For gay people, the essentializing political work of the LGBT social movement congealed our group into an imagined community of descent. As gayborhoods experienced existential threats from assimilation, heritage commodification sold gay habitus to outsiders, but a habitus stripped of the queer radical sexuality that once permeated these spaces. Without sexy community and its penchant for connecting people across racial boundaries, gay Disneyland became more strongly associated with whiteness. As Boystown became a place for “good gays,” it became respectable in a way that excludes people of
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