Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

Places of tenderness and heat, the queer milieu of fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, Olga Petri

eng

no index present

non fiction

Places of tenderness and heat

dictionaries

Olga Petri

the queer milieu of fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg

Places of Tenderness and Heat is a ground-level exploration of queer St. Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. Olga Petri takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. She reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. Focusing on a non-Western, under-unexplored and fragile form of urban modernity, Petri reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. Besides explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, she draws on the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. Her work reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces. Places of Tenderness and Heat is an ambitious record of the dynamic negotiation of illicit male homosexual sex, friendship, and cruising, and uncovers a historically fascinating urban milieu, in which efforts to manage the moral landscape often unintentionally facilitated queer encounters

adult