Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago

by Jay Orne

They’ve failed because people of color still come to Boystown. JJ and his friends come to Boystown several times a week after a long day of work, dancing their asses off into the night. I met Jon and Darren at Roscoe’s, one of the most diverse places in Boystown. Circuit, although it opens and closes frequently, is a club almost exclusively for Black and Latino queer people. They haven’t taken Boystown back from anyone. It wasn’t theirs to take. However, they’ve succeeded in changing the image of Boystown. Rather than a place where people of many different racial backgrounds come to drink and be gay, Boystown is a space for white gays. A place to celebrate an identity they feel has little impact on their everyday lives, except for giving them license to have a parade and drink excessively, much like many white people’s illusory experience with Irish identity in the United States.8

The inner circle/outer circle stereotypes don’t just describe sexual acts. They also describe the stereotypes thrown at people of color. The inner circle is white. Then, to be black makes queerness easier to achieve. As gay men become respectable, more conservative, and homonormative, the category of gay becomes connected with whiteness. Take Back Boystown shows us the racial consequences of gay Disneyland and the heritage commodification of gay habitus. The transformation of these spaces to respectable inner circle morality encourages us to think about gayness as a kind of white ethnicity.

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 color. To be a good gay is to be white.

In the example I described in this earlier research—coming out—it could involve someone asking invasive personal questions afterward, but it could also be just being in an environment with others who you know don’t fully accept you. When in the line of fire, you have to spend energy, doing the “emotional labor” of managing your actions, your words, and your very presence in the space to not provoke conflict with the person(s) in power.13

Queernormative spaces, because they are built as an oppositional identity to the majority politically, don’t want to acknowledge that within their own spaces, they are the people in power.

We shouldn’t shy away from doing the emotional labor of making sure what we say and do doesn’t harm others.

One of the most common ways of dealing with moments of feeling in the firing line is to run. If someone makes you constantly uncomfortable, or a space seems unwelcoming, then what incentive is there to continuing to frequent that space or talk to that person? In my previous research, people regularly told me they would disengage with people that took aim at them. Or, they said, they wouldn’t let these people get close to them, cutting them off from certain parts of their life, limiting the amount of information they had, or otherwise minimizing their interactions.

If queernormative spaces keep people constantly on guard, fearful others will attack them for a wrong move, then those spaces will be alienating, even for those who stay within them. Intimacy—the kind that breaks barriers—will be hard to come by, aggravating tensions already present. What’s worse, this effect happens when people are actually concerned about their prejudice.

This revenant is queernormativity: the relentless political focus on the destabilized self through the policing of discourse. Rather than queer separatism (as embodied in sexy communities) with the goal of “the dignity of difference,” in Sacks’s words, it seeks the universal essential self behind these destabilized selves. It uses intersectionality as a way of canceling out privilege rather than an intersectionality that recognizes our embeddedness within multiple particular groups. By focusing on the individual and their sins, we forget the group. Identity alone cannot change a space. Instead, it hides the power working in these spaces through structural categories.

For Simmel, the stranger is someone who is outside of the group, but who, because of their social position, “often receives the most surprising openness—confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person.” The stranger is someone both near and far, outside of the petty strife of our in-group dynamics, but privy to some of our closest secrets because of their distance. People implicitly recognize the value of the stranger when they talk to a therapist, spill their guts to a fellow traveler on an airplane, or, as I’ve discussed, have candid conversations about their lives with people they’ve never met during a quiet moment of a sex party.

Nondualistic. Multilogical. We honor the intentions of others by allowing them to make mistakes and fix them. We focus on pragmatic issues of oppression, inviting individuals who might otherwise think that, because of their demographics, they are closed off from the discussion to listen and then join in the dialogue about how to fix things. These changes would prevent the space from being pulled into a chilled censoring that prevents people from letting their guards down. Such changes are essential for having fun and creating a sexy community, allowing people to combine across intergroup boundaries through pleasure.

That freedom of sexy connection requires segregation from the strictures of everyday life. It breaks down some boundaries by reinforcing others. This is the intersectional knot. Oppression is tangled, strands interwoven, producing social structures, cultures, and interactional scripts. Loosen one string, and the others tighten. The queer project is not uniformly good. Racial diversity in some spaces blossoms while women are turned away at the door. The boats of the plastics, protected by class, are not some queer utopia. But neither are the house parties of the political queers.

Because we seek our tastes, we become gay, it isn’t merely a sexual orientation. We learn to be gay or to be queer. Given the choice, we should learn to be queer. Gay and straight alike, we can choose to be queer, by fostering queer spaces, by taking hold of the spirit of the night and using its lessons during the day, by embracing our sexuality.

Sex is something that has been taken from us. Sex is a kind of connection we deserve. The lies of abstinence-only sex education, the false moral choices of some religious doctrines, the patriarchal racist and classist code of ethics that dictates that only some kinds of families, some kinds of bodies, are worthy of sex, of love, of the naked intimacy of the erotic. Sex is something we—you—deserve.

All spaces are not for all people. I don’t advocate a world where every space has a perfect diversity of bodies. However, there are some straight women and men who do not come to Boystown on safari but who come to the queer spaces outside of the charmed circle like the Hole. These people are the future, the spark of queer heterosexuality. These people are the dawn of our next sexy communities.

violence drive straight women to Boystown, just as much as Boystown pulls them there to learn a gay habitus.

For now though, queers do it better. I hope that this book helps people preserve some of the spaces that create sexy communities against the assimilation and heritage commodification of gay male spaces—especially since queers also have a lot of things that they could do better.

We need to welcome queer women into queer spaces, which are often male dominated. We need to do it in a way that doesn’t continue to entrench privilege but embraces the fun of desire. Letting pleasure, and the intimacy it can deliver, form a backbone of community.

We have to remember that the spaces that we foster are important. Economics—what will be economically viable—shapes the kinds of spaces we are going to see. Those spaces in turn shape us. We must actively foster the kind of spaces that teach the habitus that we want others to have. If we hope to have a queer revolution, it has to come from us. That means being proactive about building, fostering, and supporting with our dollars, places of fun, of pleasure, of erotic intimacy. Not just in our books, not just in our minds, but with our bodies, with our time, and with our money. We embrace the dawn in our own lives. Boystown, with all its complications, with all of its fluctuations, is my home. I will no longer live in the darkness, but I will bring its lessons into the day.