The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Lesbian Flâneur
of thousands. Resisting the small-town suburban conformity of the United
States of the 1950s, men and women were again drawn, or driven, to cities
as places to express their “deviant” sexuality. 8 The anonymity of the city
made a gay life realizable in a repressive era. This odyssey is well represented
in the lesbian novels of the period. 9 Nightclubs were a visible site for women
interested in “seeing” other women, and it is in the literature of the 1950s
and 1960s that the bar becomes consolidated as the symbol of home. 10 Lesbian/whore
became a compacted image of sexual consumption in the popular
dime novels read by straight men and lesbians alike. The lesbian
adventurer inhabited a twilight world where sexual encounters were acts of
romanticized outlawry, initiated in some backstreet bar and consummated
in the narrative penetration of the depths of mazelike apartment buildings.
She is the carnival queen of the city—“Dominating men, she ground them
beneath her skyscraper heels” 11 —a public/private figure whose excess sensuality
wistfully transcends spatial and bodily enclosures. This modernist
nightmare of urban sexual degeneracy is crystallized in the identification of
the city with homosexuality. Lesbian-authored fictions of the period set in
the Village, like Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series (1957–1962), though
less sensationalist syntheses of the available discursive constructions of “lesbian,”
still depend on that myth of the eroticized urban explorer. 12 Transmuting
in more liberal times into the lesbian sexual adventurer, this figure
can be recognized in diverse texts, from Rita Mae Brown’s post–sexual revolution
Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) to the San Franciscan postmodernist porn
parody Bizarro in Love (1986). 13
In this outline of the flâneur I have tried to gesture toward both the
textual history of the form and its echo in the narratives of lived identities.
As a cultural form, its status as “myth” as opposed to “lived experience” is
irreducible. The flâneur is an incongruent and complex figure suggesting a
number of antitheses: motion/stasis, mastery/fragility, desire/abstinence,
complacency/alienation, presence/intangibility. Singularly perhaps the
flâneur is a symbol of urbanity. When Walter Benjamin described flânerie
as going “botanizing on the asphalt,” 14 his turn of phrase hinted at a gender
ambiguity facilitating a reading of this poet as less—or more—than male.
The lesbian flâneur is one step from here.
The lesbian flâneur appears as a shadow character or a minor theme
in a number of recent novels, and I want briefly to offer examples of her appearance
as a structuring principle in four New York fictions: a stanza of a
poem by Joan Nestle; a short story, “The Swashbuckler,” by Lee Lynch
(1985); Don Juan in the Village, by Jane DeLynn (1990); and Girls, Visions,
and Everything, by Sarah Schulman (1986). 15 Within contemporary lesbian
writing we encounter a specific, even nostalgic, image of the stroller as a