ABSTRACT
Since the early 1980s, historians of sexuality who locate the emergence of American lesbian and gay life in cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco have tended to explain the conspicuous urban-ness of their account by pointing to the modernising effects of capitalism. Essentially, they argue, capitalism rendered the pre-industrial household obsolete as a unit of production. In its place arose a public world of socially individuated wage labourers, and a private domain defined largely in terms of the biological family. Although the family continued to serve an important function as a locus of care giving and sentimental attachment, the natal household’s once absolute significance in determining one’s life course diminished over time as many women and men began to leave its confines to participate in the wage labour economy instead of the household economy. Freed from their economic reliance on the family, some women and many men who felt same-sex attractions were now at liberty to move to densely populated urban areas where they believed they would be more likely to find others like themselves.1
