Why is it so hard to talk about sex and sexuality? In this crisp and compelling book, Amin Ghaziani provides a pithy introduction to the field of sexuality studies through a distinctively cultural lens. Rather than focusing on sex acts, which make us feel flustered and blind us to a bigger picture, Ghaziani crafts a conversation about sex cultures that zooms in on the diverse contexts that give meaning to our sexual pursuits and practices. Unlike sex, which is a biological expression, the word 'sexuality' highlights how the materiality of the body acquires cultural meaning as it encounters other bodies, institutions, regulations, symbols, societal norms, values, and worldviews. Think of it this way: sex + culture = sexuality. Sex Cultures offers an introduction to sexuality unlike any other. Its case-study and debate-driven approach, animated by examples from across the globe and across disciplines, upends stubborn assumptions that pit sex against society. The elegance of the arguments makes this book a pleasurable read for beginners and experts alike.
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“Gay enclaves face prospect of being passé.” This alarmist front-page headline in the New York Times predicted the demise of San Francisco’s Castro district – arguably the most famous gay neighborhood in the world. The journalist Patricia Leigh Brown lamented, “These are wrenching times for San Francisco’s historic gay village, with population shifts, booming development, and a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance.” The story describes how these local shifts mirror broader trends “where you are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population becomes slightly more urban.” One indicator is “the influx of baby strollers – some being pushed by straight parents, some by gay parents.” For residents of gayborhoods like the Castro, strollers symbolize that the area “has gone from a gay-ghetto mentality to a family mentality.”
The meanings of sexuality are upending from what they were just a generation ago when gay neighborhoods first formed. “Cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, KY; and Virginia Beach.” The demographer Gary Gates told Brown, “Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York. Now you can just go to Kansas City.”1 These changes are contentious. “We often clamored for equality where gay and straight could co-exist,” said gay Mayor John Duran of West Hollywood to Brown. “But we weren’t prepared to give up our subculture to negotiate that exchange.” Many residents agree. Amy Sueyoshi, a dean at San Francisco State University, describes her typical hangout spots in the Castro: “I’ve noticed more straight people making out at these places where I go deliberately to NOT feel like I am oppressed by heterosexuality. Really, straight people, do you HAVE to make out in the Castro as well? Good Lord.”2
In response to the conflicts, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society of Northern California hosted a roundtable session that urgently asked, “Are Gay Neighborhoods Worth Saving?” According to a press release for the event, the session reflected “an upsurge of dialogue about the potentially imperiled future” of gayborhoods across the country. Board member Don Romesburg cautioned that the meanings of a neighborhood arise within specific circumstances: “We tend to assume that[,] once created, queer neighborhoods will be self-sustaining. That’s not true . . . [O]ur neighborhoods get built within particular economic, political, and cultural circumstances. When those change, so do our neighborhoods.”3
What we see in the United States represents an international trend of reinventing urban sex cultures. In Toronto, the Gay Village used to be “the centre of the universe,” says a journalist writing for the National Post. Gay couples are still visible on the streets, but so are straight men and women. “Some are pushing baby carriages – a lot more than a decade ago.” Micah Toub, a journalist with the Globe & Mail, interviewed a real estate agent who noted, “I guess more people just feel like, ‘I don’t care if it’s a gay village, or any village – I want to be downtown.’”4
The noticeable numbers of straight bodies in the gay village of Montreal motivated Alexander Dunphy, the city’s official tourism blogger, to write a piece entitled “A Straight Friendly Guide to Montreal’s Gay Village.” Dunphy asks a poignant question that’s on a lot of people’s minds: “The Gay Village is rich in history, culture and concentrated fun. But is it only for us gays?”5 Residents of Vancouver’s Davie Village have noticed the same thing. In contrast to Dunphy’s perspective, many Vancouverites feel that the presence of straight people in their gayborhood forces them to “straighten up.”6 American and Canadian restlessness draws our attention to the disquieting question of whether we need gayborhoods anymore, especially to create and preserve queer cultures.
Across the pond, a story published in The Independent screamed at the straight people who were socializing in gay bars in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh: “Please keep out of gay bars and clubs. It’s uncomfortable to start snogging [kissing] on a dance floor and surface to find a hen [bachelorette] party staring in amazement.”7 Writing for The Guardian, Feargus O’Sullivan took his readers on a quick jaunt: “The waning of gay-identified neighbourhoods . . . is happening in Paris’ Marais, Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg and Munich’s Glockenbachviertel.” The gay and lesbian residents of these districts have not always welcomed their new straight neighbors with open arms. “Many locals have mobilized to protect their communities’ meeting points, but amid the fightbacks and general hand-wringing there’s also a sense of confusion.”8
Urban sex cultures are changing in Canada, France, Germany,the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere as more straight people move into gay neighborhoods while gays and lesbians fan out to other parts of the city. The cultural meanings of these migrations are fiercely debated. Consider an article called “The Party’s Over” which The Advocate published in 2016. The story focuses on twenty-six “dead (or dying) gay bars” in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. “Cities around the country, and globe, have seen many of their most beloved gay and lesbian watering holes close down – often after the area’s queer population diffuses or the owner simply gets priced out . . . [These bars] served as de facto community centers, offering a kind of glue that kept our disparate minority together.”9
Why do you think more straight people are moving into gayborhoods while gays and lesbians are leaving them?
What do you think gayborhoods teach us about how the meanings of sexuality are changing?
How does culture shape sex into sexuality in an urban environment?
Albuquerque, Berlin, El Paso, Kansas City, Key West, London, Los Angeles, Louisville, Manchester, Montreal, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, and West Hollywood: these are all culturally distinct places, yet they have something important in common. They show us that cities have become “a catalyst for homosexual activity” (Aldrich 2004: 1731). Scholars first took an interest in urban sex cultures during the early twentieth century. “The city was as much a sexual laboratory as a social one,” Heap (2003: 458) remarked in his review of scholarship produced by the esteemed Chicago School of Urban Sociology (see Park and Burgess 1925). In fact, “by 1938, Chicago sociologists’ association of homosexuality with particular urban spaces was so complete that Professor Burgess could expect students . . . to provide an affirmative answer to the true–false exam question, ‘In large cities, homosexual individuals tend to congregate rather than remain separate from each other’” (Heap 2003: 467).
So sweeping is the reach of sexuality in our lives that our discussion of the nexus of sex and culture could begin anywhere. I have chosen to start our conversation in the city, an important part of human history and our lives today. We have witnessed a staggering increase in urbanization over time. In 1800, only 3 percent of the entire world’s population resided in cities. By 1900 that number had jumped to 14 percent, and fifty years later 30 percent of the world’s population was living in an urban area. The World Health Organization reports that the urban population in 2014 made up 54 percent of the total global population. By 2045, the World Bank adds, the number of people who will live in cities will soar 1.5 times, to a stunning 6 billion – 2 billion more than the present day. The trend of urban population growth shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, and cities will become more central to our lives with each passing year.10
Cities are home to many neighborhoods, but here we will focus on the gayborhood. It is a topic of great personal interest, as I have been living in and writing about these districts for the better part of the past decade. More importantly for us, the gayborhood offers a concrete manifestation of those elements of our story that are not always so obvious. It is home to many urban sex cultures – an alchemy of bodies (especially those that desire other bodies of the same sex), customs (those that challenge heteronormativity and traditional ideas about sex and the family), commemorations (pride parades and street festivals), symbols (ranging from the rainbow flags that adorn the streets to strollers), institutions (bars, nonprofit organizations, gay-friendly churches), and histories (from the role of the Castro in helping to elect the first openly gay person to public office in California to Chicago becoming the first city in the world where the municipality used tax-funded dollars to mark its gay district). The gayborhood allows us to examine how these and other elements come together in one place – which often is just a few blocks long! – to create the abundance of cultural meanings that we call sexuality. Gay districts are clearly shaped by sex – imagine the pronounced presence of gay and lesbian bodies on the streets – and they embody ways of life, or cultures – from the bars that flourish there to the fights that break out over who is moving in and out. From that mixture, we can learn a great deal about sexuality.
Studying how sex and culture form sexuality in the city has the added advantage of allowing us to see how much things have changed over time. If culture evolves, as we know it does, so too must sexuality. This chapter will show that sex cultures are “a historical construct,” as Foucault (1978: 105–6) told us in the Introduction. Sex cultures animate the meanings we assign to our bodies, how we use them, the pleasures they bring to us, and the conflicts they cause – all in specific places and at specific moments in time. Focusing on the transformation of urban sex cultures will show us how an academic insight about the tides of history works on the ground in the city. To put all these ideas into play, we’ll review sex cultures in North American cities across three time periods: the closet era (1870 to World W...
