GLR September-October 2023

dressing, and vagrancy presented the opportunity for un scrupulous crooked cops to extort the owners of gay bars and “ shak[e] down the homos, hustlers, hookers, and dealers. ” The queer street kids who live and operate in these districts have mostly fled unbearable home environments. They are often teenagers (or even younger) who rebelled against physical vi olence and sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or uncles. (Plas ter interviewed one young man who recounted the horrifying experience of being sexualized by his father and then passed around among his uncles from the time that he was only three years old until he escaped to San Francisco.) Generally uned ucated and unemployable, they have exchanged one hellish en vironment for another, where day-to-day survival is their primary concern. In San Francisco in the late 1950s and ‘ 60s, as white flight to the suburbs depleted the city ’ s population of white blue-col lar workers and gentrification efforts to “ clean up ” and “ beau tify ” the Tenderloin closed the once flourishing bars, pool halls, and theaters, the queer street kids and other Tenderloin denizens moved to the nearby Polk Street area. There they found low-in come housing options, cheap diners, and coffee shops. As many straight bars welcomed the change and became gay bars, Polk Street became the center of LGBT life before the Castro Street

area developed in the 1970s. The first Gay Pride march tra versed Polk Street in 1970, as did the first Gay Shame march years later. The thriving gay scene lured the hustlers who had operated almost exclusively in the Tenderloin. Nearly all of the men and transgender women that Plaster interviewed had hustled on the “ Polkstrasse, ” the ten-block area from Sacramento Street at the northern end to Civic Center at the southern. Indeed, the gay businesses along Polk Street (at one point some twenty-plus bars, porn theaters, and SROs) thrived becauseof the street hus tling. Several bars (such as the Q.T. and the Rendezvous) oper ated as places where hustlers hung out searching for customers. The Motherlode and Divas were known for their transgender clientele and johns who sought them out. Often, the bartenders and bouncers of these places served as procurers for the hus tlers or as unofficial employment agents, finding work for them in the bars and diners along the streets. This reciprocal arrange ment benefitted both the hustlers and the bars. The johns seek ing companionship for the night spent a lot of money buying drinks in the bars and in the street ’ s cheap hotels, and the hus tlers made more money in the bars than cruising the streets. Life for these young people was extremely difficult, full of violence at the hands of johns, thievery by other hustlers, and

B R I E F S stand as a sense of freedom from compul sory social norms. Wark is a “ speaker demon, ” offering in one passage a concise description of what one can experience on the dance floor: “ I want the situation, the entire situation, to fuck me. I want to be penetrated by light, fog, the floor, the walls, the anonymous swaying bodies. I want to be railed by pounding sound. ” C RAIG J ENNEX QUEER PRINT IN EUROPE Edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy

summer ’ s day with Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves as the two archivists and writers pore over their extensive collection of copies of Mietje , reflecting on gay activism in Holland and its legacy. Fiona Anderson ’ s chapter explores where you could actually buy such alternative publications in their time, including an interview with members of the group who ran Edinburgh ’ s queer bookshop Lavender Menace. It ’ s a fitting ending to an eclectic tribute to the creators of images and ideas once deemed threaten ing by mainstream society. M ATTHEW H AYS AMERICAN CLASSICIST The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman Princeton Univ. Press. 536 pages, $39.95 This is an extensive biography of writer Edith Hamilton (1867-1963), whose Mythology and The Greek Way were stan dard texts that introduced the Classical world to generations of students. This book deeply explores many facets of Hamilton ’ s long life, including her decades-long rela tionship with Doris Reid. Born in Dresden, Germany, the first of five children, Hamilton spent her child hood in Indiana, at her father ’ s estate. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, one of the first women ’ s col leges in the U.S., and returned to Germany for graduate work. She became the head

RAVING: Prac ti ces by McKenzie Wark

Duke University Press. 136 pages, $15.95 Feelings of collective belonging and bodily bliss on the dance floor have been central to queer and trans culture in the U.S. from the beginning. In Raving , McKenzie Wark pries open a dance continuum — where ostensibly distinct parties across time and space fold into each other — and presents raving as a collaborative practice that many of us find a necessary escape from an increasingly un bearable world. A self-described “ middle-aged, middle class, white transsexual dance freak, ” Wark shares insights gained through queer and trans-oriented parties in Brooklyn (and, in a brief passage, in Berlin). Part autofiction, part ethnography, Raving mirrors the com plex and collective aspects of rave experi ences. Like a practiced deejay, Wark blends genres to take us on a larger journey. Some critics who shared their thoughts with Wark when she was dancing and researching ap pear momentarily and nudge us gently to ward something new. If you ’ ve ever really needed to give yourself fully to the dance floor, you ’ ll rec ognize the profound importance of the practices Wark analyzes in this book. If you ’ ve never raved before, Raving is a fruitful introduction to the scene, its limita tions, and its promise, which — to the pounding beat of techno — we might under

Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 266 pages. $34.95. As well as being informative and entirely pleasurable, Queer Print in Europe is a book we need. The shift from print to digi tal has meant that so much of the print press has been discarded, a great deal of it forgot ten within a subculture already dangerously prone to amnesia. The authors featured in this anthology have gathered a number of images of alternative queer publications, everything from the post-Franco Spanish La Pluma to the French lesbian press to the radical Dutch queer newspaper Mietje .Most of the media examined were influenced by the radical left, while some papers have clearly been founded out of exasperation with the left ’ s cold shoulder toward the LGBT rights movement. Essays in the collection range from the academic to the informal. Benny Nemer provides a firsthand account of spending a

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