ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a series of maps and related conversational exchanges offered by interviewees that illustrate how they visually and linguistically delineate sexual citizenship on the French urban landscape. It focuses primarily on maps drawn by gay male interviewees and illustrates the tensions that emerge between the Anglo-American practices of naming sexuality in a tradition of identity politics. Recent scholarship has observed the emergence of the city as the economic and cultural center in the modern period and underscores the connection between the Western city and globalization. Henning Bech notably argues that the city has become something essential and particular to male homosexual existence, what he refers to as the gay male's life space. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century communication technologies like the Internet and e-mail have helped to bring people of various backgrounds closer together, and especially marginalized social groups, like gays and lesbians, in their process of self-identification, and psychological or physical migration to more tolerant environments.
