Gay men's communities

Abstract

Gay men's communities, social networks, and strategic action fields consider the interconnectivity of gay men. These concepts are discussed. Overall the concern is to describe how gay men coalesce, engage in concerted action, and experience categorical oppression. We can realistically speak of separate, somewhat overlapping, communities of gay men or gay men's communities encompassing territory (the gay ghettos of Wilton Manors and the Castro for example), ethnic‐like enclaves, friendship groups, institutions, social venues, fictive kin‐like relations, value or even interest, imagined, symbolic, referential, or aspiration groups, and so forth. Clearly, in late modernity there is nothing like a “total” community of gay men. There have been and in some cases today are gay men's communities of mollies, S&M, leather, drag, clones, house ball scenes (or communities), political and voluntary groups, party, sport and recreational, sexual scenes and networks, “bears,” social scenes (both commercial and noncommercial), gendered, raced, medicalized, capitalized, activist, resistant, marketed to, subaltern, secretive, professional associations (and professional groups permeated by same‐sex sexually interested and active men), Radical Faeries, queers, Act Up‐ers, Internet‐ and electronic‐based networks, groups, venues or communities, and so on. There clearly are, however, subgroups or social networks of gay men. Social movements’ analysis has some utility herese (Adam 1987). Field theory also appears to have the potential to assist with our understanding of the aggregated lives of gay men; that is, if we are interested in the birth, ebb, flow, impacts, outcomes, and possible death(s) of these gay communities, social networks or fields of culture, structure and action.