Chauncey's Coherance

From page 23 of Gay New York, the introduction.

This book maps two distinct but interrelated aspects of what I call the sexual topography of the gay world in the half-century before the Second World War the spatial and social organization of that world in a culture that often sought to suppress it, and the boundaries that distinguished the men of that world from other men in a culture in which many more men engaged in homosexual practices than identified themselves as queer. The first project of the book, then, is to reconstruct the topography of gay meeting places, from streets to saloons to boathouses to elegant restaurants, and to explore the significance of that topography for the social organization of the gay world and homosexual relations generally. It analyzes the cultural conditions that made it possible for some gay meeting places to become well known to outsiders and still survive, but it pays more attention to the tactics by which gay men appropriated public spaces not identified as gay- how tehy, in effect, reterritorialized the city in order to construct a gay city in the midst of... the normative city. Indeed, while the book analyzes the complex interaction of social conventions and government policies that endeavored...

 Then the page turns. While this isn't the shortest paragraph isn't the shortest one in the book, it does a fantastic job of demonstrating Williams' point of topics. He clearly lays out the foundation for the rest of the book, all in a very clear format. There are clear transitions that make the blueprint easy to follow. We don't find the enlarged rhetoric that Calvin observes. It makes Chauncey's writing easy to follow, which is true for the book as a whole.