The (Not So) Straight Facts About Hoton | My Gay Hoton

Contents:

• GAY CISG SPOTS
• PLAC TO GAY CISE NEAR ME
• GAYT PLAC IN TEXAS FOR 2020
• GUI TO GAY BARS HOTON

GAY CISG SPOTS

Mart Leve ed spot maps of bars and cisg grounds to substantiate a "gay ghetto"; Jen Jack Giekg analyzed dividuals' "mental maps" of queer space; Am Ghaziani criqued the enclave theory of "gayborhoods" favor of what he terms "cultural archipelagos.

"2Mart Leve, "Gay Ghetto, " Gay Men: The Soclogy of Male Homosexualy, ed. Yvette Taylor and Michelle Addison (London: Palgrave Maclan, 2013), 178–200; Am Ghaziani, There Go the Gayborhood?

As Hoton's Montrose neighborhood me to be intified as a "gayborhood" between 1960 and 1980, archival evince shows that cisg narrativ played a powerful role that intifitn. Cisg is also associated strongly but not exclively wh gay men. Rather, ntemporary popular culture, high art, lerature, pornography, and vernacular speech ntue to reproduce face-to-face cisg public as part of a globally available gay sexual vobulary and social practice.

PLAC TO GAY CISE NEAR ME

Through documentg the disparate works of people who me to meet on Hoton's cisg grounds—tentnal sex-seekers, crimals explog stigmas attached to gay sex, ambivalent law enforcement officials, area nizens, and perhaps ially naïve passersby—I argue that the social distributn of knowledge about cisg illtrat that queer terrori functned part bee some who do not intify as "queer" also imaged those terrori as nnected to queer liv. Leve borrows four creria om the soclogists Robert Park and Louis Wirth to asss the stat of a "gay ghetto": stutnal ncentratn, culture area, social isolatn, and rintial ncentratn. His "exploratory fieldwork" nsisted of walkg around neighborhoods observg gay life and talkg wh gay people, activi que parallel to cisg self.

" That multiplicy of spac grounds his proposal "that we redirect the study of sexualy and space away om our preexistg assumptns of spatial sgulary—evced by a steady stream of publitns about dividual gay districts—toward a cultural archipelagos mol of spatial pluraly. Durg the twenty-year span centered on the 1969 Stonewall rts New York, cisg narrativ Hoton exhib a multiplicy of opns about a multiplicy of spac, even as public awarens of the Montrose neighborhood as "gay" solidified both lolly and natnally.

GAYT PLAC IN TEXAS FOR 2020

To unrstand better how Montrose shifted om that ele suburb to a "gayborhood, " I began a project 2014 spired by Leve's spot maps.

GUI TO GAY BARS HOTON

Historil queer advertisg ually picts that clientele as gay men and lbians, often but not always as separate populatns rather than a sgle market. Here, "tertg" served as for "gay"; the words "gay" and "homosexual" never appear the League's program, even though the drag event raised money to help those arrted raids on gay bars. While such a 1950s bar uld be any of those Carl Wtman laments his "Gay Manifto, " the 1980's bar I mentn here is que specific.

Also, attendg only to bars and bs n skew our perceptn of queer space along class-flected l; profsnal middle-class and upper-class lbians and gays chewed the bar scene as dangero for some time, even as recently as the 1990s. In Hoton, that pattern stctured the Dianas, an almost exclively whe, upper-middle-class social anizatn of mostly gay men that origated 1953 as an Amy Awards watch party a private home.

See also John Howard's eded volume Carry' On the Lbian and Gay South (New York: NYU Prs, 1997).