What They’re Reading: Colin Johnson

Colin Johnson, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, is reading Metropolitan Lovers:  The Homosexuality of Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) by Julie Abraham.

“The connection between cities and the emergence of modern lesbian and gay identity has been discussed at some length  by social historians, but Abraham’s book adds something new to our understanding of sexuality’s history by investigating how and why the idea of the city and the idea of sexual deviance came to be associated with one another in such a powerful and seemingly self-evident way over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  As someone who studies the history of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity in rural America, I am finding Abraham’s book to be extremely helpful and compelling insofar as it partially explains why the prospect of non-metropolitan queer life strikes so many people, including many lesbians and gay men, as untenable on its face, or entirely unimaginable.”

–Colin Johnson