Christina B. Hanhardt. Safe Space

The main thrust of the twentieth-century gay rights movement was to eliminate discrimination and promote acceptance through legislation and collective visibility. Christina B. Hanhardt’s inventive, prize-winning book, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, documents the understudied efforts by a range of groups to stop violence in gay neighborhoods. In the 1960s, the War on Poverty inspired gay activists to identify with analogous minorities organizing for housing and educational improvement, but too often members of the self-declared “White Ghetto” failed to build effective coalitions, and therefore “calling for police protection” frequently trumped the strategy of “challenging police power” advocated by communities of color (71). The concern with violence intensified in the era of gay liberation (early 1970s), when residents of the Castro District in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City advanced the claim that increased visibility had triggered a dangerous backlash. The Butterfly Brigade and Lavender Panthers distributed recruitment fliers, donned military garb, and blew whistles, but the upshot of these mobilizations had class and racial implications. Hanhardt reports that activists “were well aware of a general concern held by white middle-class gay men that lower-income neighborhoods with a majority of residents of color . . . might be perceived as a threat” (105). Yet her analysis of anti-violence mobilizations—that gay enclaves conflated criminal attackers with outsiders and these with people of color—is more often asserted than demonstrated with compelling evidence.

Criminology · Greenwich · Legislation · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Women of color · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies