Book of Sodom.

(London: Verso 1993).

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP on the history of sexuality has shifted away from the medical and legal codification of sexuality and the sexual acts of persons to a focus on the geographical and social terrain of sexual experience. Examinations of the sexual landscape of Victorian

London, Paris between the wars, and early 20th century New York have complicated our understanding of illicit sexual relations, gender roles and the supposedly fixed categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Of central importance in this scholastic trend are the patterns of everyday life and the dynamics of public culture in the modern city. Paul Hallam's The Book of Sodom shares the tendency of recent scholarship to explore the contours of a city, the activities of its people and their search for sexual pleasure. Unlike Judith Walkowitz's, Adrian Rifkin's and George Chauncey's, Hallam's city is not a modern metropolis but the ancient city of Sodom. Moreover, his study is not an investigation of a historical place but of an excavation of an idea -- a metaphoric city which is evoked, invented and found at the intersection of same-sex sexuality, time, space, and texts.

Hallam's book is an anthology of historical and contemporary writings which touch on Sodom or more often on those acts which were ascribed to its biblical inhabitants. These selections are prefaced by a thoughtful essay which attempts to situate the various selections and Hallam's own experience in finding and collecting these references to Sodom. Hallam's ambition is not merely to analyze the assorted representations of Sodom but to try to recognize Sodom itself, to find the city in the glance of a stranger or on the shelves of a bookstore.

The synthetic introductory essay "Sodom: A Circuit Walk" is Hallam's most successful attempt to get at the everyday experience of being a citizen of the imagined city of same-sex carnality. Instead of contemplating "identity" or sexual subjectivity Hallam attempts to understand how same-sex sexuality is experienced in physical and cognitive realms. Because Sodom is the metaphoric city of sin, of vice, of transgressive sexuality it serves as the protean urban site for same-sex cultural production. As Hallam informs us "Any city worth its salt has been called, at one time or another Sodom." Indeed it is in the supposedly low and sinful urban sites that Sodom can be encountered and apprehended.

Hallam's notion of a circuit-walk is a particularly interesting and playful approach to the literature dealing with Sodom and for considering the dynamics of same-sex sexual desire. He compares his search through used bookstores and libraries for references to Sodom to those of men cruising the parks and the public spaces of modern cities. Hallam cruises the texts while also cruising the spaces in which these texts can be read for the expression and the reciprocation of desire.

It is easy to dismiss Hallam's book as an ahistorical appropriation of a variety of texts dealing with same-sex sexuality in divergent times and places. He is guilty of such an appropriation. What Hallam fails to do in what is otherwise an interesting introduction is explore the particularly modern aspect of his historical project. This is especially so with his evocation of that seminal concept of post-Enlightenment liberal humanism--that of citizenship. Hallam's "Anthology of Sodom" is not a guide to the ancient Biblical habitus of Lot but of a more contemporary public sphere. Moreover, if as Hallam asserts "There is no Sodom. Just Sodom texts," then citizenship is the provence of the literate. Those persons circulating in the night searching of sexual encounters remain mere objects to Sodom's subjects.

Being a citizen of Sodom, according to Hallam, is a particularly contingent and chance form of existence. So much of everyday life, he argues, is made up of what Proust terms "falsehood and perjury" that one has to pay close attention to those transient moments which represent coming into the fraternal embrace of citizenship. He states, "I, a citizen, look eagerly, but find the city at once ubiquitous and elusive." Sodom for Hallam is to be found in reports about 18th century London "molly houses," in the fiction of his friend Sue Golding and in the journalism of a queer reporter exploring the Dead Sea Valley.

Much of the book is made up of a variety of texts ranging from the Bible, various literary selections, and 17th century court reports, to more contemporary writings. Hallam offers these for our own literary circuit-walks but is unable to provide us with the sensual pleasure of discovery, of reading these texts in social spaces which are charged with the types of erotic possibility he describes in his introductory essay. Instead, everything is provided for us; we can read each passage and document with full knowledge that they refer to Sodom and to same-sex sexuality. In a sense no walking needs to be done when travelling this circuit. Hallam's anthology frames all these texts within the context of same-sex sexuality. As a reader one does not wonder if a certain text is "queer" because Hallam has provided us with that certainty. Ironically we are deprived of the "falsity and perjury" which Hallam deems so essential in the process of apprehending Sodom. The author renders our circuit-walk devoid of the all important doubt, anxiety and risk. Instead of experiencing Sodom's illicit pleasures one is mired in reading representations of the city.

As a historian I was predictably frustrated reading many of the Sodom "texts." It is important to understand, for example, that for Reformation Christians attempting to build a new Jerusalem, Sodom was a powerful image of a distopic society, even a characterization of the society they found about them. Many of the Sodom texts seek to evoke an image of a physical place, of a dangerous locale which tolerates the practice of deviant sexuality. The spatial aspect of the metaphor seems particularly important to thinking about the utility and the popularity of references to Sodom. Just as capitalism is commonly conceived of in terms of the "market," or politics is thought of as the activity of the "polis" or the "public sphere," sexual relations have often been negotiated with reference to Sodom. Like exchange in the market, being a citizen of Sodom is metaphoric and actual, a referent and a social practice with consequence. Hallam's book is a reminder that social relations take place both in discourse and lived spaces; language may construct Sodom but being its citizen is something that can only be experienced.

David S. Churchill

University of Chicago