Gay Bars Research Articles

Il teatro en travesti del KTTMCC alias Pumitrozzole

Among the numerous gay performers appearing in off and off-off Italian theatres towards the end of the Seventies one group stood out: the flamboyant and diverse KTTMCC (Kollettivo Teatrale Trousse Merletti Cappuccini e Cappelliere, which could loosely be translated by Theatre Kollective Cosmetic bags, Laces, Cappuccinos and Hat boxes). In its brief but intense life the group performed in theatres, crowded public spaces, and tiny dark venues, always proposing outrageously camp political and social statements. The art of Dada and a taste for camp-ish kitsch seemed to have heavily influenced their “actions” and shows. “The sublime from above and the sublime from below coincide”. They appeared onstage in drag, not the polished and hyper-feminine type of drag popular with the mainstream gay bars clientele, but an ironic, trashy and playful one that came from their texts and from a blend of authentic high-end designer outfits, department stores little dresses, fashionable boots, dangerous platform shoes bought in thrift shops, statement costume jewelry and very, very accurately back-combed wigs. In this text, the author proposes a meeting/interview to three of the original members of the collective, Silvio, Guglielmo and Paolo, now living in different Italian cities, to gather useful information on the KTTMCC’s beginnings and on its decade- long “career” which ended with the controversial TV fame of one of its members, Platinette (boku de cû boku de tet).

"Out long enough to be historic": Racialized Gay Space in Pre-Stonewall San Antonio

Combining materials from the Carolyn Weathers Collection in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and a 2015 interview with Weathers herself, Amanda Mixon sketches queer experience in early 1960s San Antonio, Texas. Mixon revisits gay bars, community formation, racial dynamics, policing practices, cultural representations, and military suasion to highlight the ongoing need for further exploration and study of historic gay spaces across Texas.

Defining gay-friendly city as a space of resistance for Indonesian gays in Paris and Jakarta

Migration is associated with the search for a more permissive environment. By linking Paris as a place of attachment, the author sees that Paris in this case can be indicated as the “home” for Indonesian gays. The feeling of “full gay” is a feeling that they never get when they stay in Indonesia. That is why many Indonesian gays decide to move out of Indonesia in any way regardless of the difficulties they face in the destination country. This paper answer two questions: what do we understand by “Gay-friendly city”? And if we talk about Jakarta, “can Jakarta be categorized as a gay-friendly city”? The author interviewed eight Indonesian gays directly in Paris with the naturalistic paradigm and analyzed with the qualitative research, and what will be found in this paper is the narrative of the eight informants. It can be said that the Indonesian gays who have migrated to Paris do not feel that their lives have been wasted. They do diaspora by going to gay bars and participating in gay pride parades. What they feel is a feeling of freedom to be able to channel their gender and sexual expression, and they found that Paris as a gay-friendly city is a kind of space of resistance.

A Queer Homiletic Futurity: The Radical Sexuality of James Baldwin

ABSTRACT Examining the afterlife of slavery, mainly interrogating the futurity of black sexuality and contemptuous Black queer bodies as possible identities of radical futurism in a queer homiletic. I position this essay within the framework of a futuristic queer homiletic, such that, Black queer identity reimagines itself within the plane of Afrofuturism disrupting the continuum of heterosexuality, and Black respectability. The futurity of Black queerness re-turns itself into a living bound subject. I make use of James Baldwin and his gender sexual politics as a Black gay man. Drawing upon his semi-autobiographical essay, “Here Be Dragons,” Baldwin illustrates how he was eliminated from his family, primarily by his step-father, who was disgusted by Baldwin's ugliness and dark skin, and moreover, his effeminate and queer mannerisms. Baldwin, feeling “dumped” by his family, was also displaced, or, “removed” from his black community of Harlem because of his sexuality. He seeks refuge in Greenwich Village, a white community which houses many gay clubs and bars. It is here that Baldwin faces a similar reality of being isolated, neglected, and eliminated for not only his queer identity, but his Black skin and Black identity. Baldwin, in public view, renders as a site of failure in that he is unacknowledged because of his Black queer identity and is rendered, or read as disgust, an 'other.' Thus, he is bounded “out” of society, “out” of sight, and ultimately left searching for a place, a home to call his own. Baldwin reimagines himself, a living subject, bound for life. As such, a futuristic queer homiletic enables Black queerness to the center of Black sexuality and Black identity.

#Quiltsforpulse: connected and shared socio-political activism through craftivism

ABSTRACT Aligning crafts and activism, craftivism provides a useful context to study the processes of collective socio-political activism. Crafts allow us to reclaim the ability to care for others as a method of activism, which stands in contrast to the vitriolic expression that pervades contemporary online-offline political discourse. Building on connected learning, this qualitative study analyzes the #quiltsforpulse movement, a response to the 2016 mass shooting at a gay bar in Orlando that distributed over 1,700 handcrafted quilts to survivors, families, and first responders. We study the craftivist connections and shared practices of #quiltsforpulse and one implementation of the movement that produced material responses to violence. Findings broaden our understanding of connected learning by introducing how materials produced multifaceted connections and shared practices in the collective expression of care and compassion. We present implications for designing connected learning opportunities toward socio-political activism.

Celebrating Pride

June is Pride Month. It is celebrated annually in the US to honor those who were involved in the Stonewall uprising. The uprising was a series of spontaneous demonstrations that happened during a week in the summer of 1969 after New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar—and now also a National Historic Landmark—in lower Manhattan. Pride is a monthlong celebration around the globe that includes parades, parties, protests, memorials, and countless other events and activities. At C&EN we wanted to mark this occasion by publishing “ LGBTQ+ Chemists You Should Know About .” The last year and a half has taught us that life is short and full of unexpected turns that have the power to shape our lives. We have learned that every day is an opportunity to learn, grow, celebrate others, and become stronger and more grateful and compassionate human beings. “LGBTQ+ Chemists You Should

Queer Politics, the Gay Bar, and Hapless Victimhood during COVID-19: A Brief Response to Burns (2021) Queerness as/and Political Attunement

This article offers a brief response to questions posed in Queerness as/and Political Attunement (Burns, 2021). Here we challenge the notion that discussions of queer oppression during, and beyond, the COVID-19 pandemic inherently denote the queer community as “hapless victims.” Further, questions of who queer leisure scholars are writing for and about are considered. Specific attention is given to the role of “mainstream” queer spaces in processes of assimilation and transgression through discussions on the continued role these spaces play in queer lives and queer futures and the need for continued examination of queer spaces in leisure scholarship.

Erasing queerness in the neoliberal city: The democratic limitations of community consultation in planning

Tension between anti-normative queer politics and the assimilative pull of liberal identitarianism are a fixture of queer life and queer space (Cohen, 2019; Warner 1999; Nash, 2006; Nash, 2013). Recently, this is visible in the actively contested commodification and gentrification of queer neighborhoods that often sterilize spaces of their queerness (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2015; Bell & Binnie, 2004; Patrick, 2014; Doan & Higgins, 2011; Renninger, 2018). Through this lens, it comes as no surprise that a condo development proposed on the site of a prominent Toronto drag bar has been met with strong community concern or opposition. While the developer is leading a community consultation process that ostensibly seeks to maintain the presence of the bar and to support the cultural legacy of the community (Bousfields Inc., 2020), the possibility of the continued sterilization of Toronto’s gay village demands critical investigation. This study applies a queer approach (Cohen 1997; Cohen 2019; Browne & Nash 2010; Foucault 1978) that makes visible the forces of normalization at work, to assess the capacity for community consultation to protect queer interests. I raise several concerns over the democratic limitations of community consultation in planning. The neoliberal logics of urban growth at work are fundamentally anti-queer. As such, the capacity of existing planning frameworks to make space for queer life in Toronto is questionable. At this nexus of shifting queer geographies, community consultation, and urban development in the neoliberal city lie important questions about how power is geographically structured, deployed, and contested.
 ReferencesBell, D., & Binnie, J. (2004). Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance. Urban Studies,41(9), 1807-1820
 Bousfields Inc.. (2020). Public Consultation Strategy Report: 506-516 Church Street. Prepared on behalf of Graywood CM GP. Retrieved from, https://506churchstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/PublicConsultation-Strategy-Report.pdf
 Browne, K., & Nash, C. (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: an introduction. In K. Browne, & C. Nash,Queer methods and methodologies: intersecting queer theories and social science research (pp. 1-24). Ashgate.Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble . Routledge.
 Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ, 3(4),437-465.
 Cohen, C. J. (2019). The Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and GayStudies, 25(1), 140-144.
 Doan, P. L., & Higgins, H. (2011). The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation ofLGBT Neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Eduation and Research, 31(1), 6-25.
 Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Random House Inc.
 Nash, C. J. (2006). Toronto's gay village (1969-1982): Plotting the politics of gay identity. The CanadianGeographer, 50(1), 1-16.
 Nash, C. J., & Gorman-Murray, A. (2015). Recovering the Gay Village: A Comparative Historical Geogrpahy ofUrban Change and Planning in Toronto and Sydney. Historical Geography, 43, 85-105.
 Patrick, D. (2014). The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line. Social &Cultural Geography, 15(8), 920-941.
 Renninger, B. (2018). Grindr Killed the Gay Bar, and Other Attempts to Blame Social Technologies for UrbanDevelopment: A Democratic Approach to Popular Technologies and Queer Sociality. Journal of Homosexuality,66(12), 1736-1755.
 Warner, M. (1999). The Ethics of Sexual Shame. In, The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queerlife (pp. 1-40). Free Press.

Use of multiple recreational drugs is associated with new HIV infections among men who have sex with men in China: a multicenter cross-sectional survey

BackgroundThere is limited information about the types of recreational drugs used by men who have sex with men (MSM) in China or the consequent impact on sexual health and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) acquisition.MethodsWe recruited MSM from seven cities in China between 2012 and 2013 using multiple approaches including advertisements on gay websites, collaborating with local MSM community-based organizations, peer referrals, and venues such as gay bars and bathrooms visited by MSM. We divided participants into four subgroups based on the number of recreational drugs (RDs) used in the previous 6 months. We defined use of multiple RDs as use of ≥2 types of RDs. Demographics and HIV-related high-risk behaviors were collected, and blood samples were tested for recent HIV infection by the HIV-1 subtypes B, E, and D immunoglobulin G capture enzyme immunoassay (BED-CEIA). We used multivariable logistic regression adjusted for sociodemographics to determine the adjusted odds ratios (aORs) and associated 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the subgroups of RD use for recent or established HIV infection.ResultsA total of 4496 Chinese MSM participated; 28.4% used RDs, and 5% used multiple types of RDs. The prevalence of each RD use was as follows: poppers (25.9%), ecstasy (2.4%), ketamine (1.2%), amphetamine (0.6%), tramadol (0.4%), methamphetamine (3.8%), and codeine (1.9%). Users of multiple RDs commonly used poppers combined with one or more other types of RDs. Multiple RD users were likely to be aged 26–30 years (vs. 18–25 and > 30 years), live in non-local cities (vs. local cities), never married (vs. married), have a high monthly income (vs. no income and 1–599 USD), use versatile positions during anal intercourse (vs. top or bottom), and have inadequate HIV-related prevention knowledge (vs. adequate). As the number of RDs used in the previous 6 months increased, the prevalence of HIV-related high-risk behaviors increased (P < 0.05 for all). The odds of recent HIV infection were higher among those who used one type (aOR = 2.2, 95% CI: 1.5–3.0) or two types of RD (aOR=2.3, 95% CI: 1.0-5.2) in the previous 6 months compared to the odds among those who did not use RDs.ConclusionThe level and pattern of multiple RD use among Chinese MSM were different from high-income countries. MSM who used more RDs are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors, and these behaviors may be associated with increases in new HIV infections.

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

Reviewed by: When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (bio) When Brooklyn Was Queer By Hugh Ryan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2019. 320 pages, 6" x 9". $29.99 cloth, $17.99 ebook. When Brooklyn Was Queer By Hugh Ryan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2019. 320 pages, 6" x 9". $29.99 cloth, $17.99 ebook. Seven years ago, I came out as queer in Brooklyn, New York. From a second-floor sublet in Kensington, just blocks from Green-Wood Cemetery, my first queer lover shared a bed with me to the tune of the D train careening over its elevated track. Brooklyn felt like a good place to be queer. I went on dates that summer with men and women in Prospect Park, and to this day there are park benches, like mnemonics in the landscape, that hold memories of cuddles or awkward kisses with queer cuties. Hugh Ryan's When Brooklyn Was Queer is about queer Brooklyn—but of a different era. For over a century from the 1850s through the early 1960s, Ryan shows that queer and trans Brooklynites made spaces of belonging in the crevices of the industrial "second city," spaces now all but forgotten by queer New Yorkers today. Ryan offers a bold thesis about the intersection of queer life and cities. He argues that changes in gender and sexuality and belonging over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were linked with the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization. This meant that the waterfront and its dirty, rowdy workspaces—those same spaces that Walt Whitman once saw teeming with handsome men ("I go with fishermen and seamen and love them" [22])—were queer. [End Page 221] Ryan follows the life stories of many fascinating Brooklynites as their labor and leisure intersected with the waterfront. We learn about Walt Whitman's attachment to the ferry and the throngs of humanity bustling to and fro. Ryan writes of queer women who found spaces of gender transgression in local theaters. Moreover, he makes great efforts to resurrect the stories of even more marginalized people such as trans women and sex workers and queer people of color. Of all the waterfront spaces, three stand out as particularly important in Ryan's telling: Coney Island, the Sands Street area adjoining the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. As a Brooklyn child, my mom used to hang out at Coney Island in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Coney Island in this book is rich and bawdy in ways that she would not have known. Ryan writes lovingly of the interstitial spaces of Black queer and intersex belonging on the boardwalk, of bathhouses where gay men cruised, and ultimately—tragically—of Robert Moses's role (as well as Donald Trump's father) in destroying Coney Island's seedy subculture. At Sands Street, we learn of the bars, dating back to the 1910s, that catered to sailors and the men who loved them. Ryan charts histories of policing and criminalization that emerged in the early twentieth century, as gay bars were raided and shut down—especially if the men inside were too feminine, or not white enough. Finally, massive public housing projects meant to provide uplift to poor Brooklynites were built on top of the ruins of once-queer Sands Street just as the Navy Yard deindustrialized at midcentury. Brooklyn Heights, with its long history of queer artists and writers shacked up in houses known for their parties, love fests, and interpersonal drama, also fell victim to mid-twentieth-century modernist dreams. Ryan does an excellent job showing how Moses's inner-city highways, suburbanization, and the processes of white flight and racist housing policies worked to decimate Brooklyn Height's gay subculture by the time a new generation of queer people rose up, across the East River, in the summer of 1969. When Brooklyn Was Queer is the result of both an extensive research project and a personal quest that the author unpacks, all too briefly, in the book's epilogue. Ryan came into his own queerness in Brooklyn, just as I did. He found himself haunted by...

Keep the South Dirty and Our Needles Clean

Keep the South Dirty and Our Needles Clean Laura McTighe (bio), Catherine Haywood (bio), Deon Haywood (bio), Danita Muse (bio), and Iris Gottlieb Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 120] hirty years ago, Women With A Vision (wwav) was just an idea, thought up by a collective of Black women on a front porch in New Orleans, Louisiana. The year was 1989, and the so-called War on Drugs had already been raging for nearly two decades. Black women were increasingly being demonized as "welfare queens" in order to justify the total gutting of the social safety net, just as sensationalized stories about "crack babies" were used to criminalize Black mothers and users in a rapidly ballooning prison industrial complex. The impacts of these policies were lethal. Rates of hiv infection were peaking and the numbers of new hiv infections among Black people exceeded those of white people; those differences still hold today. By the early 1990s, hiv was the second leading cause of death for Black cisgender women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. wwav's founders shared an intimate knowledge of how the twin epidemics of hiv and mass criminalization were decimating their communities. They also saw how funding and supportive services were systematically being denied to their people. And so, from their health and human service positions citywide, the wwav foremothers did what Black women always do: they set their hands to building what their community needed.1 This essay is grounded in thirteen years of organizing and research partnership with wwav. Together, we tell the stories of wwav's more than three decades of Black feminist struggle at the intersections of harm reduction and abolition in New Orleans. The methods that our founders used to keep forgotten and dying Black people struggling with addiction alive in the early 1990s were the same as those used to fight back against post–Hurricane Katrina sex work criminalization. These methods continue to guide wwav today in our work around decriminalizaiton. As our foremother Danita Muse puts it, "For wwav, practicing harm reduction in the South has demanded first and foremost the tenacity to believe in what we believed in. It's also helped us to hone our ability to change with the times and continue to be open to new ways of doing things, which we are always developing in partnership with the drug user and sex worker communities with whom we stand." This essay is built, as wwav's work has always been, in relationships and by doing the work.2 You Have to Build a Relationship As the story goes, Danita Muse and Catherine Haywood locked eyes across a crowded health department conference room at the height of the aids epidemic. At the time, Catherine, or "Lady," as she is more often called, was working for the Children's Pediatric aids Program on a project to increase access to hiv testing among people who inject drugs. Danita was [End Page 121] working for the Office of Substance Abuse (now the Office of Behavioral Health) and running support groups for people struggling with addiction. Both women had seen firsthand that the white-led hiv response efforts were only targeting gay bars in their outreach efforts; none were reaching out to poor Black people in New Orleans's ten housing projects, which had the highest documented incidence of hiv transmission in the city. When the Office of Public Health called a meeting after the city received an influx of funds to address a surging syphilis epidemic, both women were in attendance. This time, however, the outreach maps were following the epidemiology. When the city's zip codes were called out, Catherine and Danita claimed the ones to their uptown neighborhoods, including the St. Thomas, Magnolia, Melpomene, and Calliope Projects. That was when their relationship started. They drove the city—Danita in her truck, Lady in her car—to make deliveries. The health department simply wanted them to drop off boxes of condoms at bars, grocery stores, beauty shops, and laundromats. It took a few weeks before Danita and Catherine figured out that the people who ran these businesses were selling their free condoms...

I Have A Remember When

This article begins with a reflection on a queer reading at Knife Fork Book in Toronto where an inter-generational moment, for me, went blank. It then recounts a few personal notes concerning the history of the gay bars of the 1970s. I also reflect on what the winning of gay rights has led us to, as observed by an older gay once designated an outlaw. Where is the locale of memory when architectural erasure has demolished the sites of our history and struggle? Can a recounting of gay historical events of the 1970s and early 1980s provide a sense of both the oppression and the vice arrests by the Metropolitan Toronto police force? These events ignited and gathered a gay rebellion to form a community with rights and a standing in law.

Reactions to targeted tobacco control messaging: Transgender and gender diverse young adult perspectives

IntroductionTobacco interventions specifically created for transgender and gender diverse young adults appear almost non-existent. The Food and Drug Administration’s This Free Life is the first large scale campaign specifically designed to address the smoking disparities of sexual and gender minority (SGM) young adults. The purpose of this study was to gauge the reactions and receptivity to This Free Life from a gender diverse young adult sample using interviews conducted in spring and summer 2018. MethodsParticipants were 25 young adults recruited in Austin, Texas (M age = 23.2, 64.0 % non-Hispanic White, 70 % assigned female at birth) for semi-structured one-on-one interviews as part of a larger project focusing on the reasons and settings for tobacco use. Data in the current study pertain to attitudes and reactions to online video content from This Free Life. ResultsPositive reactions to video content related to visible queer representation and depictions of gender non-conformity in videos that were positive and affirming in tone. Negative reactions related to what was perceived as sexist stereotypes perpetuated in videos, and an over-reliance on cisgender gay bar culture. Some participants felt that messaging discouraging social/occasional smoking did not take into account their own important reasons for smoking. ConclusionsTransgender and gender diverse young adults have been overlooked in many efforts to address SGM smoking disparities. Targeted efforts such as This Free Life have the potential to help curb the disproportionate tobacco burden of gender diverse young adults by including diverse gender representation in affirming messages that emphasize freedom and autonomy.

There’s No Such Thing as a Gay Bar: Co-Sexuality and the Neoliberal Branding of Queer Spaces

Gay bars have historically functioned as communal spaces for the LGBTQ+ community. Because of neoliberalism, LGBTQ+ acceptance continues to rise as “post-gay’’ discourses, coupled with the inclusion of heterosexual audiences, have repositioned gay bars as inclusive spaces. In this study, we explore how the meaning of “gay bar” is communicatively negotiated. Specifically, we employed a co-sexuality lens with spatiality to understand how the “gay bar brand” is constructed and perceived. We used ethnographic methods including observation, 25 semi-structured interviews, and documents at two gay bars in a Midwestern college town. We demonstrate how gay bars, through neoliberal branding, reopened the meaning of gay bars as spaces for “all” sexualities. Three tensions emerged: (1) who gay bars are for (queer or general communities); (2) sexual autonomy (contested meanings around “safety” and “being yourself”); and (3) viable marketing (tension between “community” and “commodification”). This study contributes to the literature on sexuality, space, and branding by moving beyond utopian depictions of gay bars. Instead, it encourages scholars to understand the bars as destabilized and contested queer spaces.

Negotiating Organizational Identity: The Communicative Resilience of Small-Town Gay Bars

Gay bars historically functioned as the only space where LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer) people could escape intolerance and persecution. From drag shows to dancing to counterculture, gay bars are symbols of expression and hope for those misunderstood. In many ways, they are LGBTQ+ institutions that have withstood time. However, the rapid closing of gay bars coupled with Big D discourses of “post-gay,” “mainstream,” and “death of the gay bar” have threatened their existence. Much of these gay culture discourses stem from research on metropolitan cities (New York and San Francisco) with larger gay populations. Yet very few have examined how this experience affects gay bars in smaller cities with fewer LGBTQ+ spaces. Drawing on the communicative theory of resilience, I examined two gay bars in a small Midwestern city to understand how they (a) construct and negotiate their identity, and (b) manage organizational resilience in discursive and material ways. Findings and implications are discussed.

Acquainted Strangers: Thwarted Interaction in Digitally Mediated Urban Gay Bars

AbstractWhile some situations in sexual contexts facilitate interaction, others can make overtures difficult to negotiate. Furthermore, social media creates new challenges as individuals navigate sexualized spaces in an increasingly digital world. Drawing on fieldwork in Philadelphia gay bars and supplemental interviews with young gay club-goers, I find that men experience unexpected challenges that inhibit their ability to socialize with gay others and enact positive gay identities. I show how the social organization of particular bars, as well as the popularity of mobile dating applications, undermines the interactional accomplishment of positive outcomes such as identity affirmation and “having fun”: (1) men’s embodied work to evade effeminacy constrains their facial expressions, comportment, and speech; (2) gay bars’ multiple functions as sexual fields and community outposts render both social and sexual interaction difficult to initiate; (3) patrons struggle over whether and how to interact with other mobile dating app users, a novel social tie I conceptualize as acquainted strangers, in the bars. I discuss how these mechanisms—managing stigma corporeally, negotiating discrepant frames, and navigating ambiguous social ties—may thwart interactional achievements while reproducing inequalities in contexts beyond the gay bar.

Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.

Research on alcohol and other drug (AOD) use among sexual minority women: A global scoping review.

Until the 1980s, the limited research on alcohol and other drug (AOD) use among sexual minority women (SMW) focused on alcohol and used samples recruited from gay bars, resulting in inflated estimates of hazardous drinking. Over the past several decades the number of AOD studies with SMW has increased dramatically. To characterize this literature, we conducted a scoping review to answer the following questions: What do we know, and what are the gaps in research about AOD use among SMW? We searched multiple electronic databases (Medline [PubMed], CINAHL, PsycInfo, and Web of Science) for peer-reviewed research articles about AOD use among adult SMW published between January 1, 2000 and May 31, 2017. After duplicates were removed the search identified 4,204 articles. We reviewed the titles and abstracts and removed articles that did not meet inclusion criteria. We used full-text review of the remaining 229 articles to make a final determination regarding inclusion and we retained 181 articles for review. Although the quantity of AOD research with SMW has grown substantially, the great majority of studies have been conducted in the United States (US) and most focus on hazardous drinking; relatively little research has focused on other drugs. In addition, although there has been marked improvement in theories and methods used in this research, many gaps and limitations remain. Examples are the lack of longitudinal research; reliance on samples that tend to over-represent white, well-educated, and relatively young women; sparse attention to mechanisms underlying the disproportionately high rates of AOD use among SMW; and the absence of intervention research. In general, more high-quality research on SMW’s use of AODs is needed, but gaps and limitations are particularly large in non-western countries. Addressing these research gaps and limitations is essential for providing information that can be used to develop more effective prevention and early intervention strategies, as well as for informing policies that can help to reduce risky drinking and drug misuse among SMW.

Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small–city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small–city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red–state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small–city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big–city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity ed. by Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny

Reviewed by: Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity ed. by Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny Eric Nost REMAKING NEW ORLEANS: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity. Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2019. 368pp.; maps, illustrations, bibliog., and index. $28.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4780-0287-1). On March 26, 2020, the United States overtook China and Italy as the center of COVID-19 crisis and New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA) was named a hotspot, along with New York City (Reuters Staff 2020). COVID-19 was another “world’s worst” for the city to add to a list that included world’s “prison capital” (Louisiana as a whole) and world’s fastest sinking place (NPR 2012, Marshall 2013). NOLA was exceptional, an outlier compared to most of the rest of the country, requiring a NOLA-specific explanation. Some commentators were quick to blame the Mardi Gras festivities that had taken place a month earlier (Fieldstadt 2020). However, others following in NOLA’s robust tradition of lambasting parachute journalism instead highlighted the federal government’s failure to provide the city with public health guidance (Adelson 2020, Hirsch 2020). Perhaps the situation, though dire, was not so exceptional (as would be confirmed by later surges in Detroit and rural parishes surrounding NOLA, not to mention the city’s long history of confronting epidemics) and perhaps it was not really a product of New Orleans’s distinctively spirituous and celebratory culture (Aldhous and Singer-Vine 2020, Jervis et al. 2020). Adams and Sakakeeny’s Remaking New Orleans represents a remarkable collection of stories that strike at exactly these kinds of debates, through a range of essays on historical and contemporary topics written by scholars from literature studies to anthropology and political science. Topically, the volume enriches our historical geography of the city. It provides a roving review of everything from regional wrestling circuits of the 70s and 80s to mid-century gay bars, and more recently, Vietnamese Americans’ suburban farms. [End Page 279] It also aims to shift our approach to contemporary NOLA by changing what we ask of it: how is that authenticity came to be so crucial to how we view the city? In what ways is NOLA less an exception to – and more a part of or even a forerunner to – state, national, and international socio-cultural and socioeconomic trends? The volume will interest many readers of the Southeastern Geographer, including urban and historical geographers fascinated by the city itself (see O’Hare 2018 for a summary of the journal’s literature on NOLA and Louisiana). It will also interest cultural geographers who are generally concerned with authenticity and exceptionalism as particular kinds of discourses to deconstruct. Although geographers may not be represented in the volume, (i.e., Helen A. Regis, author of chapter 6, is an anthropologist from Louisiana State University), much of the content of the book should be interest to human geographers. The key concerns of the volume are inherently geographical, even if not described as such. Its motivating questions around authenticity and exceptionalism target two different spatial levels. First, remaking NOLA’s authenticity means looking towards the city itself. In a place that is politically determined to and financially dependent upon demonstrating its distinctiveness, volume contributors ask, who is it that gets to be authentic here? Who belongs and who does not? What cultural practices have come to count as traditional? As the “Producing Authenticity” section suggests, contributors’ take on this is less “let’s settle once and for all what is real New Orleans” and more “how is it that certain things have come to be described as true to city traditions? What are the social tensions that arise from this?” For instance, Nguyen in chapter ten shows us how Vietnamese Americans used their community gardening as a way to be taken seriously as authentic residents of the city before, during, and after Katrina; and Smith describes the history of the African-American-led Zulu krewe and its continued yet contested use of blackface in carnival parades in chapter four. The second geographical approach works in the opposite direction: from the city outward. The volume considers New Orleans’s...