Defining gay-friendly city as a space of resistance for Indonesian gays in Paris and Jakarta

Migration is associated with the search for a more permissive environment. By linking Paris as a place of attachment, the author sees that Paris in this case can be indicated as the “home” for Indonesian gays. The feeling of “full gay” is a feeling that they never get when they stay in Indonesia. That is why many Indonesian gays decide to move out of Indonesia in any way regardless of the difficulties they face in the destination country. This paper answer two questions: what do we understand by “Gay-friendly city”? And if we talk about Jakarta, “can Jakarta be categorized as a gay-friendly city”? The author interviewed eight Indonesian gays directly in Paris with the naturalistic paradigm and analyzed with the qualitative research, and what will be found in this paper is the narrative of the eight informants. It can be said that the Indonesian gays who have migrated to Paris do not feel that their lives have been wasted. They do diaspora by going to gay bars and participating in gay pride parades. What they feel is a feeling of freedom to be able to channel their gender and sexual expression, and they found that Paris as a gay-friendly city is a kind of space of resistance.

Gay Bars and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic public closure orders on business listings for gay bars. Recent studies have shown gay bars to be quite vulnerable, with listings showing a 36.6% decline between 2007 and 2019. To supplement historic data from comprehensive printed listings, the Damron Guide, we conducted a census of online business listings. We verified each listing in the 2019 edition, also searching for new bars that were not included in that version. Results show that gay bar listings declined by 15.2% between 2019 and Spring 2021. This compares, however, to a 14.4% decline for 2017 and 2019, indicating a surprisingly stable rate of decline. This stability may be a methodological artifact, but may also reflect the relative resources of surviving gay bars going into pandemic, and/or their continuing vulnerability and precarity.

There’s No Such Thing as a Gay Bar: Co-Sexuality and the Neoliberal Branding of Queer Spaces

Gay bars have historically functioned as communal spaces for the LGBTQ+ community. Because of neoliberalism, LGBTQ+ acceptance continues to rise as “post-gay’’ discourses, coupled with the inclusion of heterosexual audiences, have repositioned gay bars as inclusive spaces. In this study, we explore how the meaning of “gay bar” is communicatively negotiated. Specifically, we employed a co-sexuality lens with spatiality to understand how the “gay bar brand” is constructed and perceived. We used ethnographic methods including observation, 25 semi-structured interviews, and documents at two gay bars in a Midwestern college town. We demonstrate how gay bars, through neoliberal branding, reopened the meaning of gay bars as spaces for “all” sexualities. Three tensions emerged: (1) who gay bars are for (queer or general communities); (2) sexual autonomy (contested meanings around “safety” and “being yourself”); and (3) viable marketing (tension between “community” and “commodification”). This study contributes to the literature on sexuality, space, and branding by moving beyond utopian depictions of gay bars. Instead, it encourages scholars to understand the bars as destabilized and contested queer spaces.

Negotiating Organizational Identity: The Communicative Resilience of Small-Town Gay Bars

Gay bars historically functioned as the only space where LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer) people could escape intolerance and persecution. From drag shows to dancing to counterculture, gay bars are symbols of expression and hope for those misunderstood. In many ways, they are LGBTQ+ institutions that have withstood time. However, the rapid closing of gay bars coupled with Big D discourses of “post-gay,” “mainstream,” and “death of the gay bar” have threatened their existence. Much of these gay culture discourses stem from research on metropolitan cities (New York and San Francisco) with larger gay populations. Yet very few have examined how this experience affects gay bars in smaller cities with fewer LGBTQ+ spaces. Drawing on the communicative theory of resilience, I examined two gay bars in a small Midwestern city to understand how they (a) construct and negotiate their identity, and (b) manage organizational resilience in discursive and material ways. Findings and implications are discussed.

Acquainted Strangers: Thwarted Interaction in Digitally Mediated Urban Gay Bars

While some situations in sexual contexts facilitate interaction, others can make overtures difficult to negotiate. Furthermore, social media creates new challenges as individuals navigate sexualized spaces in an increasingly digital world. Drawing on fieldwork in Philadelphia gay bars and supplemental interviews with young gay club-goers, I find that men experience unexpected challenges that inhibit their ability to socialize with gay others and enact positive gay identities. I show how the social organization of particular bars, as well as the popularity of mobile dating applications, undermines the interactional accomplishment of positive outcomes such as identity affirmation and “having fun”: (1) men’s embodied work to evade effeminacy constrains their facial expressions, comportment, and speech; (2) gay bars’ multiple functions as sexual fields and community outposts render both social and sexual interaction difficult to initiate; (3) patrons struggle over whether and how to interact with other mobile dating app users, a novel social tie I conceptualize as acquainted strangers, in the bars. I discuss how these mechanisms—managing stigma corporeally, negotiating discrepant frames, and navigating ambiguous social ties—may thwart interactional achievements while reproducing inequalities in contexts beyond the gay bar.

Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.

Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small–city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small–city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red–state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small–city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big–city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

Spatial cultures of Soho, London. Exploring the evolution of space, culture and society of London's infamous cultural quarter

Space as affording social interaction is highly debated subject among various epistemic disciplines. This research contributes to the discussion by shedding light on urban culture and community organisation in spatialised ways. Providing a case of London’s famous cultural quarter, Soho, the research investigates the physical and cultural representation of the neighbourhood and relates it to the evolving socio-spatial logic of the area. Utilising analytical methods of space syntax and its network graph theories that are based on the human perception of space, the research narrates the evolution in spatial configuration and its implication on Soho’s social morphology. The method used examines the spatial changes over time to evaluate the shifting identity of the area that was in the past an immigrant quarter and presently a celebrated gay village. The approach, therefore, combines analytical methods, such as network analysis, historical morphology analysis and distribution of land uses over time, with empirical methods, such as observations, auto-ethnography, literature, and photographs. Dataset comprises of street network graphs, historical maps, and street telephone and trade directories, as well as a list of literature, and data collected by the author through surveys. Soho’s cosmopolitanism and its ability to reinvent over time, when viewed through the prism of spatial cultures, help understand the potential of urban fabric in maintaining a time-space relationship and organisation of community life. Social research often tends to overlook the relationship between people and culture with their physical environment, where they manifest through the various practices and occupational distribution. In the case of Soho, the research found that there was a clear distribution of specific communities along specific streets over a certain period in the history. The gay bars were situated along Rupert and Old Compton Street, whereas the Jewish and Irish traders were established on Berwick Street, and so on. Upon spatial analysis of Soho and its surrounding areas, it was found that the streets of Soho were unlike that of its surrounding neighbourhoods. In Soho, the streets were organised with a certain level of hierarchy, and this hierarchy also shifted over time. This impacted the distribution of landuses within the area over time. Street hierarchy was measured through mathematical modelling of streets as derived by space syntax. In doing so, the research enabled viewing spaces and communities as evolving in parallel over time. In conclusion, by mapping the activities and the spatiality of Soho’s various cultural inhabitants over three historical periods and connecting these changes to the changing spatial morphology of the region, the research highlighted the importance of space in establishing the evolving nature of Soho. Such changes are visible in both symbolic and functional ways, from the location of a Govinda temple on a Soho square street, to the rise and fall of culture specific landuses such as gay bars on Old Compton Street. The research concludes by highlighting gentrification as an example of this time-space relation and addresses the research gap of studying spaces for its ability to afford changeability over time.

The impact of age on gay consumers’ reaction to the physical and social servicescape in gay bars

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of physical servicescape, social servicescape and age on gay consumers’ evaluations of a LGBT advertisement of a gay bar of a gay bar. Design/methodology/approach A 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design was used to test the effects with a sample of gay males in the USA. Data were analyzed using ANCOVA and bootstrapping mediation. Findings Results of this study indicate a statistically significant three-way interaction effect of the two independent variables and age on the gay bar’s perceived LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender)-friendliness. Perceived friendliness mediated the effects of the independent variables on behavioral intentions. Furthermore, the mediation effect was moderated by the age cohort. Research limitations/implications The findings indicate a changing perception of gay servicescape between the older and younger gay men. Implications for hospitality managers are provided. Originality/value This research contributes to the servicescape literature by expanding the realm of research to gay servicescape and gay consumers, an emergent and more visible hospitality segment.