Your Favorite Stars, Live on Our Screens: Media Culture, Queer Publics, and Commercial Space

Abstract

s in many bars and clubs, video screens are hung prominently on the walls behind the bartender in Atmosphere, a bar in Chicago’s heavily gay and lesbian Andersonville neighborhood. In this way a patron watches the screen and is simultaneously in line to buy a drink. After all, the impetus for installing technology of this ilk is, ostensibly, to increase the venue’s bottom line. In the spring of 2007 I attended a party at Atmosphere and really liked the music video playing on the screen over the bartender’s head. When she asked what she could get for me, I asked her about the video. At that point she shrugged, reached below the bar, and lifted out a stack of DVDs, telling me “I don’t know, we get these from a service every month and I just pop them in.” While identical scenarios undoubtedly unfold in countless bars all over the globe, this practice raises a number of interesting, provocative questions for queer media criticism, specifically. This article examines the varied imaginations of media publics that convene in queer commercial space in order to unpack the ways in which both marketers and consumers utilize these venues. In that way, the complex and often vexed connections between consumer culture and queer publics come to the fore as issues inextricably linked to the politics of space and place. By examining these issues through the lens of spatial theory, I seek to avoid the irksome “either/or” binary that so frequently characterizes queer criticism of media culture. Eve Sedgwick underscores the utility of spatiality in combating the limitations of such dualistic thinking, calling for a queer critical apparatus that takes up the rich analytical dimensions of spatiality in order to interrogate and potentially overturn staid dynamics of cultural power (8). Spatial theory of the sort that Sedgwick advocates might help in thinking through the possibilities provided in the multiplicity and fluidity of gay-themed commercial Your Favorite Stars, Live on Our Screens: