Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago

by Jay Orne

Individual prejudice is perhaps the easiest to see. It is the “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” of an online hookup ad. It is the manager of a nightclub who instructs the DJ to change the music because “the room is getting dark.”

Each time I was warned about Circuit, the obvious inference was that because I was white, I was vulnerable to an aggressive Black and Latino hypermasculine sexuality. “Those boys” were going to manhandle me, and I should protect my vulnerable white body from their assault. However, that doesn’t fit the experience I had that night at Urbano. While we were dancing in the main floor of Circuit, JJ, Tamera, and I had the space mostly to ourselves. A few men stood around the railing looking at our group. However, most, unsurprisingly, were interested in the moves and bodies of the group of slender Black men dancing a few yards away. No one was eating anyone else up.

As I typically did, I pulled out my phone to take notes: “I’m not sure whether what was communicated in that moment was that I’m not interested in him specifically or whether it was read as not being attracted to Asian guys in general.”

Race is still used as a source of pleasure, exclusion, and fetishism in these spaces. However, race doesn’t foreclose other possibilities.

If diversity is not a product merely of location, why are these radical sexual spaces more diverse? They bring people together into an erotic ritual space that brings them out of themselves, creating the kind of intimate connections—like naked intimacy—that sociologists have shown reduce discrimination.

Sexy communities are not just diverse in a paint-by-numbers sense. The people within them have experienced connection beyond mere contact.

. The rule is: Get over yourself. . . . You stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you.”

Not all erotic possibility is actually possible. Romance can come at the expense of sexual kinship. The strain of unreturned feelings taxed our relationship. We kept hanging out, but that night changed things for us.

More forcefully, while sexy communities are queer in their radical sexual orientation, not all are built through queer means. Sexy community is built through exclusion—through protective fostering of a sexual atmosphere. And some, it is true, are made possible through enforcing strict hierarchies of class, beauty, or other boundaries.

These spaces have all the exclusion with none of the sexual intimacy.5

The boat’s occupants remained silent, everyone staring at her as she tried to push the sandwiches in different directions. I saw a few people subtly looking from person to person, trying to get a sense of what the others were going to do before offering a response. Inner monologues, mine at least, asked, “Am I going to eat carbs in front of these guys?”

I continued to feel moments of heightened body awareness—verging on policing—throughout the trip, but, I wondered, “Am I doing this to myself or is the space doing it to me, or both?” I noticed, for instance, that I have some dark hairs on my upper arms that I should have shaved off. At lunch, I took not only a second helping of grilled chicken but also a bun for my sausage, bread I feel certain was left as a trap. Gotcha.

And it is about class, not just genetics or wanting it bad enough. Producing the kind of body the plastics favor—the muscular clone—takes time and money.

Not everyone can simply “go to the gym” or “eat healthy” because these things cost money and—that even bigger indicator of class—time. Such that social theorist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the rich often engage in the conspicuous consumption of time rather than money.7 Preparing a lavish meal using techniques requiring hours can be another way of showing your freedom from wage work. Similarly, a gym habit demands money for a membership, but the schedule to attend for hours every week is an even more onerous requirement.

However, other sexy spaces are elite in other ways, excluding those that don’t have the right tastes. Hydrate requires hours of drinking, dancing, and, for some, a familiarity with drugs, all skills requiring cultural knowledge and patterns of consumption. Online communities, like Grindr, require an iPhone or Internet connection and use specialized lingo. At the Hole, one must be willing to absorb the stigma, as well as handle raunchiness and nakedness without being self-conscious, both of which are also skills.

The presence of Clinton’s friend Margaret on the boat actually highlights the absence of women on the boats. The boating set isolates themselves from the women invading Boystown. Barely anyone but Clinton talked to Margaret the entire trip. To be fair, whenever someone did try, she would end up telling a story about her boyfriend that seemed slightly homophobic. For instance, he won’t own a hatchback car because he doesn’t want to look gay. Another case of homophobia feeding gay misogyny, the intersectional knot.

The plastics, too, had plenty of older individuals among them, who, while they don’t appear to be at the same age as, say, Deveaux at Jackhammer, that’s because they are better preserved, able to afford the kind of food, health care, grooming products, and time-consuming health activities that would keep their skin taunt, their hair black, and their bodies firm. That is, as long as they provide the money that enables the pretty boys to suntan on the decks of their boat, they are granted access to the space. Age isn’t as big an influence on acceptance by the group as having the right kind of body or money—namely, their taste, or what I will later call habitus.

Why does Ginger think Boystown has a sexual atmosphere, when others don’t? Grindr. Ginger is an avid Grindr user. Of course Boystown is going to have a sexual aspect, because when he is in the area, even though he may be experiencing the clubs in a similar fashion to others, the use of Grindr layers over the space, giving the places a sexual atmosphere otherwise missing.

This is the kind of hybrid interaction needed to develop sexy community: connection to others through sex. Sure, people might use the app to find sexual encounters, meeting someone at their apartments, bypassing any community space at all. However, people also layer over existing places that have lost sexy flavor with a virtual space enabling that kind of connection or for following up later on an encounter they had in Boystown, turning a nonsexy encounter into a sexy one.

He carries these conversations, this community, with him into the straight world. Standing in line at Starbucks, he can see who is around him. Eyeing the person across the room, he tells me, he might not know if the person is gay. If that person is on Grindr, then he knows. He can say hello. He can flirt with him. He can invite him to fuck in the bathroom if he wanted to, because he has a back channel. He has the Hole he can carry around with him in his pocket. The gay bar might not be sexy anymore, filled with straight women and turned into a tourist trap, but he downloaded a gay bar into his phone.

One of the difficulties of ethnography is making sense of these disagreements. Mark Nott, and many of the participants in my study, like Frank, Ginger, and others, have found friends in the community of Grindr. I’ve seen people meet in Boystown clubs after using their phones to find sexually interested people in their immediate vicinity. Insecure ’Mo disagrees. In qualitative methodology, we call this a “disconfirming case,” a situation in which something is wrong with the emerging theory.

Participants believe that one of the reasons people are willing to be so explicit about their “preferences”—the most common way to code racism—online is because the social mores of Internet interaction are still forming.12 People still believe the Internet affords them a degree of anonymity to their interactions, even when photos and other identifying text is present.

Sexy community is network of people, bound together through sexual kinship, connected to a hybrid erotic space where they experience moments of naked intimacy. These spaces are racially diverse because they connect people beyond mere contact.

Having explicit sex doesn’t make a community sexy. The space must also be social. Without the hybrid space, a community can’t form.

As the places shift, new spaces opening, old places gentrifying and assimilating, the people move between them. As things have changed, assimilation hasn’t destroyed community, it has shifted it, split it from occurring only in one space, where everyone is pushed together. Queers carry with them their community connected through sex, tinged with the lingering energy of the spirit of the night.

Nearly everyone I talked to about Boystown would at some point, unprompted, compare Boystown to a theme park, a gay Disneyland. Assimilation transforms gayborhoods. Boystown has become a tourist attraction, a destination. Boystown is a place for people to visit and consume, rather than live. Boystown is like a section of Epcot in which you can eat gay foods, drink gay drinks, wear gay clothes, all of which are available for purchase in the gift shop.

“Lakeview [the designated community zone containing Boystown], and I know this demographic from being a realtor, the gay and lesbian population continues to decline in Lakeview, but unlike in past situations where people have been priced out, people have been simply choosing to move away. Whether it’s better prices, or more space, or they want to raise a family, which is something that they didn’t necessarily have gay man and women actively and openly doing so much. There isn’t really a reason to live in Lakeview for safety or comfort levels. There’s no real reason to feel more safe in Lakeview than, let’s say, Lincoln Park, Edgewater, or any other middle- and upper-middle-class area in Chicago. There’s no real reason to live in the gay ghetto.”

What is the point of a gayborhood? Gayborhoods were once about safety. A place to escape to, away from the hateful eyes of the rest of society. A place for, primarily men, to live out an alternative life, unlike their fathers and brothers who got married and had children. For straight people, a gayborhood was also a corral, containing the aberrants and their sexual deviance from infecting (somewhat literally) the rest of society.

The gentrified neighborhood now isn’t a “Black neighborhood” or a “Spanish neighborhood.” White people live there. Without the dangerous specter of color haunting the neighborhood’s reputation, more white people move to the area, except this time they have more money. These people begin to “improve” the neighborhood, turning it into a hotspot of activity. Eventually, prices have risen so much that the early adopters—the artists and bohemians and gay men—can no longer afford to live there. Privileged upper-class white people move into the area, and the cycle begins again with a new neighborhood. This less-discussed second wave of displacement is late-stage gentrification.

Seriously, if you look at the nicer, nicer areas of Chicago that have gentrified over the years and become hotspots, you’ll look at the gay migration of Chicago.

However, if we expand our conception of queer people beyond the traditional white gay male residents of gayborhoods, it becomes evident that many people of color never lived in Boystown to begin with. Pauline, a Black lesbian in her late thirties, told me that when she was young, in the late 90s, she lived on the south side of Chicago. JJ and his friends, a primarily Latino group, all live on the west side of Chicago. These arrangements are typical. Chicago is a segregated city. Boystown is no exception to that. The census data, although notoriously unreliable for neighborhood demographics for Lakeview (the designated community zone containing Boystown), show that, since 1990, Lakeview has consistently been 75 percent white.

The major bars and entertainment conglomerates on the street own the buildings in which they reside. Formerly, moving a gay bar was a matter of letting the lease run out in response to a rent hike. The new bar, perhaps with a different name, would open up in the cheaper gay area. Today, the business owners in the area have to figure out a way to protect their investments.

He began again: “It’s the classic dilemma. It’s, like, we want equality. We want acceptance. We want affirmation. But at the same time, as someone who is very involved in the community, and wants affinity, and is working at [community organization], it’s disheartening to see. We’re losing part of that because there’s not as much to fight for. There’s that complacency”—the postgay era, according to some scholars.13

How to Be Gay, noted sexuality scholar David Halperin remarks,

“Gayness is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.”1 More than a culture or identity, gayness is a habitus.

or tinted windows to prevent patrons from being seen by passersby, the only tell that it was a gay bar being an upside-down neon beer sign in the window.

Indeed, for the German sociologist Georg Simmel, neighborhoods are the way in which we maintain the “village mentality” of community in the face of the atomization and loneliness of the big city.3 This is particularly true of the nightlife spaces that I’ve been discussing.

We must see the culture that consumption teaches us. From these “third spaces,” we learn a habitus. If Boystown changes, the habitus it teaches changes. The people we become changes.

Habitus is most associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He describes the connection between social class, culture, and consumption. Bourdieu’s habitus comes from the class dispositions of one’s youth and proceeds to form an internal logic by which one judges and makes choices of taste, of distinctions (as his book was titled), and between cultural objects. Class is more than a social position to Bourdieu. Class is an embodied status coming with unconscious rules telling us why some things are better than others.

four central features of habitus.5 First, habitus is acquired. No one is born with a habitus. It must be learned over time. Second, habitus is beneath the level of consciousness. Habitus is made up of the mental structures from which people make their decisions, particularly consumptive decisions of taste. We do not consciously have habitus. It is the unconscious set of principles that one uses to reason, forming opinions that seem natural from one’s perspective. Third, habitus varies by social location and trajectory. Habitus is not the same for everyone across a culture. Rather, different social positions have different sets of tastes that seem obvious to them.

Habitus captures the connection between who we are and the structures that we live within without being rigid or predestined. Habitus shows us how parts of ourselves that seem natural are shaped by our environments, the ecological contexts and the social structures that we move through as we are taught the social relationships of taste.

Gay habitus, then, is about learning how to comport yourself as a gay man, how to groom yourself, becoming comfortable with sexual language, and learning how to read, as the drag queens say. Gay habitus is developing a sensibility that is gay, a worldview that is gay, a gay way of talking. Gay taste.

The culture of gay men dies with each generation anew. To keep it going, there must be a way of transmitting that culture to each new generation.

Because Boystown instills a gay habitus that transmits gay culture, habitus is developmental, as well as forced on us by social structure. It is a method of cultural transmission and assimilation. Habitus is instilled within us by our social relations and social spaces. We learn to be who we are. We also shape ourselves by going to some spaces instead of others. Assimilation changes people by changing the habitus they acquire through the spaces they consume.

The idea of different habituses brings up another important point: no one is born straight either. If gay habitus is learned, straight habitus is as well. However, gay people first learn straight habitus as well.

Gay men, like everyone, are full of contradictions. They hook up, but find it shameful. They hate Boystown, but go to “dance.”

Assimilation of gay men isn’t about whether they hook up or not. Assimilation is the set of values they apply to judge whether their sex lives are fun or shameful. For gay men, assimilation looks like trying to find—and be—one of the good gays. One of the good gays in a monogamous relationship, with middle-class respectability and a couple of kids.

Alexander is gay but has straight sexual values. He’s internalized the norms of straight society: how to meet people (at work), appropriate numbers of sex partners (few), or when to have sex (in a relationship). He associates violating these rules with disease and death. Why wouldn’t he? It only comes as a surprise if one thinks gay men are essentially sexually deviant. There is nothing inherent to desiring someone of the same sex that also means desiring multiple partners, sex clubs, and one-night stands. Those are queer innovations.

Marriage is a conservative cause. Marriage, even same-sex marriage, is not queer. In America, it may be advocated by the left, but only in the sense that the American left is still to the left of the right on this issue. The right is so far to the right that even though the left is on the right, they are still only slightly to the left of the right. Right?

While not changing the relationship with the state’s provision of benefits, same-sex marriage does change what it means to get married, but only if its participants continue to be open about the kinds of activities that they engage in outside of the charmed circle. As Nair points out, straight people do plenty of BDSM and fisting, yet marriage remains the same. However, that’s not really true. When those acts remain hidden, divorced from their identity, then what does it matter? When they are openly acknowledged, then the scorn of the inner circle falls on them just as much. Heterosexual people are assumed to be on the inside of the inner circle.