Barriers to belonging: race and class in the spatial socialisation of gay men residing in French working-class neighbourhoods

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Abstract Drawing on a study of men who engage in sexual and romantic relationships with other men and who currently live or have lived in large housing estates in the Île-de-France region, this article examines their occasional movements and interactions within commercial gay spaces in Paris. In a context where the injunction to be visible is often considered a hallmark of what is generally termed homonormativity (Duggan in: Castronovo, Nelson (eds) Materializing democracy, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002), this study adopts a “situated intersectionality” approach (Yuval-Davis in Raisons Politiques 58(2):91–100, 2015), which considers various power dynamics and is attentive to the specific geographical, social, and temporal contexts of individuals. This framework is used to interrogate the notion of “fleeing to the city”. The aim is to illustrate the social, economic, racial, and spatial factors that contribute to the mobility of sexual minorities in the French context. Additionally, we demonstrate that the “gay spaces” of major urban centres, often frequented at the beginning of one’s “gay career” (Becker in Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance, Free Press, Glencoe, 1963), are swiftly rejected due to both the racism within these minority spaces and their over-sexualisation.