Intimacy collapse: Temporality, pleasure, and embodiment in gay hook-up app use

This article maps key tensions in contemporary, mediatized gay male sexual culture by focusing on hook-up app use. Based on data generated through a situated and visual interview technique, the paper gather experiences from hook-up app users in the U.K. Concerned with how understandings and usage of hook-up apps are bound up with normative evaluations of their ability to produce “good” intimacy, I suggest integrating analysis of practice and infrastructural capacities with critical intimacy theory. This is captured in the concept intimacy collapse of which I examine three types: one between immediacy and foresight, another between organic and representational pleasure objects, and a third between personal and social acts of looking. The analysis demonstrates that intimacy collapses in hook-up apps produce new (in)visibilities, anxieties and opportunities that are distributed unevenly across the disparate online cultures and identities that make up gay culture.

Da arqueologia à arquitetura: história e memória gay a partir da série “Hollywood”

O artigo aborda a história e a memória das pessoas gays a partir da série “Hollywood” (2020). De cunho hermenêutico, a interpretação do objeto de análise parte da reflexão sobre comunicação, temporalidades, história, sonhos e sua relação com a obra de arte. Para tanto, interroga a cronologia dos fatos ligados à história da homossexualidade e sua relação com o imaginário gay, considerando o parâmetro temporal e o estético, para compreender a narrativa em sua dimensão factual e fictícia, amparando-se nas contribuições de Foucault (2007), Freud (2006) e Latour (2019). Como resultado, ressalta a temporalidade diferenciada da obra de arte e sua contribuição para a construção identitária dos gays.From archeology to architecture: history and gay memory from the “Hollywood” seriesAbstractThe article addresses the history and memory of gay people from the series “Hollywood” (2020). With a hermeneutic nature, the interpretation of the object of analysis starts from the reflection on communication, temporalities, history, dreams and their relationship with the work of art. Therefore, it interrogates the chronology of facts related to the history of homosexuality and its relationship with the gay imagination, considering the temporal and aesthetic parameters, in order to understand the narrative in its factual and fictional dimension, based on the contributions of Foucault (2007), Freud (2006) and Latour (2019). As a result, it highlights the differentiated temporality of the work of art and its contribution to the construction of gay identity.Keywords: Gay culture; memory; history; time; “Hollywood” series.

Queering the Nigerian Cinema and Politics of Gay Culture

The advocacy for gayism and lesbianism in Nigeria is informed by transnational cultural processes, transculturalism, interculturalism, multiculturalism and globalisation. Although critical dimensions on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) are becoming recurrent subjects in Nigerian scholarship, scholarly works on LGBT, sexual identity and Nigerian cinema remain scarce. Perhaps, this is because of indigenous Nigerian cultural processes. While Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist cum socio-political activist, campaigns against marginalisation and subjugation of gays and lesbians and for their integration into the Nigerian cultural system, numerous African socio-cultural and political activists hold a view that is dialectical to Adichie’s. The position of the members of the anti-gay group was further strengthened with the institution of stringent laws against gay practice in Nigeria by the President Goodluck Jonathan led government in 2014. In recent times, the gay, bisexual, transgender and lesbian cultures have been a source of raw material for filmmakers. Some of the thematic preoccupations of films have bordered on questions such as: what does it mean to be gay? Why are gays marginalised? Are gays socially constructed? What is the future of the advocacy for gay and lesbian liberation in Nigeria? Although most Nigerian film narratives are destructive critiques of the gay culture, the purpose of this research is not to cast aspersion on the moral dimension of LGBT. Rather, I argue that films on LGBT create spaces and maps for a critical exploration of the gay question. While the paper investigates the politics of gay culture in Nigerian cinema, I also posit that gays and lesbians are socio-culturally rather than biologically constructed. This research adopts literary and content analysis methods to engage Moses Ebere’s Men in Love with reference to other home videos on the gay and lesbian motifs.

Wearing Pink in Fairy Town: The Heterosexualization of the Spanish Town Neighborhood and Carnival Parade in Baton Rouge

The Spanish Town parade is currently the largest Carnival parade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with hundreds of thousands of attendees dressed in pink costuming, cross-dressing, and wearing pink flamingo paraphernalia. This chapter traces the queer origins of the Spanish Town parade to the racially integrated bohemian gayborhood of Spanish Town in the 1980s. Using interviews, archival research, and participant observation, I argue that current LGBTQ residents of Baton Rouge, even those who have never lived in Spanish Town, claim a vicarious citizenship to the neighborhood and parade through an understanding of the queer origins of the parade in the 1980s and the parade’s beginning in a gayborhood. This vicarious citizenship is tempered by the heterosexualization of the contemporary Spanish Town parade. Although LGBTQ residents still attend the parade in large numbers, there is more ambivalence about the homophobic imagery in the parade and the consumption of gay culture by heterosexual parade participants.

Image of Indian Gay Culture in Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend

The Boyfriend is a novel by R.RajRao, he compares untouchability with homosexuality.Yudi, the protagonist is a freelance Journalist and secretly lives a bachelor gay life in Mumbai .In this novel Raj Rao neatly drawn the picture of caste, class, religion, masculinity and the gay cultural sub-group in India. Existence of Queer in society is highlighted in this book.