Gaydar Culture

Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age

Sharif Mowlabocus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754675358
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130864
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular culture has recognized urban gay men's use of the Web over the last ten years, with gay Internet dating and Net-cruising featuring as narrative devices in hit television shows. Yet to date, the relationship between urban gay male culture and digital media technologies has received only limited critical attention. Gaydar Culture explores the integration of specific techno-cultural practices within contemporary gay male sub-culture. Taking British gay culture as its primary interest, the book locates its critical discussion within the wider global context of a proliferating model of Western 'metropolitan' gay male culture. Making use of a series of case studies in the development of a theoretical framework through which past, present and future practices of digital immersion can be understood and critiqued; this book constitutes a timely intervention into the fields of digital media studies, cultural studies and the study of gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1
Introductions: The Personal, the Political and the Perverse

This book begins with the story of a man who is bored and horny. He comes home after a dissatisfying evening out with some friends, strides purposefully through his loft apartment and sits in front of his computer. A dial-up modem springs to life, with its familiar crackle of white noise and atonal bleeping, and the man clicks on a browser icon before selecting ‘Gaymanchestersex’ from a drop-down list. Soon he is gazing at the screen in front of him, scrutinising thumbnail images as he scrolls down a webpage. He clicks on the hyperlink for ‘Goodfuk’… the screen slowly displays an image of a naked man (head cropped from the photo) as it downloads via the modem. ‘Oh yes!’ the man purrs to himself, smiling as he gazes at the body appearing on his monitor. He types ‘Apartment 16 Mariner’s Court’ into the chat programme that fills the rest of the screen. ‘On my way:-)’ comes the reply a few moments later. It is Britain, 1999. The man’s name is Stuart, and this is Russell T. Davies’ landmark television series, Queer As Folk.

I begin with this story for several reasons but not because this story represents some kind of genesis moment for the project that has since become this book. To my mind, no such origin story exists for this research and I am sorry to say that I cannot remember the point at which investigating gay men’s digital culture first became a concrete idea for me. Instead, I start with this story because it resonates with my object of study on a number of levels. Firstly, Queer As Folk (the original series) is British, and while it speaks to, and holds an appeal for, international audiences, the British-ness of Davies’ series cannot be underplayed. In an area of research that often stumbles over concepts such as ‘cultural specificity’ and ‘national identity’ (though this has started the change over the last five years) the nationality of this project is similarly important. Much of what I write about in what follows, and many of the conclusions I draw, undoubtedly resonate far beyond the borders of this sceptred isle. The gay male subculture portrayed in the TV series is inflected with international tones (be it the red ribbon of AIDS awareness, the music, the references to international travel and non-British gay male characters), and the case studies that inform this research are similarly coloured with, and shaped by, an increasingly global understanding of gay male subculture. But the roots of each project are bound up with the social, political and cultural history of British gay male subculture. This will become more evident in Chapter 2, when I chart the specific historical context in which gay men in Britain first encountered the Internet.

The second similarity between the TV series and this book lies in their shared recognition of gay male subculture as being something that is both physical and ‘virtual’. Furthermore, both projects acknowledge that these two concepts are not discrete but pervade one another, with digital communications often structuring physical practices, identities and experiences. When I began thinking about gay men’s digital culture, around 2001, much of the academic discourse on ‘cyberculture’ or ‘new media’ posited online worlds as being an escape from, or a response to, offline contexts, problems and obstacles. This is perhaps best exemplified in what Campbell (2004: 10) describes as the ‘disembodiment thesis’. Like Campbell, I found myself reading the work of Bruckman (1993), Rheingold (1994), Jones (1995) and Turkle (1995) but struggled to see how their conclusions regarding disembodiment, gender play and virtual life married with what my friends and I were getting up to online – and, just as importantly – offline. I shall return to Campbell’s work shortly but I mention it here in order to support my argument that gay men’s digital culture has always had an intense relationship with other spheres of gay male life, and that this has often stood in opposition to assumptions and ideas of cyberculture propagated within mainstream academic commentary.

Finally, and leading on from this point, I would argue that both Davies and I see gay male digital culture as being an embodied – and erotic – experience. The image that downloads onto the computer screen in the story above is of the guy who turns up at Stuart’s door later in the episode. The image that downloads is a naked image of that guy and Stuart’s sole purpose for going online is to find someone to have sex with. I am not suggesting that gay men only use digital ICTs for sex, and I am not suggesting that this is Davies’ opinion either. But a discourse of sex permeates gay male digital culture and serves to frame our experiences of digital spaces in very particular ways, and with particular consequences. This is a theme I return to in detail later, in Chapter 3 and in many ways this assertion structures much of what is to come.

This book explores gay male digital culture from a British perspective and, in doing so, it offers a series of case studies that highlight how issues of identity, sexual practice, politics, sexual health and space are being addressed, explored and reconfigured via a range of digital platforms, texts and acts. The challenge of investigating gay male digital culture, and its relationship to contemporary British gay male subculture, appears at first sight to be unmanageable. The forms and spaces of this culture, for instance, are too numerous to identify beyond the most cursory of categorisations (lifestyle, pornographic, health, financial, legal, political etc.). Even then, such categorisations become unstable almost immediately as health websites adopt pornographic vernaculars and lifestyle websites include financial information or involve a discussion of economic factors. Alongside this question of how to tackle such an investigation is the question of how to undertake such research within the context of wider material gay male subculture. My aim is not to provide a taxonomy of gay men’s digital culture. Instead, I have chosen to explore specific instances of this digital culture, in order to illustrate what I perceive to be some of the key themes that pervade gay men’s digital lives. These themes have only recently received coverage in academic writing on digital culture, and as such, this book seeks to make a critical intervention within this field. When I began researching this area of digital culture there was only a small amount of literature dedicated to this subject. I shall provide a brief overview of some of this shortly, but for now, I turn to one of the first articles that I came across, and which, for many years, has provided the motivation for my research and continuing line of enquiry.

Back in 2000, when digital culture was still in its infancy – a time when bandwidths were narrow and domestic internet connections in the UK were most commonly made through dial-up modems – Schwartz and Southern (2000) published an article in a special edition of the Journal of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. Their paper discussed the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies by (amongst others) men who have sex with men. In line with the journal editor’s own research, this study suggested a queering of these new forms of communication:

Cybersex has much in common with the tea-room. Anonymous persons engage in easily accessible ritualized behaviour that leads to impersonal, detached sexual outlet. (128)

Judging by the title of the journal, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that ‘tearoom trade’1 and cybersex were coded by both the editor and the contributors as deviant behaviour. It is also unsurprising that the link between gay male sexuality and sexual compulsion was re-enforced and maintained throughout the journal. This is, of course, not to suggest that the articles in this special edition were methodologically flawed. Reading the journal, one is left in little doubt that gay men are indeed using the CMC for sexual purposes in disproportionate numbers compared to other social groups.

Yet it must also be recognised that in identifying the gay men of their study as sexually abnormal, studies such as this one continue to measure such abnormality in relation to heteronormative standards. It has been one of the successes of the international gay rights movement to have homosexuality removed from the World Health Organisation’s register of mental illness (Mind, online)2 and the journal does not posit homosexual sex, per se, as deviant. However, the removal of homosexual sex from the register has not precipitated a qualitative re-evaluation of homosexuality. It may no longer be acceptable to label homosexuality a perversion, but the practices, cultures and identities that are constructed around same-sex desire continue to be considered contrary to a ‘regular’ heterosexuality, which itself is regarded as fixed; a central point around which all other sexualities orbit.

To illustrate this point, consider the following incident, which happened in the same year that Schwartz and Southern published their article. A 32-year-old man, let’s call him David, a regular on his local gay scene, went out one Friday evening to a club in the gay village. Towards the end of the night, David plucked up the courage to speak to someone (we’ll call him Anthony) he’d previously made eye contact with on the dance floor. They began to make small talk. Sadly their night could not continue into the small hours as David had an early start the following morning. It was already late and, contrary to his desires, he could not pursue the evening any further. Not wanting to seem uninterested, he asked for Anthony’s phone number, to which Anthony replied with a single word. Seeing the puzzled look on David’s face, he added ‘its my username, you know, on Gaydar. Look me up and message me if you want to get together’. The next morning, at work, David looked up Anthony’s profile. He learned about his likes and dislikes, about what he enjoyed doing, and why he was living in Britain (Anthony was originally from Greece). He then messaged Anthony and suggested they meet up. They dated for six passionate months before Anthony’s visa ran out and he returned home.

This anecdote (one of the many I have been lucky enough to collect over the last ten years) exemplifies gay men’s investment in digital media technologies, and as such it lends further credence to the claims made by the psychologists mentioned above. But it also reveals the hegemonic processes at work within the conclusions of the cybersex studies and identifies the cultural assumptions inherent in such work. Schwartz and Southern saw gay men’s use of the Internet as negative, labelling it anti-social, disruptive to (monogamous) relationships and hindering the user’s ability to form new (lasting) relationships. By contrast, David’s experience identifies gay men’s use of the Internet as positive, helping to bring gay men together, allowing them to negotiate issues of (safer) sex and sexual preferences and providing a space outside of a bar or club in which they can get to know one another better. Lastly, and within the context of this book, perhaps most importantly, these two differing perspectives serve to demonstrate the failure of the psychologists to contemplate the relationship that exists between physical space and digital space. The anecdote, I believe, underscores the importance of examining gay men’s digital culture within the wider contexts of contemporary gay male subculture as it is experienced, challenged and conceptualised today.

Addressing such discrepancies between popular understandings of gay male digital culture and (normative) academic discourse on new media is one of the primary incentives for writing this book, and manifests itself as a central tension throughout. Considering the fact that a fair percentage of those writing about the Internet have forged their academic identities in a melting pot of disciplines including cultural studies, media studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, cultural geography, history and fine art, it is somewhat surprising to find that the new discipline of ‘Internet Studies’ (just one of its nom de plumes) has often suffered from an impaired awareness of its own cultural position, its own cultural privilege. This impairment is now being acknowledged and addressed by some of those working within the field, yet it remains the case that the vast majority of papers, chapters, books and conferences dedicated to digital culture and people’s use of CMC lack a sense of self-reflexivity, remaining unaware of the specific cultural position(s) from which they speak.

Negotiating this discrepancy is therefore one of the central motivations behind this book and underpinning the research documented in the following chapters is a desire to marry the abstract with the material: academic discussion with lived reality. This is reflected in the case studies, all of which are rooted within specific social, economic and cultural environments. It is apparent in the second chapter, which spends relatively little time talking about computing and a lot of time talking about the history of British gay male subculture. It also influences the research methodology, which draws from a wide variety of disciplines, employs numerous (and sometimes conflicting) theoretical frameworks, and relies on rigorous academic analysis but not at the expense of personal and cultural experience.

This last point warrants expansion, not least to allay the fears of those who, reading this, are already wondering whether this book is anything more than a series of anecdotes, rumours, stories and gossip. While I consider such informal forms and networks of knowledge as being every bit as important as the critical theory that I employ to discuss and interrogate them, they are by no means the book’s methodological mainstay. However, it is necessary to position my own subjectivity within this body of work, not least because it is the other motivation behind my research. Living in what is often referred to as Britain’s ‘gay capital’, Brighton, for over ten years, I experienced first-hand the changes brought about by new forms of communication, especially those that operated via the World Wide Web. Where once cruising for sex in the ‘rainbow city’ meant standing on a freezing cold seafront for hours, by the 2000s this term had expanded to include sitting at home, logging on to a website, chatting to someone on IRC and then (depending on who was more eager) either jumping on a bus to get to their flat or waiting around for them to turn up at yours. Despite gloomy predictions that the Web would eradicate traditional cruising grounds, the briefest of walks along Hove Lawns or down to Duke’s Mound on a summer’s evening will illustrate that these are by no means redundant spaces, and have not been vacated by men seeking sex with other men. However, the introduction of firstly domestic and then mobile Internet access, has served to build upon traditional notions of cruising, and similar changes have occurred across gay male subculture as a result of digital ICTs.

Having witnessed these changes first-hand, together with the burgeoning wealth of popular cultural references to gay men’s relationship to digital media, I was surprised to find a comparative dearth of academic comment about the intersection between gay/queer culture and cyberspace. The literature that did exist when I began my research bore little relationship to the spaces that my friends and acquaintances, indeed that I, inhabited online. While television series such as Sex in the City and Queer As Folk3 referenced gay male web spaces similar to those popular in British gay male subculture, queer studies of the Internet were exploring MUDs, homo-themed chat rooms and queer diasporic websites. None of these studies were wrong, indeed, their findings are useful, not least because they made in-roads into what was a heterosexually dominated discipline. But rarely did any of them discuss ‘popular’ websites, and rarely did their authors analyse websites that have become a part of British gay culture. Wakeford (1997: 26) commented that ‘in recent years the World Wide Web has become the most prominent focus of many cyberqueer activities’ yet there remained a disparity between the popularity of the web amongst gay male consumers and academic discussion of the spaces, activities, identities and practices that make it so popular. Furthermore, much of the first-wave of cyberstudies that I came across did not seem to grasp the fact that the web has always been used by gay men as a means by which physical interaction could be sought, negotiated and organised. Gay men’s digital spaces have historically provided an environment in which offline intimacies can be facilitated.

The word ‘I’ runs through this book, since to try and remove myself from this analysis would not only be difficult, it would mar the structure of the research. Without the ‘I’, without my own subjectivity present in this research, many of the oscillations between opposing ideas, many of the arguments over gay men’s use of digital media, and many of the conclusions that I draw from the case studies would not have been possible. When people learn of my research they generally react in one of two ways. They either smirk, ‘clarify’ my statement for me by saying ‘so you’re ‘researching’ gay porn then?’ and go on to tell me their own stories of digitally-enhanced love, sex and infidelity, or they ask me the question that I hate answering: ‘so is it doing us any good or not?’ I hate this question not because I think it is invalid, or too simplistic or flippant. In many ways it is the question that studies such as this one seek to explore and, in some small way, answer. No, I abhor this question, not because of its content but because I never have the time to answer it properly.

The context in which the question is proffered is rarely conducive to a response that incorporates feminist psychoanalysis and Foucauldian discourse theory. Or one that utilises Kappeler’s work on pornographic representation and Barthes’ discussion of photography. My questioner would likely walk away long before I completed the review of existing cyberqueer literature and a contextual discussion of gay male culture, which I would need to give to in order to frame my response. By the time I got to discussing various practices and spaces that exist within gay male digital culture, not only would my unwitting discussant have made his exit, doubtless the majority of people nearby would have also vacated the room. Alongside the ‘political’ motivation identified above, then, the opportunity to consider the implications of this kind of question before offering some form of reasoned and informed answer forms the personal motivation behind this book, and perhaps also goes some way to explaining my own position in relation to my research.

Mapping the terrain: Writing (on) gay men’s digital culture

This book offers a critical discussion of gay men’s digital culture and in doing so it builds on, extends and responds to existing work focused at the intersection of sexual dissidence and cyberculture. Writing on gay/queer men’s use of new media technologies has grown steadily over the last fifteen years and as early as 1997, Shaw was examining the text-based world of gay Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Even at this point, there was clear evidence that gay men were adept at, and active in using, digital media to search for, chat to, and meet other men. Shaw refers to a 1994 list, published in Wired magazine, which lists three gay channels within the top ten most populated chat rooms on AOL. He goes on to conclude that:

For some, IRC is mere entertainment, For others it has been an integral part of their coming-out process and the formulation of a gay identity … Most of the men in the online gay community found IRC through another member and all had introduced at least one other friend to the community. They all want to meet other gay men, and most posit CMC as the only alternative to a gay bar. Thus, for the gay men participating in CMC, the virtual experiences of IRC and real-life experience share a symbiotic relationship; that is, relationships formed within the exterior gay community lead the users to the interior CMC gay community, where they, in turn, develop new relationships which are nurtured and developed outside the bounds of CMC. (143)

Shaw’s work on gay CMC is arguably the first to directly focus on gay men’s digital culture and in many ways this book can be seen as both an extension of, and a response to, his 1997 article. Perhaps one of the most interesting observations to be made of here is the awareness Shaw demonstrates of the relationship existing between ‘offline’ gay culture and ‘online’ gay life. He posits a ‘symb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introductions: The Personal, the Political and the Perverse
• 2 Contexts and Frameworks: British Gay Male Subculture – 1984 and Beyond
• 3 Cybercarnality: Identifying a Critical Pathway through Gay Men’s Digital Culture
• 4 ‘From the Web Comes a Man’: Profiles, Identity and Embodiment in Gay Dating/Sex Websites.
• 5 Cruising the Cybercottage
• 6 Bareback Sex Online: Knowledge, Desire and the Gay Male Body
• 7 Digital Cruising: Mobile and Locative Technologies in Gay Male Subculture
• 8 Conclusion: Some Final Thoughts on Gay Men’s Digital Culture
• Bibliography
• Index