a way, this is an anti-classist work. It speaks of those at the bottom of the class structure, at times.

I always thought France got rid of its sodomy laws a century before Britain does because Napoleon was being a nice guy. However, the author does a great job in saying how the philosophes and the French Revolution affected thinkings in France. Just as abolitionists didn't necessarily advocate miscegenation, antidiscrimination laws, or integrated neighborhoods, the philosophes could not be equated with modern supporters of gay rights. Just because the Francophone world lacked de jure homophobia didn't mean they didn't have the de facto type.

Still, this book falls short at times. The author writes in one sentence, "Judges would convict 'indecent' men because the offense was a misdemeanor and they wanted to focus on felonies." Okay, after he said that, then there was no need to have a chapter about judges actions; it's already been concisely stated. Next he has a whole chapter on wardens' or criminologists' thoughts on gayness, but it really only covers four books. It's great he had access to those books, but any college-educated person with similar access could have written the same chapter.

In obeisance to ideas on constructionism, the author never translates terms that could help modern readers. He mentions men who beat up gay clients, but never calls them "rough trade." He mentions men who only practiced homosexuality while incarcerated but never says "prison gay." Though Bray said Anglophones did not equate effeminates with sodomites until the late 1700s, this author quotes a man that used feminine nouns and adjectives to describe gay men and the author never comments upon it.

The examples in this book come at the end. Non-academic readers may want to start there or only read that portion of the text. These stories are not "respectable" in a Brokeback Mountain-type of way. They involve prostitution, public sexual activity, and other things that prudish readers may consider salacious. But hey, authors have to work with what they have and this author wanted to discuss those who got caught by police, not those who could successfully hide and thus not be written about.

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