The closet and the cul-de-sac: the politics of sexual privacy in Northern California

The closet and the cul-de-sac: the politics of sexual privacy in Northern California, by

Clayton Howard

Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, 392 pp., $45.00 (hardcover).

In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson wagers that 'suburbia is both a planning type and a state of mind'.[1] In Clayton Howard's ambitious and impressive The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California, Howard's intervention is to argue that both the planning type and ideological orientation of suburbia inhere in the history of sexual privacy.

The book takes the closet as its central metaphor, arguing that 'bedrooms exemplified what a future generation of gay men and lesbians would call the "closet", the spatial expression of wider society's repression and shame' (p. 111). Howard reads the 'closet' as a metaphor for the spatialization of sexual privacy and its culture that equated sexual expression and shame among queers, but also among heteronormative moderates. The frame of sexual privacy and its spatial, political, and cultural representation allow Howard to address an impressive span of topics across San Francisco and its suburbs, including secular and religious sex education, the design of suburban homes, regional migration, and postwar queer organizing and the homophile movement.

The overall focus of this varied archive is the impact of suburbanization and its sexual politics on regional inequality in the Bay Area. Howard refers to suburbanization as 'one of the greatest sexual migrations of the twentieth century' (p. 81). While he identifies the Bay Area suburbs as dominated by white moderates engaged in marital heterosexuality, he also acknowledges that 'Suburban privacy made it easier for people to have all kinds of sex', and that 'bedroom privacy was not inherently normative, queer, emancipatory, or repressive' (p. 87, p. 115). In this way, Howard develops a narrative that is about the spatial and sexual privilege afforded to married heterosexuals. Howard reveals further, however, that the desire of married heterosexuals to conceal both their own non-normative sexualities, and the non-normativity of sex itself from their children, their neighbours, the government, and often from their own partners, produced a context in which the varied sexual desires of the middle class could be accommodated as long as they followed a norm not of sexual behaviour, but of sexual privacy.

The central intervention of The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac is therefore as much about the restriction of privacy's accessibility to people with racial and class privilege as it is about the postwar heterosexual privilege of marriage and normative family life. Howard challenges historians of urban and regional postwar development to address both the sexual politics of class, and the class politics of sexuality. If Thomas Sugrue argued in The Origins of the Urban Crisis that race in the postwar context took on a spatial dimension, and Matthew Lassiter argued in The Silent Majority that class was also spatialized, Howard contributes to this lineage by arguing for the spatial import and complexity of normative and non-normative sexualities.[2]

Howard's argument is organized thematically via an overlapping linear chronology that structures the book's three sections: 'the family and the state', 'the suburban metropolis', and 'the era of sexual privacy'. Howard draws extensively on newspaper accounts, state and local legal documents, archival materials, and scholarship in planning history, religious studies, queer studies, and psychology. The book's first section reads San Francisco's postwar crowding and the planning historical decisions that, Howard argues, worked in tandem with moderates' advocacy for the right to privacy to fuel suburban expansion in the Bay Area. The second section follows the interaction of planning and policy to suburban enclaves in the Santa Clara Valley, the San Francisco Peninsula, and the South Bay. Howard focuses in this section on how normative values structured both the design of new homes and the interaction between public, private, and religious life in the recently expanded suburban towns surrounding San Francisco. The book's final section focuses on gay rights and religious advocacy that each cited a right to privacy as justification for their political and spatial representation. The epilogue brings debates about sexuality, family life, planning, and privacy to the present as it contextualizes the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision to legalize same-sex marriage as it was preceded by the postwar debates about privacy that the book describes.

Howard's intervention in postwar American history is persuasive and necessary, and at once specific and complex. The utility of his intervention in a lineage of urban and regional planning historians raises equally pressing questions about the relationship between urban and regional sexual history and the longstanding engagement with the same questions of politics, space, and sex in parallel conversations in interdisciplinary queer studies. For instance, Howard argues that

the federal and California state governments tried to promote heterosexuality and marriage through instructional campaigns modeled after public health initiatives. Sex education, alternately framed as 'parent' or 'family life' education, acted as one important avenue through which authorities promoted what they viewed as sexual norms. (p. 65)

As he makes this argument, he provides an historical precedent for an argument that queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner make in their 1998 essay 'Sex in Public' that 'National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship'.[3]

Similarly, as Howard's final sentence in the book's epilogue argues, 'Acknowledging the true scope of past discrimination offers one possible path to a more egalitarian future' (p. 300). Howard shares an interest in describing the coalitional potential of complex and non-linear systems of discrimination with political scientist and queer theorist Cathy J. Cohen. Cohen argues in her 1997 essay, 'Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?' for 'a politics where one's relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one's political comrades'.[4] A precedent for the turn toward coalitional potential as a response to stratifying norms is further evidenced in the history that Howard provides.

Howard's book offers a transformative contribution to American and urban planning history as it demands that the field take sexual politics as importantly constitutive of the postwar landscape. Howard's argument further offers a spatial framework that supports and contextualizes the core arguments of several decades of work in queer studies. The Closet and the Cul de Sac therefore provides a vital framework and context for examining the sexual and gender vocabularies that are necessary for all scholars studying the spatialization of power in the urban and regional landscapes of postwar America.