Andrew Israel Ross’ cultural history of public sex and desires brings right in front of our eyes the sexual connotations of the nineteenth-century Parisian urban landscape. In his fascinating study, he shows how passers-by could easily read the street and gather, willingly or not, information about the availability of sex. Ross’ aim in this book is to unveil and make sense of nineteenth-century urban development in relation to urban sexual culture, by looking at two forms of sexuality and their publicity: prostitution and homosexuality. The study draws on recent work about the cultural urban landscape of pre- and post-Hausmannization Paris, on the gendered use of the streets, and on the commercialization and massification of pleasures in the late nineteenth century. His arguments stem mostly from the analysis of the police archives, specifically those produced by the section in charge of the regulation of prostitution in Paris.

In chapter 1, Ross argues that the municipality and the police, by trying to limit and control the overt display of sexual pleasures from the late Restoration onwards, actually created new forms of display, which were added to the language of public sexual culture. For instance, the use of a ‘gros numéro’, visible from the street to indicate the entrance of a brothel made the brothel all the more conspicuous to passers-by. But the visibility of sex in the urban landscape was not only a consequence of administrative changes: as shown in chapter 2, men looking for same-sex relations used the newly built urinals as a place of encounter, subverting the initial goal of the municipality of making the city more hygienic and more accessible and usable to men. But as Ross explains, the public urinals ‘paralleled the spatial logic of the brothel itself: plentiful and recognizable, these facilities were also able to hide the activities they enabled from the general public’ (p. 19). Urban planners, police and public hygienists were following a bourgeois ideal of modernization, but by transforming the urban landscape, they also inadvertently created new and unexpected ways to use, read and understand it.

In chapter 3, Ross addresses in more depth the link between prostitution and male homosexuality. His approach is illuminating: the historiography often studies them apart but Ross shows how people in positions of power, and other social commentators, defined homosexuality around 1850 as a social problem and construed it in terms similar to the better known problem of female prostitution. Ross is not attempting to do a comparison between types of control; on the contrary, he successfully connects these two subjects through the mesh of urban public culture. Chapter 4 goes further in highlighting this comparison by looking at the mobility of men seeking other men and prostitutes seeking clients. The language (verbal and non-verbal) that they developed to communicate that sexual contact was possible also brought other people – not just the initiated – into their realm, thereby creating a ‘public sexual culture’, visible to most.

Chapter 5 studies the different attempts by the Third Republic to control public sex, after being overwhelmed with complaints. Ross successfully brings to the fore the development of a normative discourse linking freedom of the street, modernization brought by urbanization and bourgeois ideals. Democratization, a spearhead of the Third Republic, led to the mass commodification of pleasure, and public sexual culture also became part of it, as described in the last chapter. Music halls and cafés were places offering dual forms of entertainment: the general public could enjoy various types of spectacle, while sharing the space with people looking for sexual entertainment. Culture of public sex was thus intrinsically linked to early mass consumption and leisure culture.

One critique that could be made of this study is that the voices of the sex workers and of the people selling or seeking same sex relations are not really present in this book. It remains a top down study of the visibility and ‘inconveniences’ of public sex in Paris, from the point of view, mostly, of the police and its archives. That being said, personal voices are not missing from Ross’ work: the close reading of the letters of complaint written mostly by male middle-class citizens is particularly inspiring. Ross shows how these complainants advocated for a bourgeois, moralistic and patriarchal understanding of the right to the street and freedom of the city while, conversely, encouraging greater surveillance by the police. They pressed for limiting the freedom of those who they thought disturbed their own enjoyment, in contrast to the more democratic image of the Third Republic.

I highly recommend reading this book to get a better sense of the culture surrounding public sex in the nineteenth-century city and to go beyond the study of its control. Of course, Paris remains a specific case-study, which developed its own normative discourse and practice. Ross underlines, however, some constancy over time, most likely reproduced in other western cities: desires and sexual encounters were conceived as heterosexual, and male desire had to be fulfilled, one way or another.