Kindle Notes & Highlights
Straight people come for the glamour, forgetting sometimes that real people are behind the enchantment as they look to have their own night out on the town.
“Jesus. Can we go someplace gay, Jason? I’m not paying a cover for this.” Austin said.
Although no longer essential, dedicated gayborhoods are still needed, Ghaziani contends, to provide gays with some measure of safety and as multicultural enclaves celebrating LGBT identity.4
gayborhoods don’t celebrate differences; they create them. Through fostering a space outside the mainstream, gay places allow people to develop an alternative culture, a queer culture that celebrates sex. In gay clubs around America, one learns different values, a way to judge people by different rules. When night falls, we learn new lessons.
Those who are sexual deviants, who are genderfucking and trans, who are too brown and black, or who are too poor, Boystown rejects these people now. They don’t fit Boystown’s new image as a gay Disneyland, a safe theme park, a petting zoo.
If a boundary disappears, then acceptance into the inner circle means new morals.
Were breaking down the walls and creating a normwhich welcomes other norms
Gay movements want a return to privilege’s embrace; queer movements resist the inner circle’s vice grip.
We like the Shoe, as Boystown regulars call it, because it is literally dirty enough that no bachelorette would venture in.
Americans consider sex private, yet we talk about nothing else. Sexuality is an intimate experience that defines our public lives.
Society shames queers. Queers resisted by forming their own spaces.
Assimilation is the cultural impact of HIV.
Here’s my conservative estimate: in 1995, when AIDS deaths peaked, 21 percent of American queer men had died.17 I try to imagine a fifth of my friends dead. Devastating, life changing.
Straight people could have gone further, too. In 1986, the New York Times published an article titled, “With AIDS about, Heterosexuals Are Rethinking Casual Sex.” Advances in contraception and women’s liberation made casual sex a possibility. The risk of contracting HIV cast everyone back into a time of sexual fear. The sexual revolution was not just a queer revolution, though perhaps queers kept its lessons alive.
Straight women, tired of sexual harassment, look to gay neighborhoods to find the same freedom—though not always with the best consequences—to grasp a life beyond shame, embracing the sexual body, to learn about the outside of the charmed circle from the night’s denizens.
Sexy communities form in hybrid collective sexual spaces: a social mixed-use public space containing flirting, hooking up, or fucking. Pleasure—sex, the erotic energy of a space—connects people together, forging naked intimacy in the crucible of the night.
Sexy communities are less sexually racist. Conversely, assimilated spaces are more sexually racist. Assimilation not only brings gay men into the inside of the charmed circle, it also makes gay spaces structurally, culturally, and interactionally whiter. Becoming normal means becoming white. Becoming white is part of becoming normal.
together people unable to go elsewhere—Boystown’s sexy communities exist on the periphery in the shadiest spaces, the darkest bars in the deepest night.
Society accepts gay men, but not queer sex.
The places where we live influence us; these are the “neighborhood effects” discussed by the Chicago school of sociology.18 However, I argue that the neighborhoods we live in teach us more than just for which political party to vote or which food we like to eat. Our neighborhoods teach us our sexuality.
Gay men and straight women have an easy script. The characters are stereotypes but fun to play nevertheless.
But Boystown also sells the gay men and their sexual space. Boystown promises straight women a petting zoo where they can see the gays. Boystown is a novelty promising a wild night out. Boystown is a chance to go on safari.
Someone is on safari when they consider the consumption of a space as a new authentic experience to be more important than appreciating the space’s purpose.
If Sam acted in Wrigleyville like he was in his sexual field, he would be attacked.
Overly concerned with seeing new things—having a tourist gaze—those on safari often watch too intently or involve themselves too much in the ongoing flirtation that can lead to sex.
raunchy atmospheres.
Is this what creates bad attitudes towards gay men and their self expression?
“Straight women have become very disrespectful towards gay men, insomuch as to be invalidating of their personal boundaries, and invasive of their public spaces.
As I would have predicted, the straight women I’ve talked to have never encountered anyone telling them they aren’t allowed in the clubs.
Because we can be annoying. I can see why there might be some pushback but I’ve never encountered it,
“Get Out of My Gay Bar, Straight Girl.” Chloë Curran’s argument, written in typical Internet clickbait hyperbolic style, was that straight women needed to stay out of queer women’s spaces.26
“I’m not here to argue for a ban on straight people in gay clubs; that’s discrimination, and clearly wrong.” She writes, “However I will ask you to a) rethink the entitlement you feel to occupy every space and b) respect that no matter how much you ‘love the gays,’ sometimes gay people need to be amongst their peers and therefore apart from you.”
The problem is that dominant people feel entitled to all spaces, not recognizing times when minorities need spaces away from dominant culture.
Every gay man has been on safari. Perhaps one day it will be different, but few gay men grow up in queer cultures. Everyone comes from a straight family, coming to a place like Boystown in adulthood. Everyone has to learn the script.
“When you’re stripped of clothes, you’re not reading people’s social class in their clothes. There’s more mixing, but there are less social cues. So there’s a way in which that diversity question is muddled there.”
Because inner circle morality declares sex private, we assume that group sex and collective public sexuality are not similarly religious, emotional, and intimate in this manner. However, just as sex between two people connects them, collective sexuality similarly brings people out of themselves and into oneness.
Our bodies, connected as they are to sex, remind us of these moments and of the intimate connections made.
Those who have not experienced sexy community might be surprised to learn that there are a lot of nonsexual moments that occur within erotic spaces. If the image of the Hole that you have taken from these pages is one of a sleazy orgy, people having sex everywhere, then you might have emphasized the wrong aspects of the text in your mind, perhaps because of the difference the spaces have from heterosexual and homonormative community spaces. There is a lot more talking than sex. Naked intimacy isn’t exclusively sexual, and the erotic isn’t exclusive to the sexual act.
She
I love the back and forth of pronouns!!
Sexy community is a network of people, connected through naked intimacy that results from spaces that have erotic potential—a group based on sexual connection, erotic possibility, and sexual kinship. Sexy community doesn’t require sex to always be happening. In fact, these spaces must be hybrid, with sexuality taking place alongside swapping stories or menial gossip. Sexy communities have real consequences. They connect people across boundaries such as race. Sexy community is a lesson straight society could learn from queers.
a community is a group of people with a shared definition of the situation. They share similar interpretations of what is going on. Their understanding of the space might be slightly different, but in general they agree on some basic facts.
For now, consider community, especially sexy community, to be a group, whether they realize they are a group or not, that has a shared definition of what is happening, a similar set of values concerning how to act in that situation, and shared criteria to judge whether others are acting appropriately in the space. Therefore, by sexy community, I mean a community bound together by sex.
They carry these scars with them even after they’ve patched up the initial damage and have good relationships with their family. They will always remember the moment they realized a family’s love was conditional.
However, sexy community is something different, and compartmentalizing all queer connection into the bag of families of choice undercuts the many kinds of inventive relationships we have built out of the rubble of shame.
community can more aptly be described as a network.
Important difference between community and family
We had always been in a community. I just hadn’t known it.
oppressions cannot be fully disentangled from one another. They overlap, transforming the experience of other social locations.
Meeting different people, by virtue of exposure to them, helps break down the stereotypes that we have about them.
The problem is that this isn’t true. Even in the realm of romantic attraction, you could be attracted to someone despite or because of their group status. You might think of them as an exception to the rule. You might change your definition of the group to not include them—“well, he isn’t like those Black guys”—or change your stereotypes such that they are about a more narrow subgroup that doesn’t include this person.7
To change someone’s views about a group, it is not enough simply to be in the same space with them: you have to connect with them intimately. You have to go beyond mere contact.9
These cultural images don’t float in the ether, people use them. Examined though culture, we can see how these images shape sexual racism. It isn’t enough for a space to have the mere presence of people of color.
Cultural sexual racism creates the environment, the context, in which interaction takes place, the scripts people use to flirt, and the metrics they use to determine who is hot.
