In The Closet and the Cul-De-Sac, Clayton Howard expands the study of sexuality from the scale of the City of San Francisco to its relationship to the greater Northern California region. In eight chapters that cover the timeframe of the 1940s to the 1970s, he uses debates about sexuality and privacy to tell a more nuanced story of the gay rights movement's relationship to the ‘silent majority’, a political constituency usually associated with its polar opposite: the conservative Christian Right. Rather than narrate either gay rights activists or conservative Christians as historical victors, however, Howard argues the history of the culture wars might be ‘best comprehended…not as a two-sided fight over the legacy of the sexual revolution but as a multi-sided debate over the boundaries of the closet’ (p. 2). In doing so, Howard points to what he calls a ‘moderate revolution’ over the role of government in regulating sexuality.

Howard thus asks urban historians to be sceptical of normative interpretations of the Gay Rights movement that see certain laws, such as sexual non-discrimination policies, as signs of civil rights progress. He argues that political moderates actually tended to vote for laws restricting the intrusion of the state into the lives of homosexuals not because they were pro-gay but because they believed privacy was fundamental for defending principles underlying middle-class heterosexuality. Howard also suggests that scholars should practise the same caution around conflating the ‘silent majority’ with conservatives, arguing that white gay moderates – who might otherwise be seen as politically and socially liberal – might have joined the Christian Right in voting for laws limiting the rights of gender non-conforming citizens, women, immigrants and people of colour. Such an analysis illuminates a useful framework to analyse other debates centred around sexuality, such as those concerning safe sex literature during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, or the battle for ‘likely voters’ in an age of political and spatial extremes where the wishes of voters in rural poor ‘red states’ and wealthy urban ‘blue states’ do not necessarily convey a deeply ideological commitment to partisan ideas of who is and is not a ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’.

Howard's narrative unfolds over three parts. In the first, he demonstrates how gay rights activists and social conservatives both used the discourse of privacy but for distinctly different ends. As demographic change unearthed more visible signs of gay bar and street life, middle-class families began to leave for suburban enclaves outside of San Francisco's downtown core and city limits, and social conservatives used privacy discourse to defend the ‘vice’ of homosexuality from family-centred neighbourhoods. Gay rights activists too, however, also used sexual privacy discourse to defend their own presence in the city. Both sodomy laws and police practices targeting ‘lewd acts’ and gay bars, they argued, were unwarranted forms of government intrusion into the private lives of citizens. In part two, Howard connects the normalization of master bedrooms in middle-class neighbourhoods to the privacy discourse of social conservatives. In doing so, he demonstrates how ideas about respectability and the protection of heterosexuality increasingly required its spatial manifestation in the propriety, seclusion and secrecy found in master suites walled off from children and the street. He demonstrates, however, that such built environments inadvertently provided middle-class homosexuals with the benefit of privacy – a fact that helps shatter the myth that homosexual life depends solely on the built environment of the city. In the book's third part, Howard surveys the contest over compulsory sex education. This battle in California's public schools demonstrated that gay rights and Christian conservatives could not win progress on their agendas without appealing to a moderate centre. Although citizens, parents, teachers and even religious leaders generally agreed that sex education served a common good, sex education advocates often battled over the ‘science’ and ‘fact’ of sex – particularly whether the curriculum implicitly condoned or encouraged same-sex sex practices.

In sum, Howard suggests that the clash between political moderates demonstrates that the American public may love limited government and privacy more than they hate gays – and, indeed, more than they love God. The Closet and the Cul-De-Sac is thus full of contributions to the study of US urban history and the history of sexuality more broadly, precisely because it smartly expands the spatial analysis of homosexuality to include suburbs, bedrooms and schools.