Palatable poison 359

344 julie abraham However, Park and Hall were both invested in the “naturalness” of their subjects Paradoxically, despite Park’s belief in the city’s suppression of natural instincts, he and his Chicago School colleagues were committed to the concept of the great city as “organic,” as “a living entity” (93), “a product of nature, and particularly of human nature” (91) Equally paradoxically, while Hall’s opening identification of heterosexuality with the natural world of the countryside implies a corollary identification of homosexuality with the unnatural, the one subject on which Hall’s opposed avatars of modern homosexuality, Stephen Gordon and Valérie Seymour, agree, is that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon Stephen, protesting “the preposterous statement that inversion [is] not a part of nature”—“since it exist[s] what else could it be?”—declares the invert “God’s creation” (405) Valérie presents “Nature” as a feminine life force “trying to her bit.” “Inverts,” she argues, are “being born in increasing numbers” (406) Park’s theory of the organic city depends on two interdependent propositions: first, that the city’s population naturally organizes itself into particular forms; and second, that while the city might reward the abnormal, it does not produce their abnormality but merely fosters the “innate dispositions” they bring with them from the countryside and/or smaller communities they are fleeing These propositions are interdependent because the characteristic site of naturally occurring social organization in Park’s account of the city is the “moral region.” According to Park, individuals naturally and therefore inevitably segregate themselves into moral regions based on shared interests or passions And the quintessential form of the moral region is the “vice district,” a “detached milieu in which vagrant and suppressed impulses, passions, and ideals emancipate themselves from the dominant moral order” (128) For Park “the forces which in every large city tend to develop these detached milieus,” if they are to be understood as natural, must be a product of the “latent impulses of men” (128) That is, the “reward” the city offers to Park’s criminals, defectives, and geniuses is “the opportunity to develop [their] innate disposition[s]” (126) To “become” urban might be “to develop,” but only to develop a possibility already present in the self, already produced by nature Consequently, the city’s relation to nature depends, for Park, on the relation to nature of the city’s “abnormal” residents, people such as the city’s queers The right relation to nature of the invert guarantees the city’s right relation to nature But the “right” relation in each case is reversed The