Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.