ancient cities

698 Sex and the City
city had to offer, including its women. Despite his
heterosexual origins, the figure of the flâneur has
been adopted by writers who have explored the
possibilities for homoerotic pleasure in the city.
Although usually perceived to be male, the flâneur
is a frequent figure in lesbian novels and is often
used as a mechanism for exploring the performance
of female masculinities. Nevertheless, in negotiating
the city’s streets, the lesbian flâneur must also negotiate
the many ways in which heterosexism and
patriarchy constrain women’s use of public space.
There are certainly similarities between the
flâneur’s pleasure-seeking strolls through the city
streets and the act of homoerotic cruising. Cruising
exploits the ambiguities of encounters on the city
streets—the cruiser’s glance can easily be interpreted
as a modest interaction intended to enforce
anonymity and separation, rather than an invitation
for connection. Given this ambiguity, cruising
is more effective in those urban sites where the
cruiser knows he (or she) might find others looking
for similar encounters. Consequently, cruising is
enacted through an embodied understanding of
the erotic potential of specific (urban) sites.
Through cruising, the gay flâneur not only seeks
sexual adventure but can find community and
solidarity (often across social divisions, such as
class boundaries and sexual identity).
Sexual Minorities
Although city life shapes the sexual habits and
desires of all inhabitants, studies of urban sexualities
continue to focus on the lives of those who belong
to sexual minorities. Some of the earliest geographical
theorizations of sexuality identified that
although urban public spaces, from supermarkets to
streetscapes, were saturated with expressions of heterosexuality,
these practices and representations
were so common and hegemonic that they went
unnoticed and unremarked. All space is sexualized,
but only spatial practices that express minority
desires tend to stand out. Consequently, such mundane
expressions of same-sex affection as kissing a
lover and holding hands are marked as deviant,
“other,” and often subject to some form of policing.
When urban expressions of heterosexuality
have been considered, the focus has tended to
be on sex work and red-light districts, or on
BDSM (some combination of bondage/discipline,
dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) and
other forms of kinky play. There continues to be a
dearth of investigations that examine mundane
heterosexuality in city spaces and the reproduction
of normative lives.
The heteronormativity of urban space can be
challenged by individualized public displays of
(same-sex) affection, as well as larger-scale collective
events such as lesbian and gay pride festivals.
The earliest lesbian and gay pride marches were
political protests that sought to contest the criminalization
and social marginalization of homosexuality.
In some places, such as Poland and Serbia,
they continue to fulfill this function. However, in
more politically liberal contexts, these festivals are
increasingly becoming incorporated into cities’
place-marketing strategies. Recent pride festivities
in Sydney, London, and Manchester have come
under critical scrutiny for their commercial focus
and the apparent replacement of politics with
hedonism. As flamboyant, public displays of alternative
sexualities, these events have been read as
carnivalesque spaces that have the potential to
transgress social norms and reveal them to be contingent
and socially constructed.
Yet it is not just in the extraordinary that spaces
have been claimed for lesbian and gay sexualities.
The growth of employment in service industries
since the 1970s, and employment opportunities in
these sectors of the economy for men and women
who did not conform to dominant gender roles,
has been associated with the growth of distinct
lesbian and gay neighborhoods (primarily in many
major North American and European cities).
Certainly this period seems to have coincided with
a renewed migration of sexual minorities to tolerant
metropolitan centers, in search of the freedom
these cities could afford them. There is a political
geography to how scholars have considered the
growth of these neighborhoods. North American
writers have emphasized how sexual minorities
have claimed territory in the city from which to
build political representation and inclusion. In
Europe, gay and lesbian space has been considered
in terms of resistance and transgression, and this
has meant a focus on marginalization and the spatial
exclusion of lesbian and gay lives from quotidian
cityscapes. Whatever the political reading of
these sites, studies of inner-city concentrations
of lesbian and gay leisure venues and residential