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Gay by the Bay is an evocative blend of urban boosterism, narrative history, nostalgia, celebration of persistent, insistent desire, post-modern identity politics, and affirmation of the Bay Area queer community's "sober optimism" at the turn-of-the-century. The book's eye-catching cover is adorned with photographs which don't disappear once the book is opened. Instead, beautifully rendered photography enlivens every page of Gay by the Bay. The photography, graphic design, and "the exciting story of what lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and gay men in the Bay Area have accomplished" (4) make Gay by the Bay a welcome addition to coffee tables across the queer nation, indeed around the queer world.
The publication of Gay by the Bay coincides with the opening of the Gay and Lesbian Center of the new main San Francisco Public Library, the only publicly funded archive of its kind. In the process of making selections for this book, authors Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk painstakingly sorted through a tremendous amount of public and private archival material (especially the rich holdings of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California), photography collections, oral histories, secondary literature, and reference works. Many readers will enjoy countless hours randomly perusing the book's stunning visuals, reminiscing and/or fantasizing about the delights of the "Gay Capital of the World."
Stryker and Van Buskirk should be commended for their clear commitment to making this history of queer culture as representative as possible. They foreground the Bay Area community's historical expansiveness and appreciation of the wild diversity of queer identities, practices, and styles. Stryker and Van Buskirk signal a few historical moments when political, ideological, and representational conflict shook San Francisco's queer communities. But in the end, the most compelling assertion of Gay by the Bay is that the histories of queer identities and practices deserve to be told, preserved, and visually represented along the entire spectrum of queer possibility.
Gay by the Bay surfaces some of the central questions confronted by those interested in public history. How to acknowledge individual or sub-cultural "needs and kinks" while sustaining a focus on community? How can political "specificities" (around race, gender, and class, for example) be recognized within an identity politics amongst those "adversely affected by the same power structures?" What...