Identities are formed in part by the spaces we inhabit. But urban spaces are also defined by the people who frequent them. This relationship, and the tension between these forces, is explored in both Julie Abraham's Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities and David Caron's My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community. Each traces the relationship between urban space and homosexual identities. Exploring the interplay between these categories, Abraham asks how homosexual has become for many, both pro-gay and anti-gay, a place-bound identity. This locatedness of homosexuality is important, she concludes, because the conflation of urban spaces and consumption practices with homosexual identities has ensured that the homosexual who is identified with modernity and the city remains affluent, white and male. Caron in turn looks to the location of both homosexuality and Jewishness within a particular urban space – Paris’ Marais district – to understand the relationship among and tensions between community, group identities and French national identity. Both authors illuminate the historical undergirding of contemporary understandings and fears that identify homosexuality as urban, consumerist and threatening.

Abraham's study is based on the assertion that ‘homosexuals became, over the course of the past two centuries, simultaneously model citizens of the modern city and avatars of the urban’ (pp. xvii–xix). Metropolitan Lovers is an exploration of how that happened. She achieves this through analyses of literary treatments, biographical studies, popular culture and diverse ‘expert’ understandings of the city and sexuality. Together these sources demonstrate a broad convergence of factors that served to inscribe queer bodies as urban and urban spaces as potentially queer. Literary and non-fiction authors, for instance, long used the rhetorical power of homosexuality as a metaphor for the secrets and dangers of the city. Sexologists and social scientists explored the homosexual subcultures of cities to determine individuals’ characteristics and group dynamics. And urban homosexuals themselves, from the late nineteenth century on, wrote about their own lives, casting homosexuality still further as located experience. Helpfully, Abraham breaks down the association of the city with male homosexuality by centrally including discussions of lesbian identities and spaces. Already in the nineteenth century, writers positioned lesbians and fantasies of lesbianism at the very heart of the city. Baudelaire's, Balzac's and Zola's fascinations with sexual modernity enacted within the city served to highlight lesbians’ role in building urban sexual modernity. They represented the modernity of the city, but also its dangers to male citizens. So powerful were these literatures, and parallel memoirs, exposés and paintings that they affected observers’ impressions of the metropolis, newspaper and government reports, and even judicial decrees. Lesbians were not only objects of others’ fantasies and fears, however, and Abraham amply demonstrates the continued role of female same-sex desire in linking the urban and queer. Reformer Jane Addams and writers Radclyffe Hall and Gertrude Stein all found inspiration in the city, and made it a feature of their lives and works. The secret desires and urban spaces lesbians represented, however, also introduce a key issue within both Abraham's and Caron's studies – legibility.

Each book is concerned with the legibility of urban spaces and the men and women who inhabited them. Nineteenth-century railroad executives, Abraham tells us for example, sought to make Los Angeles legible as a modern urban centre by inviting Oscar Wilde on his 1882 speaking tour of the US to aid in this project. Not yet fully legible as a queer figure, Wilde was nonetheless urbane and metropolitan, characteristics that boosters like the railroad executives wished to cultivate and inscribe on their own city. Wilde declined their offer. Of course he continued to affect understandings of urban space. In part because of the publicity surrounding his 1895 trials, homosexuality became increasingly public and increasingly legible. Because of Wilde's established associations with the city and enormous personal notoriety, homosexuality thereafter became linked still further to urban experience. In Paris, Caron identifies an excess of legibility. In the Marais, the oldest intact region of Paris, waves of immigrants have made this district legible for centuries. They have defined it for a time, and then left markers attesting to their presence. In the twentieth century this included substantial Jewish immigration before World War II, and later the emergence of a gay subculture that has also identified the Marais as a spatial focus of its own community. Deciphering the legibility of Jewish and gay sites across Paris, reading them against French national identity and understanding both his father's and his own relationship with these communities is the focus of My Father and I.

In the second half of the twentieth century, discussions of urban homosexuality turned from concerns about individual vice to anxieties over group identification. For both authors, the role of the city in forging community identities is critical. The act of ‘coming out’, in which Abraham sees gays and lesbians ‘assert[ing] their right to legibility’ (p. 232), further identified them as part of a public and undeniable group. The gay liberation movement embraced homosexuality by further celebrating group identities and by reclaiming the city. According to Abraham, ‘Gay liberation was a full frontal assault on post-World War II American hostility to attachment and to groups’ (p. 233). Here Abraham's and Caron's projects overlap again. In France, where the power of universalist rhetoric of national identity is suspicious of potentially divisive group affiliations, Jews and gays have been of particular concern as a potential threat.

In France, homosexuals have unsurprisingly also been constructed as urban, but also in conflict with idealized French national identity. Caron identifies the tension between urban homosexuality and the wholesome Frenchness of the provinces. Idealized as the repositories of authentic French national identity, the provinces provide a foil for the threat of communautarisme, or social separatism, by urban Jews and gays. Both of these groups are also associated with the Marais, further positioning it as a fraught and contested urban space. Caron and his father, for example, both have relationships with the Marais that go deep. His father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor, first settled in the Marais, long the centre of French Judaism, before World War II. Cleared by the Nazis, reminders of this area's past nonetheless come to the surface in the small stetl or hub of Jewish life that continues in the Marais. In more recent decades homosexuals like Caron himself have found a sense of community and shared space within the indistinct boundaries of the Marais, sharing some streets with the Jewish Marais. But as Caron relates, the legibility of each community's idea of the Marais often remains out of focus to the other. Still, both Jews and homosexuals have several points in common: a group identity organized in part around the spaces of the Marais; consolidated group identities based on the trauma of the Holocaust and AIDS respectively; and communal ties viewed as a threat to the universalism of French national identity.

Both Julie Abraham's Metropolitan Lovers and David Caron's My Father and I offer a sophisticated treatment of the relationship between homosexuality and urban space that is both historically situated and still relevant to the present. Literary scholars and queer theorists will find these books most rewarding, but urban historians and cultural historians will be similarly impressed with their breadth of discussion and range of sources. Across literature, memoir and cultural theory, Abraham and Caron historicize contemporary associations and fears of homosexuals tied to the urban. Understood today in relation to gentrification, ghettoization and consumerism, homosexuals continue to be enmeshed within chosen and unchosen associations with particular spaces. First lesbians in the nineteenth century and then gay men in the twentieth, Abraham argues, ‘remained supremely useful subjects for urban commentators’ (p. 256). This has tied them to commercial desires ranging from consumer products to property development. And as Caron shows, their utility extends even to discourses of national identity. Standing in symbolically and strategically for the city and its threats in so many different ways, homosexuals and homosexuality remain useful to many in the twenty-first century.