Gay Spaces Research Articles

A queer geography of a school

What does it mean to queer a schooled space? When queers are physically visible in schools, how does that change the power relations and relationships within it? Researchers in the field of Human Geog-raphy have explored physical spaces that are “queered” – the gay ghettos – such as the gay bar, neighborhood, or city. While celebrating these gay spaces, and markers such as the safe space triangle sticker that allies in schools in the USA utilize to mark their offices as places where LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) students can “go” to feel comfort-able, or at least not bullied, that does not always mean that queers feel safe(r) in those spaces. Also, if one space is marked safe, what happens to the other unsafe spaces? Do they stay intact, and if so, is that to the detriment of all students? Therefore, it is imperative also to define what a safe or safe(r) space is, and then why they should exist at all. According to a recent nationwide survey conducted by Joseph Kosciw, Emily Greytak, and Elizabeth Diaz, nine out of ten LGBTQ-identified youth state they have been harassed and bullied in their schools. This is unacceptable.
 One option in particular for queer subjects is to construct, live, and utilize these “queered” cities, neighborhoods, and schools. A physi-cally separated “gay space” could be a countersite for other, more privileged landscapes and narratives. For example, geographer Dereka Rushbrook takes Michel Foucault’s idea of “heterotopias” and defines it as “places that hold what has been displaced while serving as sites of stability for the displaced”, which I will use as a framework in this article. Much of the literature on queer geography has been on isolated or commercialized spaces, neighborhoods, cities, workplaces, bath houses, media, drag shows, sex workers, and more recently on immigration, transnational politics, public health, and globalization. The level of inclusivity of a school, for example, is traditionally a space that holds potential economic and social power for underrepresented students, including but not limited to queer-identified individuals.

This is where we live: queering poor urban spaces in literature of black gay men

This article critiques the exclusion of working-class and impoverished gays and lesbians of color by drawing on popular and academic theories of the development of gay and queer urban spaces. Through an analysis of black gay men's literature of the 1980s and 1990s, it explores the factors that tie black gay men to and ostracize them from their home neighborhoods. It is argued that black gay writers use textual strategies to question their invisibility in their communities of origin and in white gay neighborhoods, show their positions and roles in the home and neighborhood, and queer these spaces.

Challenging the gay ghetto in South Africa: Time to move on?

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in changes within gay ghettos, villages, precincts, and neighbourhoods in different cities and regions, particularly in the West. This includes concerns from some constituencies about the decline – or de-gaying – of some queer neighbourhoods, coupled with commentary about the emergence of newer places, sometimes espoused as mixed, gay-friendly, or post-gay. Drawing on the South African experience, the question of how central these debates should stand in gay geographical scholarship is posed. Although it is increasingly acknowledged that the “old gay ghetto debates” are in some ways parochial (both spatially and theoretically), the dominance of such concerns remains pervasive in Western gay space theorisation. In this paper, attention is focused on Western theorisations of the relationship between gay sexualities, its links to specific forms of gay space such as gay ghettos and neighbourhoods, and the South Africa context. The contention is that gay spaces (in the form of consolidated space, or villages) are not a necessary outcome of lived gay identities. It is argued that in South Africa differently constructed gay identities are differently spatialised and ultimately incongruent with Western theory. The investigation supports the growing scholarship that suggests Western theorisation of the links between gay sexual identity and space is not universally applicable.

Making masculinity: Negotiations of gender presentation among Latino gay men

Many studies of masculinity examine the experiences of White men, men of color and White gay men, but often do not incorporate the experiences of gay men of color. This study builds on recent work on Latino gay immigrants by focusing on the experiences of US-born Latino gay men, who have received relatively scant attention by researchers. Drawing from ethnographic findings of gay Latino social circles, this study examines how gay Latino men negotiate boundaries of masculinity. These men employ specific strategies when “doing” masculinity, which in turn are shaped by their racialization as Latinos within the US context, their gendered socialization within their immigrant family, and feelings of exclusion from mainstream gay spaces. These findings have implications for better understanding and addressing racial and class schisms within the larger LGBT movement.

Zoos, Sanctuaries and Turfs: Enactments and Uses of Gay Spaces during the Holidays

ABSTRACTExtant theory suggests that the existence of gay space is an important (or even critical) element of gay people's holidays. However, more knowledge on the roles that gay spaces play during the holidays is needed. Drawing on interviews with 53 gay tourists, this paper suggests that the roles gay spaces play differ across gay tourists. Some interviewees enact gay spaces as ‘sanctuaries’, at which one can feel free and openly show one's sexuality. Others feel that gay spaces resemble ‘zoos’, i.e. tourist attractions at which straights gaze upon gays. Finally, some tourists find that gay spaces are too male oriented or even men's turfs. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Performing Location and Dignity in a Transnational Feminist and Queer Study of Manila's Gay Life

The article offers an analysis of transnational feminist and queer methodologies by reflecting on the ethnography of gay space in Malate, a former sex and current tourist district in the city of Manila, the Philippines. The concept of "limited location" is used to theorize entry and relations in the field, following how spaces and identities mitigate field exchanges, how urban mappings formulate experiential analyses of urban space, and how the spaces of interaction show both desire and emotionality in field research. The article attends to feminist and queer concerns about researching across race, class, gender, nation, and inequalities, issues of "access," gendered work and performance, and the micro-politics of knowledge production wherein a researcher can embrace how informal sexual laborers (gay hosts) perform dignity in field exchanges. A transnational feminist and queer methodology opens epistemology to the visionary lens of lived experience, which in the case of gay hosts shows their labor and place in Malate's emerging gay nightlife.

The Emerald City of Oz: The city of Sydney as a gay space in Australian feature films

ABSTRACTAustralian feature films featuring gay male characters have consistently defined the inner-city—and. particularly the inner-city of Sydney—as. a gay space. This article examines a range of such films within the historical context of the emergence of gay male community and culture in Sydney. While this history reveals the complex and contested nature of gay men's connections to the city, on-screen depictions have tended to mask such complexity in favour of a simplistic urban/gay versus rural/straight divide. By repeatedly exploring gay life in inner-city spaces through the eyes of heterosexual, rural visitors, Australian films have developed and replicated discourses that have seen Sydney defined as the ‘true’ home of gay male community and culture.

We are here to party? Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans leisurescapes beyond commercial gay scenes

Gay spaces in particular cities have been the focus of studies of sexualities in leisure studies and geographies. However, with the British cultural development toward increasing acceptance of particular gay (and lesbian) lives, lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) leisurescapes can no longer be confined to gay space/times or discussed solely in terms of exclusion. Conversely, the view that all other spaces are heterosexualised and therefore dangerous also needs critical reconsideration. Drawing on data from the ‘Count Me In Too’ project, a Brighton & Hove based participatory action research project, we find that LGBT people socialise beyond the ‘gay ghetto’, and whilst certain ‘straight’ leisure spaces are still hostile, generic social space is not necessarily unwelcoming to some LGBT people. We contend that space can be simultaneously gay and straight, yet gender and sexual identities, mediated through other social differences, continue to be important in understanding LGBT experiences. However, LGBT socialising (and to a larger extent leisure activity) does not occur predominantly in commercial leisure spaces (whether these be understood as gay or straight). Understanding the breadth of LGBT socialising and the transgression of gay/straight divides enables an engagement with everyday space that does not presume it is heterosexual waiting to be ‘queered’.

Cartographies of Desire: Mapping Queer Space in the Fiction of Samuel Delany and Darieck Scott

Applying his knowledge of urban planning to the field of cultural theory, HaitianAmerican architect-artist Jean-Ulrick Desert invokes the concept of “queer space” in order to describe the complicated (yet valuable) nature of actual gay and lesbian communities and neighborhoods; these locations, he contends, simultaneously engage and transgress the social, architectural, and juridical meanings attributed to the areas that they occupy by means of the subversive bodies that collectively inhabit and pass through them. He goes on to characterize this concept in these terms: “queer space is in large part the function of wishful thinking or desires that become solidified: a seduction of the reading space where queerness, at a few brief points and for some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative of the landscape” (21, emphasis added). 1 The term “queer space” is most often employed as a way to discuss and analyze the precarious positioning of gay, lesbian, and transgender social spaces and the politics of gentrification in regard to these locations. 2 However, I believe that Desert’s formulation reveals the potential of the lens of “queer space” to exceed its strictly geographical or architectural valence and provide a framework for theoretical and formal analysis within literary studies. In this paper, I use this theorizing of residential and social districts such as Greenwich Village in New York City, the Castro in San Francisco, or Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, as a conceptual framework to analyze the engagement and redefinition of public space in Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) and Darieck Scott’s Traitor to the Race (1995). In other words, I use an idea developed by geographers and social commentators to elucidate thematic and formal choices made by novelists. My argument is not that the actual physical spaces function as the literary texts do, but rather that the framework used to describe and document these districts also has value for the analysis of art. I contend that these novels provide effective cartographies of desire that generate “queer space” within the generic parameters of the novel. In addition to exploring the affective dimensions and implications of the enacted queer spaces within the novels, my analysis will demonstrate (or map) how the impulses toward and attention to the “placemaking practices” that characterize queer space get reinterpreted and transmogrified into innovative aesthetic methodologies. 3

Thinking beyond Homonormativity: Performative Explorations of Diverse Gay Economies

This paper performatively decentres the role of mainstream gay consumption in contemporary thought about the economic and social lives of lesbians and gay men in the Global North. It is simultaneously critical and reparative in outlook. This paper critically engages with recent writing on homonormativity, suggesting that this work presents ‘homonormativity’ as an all-encompassing structure that becomes politically unassailable. In parallel with an analysis of contemporary lesbian and gay life as being complicit in the reproduction of various normativities, this paper takes the innovative and reparative stance of considering how such spaces and practices also produce interdependent relationships across social difference. Drawing on the recent work of Gibson-Graham (2006, A Postcapitalist Politics University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) this paper considers the prospects for outlining the diversity of lesbian and gay economic practices, with the performative ambition of making existing noncapitalist practices more visible and viable. To this end, the paper examines a number of gay spaces and practices to consider the different forms of enterprise, transactions, and labour that take place within them. On the basis of its preliminary inventory of diverse gay economic practices and spaces, this paper proposes that there are many aspects of contemporary urban gay life that already offer alternatives to the homonormative practices of neoliberalism.

Holidays of older gay men: Age or sexual orientation as decisive factors?

Studies of holidays by gay men and lesbians reflect the characteristics and tourism profiles of younger persons. Invariably such studies show intensive holiday-taking and a desire for gay space when on holiday. Existing specialist product offer is targeted at this younger market by a small number of specialist tour operators. In this UK-based study, the requirements and current holiday profile of older gay men were examined. Studies of older gay men identified various views about lifestyles including both lonely, closeted individuals and well-adjusted individuals with surrogate families. Studies of ‘mainstream’ senior tourists implied intensive and experiential holiday-taking. On the basis of this literature it was postulated that the tourism profile of older gay men would be ‘positive’. The study was undertaken through interviews conducted with 23 men over the age of 35. It was concluded that holiday requirements were similar to those of other older people but with the further dimension of gay-friendliness. Informants felt there were opportunities for specialist and other tour operators to develop products and for destinations to be positioned appropriately for an older gay man's market.

Framing exclusion in Cape Town's gay village: the discursive and material perpetration of inequitable queer subjects1

Within and beyond geography, there has been a growing concern in understanding how and why exclusion can occur within ‘gay spaces’, with a specific focus on Western Europe and North America. Heidi Nast's (2002 Queer patriarchies, queer racisms, international Antipode 34 874–909) work on the ‘white queer patriarch’ has taken this work further by exploring the multiple, interrelated, historical and contemporary factors that can lead to exclusion and exploitation. Despite growing interest surrounding South Africa's new liberal queer agenda, issues of contemporary exclusion among queer groups as a direct result of race and racism have remained relatively unexplored. By incorporating elements of Nast's schema, this article will examine the power that exists in the creation and framing of essentialistic ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ queer male subjects in Cape Town's gay village. These subjects will be shown to simultaneously draw on historical inequalities while also re‐imagining them in contemporary settings to re‐inscribe perceptions of classed and gendered difference. The creation of such inequitable subjects helps us understand how exclusion can become real and normalised within a space such as Cape Town's gay village in a way that draws on a history of material inequalities and discursive perceptions of race.

Endangered territory, endangered identity: Oxford Street and the dissipation of gay life1

Oxford Street in inner-city Sydney has been associated with gay identity, community and life since the early 1970s. In recent years, however, the street has declined as a gay precinct. This has engendered considerable anxiety among sections of the gay community, especially those activists and constituents with a substantial emotional investment in the idea of gay community and territory. These concerns have been especially acute around the issue of anti-gay violence on Oxford Street. The loss of gay space and the threat of violence are evocative concerns for they speak to the current dissipation of established patterns of gay life.

‘The Rice Steamer’: race, desire and affect1 in Sydney's gay scene2

While for some Sydney's gay scene is a space of sexual liberation, for Asian-Australians it's also a space of racial segregation. Drawing on ethnographic research in gay venues in Sydney and employing Deleuze and Guattari's notions of ‘striated space’ and ‘territorialisation’, this paper explores the ways that racialised sexual desires constitute spatial formations and practices that literally confine gay Asian males into ghettos within gay space. The second part of this paper asks what processes of deterritorialisation are at play in gay spaces that might enable possibilities of connecting bodies not reducible to race. Using an autoethnographic and performative mode of address, I draw on a sexual encounter in a gay dance party in order to chart a set of affective connections, which, while not demolishing race, is nevertheless irreducible to it. In doing so I put forward a model of desire that forces us to rethink what queer space might look like.

Economic Transformations of Gay Urban Spaces: revisiting Collins’ evolutionary gay district model

Over the past half century, many visible gay districts emerged in Western inner cities as sites of gay and lesbian residence, commerce, entertainment, culture and politics. Rather than static enclaves, these visibly gay districts are constantly changing, reflecting improved social attitudes towards homosexuality, increasing diversity of social activities and venues, and financial constraints on residential location in the inner city for many lesbians and gay men. This paper revisits Collins’ evolutionary gay district model to examine recent changes around one such inner-city district, Oxford Street in Sydney, Australia. A neoclassical economic perspective, focusing on market forces, consumer preferences and incentives, is used to hypothesise whether these changes are a process of decline, integration or colonisation of gay space. For the Oxford Street district there is growing evidence that various factors have eroded the vibrancy of gay cultural expressions. The paper concludes by discussing the different possible ongoing transformations of inner-city gay districts.

Urban (Homo)Sexualities: Ordinary Cities and Ordinary Sexualities

AbstractThis article appraises the current state of research on urban sexualities and suggests some underexamined areas of research that might productively be explored further. This review primarily focuses on studies of gay space and urban homosexualities, as this remains the largest body of work on urban sexualities within geography. I argue that this work has got caught in a trap of concentrating on the production of gay identities and spaces within small areas of a relatively small set of cities, against which all other spaces are implicitly assessed. Drawing on recent post‐colonial debates within urban geography, this article argues that it is time for sexual geographers to expand their horizons and move beyond this hierarchy of metropolitan gay centres, to study a broader range of sexualities and spaces in ‘ordinary cities’ assessed on their own terms. To this end, the article considers work on gay domestic spaces in suburban Australia, and the interaction of local homosexualities with transnational ‘gay’ identity in Chengdu, China. This work offers productive examples of studying gay space across the whole city and attending to urban homosexualities outside of the world cities of the Global North.

“Out” in the Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architexture of Black Masculinity

This essay explores the relationship between black masculine performances, the club space, and men on the "down low” (DL). Some black men who have sex with other men, who dis-identify with normative descriptors of sexuality, refer to themselves as “men on the down low.” The assumption about DL men, in recent publications, is that they do not reside in identifiably gay or queer spaces. This essay examines “The Gate”—a gay black club in Chicago—as a space which allows DL men to negotiate their masculine ideals and queer desire, challenging the traditional closet-threshold paradigm.

The homonormalisation of white heterosexual leisure spaces in Bloemfontein, South Africa

The paper comprises a response to the overwhelming lack of geographical research into South African gay male leisure space development and augments the first detailed analyses of white gay leisure space development in this country by redirecting the geographic focus to a smaller provincial city. The image of gay leisure space that emerges in Bloemfontein is different from those identified and described in large metropolitan complexes. What emerges in this city is the development of gay-coded spaces in which heterosexual leisure spaces are queered, but not with the intent or outcome of generating exclusively gay spaces. Homonormalised spaces are created. It is contended that much of the current debates approach the so-called homonormalistion of gay leisure space from an unhelpful “gay/queer-disempowered” perspective which is inadequate to explain the development of a range of leisure spaces certain gay/queer cohorts created and/or seek out. It is suggested that homonormalised spaces are far more than heteronormativity infiltrating the gay (leisure) world through a range of consumption-led processes/events, or gay male capitulation to such normative hegemonies. It is argued that “homonormalisation” should be understood more reflexively.

Boundaries of Desire: Becoming Sexual Through the Spaces of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games

What are the consequences of unbounded gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (GLQBTI) spaces that are positioned as inclusive through welcoming everyone? Two festival spaces of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games, the City Hub and Oxford Street, illustrate inclusivity within nonheterosexualized space. Adopting a poststructuralist feminist approach, I examine experiences of male desires. The spatial metaphor of a “GLQBTI borderland” provides a conceptual lens through which to rethink the relationship among desire, boundaries, imagined space, and sexualities. The uncertainties of GLQBTI borderlands indicate it might be possible to revisit the queer political agenda by acknowledging that sexual identities are actively and spatially produced through processes that simultaneously draw from and defy social borders.

Remaking the masculine self and coping in the liminal world of the gay ‘scene’

This paper investigates social transitions, constructions of masculinity and coping among men in commercialized gay spaces, such as nightclubs and dance parties (‘the gay scene’). The findings are derived from two qualitative studies involving individual samples of 24 and 12 younger (aged 19 to 36) same‐sex attracted men living in Melbourne, Australia. The analysis recasts ‘coming out’ into the gay scene as a passage into a ‘new world’ and a ‘new self’. On the scene, notions of selfhood are challenged and men enter various states of liminality as they (re)construct themselves. New ways of performing the self can be tried on through ritualized behaviours, including performing various masculinities. While successful performances of masculinity can promote social acceptance, those who express less valued forms of masculinity can struggle harder. Internalized homophobia influences rituals on the scene, and men reported feeling like perpetual outsiders, regardless of the success of their performances. The emotional dangers to selfhood lurking in performance and ritual are explored, as well as the ways that men find to prevail. Invariably, liminality ends, and the men who do well approach themselves, the rituals and the performances with insight. Résumé Cet article examine les transitions sociales, les constructions de la masculinité et le coping chez les hommes qui fréquentent les espaces commerciaux gay, tels que les boîtes de nuit et les dance parties (la « scène gay »). Les résultats proviennent de deux études qualitatives menées sur des échantillons représentatifs de cette population : 24 et 12 hommes âgés de 19 à 36 ans, attirés par le même sexe et vivant à Melbourne, en Australie. L'analyse donne au coming out sur la scène gay un nouveau rôle de passage vers un « nouveau monde » et un « nouveau soi ». Les notions de soi sont récusées et les hommes atteignent divers états de liminalité, à mesure qu'ils se (re)construisent. De nouvelles formes de représentation du soi peuvent être testées à travers des comportements ritualisés, parmi lesquels la représentation de masculinités diverses. Tandis que certaines représentations réussies de la masculinité peuvent favoriser l'acceptation sociale, celles qui expriment des formes non hégémoniques peuvent s'imposer plus difficilement. L'homophobie intériorisée influence les rituels sur la scène gay, et les hommes déclarent se sentir comme des outsiders permanents, indépendamment du succès de leurs représentations. Sont explorés les dangers émotionnels vis‐à‐vis du soi qui subsistent dans les représentations et les rituels, ainsi que les différentes approches utilisées par les hommes pour l'emporter. Invariablement, la liminalité s'achève, et les hommes qui s'en sortent bien ont une approche intuitive d'eux‐mêmes, des rituels et des représentations. Resumen En este ensayo investigamos las transiciones sociales, la construcción de la masculinidad y los mecanismos de defensa entre hombres en ambientes de comercio homosexual, por ejemplo clubes y fiestas de baile (el “ambiente gay”). Los resultados proceden de dos estudios cualitativos con muestras individuales de 24 y 12 hombres jóvenes (de edades comprendidas entre 19 y 36 años) que sienten atracción por otros hombres y que viven en Melbourne, Australia. El análisis redefine la “salida del armario” en el ambiente gay como un paso a un “nuevo mundo” y a una “nueva identidad”. En estos ambientes, se ponen a prueba las nociones de identidad y cuando los hombres se regeneran pasan a varios estados de carácter liminal. Existen nuevas formas de expresión de la identidad individual a través de rituales, como por ejemplo mostrando los diferentes caracteres de la masculinidad. Aunque expresar con éxito la identidad masculina puede fomentar la aceptación social, los que expresan formas no hegemónicas de masculinidad pueden encontrarse con dificultades. La homofobia interiorizada influye en los rituales en estos ambientes y los hombres informaron que se sentían rechazados continuamente, independientemente del éxito que tuviesen en su desempeño. Aquí analizamos los peligros emocionales para la identidad que implican la expresión la identidad masculina y los rituales, y estudiamos cómo consiguen los hombres su objetivo. Al final, el carácter liminal termina y los hombres que salen airosos tienen una actitud positiva hacia ellos mismos, los rituales y en su modo de expresar la masculinidad.