Erasure of urban detritus: Toronto’s Sin Strip

Prostitution is considered the oldest profession in the world. Although the culture and date of its inception is not clear, there are various myths. It has different meanings and reflections in every culture and civilization. This situation causes it to take on different places. The beginning of prostitution is thought to derive from phenomenon of war; therefore, it relates to the settlement of the occupation forces in the cities. Economic reasons accompany the phenomenon of war. According to the type of prostitution, the phenomenon of religion also shapes prostitution. Social and cultural meanings attributed to prostitution, types of prostitution and sex workers, accessibility, urban politics and technology can be counted among the dynamics in the selection of spaces of prostitution. All these factors transform and diversify the places of prostitution. We will examine the changing places of prostitution from the past to the present including what these types of places are, both chronologically and thematically on the basis of countries. It is possible to collect types of spaces of protitution under eight different headings from design (planned and organic), settlement (urban and rural), religion (holy and non-religious), law (legal and illegal), and location in urban space (centre and periphery – scattered or combined), to access (virtual and real – mobile or fixed), continuity (legal and illegal) and front spaces (night club, pavilion, residence, hotel, massage parlor, Turkish bath and tourism). In this study, it is aimed to discuss the dynamics of choosing a place for prostitution, its concentration in the region where prostitution occurs, and the formation of prostitution in a region with activities of no prostitution. For this purpose, spaces of prostitution will be categorized. For the classification of spaces of prostitution, the phenomenon of prostitution in different countries will be analyzed. Key Words: Prostitution, Spacial, Red Light District, Sex Worker, Brothel.

Ever since the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, the Netherlands has been at the forefront of championing erotic freedoms. Amsterdam became internationally renowned as a city of sex, drugs and rock & roll – the gay and sex capital of the world, wide open to the celebration of erotic pleasures. The change for the Netherlands was dramatic: from a society ruled by Christian political parties and a conservative morality to a nation where sex could be enjoyed by locals and foreigners alike. The sexual revolution had far-reaching effects on Dutch society. While surveys show that most Dutch until the late 1960s were opposed to homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, abortion, divorce and preand extramarital sex, the majority a decade later claimed to accept such behavior. Stimulated by the NVSH (Dutch Society for Sexual Reform) and the COC (Center for Recreation and Culture, a code name for what would be baptized in 1971 the ‘Dutch Society for Integration of Homosexuality’), as well as by numerous social changes, the Dutch in the 1970s emerged as the most liberal nation in the world on issues of sexual morality (see Hekma and Duyvendak, 2011). This gave the Netherlands, and especially the city of Amsterdam, a worldwide reputation as a place of sexual freedom. Amsterdam became a magnet for foreign tourists, particularly its Red Light District and its gay scene. Sexual emancipation was a watershed for women and even more so for gay men – they were no longer seen as sinners, criminals or psychopaths. This narrative of sexual liberation continued with twists and turns until 2001, when the Netherlands reached the pinnacle of its erotic freedoms with the legalization of prostitution in 2000 and the opening of marriage to same-sex couples in 2001 (being in both cases the first country to do so). In the eyes of the law, homosexuality and heterosexuality were now nearly equal, though legal equality did not mean social equality. While gay and straight alike saw these legal victories as the end of a long struggle for equal rights, the media began to report on regular incidents of queer bashing, gay and lesbian teachers and students remaining closeted in schools, and LGTB people being chased out of their homes. Social problems

Even though there is a long tradition of red-light districts (RLD) being concentrated within the city centre, gentrification policies in many European cities now aim at spatially dispersing the sex market (and its workers) to the fringes of the city. Moving RLDs out of the city centre (or transforming them into more-upscale entertainment provision) calls into question the physical place allotted to sex work in our cities, as well as the moral geography behind these decisions. This article examines urban regeneration processes in two particular European cities – Amsterdam and Zurich – both cities with a long history of progressive drug and sex-work policies where sex work has been part of the visible urban fabric. In the article we look at urban policies and the legal framework, as well as at moral reasoning and discourses around the legitimacy of moving sex-workers away from city centres. We argue that in both cities moral arguments play an important role in the legitimization of the transformation of the RLD which contributes to a new race and gender order that stigmatises sex-workers as a group as if they were all victims of trafficking.

"I had just witnessed women who shingled their own roofs, drove eighteen-wheeler trucks, and built their own houses—as well as kept them clean and cooked a damn good meal. On women's land I am a first-class citizen, I'm treated as an equal. I now see the world with righteous anger and hope. Living in womyn's community has provided that lens for me."—Elizabeth Sturrus, third wave feministOne of the driving forces in the lives of many lesbians is the search for community in a society that favors heterosexuality and often turns a cold shoulder toward women who love women. Lesbian Communities: Festivals, RVs, and the Internet takes you inside flourishing lesbian communities—physical, spiritual, and virtual (online)—that provide practical help, emotional support, and much-needed outlets for creative expression. Exploring communities functioning in harmony with general American society as well as separatist groups, "festival communities" which form for short times annually, and informal online groups offering meaningful communication to physically isolated lesbians, this book offers a ray of light to those whose search is still ongoing. It also provides much-needed analysis of the current state of lesbian communities—some decades old now—for educators, researchers, and social scientists. In Lesbian Communities: Festivals, RVs, and the Internet, Susan Krieger revisits the vibrant community she first explored in The Mirror Dance. An African American member of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change shares the details of her search for a cooperative, caring space for aging lesbians—and what led to her eventual decision to create this space herself. And one of the founders of Hallomas, a back-to-the-land community that has survived in northern California since the late 1970s, reflects on that unique community's birth and life—with 13 photographs and illustrations. The book also bears witness to a life-changing encounter and dialogue between second-wave feminists from the woman's land collective of Arcadia and third wave feminists. You'll also learn about: the birth, joys, and tribulations of an online community that becomes physical each year at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival the accidental birth of a lesbian community in isolated and fundamentalist-dominated West Texas the international online lesbian parenting community called MOMS (affectionately known as Dykes and Tykes)—how it began, what belonging to this community provides for its members, and a look toward the future the debate on inclusiveness versus exclusiveness (of bisexual women, transgender people, and the male children of lesbians) in lesbian communities the current decline of availability and dilution of the purity of lesbian-only space—and the rise of segregation (by social class and financial status) and oppression within the lesbian community the current plight of lesbian bookstores, which since the 1970s have served not only as gateways to a multitude of lesbian communities, but as the centers of lesbian communities themselves the online experience of lesbians searching for community in Japan the issues facing Jewish lesbians and the formation of Nice Jewish Girls, a Montreal group for anyone who identifies as a lesbian, bisexual, or queer woman and their non-Jewish partners and friends the power of myth and mythmaking to help women regain lost strength and reclaim lost history From the efforts of back-to-the-land groups creating "wimmin's space" to life in modern residential/retirement settings, this book explores the places created by and for lesbians. Photos and illustrations bring these women and their communities to life. Lesbian Communities: Festivals, RVs, and the Internet w

Whether one thinks homosexuals are born or made, they generally are not born into gay families, nor are they socialized to be gay by their peers or schools. How then do people become aware of homosexuality and, in some cases, integrate into gay communities? The making of homosexual identity is the result of a communicative process that entails scarching, listening, looking, reading, and finding. Contacts Desired proposes that this communicative process has a history, and it sets out to tell that story. Martin Meeker here argues that over the course of the twentieth century, a series of important innovations occurred in the networks that linked individuals to a larger social knowledge of homosexuality. He points to three key innovations in particular: the emergence of the homophile movement in the 1950s; the mass media treatments of homosexuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the popularization of do-it-yourself publishing from the late 1940s to the 1970s, which offered bar guides, handmade magazines, and other materials that gay men and lesbians could use to seek one another out. In the process, Meeker unearths a treasure trove of archival materials that reveals how homosexuals played a crucial role in transforming the very structure of communications and urban communities since the postwar era.

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

Black Lives Matter's Toronto chapter protested at the city's 2016 LGBTQ Pride parade to make pointed demands for more funding, access to space, and the removal of police presence at future pride celebrations. Their protest led to polarizing discussions about Black Lives Matter's involvement in the community and white supremacy in the LGBTQ community, with rhetoric that attempted to separate blackness from queerness and transness. Drawing from the protest and its tumultuous aftermath and from literature on Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ movement, this paper explores points of tension and intersection between the Black Lives Matter movement and the LGBTQ movement. It then examines critical race theory, queer theory, transgender studies, and intersectionality as theoretical lenses for Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements. Implications for community psychology praxis with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements are outlined.

The study of various aspects of the life of closed and invisible social groups in the recent history of Ukraine and Slobozhanshchina is associated with the need to solve a number of methodological, source and ethical problems. The lack of theoretical reflection on the peculiarities of studying the history of the LGBT community and the limited range of available research on this topic in domestic science pose a number of challenges and problems that can be answered based on the experience of American, British and Canadian scientists, as well as guidelines of Ukrainian researchers in oral history. The specificity of the sources available for the study of urban space in the history of LGBT people is determined by the peculiarities of the representation of their experience, given the attitude of society and its institutions to vulnerable social groups, and the researcher's ability to communicate with the LGBT community. The first and most important source is the oral stories of the direct participants in the creation and operation of a number of important places for the LGBT community in the public space of the city. From the 2000s to the present, the role of Internet forums, websites, mobile applications, as well as publications in the media, electronic and printed publications that contain memories of LGBT people. A promising source is personal belongings, photos and video archives, only a small part of which can be found in the public access. The specificity of the range and availability of sources determines the importance of developing and adhering to appropriate ethical approaches of the researcher. The key principles should be trust, confidentiality, and in most cases anonymity of the respondent in communication and oral testimony, clarity and openness of research goals and objectives, proactivity, tolerance and non-discrimination, maintaining a lasting connection with the LGBT community, return the research results to the community itself in the form of both scientific and popular science publications, events, exhibitions and presentations. The results of such research should be aimed at changing the situation of vulnerable social groups, overcoming barriers to equal rights and opportunities, and addressing a number of socio-cultural, economic, medical and legal issues facing the LGBT community. The analysis of the availability of sources and ethical aspects and the obtained results find practical application in the study of the history of the LGBT community and the urban space of Kharkiv.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people continue to experience various forms of oppression and discrimination in North America and throughout the world, despite the social, legal, and political advances that have been launched in an attempt to grant LGBT people basic human rights. Even though LGBT people and communities have been actively engaged in community organizing and social action efforts since the early twentieth century, research on LGBT issues has been, for the most part, conspicuously absent within the very field of psychology that is explicitly focused on community research and action--Community Psychology. The psychological and social impact of oppression, rejection, discrimination, harassment, and violence on LGBT people is reviewed, and recent advances in the areas of LGBT health, public policy, and research are detailed. Recent advances within the field of Community Psychology with regard to LGBT research and action are highlighted, and a call to action is offered to integrate the knowledge and skills within LGBT communities with Community Psychology's models of intervention, prevention, and social change in order to build better theory and intervention for LGBT people and communities.

Urban space is tactile and meaningful because of social context and content. The essence of an urban enclave depends on how fluidity and uses adjust spatially and socially in its broader context, and on how the physical space is activated by people’s choreography within. Human activity in urban space is purposeful and political, where the latter establishes the rules of engagement through relationships of power. This paper explores the socio-spatial form of an urban square and its evolution from contested territory to a site of resistance, and then to a contemporary public space characterized ostensibly by social equality and inclusion. The Square’s Greek name is transliterated into English as Heroon Square, which means Square of the Heroes, as it commemorates Cypriot men who died in the Second World War. Over the span of a century, the site evolved from private property to a cultural hub, before becoming the city’s red-light district. and then transitioning again in its current state as a rejuvenated, vibrant, urban space of mixed uses. The particular transformation from red-light district to an area of thriving economic activity signifies a shift in women’s place, from ‘prostitute’ serving men’s desires, to worker and colleague, revealing a complex relation between women’s socially sanctioned role and urban functions. The study explores the Square’s past through historiographic accounts, examines architectonic remnants that reveal past uses, and analyses the area’s present form through a series of onsite investigations. Thus, a layered history is constructed, elucidating the fascinating story of the women of Heroon Square, a.k.a. Heroes’ Square, and weaving a narrative of women’s agency within the processes of urban democracy.

Though historians have often traced the evolution of LGBT ‘communities’ in the United States, they have left the genealogy of queer ideas of ‘community’ underexamined. This article begins to address this lacuna by charting the bifurcated early history of these ideas in the nation’s ‘gay capital’, San Francisco. It identifies homophile activist José Sarria’s 1961 campaign for San Francisco city supervisor as the event that introduced the notion of a ‘gay community’ to lasting effect into local homophile organizing. Sarria’s camp mobilized the idea as a resistance tool for the fight against state repression. In the following years, the concept established itself across local homophile activism. Simultaneously with the rise of ‘gay community’, some homophile leaders also developed coalitional visions of ‘community’. These were inspired by Black freedom organizing and prioritized building community with other marginalized groups. Only a mid-1960s struggle over the orientation of the country’s first homophile community centre led to a lasting sidelining of this coalitional tradition. The reconstruction of this bipartite history challenges enduring myths of a monolithically conservative homophile movement, and helps explain the subsequent success of a homonormative gay politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The decade since highly active anti‐retroviral therapy (HAART) arrived has been a time of change for gay men in the West. HIV incidence rates have been levelling off—and in some cities, increasing markedly—for the first time since the early years of the pandemic. New sexual subcultures have found expression, including Internet chat rooms, ‘poz‐only’ sex parties, ‘barebacking’ and crystal methamphetamine use. These circumstances force a re‐evaluation of HIV prevention targeting gay communities. We examine the antecedents of current HIV‐prevention dilemmas in findings from a qualitative study of gay men who were personally and professionally engaged in HIV/AIDS in Sydney, Australia, in 1997–1998, immediately after the ‘protease moment’. The men's lives were characterized by constant and difficult negotiation of gay subjectivities. They did not find a place of uniform belonging in the gay community; rather, ambivalence—toward the gay community and HIV prevention—and fragmentation emerged as themes. Our findings suggest that by the late 1990s, the ethos of safe sex developed in the early HIV/AIDS period was no longer a unifying cultural value. We explore the conditions that led to this shift and the implications for HIV prevention in the 21st century.

Reviewed by: Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century by Sabine Lee Emily Gallagher and Camille Mahé Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century. By Sabine Lee. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. xii + 312 pp. Cloth, $110, e-book $110. In the 1980s, the United States passed a series of legislative changes that gave preferential immigration status to “children of United States Citizens,” allowing more than 21,000 Vietnamericans born during the Vietnam War (1955–75) to immigrate to America. Sometimes known as the bụi đời (“dust of life”), these young men and women were the children born of American soldiers and local Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War. Targets of Vietnamese hatred toward America and facing rejection in their country of birth, they were traveling to America in search of a place to finally call home. “Instead of saying welcome to these children,” declared then-US president Ronald Reagan in 1982, “we should say welcome home.” But Reagan’s welcoming words were to ring hollow, with very few of these young people finding the refuge they were hoping for in their father’s land. As Sabine Lee observes in her recent book Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century, children born of war (CBOW)—“children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers during and after armed conflict”—have faced ostracism and disadvantage for centuries, often irrespective of where they live (1). Even when individual circumstances have prevailed over economic hardship or social disadvantage, CBOW have been haunted by questions of identity and belonging, growing up in single-parent or adopted families where their father remains unknown or barbarized. Since the late 1990s, the lives and experiences of CBOW during the twentieth century—estimated to number at over 500,000—has increasingly come under sustained academic inquiry (3). Arising from a recent EU-funded research project and contributing to the burgeoning field of CBOW, Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century is a well-contextualized situational analysis and introduction to research on CBOW. Examining women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence as well as the legal and social challenges faced by CBOW during and after the Second World War, Vietnam War, Bosnian War, Rwandan Genocide and Lord’s Resistance Army, and recent UN peacekeeping missions, Lee “aims to investigate the situation of CBOW since the Second World War and thereby to provide a historical synthesis that moves beyond individual case studies and to explore circumstances across time and geopolitical location” (6). Emphasizing [End Page 153] the relationship between mother and child, the reception of CBOW within different communities, and the challenges caused by inadequate or contradictory human rights and government legislation, Lee’s book takes an expansive and interdisciplinary approach to the study of CBOW and their families over the last eighty years. Yet, while Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century pursues several important lines of inquiry about the legacy of wartime sexual violence and the legal and social challenges faced by CBOW, the reader often longs for further primary evidence. Although the jacket claims that the book is “based on extensive archival work” and Lee writes that she will “where possible, include those voices of CBOW,” autobiographical and contemporary sources authored by children remain disconcertingly absent from the five case studies (6). Many historians have recognized that locating children’s voices in the archives can be difficult; however, even if archival records authored by CBOW do not exist, it is unclear why Lee did not pursue extensive oral history interviews. If CBOW are frequently a “hidden” group in post-conflict societies, the inclusion of their voices, where possible, is central to a project that aims to understand and explain their experiences—individually and collectively. Moreover, although Lee demonstrates a strong familiarity with the existing literature and debates relating to CBOW, especially in the first chapter, one would have liked to see further engagement with recent discussions among historians of children and youth. For example, readers might have expected at least some reflection of what constitutes childhood or a “child soldier.” Are sixteen- year-old boys fighting for Hitler’s Volksturm really children? And who are the “children of child...

The history of race in nineteenth-century Cuba unfolded amid a series of dramatic transformations. With the meteoric rise of Cuban slavery, the island became the focus of campaigns to abolish the slave trade, followed by three independence wars merging the imperatives of antislavery and antiracism. As Bonnie A. Lucero's A Cuban City, Segregated demonstrates, this history also took place through incremental change.Rooted in a wealth of archival research, Lucero's study provides an important perspective on colonial Cuba within a historiography dominated by studies of the city of Havana and the slave plantation. Lucero analyzes the “multiple axes of oppression” through which white residents of the city of Cienfuegos endeavored to achieve a modern ideal of “urban order” characterized most prominently by a “white city center” (p. 11). In doing so, Lucero contributes to a growing number of studies reimagining the mutually constituted histories of race and nation through increased attention to family and the rhythms of everyday life.Founded in 1819, the settlement that would come to be known as Cienfuegos was intended to combat the “Africanization” of Cuba by incentivizing white immigration to the island. Dreams of a white settlement never materialized, however, as free people of color already inhabited the region and as white residents brought with them their slaves. Though municipal laws did not explicitly mandate the exclusion of the African-descended, white residents nonetheless contrived ways to limit black property ownership to peripheral areas, resulting in the emergence of what Lucero refers to as “de facto racial segregation” (p. 48).As Cienfuegos grew into a city, the aspirations of the African-descended to acquire property continued to confront the inclinations of local authorities to control that property's development. Even as people of color took advantage of leasing practices to gain access to land, building regulations and tax codes ensured that such access was always precarious. Lucero's research shines as she reveals the ways that shifts in sugar markets abroad and war at home were particularly stressful for people of color, who generally held subordinate positions throughout Cuban society. As they inherited properties from their parents, they were more likely to have to sell these properties owing to burdensome taxes and regulations, thus curtailing the generational accumulation of wealth by Cienfuegos's black community. Nevertheless, pockets of black proprietorship matured into established neighborhoods that became coveted properties of an expanded city center.Black residents also experienced uneven access to public spaces. While a small middle class of color faced frustration as they tried to gain access to places such as schools, cafés, and theaters, local authorities acted on gendered notions of hygiene as they policed predominantly black centers of Cienfuegos's informal economy, such as the red-light district. As Lucero argues, “These mechanisms of control and containment effectively restricted the way black residents of the expanded city center could inhabit the urban space surrounding their properties” (p. 119).With the US occupation of Cuba in 1898, municipal authorities in Cienfuegos reconfigured their efforts to achieve “urban order” to conform with the racial ideologies of the United States. Black veterans of the Liberation Army were thus excluded from various jobs and levels of civic engagement, black labor organizations experienced suppression, and black neighborhoods faced displacement, engendering uncharacteristic levels of urban violence. The city's racial topography, which had historically expressed the logics of control and containment, now began to resemble the type of segregation that had taken root in the United States.The strength of Lucero's study lies in its careful research, even as aspects of her analytic framework feel slightly shopworn. Lucero relies on the concepts of de jure and de facto segregation to argue that racial integration played a less prominent role in Cuban history than the dominant narratives suggest. As legal historians of race have increasingly noted, however, the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is more of a political artifice than a social fact. In the United States, for instance, this distinction developed over time to obscure the pervasiveness of segregation and to frustrate legal arguments equating segregation with racial discrimination. Indeed, Lucero's own use of the terms control and containment resonates far more clearly with the complicated history of exclusion and inclusion in nineteenth-century Cienfuegos than do the terms segregation and integration, with all their attendant twentieth-century meanings. At the center of her study, then, is a sophisticated analysis of the interplay between the development of urban space and racial ideologies that will be of interest to scholars of Cuban and Latin American history as well as urban history more broadly.

Too frequently regional LGBTQ history outside of major metropolises is not a major focus either in university curriculum or for financially strapped local non-profit organizations as they provide essential direct services to our communities. Even as the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have ushered in a new focus on local archival projects, regional organizations often struggle to find funding for local historical projects while universities provide LGBTQ studies courses that center activism in NYC, Los Angeles, or San Francsico, marches in Washington, D.C., and the value of subcultural spaces on the coasts. As scholars have argued in the past decade, literary critics and historians need to focus more attention on LGBTQ activism, cultural production, and community formations outside of major urban centers. For university faculty, staff, and archivists, we have the opportunity to address this need by partnering with regional LGBTQ organizations, using our resources to help build strong local archives, and working with community members to shape narratives about LGBTQ history that engage with national movements while also addressing the nuances of activist work in various cultural contexts. This article addresses how community center leaders, archivists, faculty, and students in Allentown, PA have collaborated to meet these challenges by discussing three impactful archival projects: F.A.C.T. (Fighting AIDS Continuously Together) public history courses, an exhibit titled “Pride Guides and the Early Years of Lehigh Valley Pride Festivals,” and the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. As we provide details about these projects, we trace the value of centering regional AIDS activism, pride celebrations, and struggles for anti-discrimination legislation for our regional LGBTQ community and our students. We argue that courses, exhibits, and oral history collection not only produce regional connectivity to national political projects and strategies, but also build stronger understanding of the import of local activism for promoting equity at the civic and state level. Beyond understanding the historical trajectory of regional activism, archival work and exhibitions bring diverse young people, elders, and those in the middle of life together who may not have met otherwise to reflect on our history and to imagine our future. The process of incorporating students, organizational leaders, and archivists in shared historical projects and narratives formation builds new networks for meeting urgent present-day needs.