The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac

The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac is a fascinating book that brings together in revelatory ways the political economy of metropolitan development and the history of sexuality, offering new interpretations of postwar political culture. Through a rigorous investigation of housing and neighborhood development, it makes logical what first appears to be a paradox: the triumph of a 'tolerate but not endorse' politics around non-normative sexuality in the second half of the twentieth century. Clayton Howard makes a convincing case for a 'metropolitan' approach to political economy and social life and weighs the implications for sexual politics more thoroughly and creatively than I have seen anywhere else. -Sarah Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America Clayton Howard has written an important, provocative, and path-breaking book centered on a wide-ranging, eye-opening, and nuanced discussion of the right to privacy and its role in conversations about public and domestic spaces, sexual rights and freedoms, and the proper place of queer and straight people in the body politic. No one has identified the varied threads of privacy embedded throughout the social fabrics of modern cities and suburbs like this before. -Bryant Simon, Temple University Howard, in evaluating the city and the suburbs as interconnected, successfully brings suburbia into LGBTQ history . . . He has found an inventive way to keep the study of San Francisco's sexual culture fresh and has added new dimensions to the literature on the queer mecca. -Western Historical Quarterly