Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling
Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest
by Peter Boag
University of California Press
335 pages, $60. (paper $24.95)
WHETHER FOUND in the alleys of Seattle’s Skid Row, the lumber camps of the Cascade Mountains, or the locker rooms of the Portland YMCA, homosexual men were on the move in the turn-of-the-century Pacific Northwest. Peter Boag surprises modern readers with his richly textured account of the region’s thriving homosexual communities of nearly a century ago. Who knew? But Boag does more than surprise: he tells us precisely who knew—as well as how people came to know what homosexuality was. It was a knowledge that would have significant consequences for the men of the region.
Same-Sex Affairs begins with an investigation of sexual practices in the all-male worlds of the region’s mining communities, logging camps, and hobo travelers. Reconstructing the past through sensitive readings of fragmentary and biased records, Boag paints a vivid picture of sexual relationships, sometimes but not always coerced, whose elaborate role-playing structures were captured in such slang as “wolf” and “lamb,” “jocker” and “punk.” These practices drew little attention from the region’s authorities, who had long since dismissed the working class as uncivilized, animalistic, and sexually base. Not our kind, dear, said the upstanding middle-class citizens of Portland, if they spoke of such matters at all. Even the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, widely discussed in the press of the Pacific Northwest, did little to change class-specific notions of same-sex sexuality: Wilde’s behaviors were seen as aberrant and European (and aberrant because European). It couldn’t happen here.
Meanwhile, some men constructed new lives for themselves under the noses of buttoned-down middle-class Portland. Returning to an old debate about the relationship between capitalism, urbanization, and gay identity, Boag explains how modern corporate capitalism gave some men the financial independence to live unmarried lives apart from a biological family, freeing them from the family labor system whereby a man’s worth depended on his control over an agricultural household. It also brought about a physical separation between employment and leisure space, a shift that offered both private spaces and off hours to take advantage of them. The gay world emerged, then, not from the slum, the vice district, or the sensual spaces of urban consumer culture, but from someplace far less sexy: the office. The clerks and salesmen of Portland would not have identified with the punks and jockers; nor would they have been much interested in sex as practiced across the tracks. In one of the book’s most provocative claims, Boag argues that these middle-class men engaged in distinctively middle-class kinds of sex acts, mostly oral eroticism, and that the emergence of a modern gay identity, with all of its middle-class cultural markings, may actually have been more sexually liberating than the rigidly hierarchical sexual cultures of the working class could have been.
Portland’s middle-class men found a place at the YMCA, which lent its name to the 1912 sex scandal at the center of Boag’s book. Investigations turned up dozens of men, perhaps as many as 100, and connected them in an identifiable subculture. And the men they exposed were neither swarthy immigrants nor European aesthetes, but ordinary, upstanding citizens. What was shocking about the scandal was that it revealed to the rest of middle-class Portland the homosexual in their midst. The city’s fractious politics guaranteed that the YMCA investigations would create a political scandal as well as a sexual one. When prominent reformer E.S.J. McAllister got caught up in the scandal, so too did the radical political ideas he espoused. The labor press attacked the YMCA, a symbol of middle-class respectability much resented by workers, immigrants, and the poor.
The whole city soon concluded that “the homosexual” was a man of the middle classes, but the scandal also made them rethink what all that jocking and punking might be about. “[A]fter the appearance of the ‘homosexual,’” writes Boag, “society began to view all expressions of same-sex sexuality, including that of the working classes, as homosexuality.” Authorities soon took drastic steps to root out this newly visible problem, attaching harsher legal punishments to same-sex transgressions. Oregon’s law, revised just a few years after the scandal, allowed sterilization or castration of “habitual criminals,” including those convicted of sodomy. The law remained on the books until 1965.
The conclusion of Boag’s narrative packs the payoff of his careful attention to class. These stringent new laws, promulgated by the middle class in response to learning that homosexuality was in their midst, disproportionately affected working-class men, who could little afford legal counsel or zones of privacy. The drifters and common criminals whose prison photographs peer out from the pages of Same-Sex Affairs are testimony to the power of sexuality as a political issue.
Readers are in debt to Peter Boag for years of archival research (much of it surely quite dull), for providing such a rich account of these same-sex affairs, and for grounding his study in historical time and geographical space. While its prose could have used a lighter touch at times from its author, and a heavier hand from its editor—no press should permit the words “lightening rod” to appear in print once, let alone twice—Same-Sex Affairs is a valuable contribution to history’s bookshelves. It restores a lost world to its place in history, and makes us rethink our assumptions about that world.
Christopher Capozzola is an assistant professor of history at MIT and a frequent contributor to this journal.
