"Wide-Open Town offers a satisfyingly complex narrative, weaving together queer genders and sexual pleasures with pop culture, race, class, political and legal conflict, official over sight and harassment, and group recognition and survival."
"Wide-Open Town joins a growing set of classics, such as George Chauncey's Gay New York and Garry Wotherspoon's City of the Plain, that give us a more finely grained and nuanced account of how queer people have come into being. These city histories offer important evidence for some of the central questions of queer studies: how and why LGBT identities formed and came together as quasi-ethnic communities; how state and capital have shaped the formation of (LGBT) civil society; how people subjected to formidable degrees of state suppression nevertheless found ways to consolidate themselves, resist, and reshape the larger society; and how sexuality changed with each historical period."
"Nan Alamilla Boyd's account is an invaluable contribution to U.S. queer history, as well as to oral history, California history, the history of sexuality, class, and gender and to the literature connecting formal and informal political resistance."
"Boyd illuminates the interplay among sex tourism, drag shows, and civil rights activism that fostered GLBT community development in the city."
"A dynamic, immanently readable study of the making of queer public culture in San Francisco."
"Wide-Open Town is a well-researched and well-written history of an essential topic that manages to be scholarly without being dull. To those who came of age after Stonewall, this book is a vivid look at a bygone era, and of the women and men who made gay San Francisco what it is today."
"In its vivid re-creation of bar and drag life, its absorbing portraits of central figures in the communities, and its provocative chronicling of this period in the country's most transgressive city, Wide-Open Town offers a fascinating and lively new chapter in American queer history."
“For anyone interested in as-yet-untold queer history, this is a must-read.”
"A smart, insightful, readable book. Boyd expertly outlines the political, economic, and legal contours of San Francisco's queer history. With a rich array of sources, she reconstructs the nightclubs and bars where customers, workers, and owners fought for the right to public assembly and helped inaugurate a movement for gay and lesbian civil rights."—Joanne Meyerowitz, author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
"An outstanding book, a major contribution to U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer history. Nan Boyd has produced a fascinating account that helps us to understand why and how San Francisco has come to occupy such pride of place in the queer imagination. Traversing the complicated geography, the multiple gender and sexual cultures, and the multi-layered politics of a great metropolis, Wide-Open Town is a must-read for historians, students and scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality, and all those who have ever left their hearts in San Francisco."—Marc Stein, author of City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972
"Boyd spins out a fascinating story of a unique community and in the process informs our understanding of the development of gay/lesbian communities and activism in places beyond San Francisco. She does this by showing the links between and relationship of cultural resistance and various forms of political organizing, and by rethinking the ways that major events in U.S. history, such as Prohibition and the Second World War, have shaped gay/lesbian history."—Leila J. Rupp, author of A Desired Past
"Nan Boyd has excavated a queer pre-history of gay liberation movements in San Francisco. By highlighting sex and race tourism as well as the centrality of gender transgression to the creation of gay communities, she sheds new light on the formation of sexual identities in the twentieth century. Both insightful and highly readable, Wide Open Town takes lesbian and gay history a step further by locating its roots in gender subversion and through the compelling stories of individual sexual pioneers who frame her analyses."—Estelle B. Freedman, author of No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women
