"Safe Space is a pathbreaking book for the interdisciplinary fields of queer studies and American studies. Offering a trenchant account of the stakes of gay (and sometimes lesbian) claims to urban geographies, this carefully researched history unsettles many of the heroic assumptions driving the current politics of sexual identity in the United States. It will make a crucial intervention in a number of scholarly and activist debates."–Siobhan B. Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture