Historian Amy Sueyoshi will discuss her new book, Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental” (University of Illinois Press, 2018). While San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century perturbed religious conservatives who saw it as a “moral cesspool,” it also developed a reputation as a city that tolerated a wide range of gender and sexual expression and that cultivated easy race relations. Yet all was not love and joy in this “wide-open town.” Discriminating Sex reveals how increasing gender and sexual freedoms for white people directly created the archetypal “Oriental” — geisha, prostitute, homosexual and martyr all rolled into one.