Places Of Tenderness And Heat The Queer Milieu Of Findesicle St Petersburg Olga Petri by Olga Petri 9781501763786, 1501763784 instant download after payment.

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.