Feeling Normal

Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age

F. Hollis Griffin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253024473
• eBook ISBN: 9780253024596
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

An analysis of emerging LGBTQ+ media, queer spaces in urban areas, and sexual identity. The explosion of cable networks, cinema distributors, and mobile media companies explicitly designed for sexual minorities in the contemporary moment has made media culture a major factor in what it feels like to be a queer person. F. Hollis Griffin demonstrates how cities offer a way of thinking about that phenomenon. By examining urban centers in tandem with advertiser-supported newspapers, New Queer Cinema and B-movies, queer-targeted television, and mobile apps, Griffin illustrates how new forms of LGBTQ+ media are less "new" than we often believe. He connects cities and LGBTQ+ media through the experiences they can make available to people, which Griffin articulates as feelings, emotions, and affects. He illuminates how the limitations of these experiences—while not universally accessible, nor necessarily empowering—are often the very reasons why people find them compelling and desirable. "As a guide to emerging queer media of our new century, Hollis Griffin is funny, generous, passionate, and lucid. Whether he's explaining Grindr's memes or the gayborhoods of Chicago, cable travel programs or online networks, Griffin discovers how it feels to be queer in the digital age." —Amy Villarejo, author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire "Offers a piercing examination of modern identity politics focused on relationships among new forms of media consumption and marketplaces, urban centers, and the experiences of sexual minorities.... Feeling Normal is a must-read for scholars and students in queer studies and communication, media studies, film studies, and sociology." — Choice

1Cities as Affective Convergences

CONVENTIONAL DEFINITIONS OF “convergence” understand the term as a “coming together” in which disparate things merge. The term has an adjacent meaning in the field of media studies, wherein it connotes the ongoing shift from analog to digital production and distribution; the dispersal of audiences across multiple delivery technologies; and the finer, more specific appeals made to consumers by increasingly conglomerated media companies.¹ This chapter considers these definitions in tandem, using the first definition of convergence to think through the second, charting a historical trajectory that connects the processes of urbanization to more recent developments in media commerce related to digital technology. Across both understandings of convergence, bodies are placed in new relations with one another via the circulation of capital. In the instance of urban centers, patterns of use and exchange orient people in space: crowds coalesce on city streets, communities concentrate in neighborhoods, and strangers bump into each other on sidewalks and public transit.² Urbanization is a corporeal experience that has enabled the development of public cultures among sexual minorities.³ This chapter demonstrates that digital technologies converge audiences around media forms in similar ways. By doing so, it identifies a precedent for the courtship of sexual minorities as consumers that dates back to the advent of modernity.⁴

Using New York, Chicago, and San Francisco as case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the experiences available to sexual minorities in urban centers are similar to those offered to them by contemporary cinema, television, and online media. The processes by which sexual minorities form publics in urban centers feature a simultaneous dispersal and concentration, wherein publics can be found throughout cities, but cluster in particular locales.⁵ Businesses that target sexual minority consumers, especially nightlife businesses like bars and clubs, use multiple attractions to court customers, like special events and theme nights that stretch across multiple levels and numerous dance floors. This aggregation of attractions is how businesses attempt to create variety, diversifying the kinds of experiences they make available to patrons and thus potentially diversifying the publics that form in them. Aggregation is one way that businesses compete with one another, a necessity given the fact that they target overlapping demographics. In fact, marketplace competition is so intense in urban centers that many businesses struggle to generate enough revenue to remain in operation. To do that, they often specialize in the kinds of experiences they provide to patrons. Because customers are more likely to frequent establishments where they think they will enjoy themselves, businesses differentiate themselves from their competitors by promising specific kinds of attractions, creating identities that can be thought of as genres. Cavernous dance clubs, intimate martini lounges, and campy dive bars provide different experiences to consumers.⁶ But sexual minorities sometimes experience frustration with the opportunities for publicness available to them. As a result, online communities have developed in which people organize events where they crowd bars and clubs and usurp them, transforming the genres of publicness available to sexual minorities in urban centers.

These four patterns—dispersal and concentration, aggregation, marketplace competition, and genres—enable the formation of sexual minority publics by way of commerce, creating opportunities for sociality by bringing bodies together in city space.⁷ Similar patterns can be seen in media industry contexts, where gay and lesbian audiences convene around cinema, television, and online media. In both cities and media forms, the bodies that come together through the practices of commerce form shifting, multiple, overlapping publics.⁸ For all of the cultural mores that impel sexual minorities to come out of the closet, media criticism tends to imply private consumption, often framed in terms of individual spectatorship or group viewing.⁹ In contrast, cities demonstrate how commerce enables an array of experiences for sexual minorities in public spaces, putting them in contact with others like themselves. Because same-sex desires—as well as the identities and communities they help form—are so often realized via people’s circulation in public space, cities offer a framework for understanding the relationship between capital and affect found in all gay and lesbian media. Indeed, the public spaces of urban centers preexist the forms of sociality imagined in gay and lesbian cinema, television, and online media. Even as these ostensibly more “private” media have since proliferated, the publics that form in urban centers continue to operate via the patterns of commerce described here.

Moving between the terms “queer,” “sexual minority,” and “gay and lesbian” enables a differentiation of the diverse people who circulate in urban centers from the more limited ways the businesses that court them imagine target demographics. There is no single sexual minority public in any city, in any venue—just like there is no single subject position, nor is there one solitary, univocal audience. The convergence of sexual minorities in urban centers involves a tension between universals and particulars because the characteristics shared by individuals who form publics are not comprehensive. As a result, publics are structures in tension. Sexual minority publics feature heterogeneity in the form of gender, race, and class hierarchies. Thus, the sexual minority publics that converge in urban centers are embedded in systems of knowledge and power that are well established though always contested.¹⁰ Like the media forms they predate, cities make sensory pleasures available to sexual minorities, but they are not equally accessible to all.

Cities and Their Ephemera

This chapter uses magazines that court queer readers in two ways: (1) as evidence of the patterns of commerce that develop in urban centers, and (2) as a bridge that links those urban centers to media forms created and circulated in the context of digital production and distribution.¹¹ The chapter focuses on locally published, advertiser-supported publications that inform readers of events and attractions in different locations and on particular nights of the week. In New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, such publications are distributed in businesses that serve sexual minorities and are piled in kiosks in gay and lesbian neighborhoods. Many of the attractions advertised and reported on in the magazines are commercial, as in the instance of bars, clubs, and restaurants. At the same time, many of those attractions are not commercial in the conventional sense, as in the instance of community centers, nonprofit organizations, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender)-friendly churches, schools and universities, and so on. The magazines inform readers of the opportunities for entertainment, education, and community building available to them in cities, generating revenue by blurring advertising and editorial coverage of happy hours, neighborhood association meetings, charity benefits, and fetish parties. In each of the magazines, maps, event listings, and advertisements imagine the convergence of sexual minorities in public space. In essence, the magazines articulate urban centers as a collection of opportunities for personal agency and community belonging for their readers.

San Francisco’s Gloss, New York’s HX and Next, and Chicago’s Nightspots and Gay Chicago Magazine do not simply describe urban centers as entities formed by other means, but participate in their production at the level of discourse. The magazines demonstrate how the convergence of sexual minorities in urban centers is affective in nature: advertisements and articles gesture to the joy of meeting friends at a community event, the laughter precipitated by nightlife entertainment, the wet heat of sticky bodies on a dance floor. The magazines announce guest DJs and television screening parties alongside discounted drinks, free food, dancing, giveaways, and similar entertainments. As a result, they underscore how the publics comprised of sexual minorities that form in urban centers are enabled and shaped by the circulation of bodies in public space. Cities foster a multiplicity of such convergences by virtue of their magnitude, both in terms of their spatial areas and population densities.¹² The magazines provide evidence of how that multiplicity is both fostered and hemmed in by the very nature of the metropolis.

Because cities enable contact between strangers, historians cast them as fostering the creation of identities and communities related to nonnormative sexual desires. John D’Emilio credits the expansion of industrialization and the spread of wage labor that occurred with the advent of modernity with freeing sexuality from the necessity of procreation. He argues that modernity—specifically, the growth of “free labor” and the processes of urbanization—created “conditions that allow[ed] some men and women to organize a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex.”¹³ Agrarian economies in the pre-industrial United States featured a mode of production in which people most often lived and worked with their biological families. In contrast, the modes of production that first emerged in the context of modernity involved people living and working outside of—and often away from—their kin. These changes allowed people to work in contexts other than household economies and create attachments to others in ways that differed from familial networks. Building upon that idea, D’Emilio argues that cities are central to gay and lesbian history in the United States because the urban migrations characteristic of modernity made it possible for one’s “homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity.”¹⁴ Away from biological families, people sought out interpersonal connections in new ways, like participating in the communities that formed in their new urban environs. For people who experienced same-sex desire, the city precipitated a new set of relations between those desires, their notions of selfhood, and the means by which they forged relations with others. D’Emilio states that the Great Depression and World War II accelerated the pace and volume of these shifts, “severely disrupt[ing] traditional patterns of gender relations and sexuality and . . . creat[ing] a new erotic situation conducive to homosexual expression.”¹⁵ The legacy of these shifts can be seen in the locally published magazines that serve sexual minorities in urban centers.

Issues of gender, race, and class mitigate the applicability of urbanization as a historical trope for understanding sexual minorities and the publics they form. Jack Halberstam worries about the prevalence of cities as frames of reference in queer criticism, charging that there is a tendency among scholars to understand sexual desire and identity too simplistically via a set of city-centered, “metronormative” ideals.¹⁶ While cities are unevenly experienced by sexual minorities—many live there, others visit, some never go at all—they provide many attractions, employment opportunities, and community-building resources to these populations. However tenuous, the connection between homosexuality and urban centers is so trenchant in American culture that it frequently functions as little more than a diffuse set of references. This operation of discourse is perhaps seen mostly plainly in the stereotype of the effete, worldly homosexual with high socioeconomic status and well-developed cultural tastes.¹⁷ Such references construct a common sense that underscores the power relations implicit in all operations of discourse, where even considerable evidence to the contrary does not always lessen the veracity of their claims to truth.¹⁸ Not every queer urbanite can afford season tickets to the opera, and many would not even want them. While the magazines themselves make broad assumptions and come to easy conclusions about the ways that publics form in urban centers, this chapter highlights the discursive limits of the feelings of agency and belonging they make available to sexual minorities.¹⁹

In their mixture of reportage and promotion, the magazines feature the slippage of consumption and citizenship that is the hallmark of all gay and lesbian media. In a sense, the magazines make going out for cocktails a civic matter, where particular modes of consumption are imagined to provide readers with a sense of personal agency and cultural membership. While the analysis in this chapter might have included any number of locales, I chose New York, San Francisco, and Chicago because I could access the locally published, advertiser-supported publications that circulate there. Even though such magazines are published and distributed across the United States, they are infrequently archived and not often available in online databases. Given away for free and thrown away in bulk, the magazines examined in this chapter are at once ephemeral and omnipresent. So even though they are a common feature of queer life in urban centers, they are less likely to be stored and analyzed than more self-consciously political press.²⁰ Next, HX, Nightspots, Gay Chicago Magazine, and Gloss have historical roots in publications that circulated information about same-sex leisure and entertainment in other eras.²¹ Such magazines provided people who experience same-sex desire with information about the commercial attractions and community-building resources available to them in urban centers. Historically, these publications helped sexual minorities locate and patronize businesses where they could safely seek entertainment, education, and interpersonal connection.²²

In the early 1990s, the marketplace for magazines that publish content of interest to sexual minorities transformed considerably. During that period, sex-related advertis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Cities as Affective Convergences
• 2 The Aesthetics of Banality after New Queer Cinema
• 3 Cable TV, Commodity Activism, and Corporate Synergy (or Lack Thereof)
• 4 Toward a Queerer Criticism of Television
• 5 Wanting Something Online
• Afterword: #LoveWins
• Selected Bibliography
• Index