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STAGES OF SEXUALITY:
PERFORMANCE, GAY MALE IDENTITY, AND PUBLIC SPACE(S)
Heath A. Diehl
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College o f Bowling Green

State University in partial fulfillment o f
the requirements for the degree o f
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
August 2000
Committee:
Vivian M . Patraka, Advisor
Emily Freeman Brown

Graduate Faculty Representative
Ellen E. Berry
Simon Morgan-Russell
David Roman
W 02 0 1 6
UMI Number: 9995028
Copyright 2000 by
Diehl, Heath A.
All rights reserved.
___ ®
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UMI Microform 9995028
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P.O. Box 1346
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© 2000
Heath A. Diehl
All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
Vivian M. Patraka, Advisor
Stages o f Sexuality argues that the lived spatial experiences o f Generation X gay
men are characterized by a profound sense o f homelessness (a psychic/material condition
distinguished by social dissociation, restricted social mobility, and invisibility to the public
gaze). In each o f the four chapters o f this study, I explore the cultural/sexual/generational
politics o f a single site at which young gay male identities are produced/performed to gain
an extended understanding o f how spatial practices can facilitate a more equitable
distribution o f the social order and reveal less restrictive alternatives for how young gay
men inhabit that order.
Chapter 1 suggests that the spectatorial positioning o f visitors to the NAMES
Project AIDS Quilt rehearses the historical and ideological frameworks through which the
category o f “young gay man” simultaneously has been produced as a subject and subjected
to regimes o f power external to himself. Chapter 2 argues that enactments o f cruising in
gay bathhouses not only are structured by contemporary discourses around rapidly rising
rates o f HTV-infection but also provide a model for how young gay men can write/live a
less generationally-factioned history o f the AIDS epidemic. Chapter 3 maintains that
young gay men’s engagements w ith the technologies o f telephone sex both participate in
the traffik o f our bodies (as fetish and abjection) and potentially uncover alternative forms
o f embodiment and intimacy. And Chapter 4 contends that tearoom sex, which typically
perpetuates regimes o f ageism and generational tensions within gay communities, provides
the tools for building and sustaining politically viable collectives across traditionally
divisive borders o f difference.
At the heart o f the study is a search for home, a search tempered by the knowledge
that home is both kaleidoscopic and Active, not the place we come from but the places to
which we endlessly return. Ultimately I suggest that while young gay men are always and
only “halfway home”—trapped between competing discourses o f ageism and
homophobia—we continue to press our bodies against social space both w ith caution and
determination because those actions m atter to our personal/political survival.
For Gary, ju s t because,
and
fo r “the boy, ”
m y muse and constant companion.
I wrote these wordsfo r everyone/ Who struggles in their yo u th / Who
w on’t accept deception/ Instead o f w hat is truth/ I t seem s we lose the
gam e/ B efore we even start to p la y / Who made these rules? We ’re so
confused/ E asily led astray/ L et me te ll y a th a t/ Everything is everything/
Everything is everything/ A fter w inter m ust come sp ring / E verything is
everything. . . . Som etim es it seem s/ We ’11 touch that dream / B ut things
come slow or not a t a ll/ A nd the ones on top, w on’t make it sto p / So
convinced th a t they m ightfa ll/ L e t’s love ourselves then we ca n ’t fa il/ To
make a better situation/ Tomorrow, ou r seeds w ill grow / A ll we need is
dedication. . . . Change, it com es eventually —Lauryn H ill, “E verything
is Everything ’’ The M iseducation o f Lauryn H ill
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“You’ve been so kind and generous. I d o n ’t know how you keep on giving.
F or your kindness, I ’m in debt to you. F or your selflessness, my
adm iration. For everything y o u ’ve done, you know I ’m bound. . . I ’m
bound to thank you fo r it. ” —Natalie M erchant, “K ind and Generous, ”
O phelia
I never forget that books and lives are not w ritten completely alone. Some o f the
people below have helped me with gifts o f knowledge and advice, some with personal
support and friendship, many with touches o f both.
Sincere appreciation is expressed to my advisor, Dr. Vivian M . Patraka, for her
constant direction and encouragement from the project’s initial stages to its completion.
Special thanks also are extended to committee members—Drs. Ellen E. Berry, Simon
Morgan-Russell, Emily Freeman Brown, and David Roman—for their helpful suggestions
and criticisms throughout the development o f the research and writing. Others who have
contributed greatly to this project by taking time to read and critique portions o f it include
Angela Athy, Carl Holmberg, Kathy Farber, and Lisa Wolford. Finally, I am grateful to
the Departm ent o f English at Bowling G reen State University for generously awarding me
a non-service fellowship to enable the completion o f this project.
M y deepest respect and sincerest appreciation to Marsha W ard for her infinite
wisdom and unflagging encouragement and support which have served as a guiding force
throughout my life; to Gary Thurman, for enduring my (sometimes violent) mood swings
good-naturedly, for understanding (even when he didn’t), and for always being there at
the end o f the day to say “Goodnight, hon” (our relationship has been an old-fashioned
love song from the moment we met); to Scooter, “the boy,” for frequently nudging me
with his cold, w et nose to remind me o f the world outside o f my office; to Annie Adams
for being an ideal friend and colleague—sm art, generous, supportive, and always painfully
honest—and for all the dances, buttery nipples, and good times; to K ara Jennings, for
spending many hours debating the meaning o f life, the nature o f love, and the value o f
politically-minded work with me over breakfast at Kermit’s; to Carrie (Roth) Kruse for
listening with patience and compassion when I desperately needed to “come out”; to Ellen
Berry, an exemplary career model (to which I always will aspire), for teaching me to think
theoretically and for reminding me o f the consequences o f doing so; to Sharon A.
Showman for imparting to me her deep sense o f conviction and strength o f character; and
to Nadirah, Sylvia, and Desiree for reminding me that “style” is a crucial part o f being
Queer.
Some o f this writing demanded more o f me that I could find alone, and I have been
fortunate to be supported by an extraordinary group o f people who had the courage not to
abandon me when I faltered along the way. Sara Webb-Sunderhaus; Angela Athy; Becky
Becker; Carl Holmberg; Peter Saccio; Jon Fraser; Eric Severson; Lionel Walsh;
Noreen Bames-McLain; Norma Bowles; Linda Eisenstein; Bob Schanke; Jill Van
Brussel; Darius O. Williams; Emily Lanik-Parr; Theresa Bushman; Lisa Fiorelli;

Elisabeth Showalter; Ellen Larabee; and Dawn Shaffer. To enumerate their individual
gifts would constitute another volume, so I will simply say that each in her or his own way
gave me something absolutely indispensable, for which I am forever deeply grateful.
Finally, to all the “boys” I’ve loved before: Frank, David, Kevin, Michael, Tom,
Jason, Chris, Jon and, o f course, Gary. You made this a journey worth taking.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................1
Surveying the Terrain.................................................................................................... 5
Breaking Ground.......................................................................................................... 13
CHAPTER I. PERFORMING (IN) THE GRAVE: SCHIZOPHRENIC
SUBJECTIVITIES AND THE NAMES PROJECT AIDS QUILT....................................17
Introduction................................................................................................................... 17
The Quilt: An Origin Story........................................................................................ 23
“See The Quilt and Understand”................................................................................ 25
See the Quilt and (M is-)Understand...........................................................................30
Resisting Pathology/Pathologizing Resistance.......................................................... 41
Conclusion....................................................................................................................50
CHAPTER H. (RE-)CONSTRUCTING “A PLACE WHERE HISTORY HURTS”:
GAY BATHHOUSES, AIDS AMNESIA, AND TRAUMATIC HISTORY.....................51
Introduction...................................................................................................................51
“AIDS Amnesia” and the Politics o f Forgetting........................................................ 55
“Wrapped in a Timeless Cocoon”.............................................................................. 61
Closing the Baths.......................................................................................................... 66
Architectural Nostalgia................................................................................................69
Writing Traumatic History.......................................................................................... 73
Conclusion....................................................................................................................77
X
CHAPTER m . “REACH OUT, REACH OUT AND TOUCH M YSELF’: BODIES,

TECHNOLOGIES, AND PERFORMATTVTTY ON GAY MALE TELEPHONE SEX
LINES........................................................................................................................................ 81
Introduction-.................................................................................................................. 81
Refashioning the Body/Reconfiguring the “Live”..................................................... 86
Disciplining the Body................................................................................................... 88
Refashioning the Body/Reconfiguring the Live (Reprise)....................................... 92
Perfbrming/Perfbrmativrty in the Virtual Live............................................................96
Conclusion................................................................................................................... 101
CHAPTER IV. “KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN, EXPECT THE WORST, AND HANDLE
IT ON YOUR OWN” : POST-GAY POLITICS/TEAROOM TRADE/STRATEGIC
COLLECTIVES...................................................................................................................... 104
Introduction................................................................................................................. 104
Toward a Politics o f the Personal............................................................................. 109
Broken Lineages/Ungrateful Sons.............................................................................116
Enacting Sexual Dissent/Building Strategic Collectives......................................... 124
Conclusion................................................................................................................... 129
CONCLUSION: LAST DANCE..........................................................................................133
Introduction................................................................................................................. 133
There’s No Place Called “Home”..............................................................................134
Spatial Practices/Identity Politics..............................................................................136
Spaces that M atter......................................................................................................138
“Home is the place you get to, not the place you came from”............................... 139
ENDNOTES........................................................................................................................... 141
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................... 158
1
INTRODUCTION
“Home is the place you g et to, not the place you came from . ” —P aul
M onette, Halfway Home, p . 262
Since the first time I watched The Wizard o f Oz (1939) at age seven, I have
wanted to ow n a pair o f ruby red slippers like those worn by the film’s protagonist,
Dorothy GaeL N ot because I have a fetish for women’s shoes. N ot because I have a
penchant for drag. I wanted to own a pair o f those slippers because, for a gay kid
growing up on the cusp o f Appalachia, they offered a pinch o f style and a splash o f
resistance in a world densely populated by flannel shirts, blue jeans, and work boots.
Those slippers also held the allure o f being able to convey me to a haven o f shelter, love,
and happiness, to transport me home, w ith ju st three clicks o f my heels. Never having felt
a sense o f belonging in my hometown o f Chillicothe, Ohio, I, like Dorothy, pined away
daily for that mythical, magical “somewhere”—a somewhere which “wasn’t a dream,” but
which was “a real truly live place.” Somewhere promised not only to arm me with the
pithy affirmation that “There’s no place like home,” but also to provide me a stable point
o f reference (i.e., a home in Kansas) from which to make such comparisons. In many
ways, then, those slippers were my ticket home.
Although I have yet to own a pair o f those slippers, in the fell o f 1994 during my
senior year as an undergraduate at Bluffton College, I did travel to Oz. N ot the “merry
old land o f Oz” o f celluloid feme, but a gay bar called “Somewhere in Time” (a clever play
on the title o f Dorothy’s song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”). Located on the fringe
o f downtown Lima, Ohio, the bar inched me out o f the closet and launched me on a quest
down the yellow brick road in search o f “my ow n heart’s desires.” Along the way, I
formed attachments with a few Glenda-the-good-witches (gay mentors), cowardly lions
(my first boyfriend, Frank), and brainless scarecrows (my buddy, David) and I learned to
avoid the advances o f heartless tin men (the pretty boys) and flying monkeys (the trolls).
Transfixed by the Technicolor hues o f a pulsating strobe and seduced by the seemingly
2
never-ending pounding o f a techno beat, I finally felt a sense o f belonging and rootedness
among like-minded individuals.
Unfortunately, I soon realized that my Somewhere had neither the endurance nor
the stability o f Dorothy’s Kansas, that this space remained inhabitable only for as long as
the music continued to stream from the speakers, the cocktails continued to be served, and
the ugly lights continued to be dimmed. While I w as excited by the prospect o f having
Somewhere to reside (at least momentarily), that excitement always was tempered by the
feet that this home was a fiction, a mere stopping point on a journey without a fixed,
singular destination. For me, there was no Emerald City at the end o f my yellow brick
road, but only an unspecified location circumscribed by its own ephemerality—a
Somewhere in Time. From my experiences at Somewhere, I learned to accept that
“There’s no place like home” because, for gay and lesbian people, there’s no place called
home.
The question o f “home” is o f central importance to any investigation into gay
experience because gay men encounter the socio-spatial landscape o f contemporary
America as what M arxist cultural critic David Sibley has termed a “geography o f
exclusion.” In Geographies o f Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (1995).
Sibley explains that “power is expressed in the monopolization o f space and the relegation
o f weaker groups in society to less desirable environments” (ix). Driven by the tw in goals
o f order and (reproduction, built environments inherently sustain regimes o f
heteronormative pow er by relegating sexual nonconformists to ghettos, back alleys, and
red light districts. In these marginal areas o f the city, gay spaces do take root in the form
o f housing, specialty shops, adult book stores, sex clubs, bars, bathhouses, and community
centers. However, because these spaces are tucked within the dark recesses o f the city,
hidden from what Neil Smith terms “the ruling coherence o f the urban landscape” (89),
their existence exacerbates, rather than eradicates, the devastating sense o f dispossession
which characterizes gay experience. The concentration o f gay spaces at the limits o f the
3
planned city also restricts social mobility' and ensures social dislocation by circumscribing
gay experience to clearly bounded and rigidly policed arenas outside o f the purview o f the
public gaze. M oreover, while these spaces typically offer their inhabitants a temporary
respite from a maniacally homophobic culture, they are nonetheless nondwellable precisely
because the very institutions and practices which necessitate their construction also
consistently endanger their existence w ith threats o f police raids, hate crimes, and
mandatory closings due to zoning and health code violations.
Stages o f Sexuality assumes that homelessness is the chief determinant o f gay
men’s experiences in social space. M y use o f the term “homelessness” is more tropic than
literal, intended to imply not an eviction from the real estate market, but the lived realities
o f social dissociation, restricted social mobility, and invisibility to the public gaze to which
I allude above. Obviously, homelessness is not an either/or dilemma that can
unproblematically be delineated according to the binary logic o f hetero sexual/ho mo sexual.
Rather, homelessness constitutes a site-specific condition which occurs by degrees.
Bathhouses, for instance, often are more vulnerable than bars to attacks by the “moral
majority” because these spaces foreground same-sex sexual practices as their raison
d ’etre. Initiatives to regulate/close the baths not only call into question the use and
ownership o f public space, but also these initiatives work to invalidate gay men’s claims o f
possession (to space, to visibility) by recapitulating the primacy o f heteronormativity in/on
the social.
While all gay men have, at some point, experienced these feelings o f isolation and
dispossession, the degree to which individual gay men are excluded from the social arena
depends on how sexual orientation is cross-cut by a range o f other identity-based
concerns. One o f the most vehement and recurrent critiques o f gay and lesbian rights
liberation movements—that is, that they propagate the cultural visibility and political
viability o f white, affluent gay men—offers a useful example o f how privilege and
marginality are diffuse categories, unevenly dispersed across a recognizable identity cohort
4
(Le., “gay men”) based on interrelationships between/among sexual orientation,

race/ethnicity, and class. In a sim ilar manner, the multiplicity o f differences within the gay
community yields disparate levels o f access to public spaces. Whereas telephone sex lines
tend to cater to the cultural/sexual fantasies o f white, affluent gay men between the ages
o f 25 and 40 (because that population boasts o f a disposable income), bathhouses (which
exact a less costly fee from patrons) attract a more diverse clientele in terms o f
socioeconomic status, age, education, and race/ethnicity. Patrons’ experiences within
these spaces also vary according to an individual’s composite identity. For example, as an
overweight but otherwise “attractive” [by current (sub-)cultural standards] gay man, I feel
less relaxed and at home in a bathhouse (which I must traverse nude or in a skimpy towel)
than I do in a bar (where I can wear my own clothing). Homelessness thus is not a
transcendent, universal condition which all gay men co equally experience just by virtue o f
their being gay. Instead, the extent to which homelessness presses on and gives meaning
to the practices o f everyday (gay) life is contingent upon the particularities o f exchange
between the social construction o f identities, the lived experience o f difference(s), the
delineation/distribution o f public space, and the cultural politics surrounding specific
institutions/locations.
Throughout this study, I contend that homelessness is especially resonant in the
lived experiences o f Generation X gay men because age and sexual orientation w ork in
tandem to exclude them from material locations, economic resources, and political
visibility. I argue that an extended understanding o f how social relations express and are
expressed by spatial practices not only offers insights into the lived realities o f
homelessness (as a social/material/psychic condition), but also reveals how spatial
practices can intervene into the production o f social relations in order to facilitate a m ore
equitable distribution o f the social order and less restrictive alternatives for how young gay
men inhabit that order. In each o f the four chapters o f this study, I explore the cultural
politics surrounding a single public space in which narratives o f generational tension,
5
moments o f generational crisis, are foregrounded. The spaces on which I have chosen to
focus (which include the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt, bathhouses, telephone sex lines,
and men’s public bathrooms) are “public” in the sense that they are relatively accessible to
the general (homosexual) population.1 Yet each space also is a site ofifor exile and
exclusion since all o f them concern (whether implicitly or explicitly) gay male sexual
practice. F or this reason, these spaces are virtually ignored as “valid” objects o f academic
study, relatively unmapped in the absence o f gay bodies.2 Because gay culture
materialized in/around spaces like those I discuss in the following chapters, these spaces
obviously engage w ith and produce narratives about sexuality; that is, they render sexual
identities and subjectivities intelligible through socio-spatial interactions. But, as I
demonstrate, these spaces also operate in/around generational narratives, narratives which
typically posit the young gay man as an unknown and, indeed, unknowable entity. By
locating the young gay man within each o f these spaces, and by tracing his movements
therein with/against narratives o f sexuality/generationality, I seek to provide some
indication o f how young gay male identities are constituted and contested through
socio-spatial practices in the everyday.
Surveying th e T errain
W ithin the past five years, the fields o f gender and sexuality studies have witnessed
what feminist cultural critic Sue Best has term ed “a ‘boom’ in studies o f space” (181)
which has brought to the fore these issues o f homelessness and belonging. As Best has
written, “[Sjpace has become a truly interdisciplinary problematic, attracting the attentions
of not simply its traditional interlocutors—geographers, philosophers and scientists—but
also soliciting the interests o f literary critics, historians, art historians, architectural
theorists, and cultural critics” (181). In his edited collection Public Sex/Gay Space
(1999), anthropologist William L. Leap argues that these emergent spatial concerns have
focused sexuality studies on “the locations within which gayness and its related claims
become constructed and negotiated, and, m ore specifically, to the particular intersections
6
o f location, gay identity, and male-centered sexual practices” (1). While all o f these
studies intimate that s e x u a l i t y and spatiality “stand a t crucial historical junctures on the
map o f political and cultural thought at this fin-de-m illenaire ’’ (Ingram, et. aL 4), these
examinations typically derive from markedly different methodological approaches, operate
under a unique set o f critical questions, and arrive a t distinct conclusions. In Queer Space:
Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (1997), for instance, architect Aaron Betsky charts the
development o f gay identity through the evolution o f twentieth-century architectural forms
characterized by excess and artifice. By contrast, geographers David Bell and Gill
Valentine, in their co-edited collection mapping desire: geographies o f sexualities (1995),
take a cultural studies approach in their efforts to describe “the performance o f sexual
identities and the w ay they are inscribed on the body and the landscape” (8). In a similar
way, Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda R etter’s edited
collection Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites o f Resistance (1997) is
invested in “the conscious ‘making o f space’” (8). But whereas Betsky defines the
relationship between sexuality and spatiality as orgasmic and pleasurable, and whereas Bell
and Valentine define this relationship as constitutive, the editors o f and contributors to
Queers in Space identify the relationship as antagonistic, with space itself representing
“the defining element in tracking chronic inequities” (7).
Despite the wealth o f studies on sexuality and spatiality which currently are in
print, I still would agree with philosopher David Farrell Krell who, in Archeticture:
Exstasies o f Space. Time, and the Human Body (1997), asserts that “[w]e do not know
what space is. We know only that space and place alike recede from our geometries,
frustrating the measuring rods and calipers we once spread so confidently across Gala, the
Earth” (3). One o f the most significant problems w ith studies o f queer space, and one o f
the primary reasons that we still do not know what space is, is that a very
narrowly-defined understanding o f spatiality continues to guide and direct so much o f this
work. For most critics (including those identified above), spatial concerns and
7
problem atics are elided by a near-exclusive focus on the production o f sexual identities; in
other words, the question o f how sexuality and spatiality are mutually generative is
ignored in favor o f the question o f how sexual identities are socially constructed. Bell and
Valentine, for instance, describe their collection as one among “[a] whole body o f w o rk . .
. th at explores the performance o f sexual identities and the way that they are inscribed on
the body and the landscape” (8). Similarly, in his introduction to Stud: Architectures o f
M asculinity (1996), architect Joel Sanders contends that “[a]rchitecture, through the
establishment and alteration o f reiterated types and conventions, creates the space—the
stage—where human subjectivity is enacted and performed” (13). For these and other
critics, then, architecture serves as always and only a backdrop, as set dressing, for the
production and performance o f social identities, rather than as simultaneously producer
and product o f those identities.
In In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996), cultural critic
V ictor Burgin articulates a three-pronged model o f spatiality which helps to clarify my
critiques o f much o f the extant scholarship on queer space. Burgin argues that spatiality is
m ost accurately represented as having three dimensions: spatial practice, representations
o f space, and representational space. Spatial practice “is the m aterial expression o f social
relations in space” (27). The book Queers in Space, which traces how material inequities
produced out o f a homosexual self-identification are reproduced in/through socio-spatial
relations, offers an excellent example o f a study fiamed by concerns for spatial practice.
On the other hand, representations o f space “are those conceptual abstractions that may
inform the actual configuration o f such spatial practices” (27). Stud’s dual focus on how
“buildings derive from the . . . unity, scale and proportions o f the male body” (11) and on
how “architecture behaves as one o f the subjectivating norms that constitute gender
performativity” (13) reveals the editor’s investments in unpacking “representations o f
space.” Finally, representational space “is spaces as appropriated by the imagination”
(27). In Queer Space, for instance, Betsky clearly identifies “representations o f space” as
8
the proper object o f bis study by suggesting that architecture “allows us to place ourselves
in the world, define ourselves in relation to others, and create another, artificial world that
replaces the one we have remade” (7).
By assessing the scope o f queer spatial studies, I do not intend to invalidate the
claims made o r the conclusions reached by these other critics; indeed, the aforementioned
studies have contributed a wealth o f significant knowledge to critical understandings o f
everyday lived realities for gay and lesbian people. My intent, rather, is to situate my
study within this larger conversation by identifying as yet unexplored questions to which
my study responds. Unlike the majority o f its predecessors, which isolate one component
o f spatiality for examination, Stages o f Smmality uses Burgin’s three-pronged model o f
spatiality as its point o f departure, simultaneously examining the locations under
consideration in term s o f spatial practices, representations o f space, and representational
space. In Chapter 2 (Re-Constructing “A P lace Where H istory H urts”: Gay Bathhouses,
AID S Am nesia, and Traumatic H istory), for instance, I argue that enactments o f cruising
in gay bathhouses (Le., spatial practices) not only are structured by contemporary
discourses around rapidly rising rates ofHTV-infection in young gay men (Le.,
representations o f space) but also provide a model for how young gay men can intervene
into the production o f these discourses in order to write/live a more inclusive and less
generationally-factioned history o f the AIDS epidemic (i.e., representational space).
Likewise, in Chapter 4 ( “Keep Your Eyes Open, E xpect the Worst, and H andle It On
Your Own Post-G ay Politics/Tearoom Trade/Strategic Collectives) I contend that
tearoom sex (Le., spatial practices), which typically perpetuates regimes o f ageism and
generational tensions within gay communities (i.e., representations o f space), provides the
tools for building and sustaining politically viable collectives across the traditionally
divisive borders o f differences (Le., representational space).
This study also differs from its predecessors due to the emphasis which I place on
generationality. Previous studies o f queer spatialities tend to privilege sexual orientation
9
as what visual artist Lyle Ashton Harris has described as “the transcendent signifier” (qtd.
in D esert 25). While most critics at least offer the obligatory nod o f the head to
“difference” (not to do so in this historical moment would be the equivalent o f critical
suicide), these critics consistently and (seemingly) inevitably return to the simplistic binary
logic o f heterosexuality/homosexuality to offer either an oppositional or a defeatist
manifesto on how all queer people inhabit and experience space. In “Queer Space,” for
example, architectural theorist Jean-Ulrick Desert begins w ith the assertion that “[q]ueer
space crosses, engages, and transgresses social, spiritual, and aesthetic locations” (20),
thus hinting at the import o f examining the contradictions which are produced out o f
differences among queer individuals. Yet one paragraph later, Desert supplants this
multiplicity o f differences with sexuality-as-transcendent-signifier when he defines queer
space as “a seduction o f the reading o f space where queemess, at a few brief points for
some fleeting moments, dominates the (heterocentric) norm, the dominant social narrative
o f the landscape” (21).
Similarly, American studies scholar James Polchin frames his argument in “Having
Something to Wear: The Landscape o f Identity on Christopher Street” with the questions:
“What is it about [Christopher Street], its structure and character, that allows certain
social interaction? And how is it that Christopher Street not only produces types o f
experiences but also history, memory, and symbols o f queer resistance?” (emphasis added)
(381). That Polchin uses the phrase “types o f experiences” immediately suggests a range
and diversity o f queer identities, rather than a monolithic identity category presumably
characterized by commonalities in experience as a result o f a shared homosexual
self-identification. However, like Desert, Polchin ultimately recapitulates sexuality as the
primary marker o f gay male experience, arguing that “Christopher Street produces a
symbolic place o f queer identity. . . . The street is imagined, re-created, and consumed
through the narratives o f collective identity” (388-389). Here, Polchin acknowledges how
the presence o f differently desiring bodies can rework the social meanings o f a particular
10
space, but he ignores the ways in which factors o f race/ethnicity, physical appearance,
class, and so on w ould limit certain gay men’s experiences in a space in which desirability
is linked specifically to white, middle-class, masculine, able-bodied young men.
Given th at “generation” is itself a highly contested identity category, one which
(like sexual orientation) often has been deployed as a transcendent (rather than contingent)
signifier o f difference, it seems imperative to rehearse some o f the more frequently voiced
debates over the nebulous parameters o f this term and to arrive at a clearly-defined
understanding o f how “generation” functions in the context o f this study. On one hand,
generation has been used by social scientists and demographers to denote commonalities
in lived experience and historical placement among individuals bom within a fixed number
o f years. As political scientists Stephen Earl Bennett and Stephen C. Craig note in
“Generations and Change: Some Initial Observations,” demographers use “generation” to
denote “a period o f roughly twenty-five years, which is the time required for a newborn
child to grow up, m ature, and begin to produce offspring” while social scientists
“generally define the length o f a generation in terms o f the critical events that m ark its
beginning and end” (4). In Generations: The History o f America’s Future. 1584 to 2069
(1991), political satirist William Strauss and economist/historian Neil Howe identify
“eighteen. . . generations through four centuries o f American history, dating back to the
first New W orld colonists” (8). For each generation (defined in terms o f birth years),
Strauss and Howe provide a “generational biography” (17) which not only details “how
the great events o f American history. . . have affected the lifecycles o f real people” (8) but
also offers “an honest depiction o f where the generational cycle says the nation is headed”
(15) based on recurring patterns o f behavior across/within generational cohorts. While
this study is rich in historical and social scientific observations, its conclusions are
nonetheless limited by the authors’ exclusive focus on generation as what feminist cultural
theorists Ellen Berry, et. al. have described as “a relational temporal term pointing to one’s
chronological age o r location in history.” By framing their generational inquiry solely in
11
terms o f age, Strauss and Howe (necessarily?) rely on broad generalizations about the
lived experiences o f diverse groups o f individuals to establish commonalities, and thus
they elide larger questions o f how lived experiences within a generational unit (e.g.,
Boomers, X ers, etc.) are further impacted by race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender,
class, and so on. (This critique is also applicable to Strauss and Howe’s book 13th Gen.
in which they provide a detailed, though in many places over-simplified, portrait o f
Generation X .)
The term generation also is used to refer to “one’s relation to institutional and
cultural p o w e r regardless o f age” (Berry, et. aL). In American Homo: Community
and Perversity (1998), for example, cultural critic Jeffrey Escoffier contends that
“contemporaneity is not enough to forge a generational identity. Instead, that bond
derives from a shared historical experience that creates a distinctive attitude toward life, a
sensibility, and a collective state o f mind” (121). Similarly, in the (second) introduction to
her co-edited (w ith Devoney Looser) collection Generations: Academic Feminists in
Dialogue (1997), feminist cultural theorist E. Ann Kaplan notes a preference for the term
“age” over “generation” because the former “means that one has been around for a while;
that one has had certain experiences, participated in certain movements, perhaps helped
produce certain social and intellectual changes within a specific historical span o f time”
(13). Both Escoffier and Kaplan rely on a generational m odel/narrative as the means o f
consolidating a group identity; however, unlike Strauss and Howe, Escoffier and Kaplan
define this collective identity less in term s o f age than in term s o f how one is located
within the historical trajectory o f a given social movement. F or Escoffier, generation
derives from a shared sense o f purpose, from collective commitments to combating the
inequities o f being queer in a homophobic culture, and aids individuals in their work
toward the achievement o f commonly-held goals; for Kaplan, generation creates a shared
sense o f history, a legacy o f struggle that, as feminist critic Judith R oof has noted, assures
“feminist pioneers that they are indeed part o f a trajectory—a passionate journey—that has
12
always been leading somewhere” (69-70). Studies such as Escoffier’s and Kaplan’s
certainty have produced invaluable knowledge about how regimes o f
cultural/political/institutional power are reproduced in/through socio-spatial relations; but
these studies also typically evidence one central problem: that is, they virtually ignore the
ways in which generation as an age-based identity construct influences the direction and
shape o f lived experiences.
I f generational inquiry has, in the past, been split between those critics who view
generation in term s o f chronological age and those critics who view generation as an
expression o f cultural/political/institutional power, then Stages n f Sexuality attempts to
bring these traditionally conflicting lines o f inquiry together within a single study. I begin
with a social scientific definition o f Generation X as “those bom between 1960 and 1981”
(Wesson 16)? Throughout the study, however, I hone and refine this definition o f
generation along other axes o f lived experience, including: formation o f subjectivities
(Chapter 1); relation to history (Chapter 2); modes o f embodiment (Chapter 3); and
expression o f political commitments (Chapter 4). In Chapter 1 (Perform ing (In) the
Grave: Schizophrenic Subjectivities and the NAM ES Project A ID S Q uilt), for example, I
conduct a genealogy o f the young gay male subject, arguing that while all young gay men
experience the AIDS epidemic as outsiders, as objects divested o f the power/authority to
speak of/for their experiences (a condition which I contend is most powerfully resonant in
viewing the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt), the model o f subjectivity which records these
experiences o f marginality must be malleable, shifting, and contingent (Le., what I term
“schizophrenic”) in order to account for gradations o f outsiderhood experienced across
this particular generational unit. Furthermore, in Chapter 3 ( “Reach Out, Reach Out and
Touch M yself”: Bodies, Technologies, and Q ueer Performatvvity on G ey M ale
Telephone Sex Lines) I argue that telephone sex lines provide a potential site from which
young gay men can unsettle prevailing cultural narratives which simultaneously fetishize
and demonize our bodies/desires. Although I suggest that these cultural narratives
13
constitute a shared historical experience for gay Gen Xers, I also point up how their
impact and force are differentially dispersed across young gay men based on other factors
o f difference.
Admittedly, this study too evidences a tendency to generalize about the lived
experiences o f young gay men. That is, Stages of Sexuality is, like all critical ventures,
“limited, constrained by what one cannot see, and structured by context” (E. Ann Kaplan
13). That this project constitutes the first book-length study o f the ways in which
sexuality and generationality intersect w ith and impact socio-spatial relations in
contemporary America necessarily accounts for many o f the gaps, omissions, and
generalizations which occur in the following chapters. Here, I am less inclined to offer a
nuanced examination o f frequently rehearsed critical questions than I am to outline the
broad parameters o f an emergent area o f inquiry. For example, I explore the benefits and
limitations o f particular methodological approaches [including, performance studies
(Chapter 1); historiography and architectural theory (Chapter 2); ethnography (Chapter
3); and cultural criticism (Chapter 4)] to the larger questions posed in this introduction. I
also trace lines o f relation between traditionally disparate objects o f study (such as cultural
spaces, cinematic texts, historical documents, media reports, etc.) in order to tap into
alternative bodies o f knowledge. This is not to suggest that Stages o f Sexuality opens up
an entirely new arena o f critical inquiry; indeed, there exists a range o f critical
investigations into most o f the spaces under study here. But guided by the assumption
that “to return is not necessarily to repeat, provided we approach the place we know by a
different road” (Burgjn 2), I cross and re-cross the vast theoretical and material spaces o f
queer culture, always striving to articulate new models for living and understanding the
unique political/communal/personal experiences o f Generation X gay men.
B reaking G round
As I note above, this study is divided into four chapters, each o f which explores
the cultural/sexual/generational politics o f a single site in which young gay male identities
14
are produced/performed. I have chosen to focus each chapter on only one space because,
as community organizer John Hollister has written, every space “has its own logic o f
reproduction—its own means o f perpetuating itself as w ell as its own conditions o f
existence. It begins at som e point in history, and lasts as long as its participants have a
reason to care, and as long as its conditions o f existence perm it” (67). In other words,
each space exists within and is produced out o f specific historical/cultural forces such that
the parameters and conditions o f one space cannot be unproblematically applied to another
space. Take, for instance, gay bathhouses and tearoom s. B oth spaces are created through
gay men’s appropriations o f the social arena. B oth spaces facilitate sexual encounters
between men. But whereas bathhouses are established as gay-specific sites, tearoom s
must consciously and continuously be “queered” through the perversion o f a public space
(Le., men’s public bathroom s) and its intended purposes (Le., elimination).
M oreover, three o f the four spaces under study (w ith the exception o f the NAMES
Project AIDS Quilt) are male-centered, meaning that they are spaces frequented
exclusively by men. In his edited collection Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600
(1999), historian David Higgs offers a compelling explanation for why queer studies o f
spatialities must be further delineated along the lines o f gender, noting that
Twentieth-century lesbians in the cities discussed here generally do not use
parks and the outdoors like the gay m en who enjoy outdoor cruising, and
certainty did not do so in the past. So there is not the same sexualized use
o f outdoors. Even indoors there was less tendency for women to ow n their
housing and to live adjacent to other lesbians than is the case for gays in
the em ergent gay ghettos o f the bigger US cities from the 1970s on. (3-4)
Higgs’ point, o f course, is that shared sexual nonconformity does not constitute a secure
enough foundation for a shared history o f socio-spatial experience because gendered
disparities between gay m en and lesbians at the levels o f (sub-)cultural and political
visibility have produced such markedly different spatial experiences and social histories for
15
each group. Gay men, for instance, have created sites (like bathhouses, sex chibs, and
highway rest areas) for which there are no lesbian-specific equivalents since, as men, they
have historically enjoyed a greater degree o f access to the public arena.
Furthermore, even with regards to the spaces that gay m en and lesbians have in
common (like bars), there are marked differences in their uses o f the spaces, differences
which reflect the relative paucity o f social spaces in which lesbians can congregate when
compared to the wide variety and large number o f similar spaces available to gay men.
For example, gay men typically approach the bars as cruising/hunting grounds and some
bars in larger cities—like New York and San Francisco—provide a dimly-lit back room for
patrons to have sex without leaving the premises. Lesbians, on the other hand, often do
not have access to their own bars and therefore must appropriate gay-specific bars or
patronize bars with a mixed clientele. Certainty the “sexualized use o f space” figures less
prominently in lesbian bar experience than in that o f gay males (a point perhaps most
persuasively argued by the feet that few—if any—bars provide a back room in which
lesbians can have sex); instead, lesbians typically approach the bars as sites for
building/sustaining long-term commitments (either friendships o r partnerships) with one
another.4
Individually and collectively the chapters o f this study record a journey, one which
is necessarily fragmented, ongoing and incomplete given that one o f the central tenets o f
this study is that gay men are always and only homeless. At the heart o f the journey is a
search for home, a search tempered by the knowledge that home is both kaleidoscopic and
Active, not the place we come from but the places to which w e endlessly return. My
journey in this project sketches narrative paths which cannot be charted on a map, retraced
in the physical realm, precisely because they are enabled by materially-grounded,
historicalty-contingent, ephemeral conditions. Like all journeys, this one is marked by
digressions, short-cuts, back-tracking, and pauses. Thus the narrative trajectory o f my
argument, like the organization o f the spaces it seeks to document, is “not linear, but
16
labyrinthine” (Betsky 190). By this I mean that the ideas which I present twist out and
turn in on themselves, revealing new avenues o f inquiry, untapped bodies o f knowledge,
new sites for critical investigation.
Throughout Stages o f Sexuality, my conclusions are, at best, tentative, offered
more as a gesture o f hope than as a model for survival. My study is not a ‘h o w to” guide
for living as ju st another gay Xer in a heteronormative Baby Boomer world. Instead, it
represents a sort o f theoretical travel log o f one young gay man’s journey within and
through the landscape o f contemporary America.^ Because “the directions we take
unavoidably begin where we are, and in relation to where we have been” (Burgin 1), this
study is deeply personal, refracted through my own commitments to finding hope in
despair, community in isolation, intimacy in disembodiment, and politics in the personal.
But unlike a personal joumal/diary, which often offers a sentimental (but uncritical)
reminiscence on the events which shape an individual life, this study also asserts a
collective political agenda which calls for the equitable distribution o f social space and
material resources and for the just and lair treatm ent o f gay and lesbian people both within
and outside our communities. Painfully aware that “there’s no place called home,” yet
conscious o f the fact that gay men and lesbians do inhabit and traverse the social, this
study is dedicated to documenting the “community o f moments” (Betsky 87) which we
build and maintain in the heteronormative world. Ultimately I suggest that while young
gay men are always and only “halfway home”—trapped between the competing discourses
o f homophobia and ageism with neither an origin nor a destination in sight—we continue
to press our bodies against social space both with caution and with determination because
those actions m atter. We act with caution because we understand the devastating and, at
times, fatal consequences o f asserting claims to visibility and location. We act with
determination because we are conscious o f the equally perilous consequences o f not doing
so.
17
CHAPTER I.
PERFORMING (IN) THE GRAVE:
SCHIZOPHRENIC SUBJECTIVITIES AND THE NAMES PROJECT AIDS QUILT
[T]he land [the madman] w ill come to is unknown—as is, once he

disem barks, the land from which he com es. H e has his truth and his
hom eland only in thatfru itless expanse between two countries th a t cannot
belong to him. —M ichel Foucault, M adness and Civilization, p . 11
Introduction
Over the past twenty or so years, critics within the humanities have explored the
limits and horizons o f identity politics as a paradigm for how individuals relate to one
another and to the worlds in which they (co)exist. The central assumption undergirding
much o f this w ork is that social identities are both discursively constituted and somatically
perceived. On one hand, social identities are shaped and determined by a complex
network o f discursive categories and representational practices. Discursive categories like
“man,” “woman,” “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” “Caucasian,” and “African-American”
render the individual intelligible as a social actor (or, subject) by locating him/her within
recognizable identity formations. Through various form s o f media (e.g., film,
documentary, advertisements, news reports, etc.), these categories are narrativized, given
meanings which further delimit their boundaries and their place within the social order.
On the other hand, these identity constructs extend beyond representation to produce
material effects on/in bodies. The social identities o f individual bodies are concretized
through a presumption o f belonging, a presumption which stems from bodily inscriptions,
self-identification, modes o f behavior, and so on. Based on the presumption o f belonging,
individuals respond to one another and to their social world in pre-narrativized ways
dictated by discursive categories and representational practices. * In this way,
representational practices and somatic effects on bodies are mutually generative o f
subjectivities because each one participates in the processes through which individuals are
invested/divested w ith the power and authority to speak for themselves.
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
IS
Investigations o f subject formation are particularly vital projects for marginal

individuals who are systematically divested o f the authority to speak o!7for their
experiences. In “Subjectivity, Experience, and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for
Rainbow Coalition Politics,” philosopher Sandra Harding explains what is at stake for
marginal critics in such projects:
For marginalized people, to achieve subjectivity is to claim a subjugated

history. Members o f dominant groups are inserted into language, history,
and culture as legitimate speakers and historical agents through no acts o f
their own, so to speak. They do not have to exert effort in order to see
themselves in o r as actively making history o r to imagine themselves as
authoritative speakers and actors. (128)
For Harding, the naming o f marginal experience is a politicized act o f self-identification
and -empowerment, “a cry for survival” (129). To “claim a subjugated history” is to
contest extant structures o f social relations which simultaneously legitimize and
universalize a narrow field o f experiences, a restricted body o f knowledge, and a limited
range o f identities (this is w hat has been termed the “dominant culture”). By speaking
from /for positions and experiences historically located outside o f the purview o f the
dominant culture, marginal individuals reveal cracks in the seemingly impenetrable shell o f
universality built up around identity categories such as, “Caucasian,” “male,”
“middle-class,” “heterosexual,” “able-bodied,” and so on. In so doing, marginal
individuals give lie to the common misperception that social identity is a fixed and
unchanging property o f the self and expose subject formation as an ongoing, incomplete
process. In other words, marginal investigations into the process o f subject formation
w ork to reveal how “subjectivity and experience are made, not bom ” (Harding 129).
To acknowledge that “subjectivity and experience are made” is implicitly to
identify the process o f subject formation as deeply historical. H ow specific experiences
and identities are situated within the social order varies from one historical moment to
19
another precisely because social relations are neither fixed nor unchanging, but rather are
open to negotiation and revision. As m aterial conditions alter the dynamics o f social
relations, so too do they shift the meanings ascribed to particular identity categories.
I f subject formation is intimately linked to the material conditions which
characterize a specific historical moment, then it might seem axiomatic to assert that
generationality constitutes a key site for explicating the processes through which identities
and subjectivities are rendered intelligible and legitimized. As an identity construct,
generational affiliation rests on the assumption that the material conditions o f a designated
period o f years (usually 20) work to produce commonalities in the experiences o f
individuals bom within that period o f tim e. O f course, as I note in the introduction to this
study, the degree to which generationality impacts and shapes lived experience is
determined by how that index o f experience is cross-cut by other identity-based concerns.
In other words, some individuals/groups may have more o f an affiliational imperative than
others depending on the extent to which generationality determines their location in the
social arena. Still, generational commonalities stand as one o f the key frames through
which to read and understand how an individual is historically produced as a social actor.
Despite the obvious link which generationality draws between identity and subject
formation and history, however, it remains a relatively unexplored dimension o f identity

politics. This chapter begins the important and necessary project o f explicating
generational identities by looking at the historical processes through which young gay men
are read, interpreted, and lived as subjects.
The generation o f Americans bom between 1960 and 1981 has been designated by
a number o f identity markers, though few (if any) o f these markers adequately speak to the
social and historical conditions which inflect these generational subjects. “Generation X”
'y
is perhaps the most commonly deployed identity marker in reference to this group.
While the letter “X” presumably is intended to describe this generation, to differentiate it
from those which have come before and after it, in actuality, the marker demonstrates
20
how, for this particular group, questions o f generational affiliation are either elided or
effaced in examinations o f identity and subject formation. At times, “X” is used to
designate a specific location (as in, “’X ’ marks the spot”); however, “X” m ore often is
used to delete, cancel, obliterate. In this regard, the use o f an “X” to demarcate the
commonalities among this generation conveys the sense o f void, o f lack typically
attributed to its members, and lends credibility to those who dub Generation X “the new
lost generation.”
The letter “X” also can denote an unnamed factor, a generic variable (as in,
algebraic equations). This definition suggests that members o f Generation X constitute a
nameless, faceless mass with no distinguishing features, no commonalities, aside from the
lack o f distinction. It is this logic which prom pted Washington Post columnist Nancy
Smith to assert, “It’s like, we [Gen Xers] don’t even have a name. Yours—cBaby
Boomers’—is so big we fell in its shadows” (1). The contrast which Smith draws between
Gen Xers and Boomers echoes a recurring m otif in attempts to define this generic
generation: that is, to delimit Generation X through its relationships with other, more
clearly delineated generations. Perhaps predictably, the relationships invoked are typically
posed as negatives, as what Generation X is not—Gen Xers are not as ambitious and as
prosperous as Boomers; they are not good roles models to the millennial generation.
Thus, whether the “X” is read as a cancellation or as a generic, the outcome is similar:
Xers are divested o f the power and authority to speak for/from their experiences as
generational subjects.
Gay Gen Xers often find the terrain o f subject formation particularly difficult to
traverse because their identities are doubly subject to erasure. N ot only are such
individuals overshadowed by the hegemony o f Boomers, but also they are rendered
illegitimate as social actors in a maniacally homophobic culture. On both fronts, young
gay men are subjected to the power and authority o f others, rendered objects who are
spoken for and about but never subjects in their own right. This is not to suggest that
21
subjectivity and subjection are mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Queer theorist Judith Butler
notes in The Psychic Life o f Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), “Subjection consists
precisely in [the] fundamental dependency on a discourse we never choose but that.,
paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency” (2). In other words, the very discourses
and practices which work to elide and efface young gay male identities are implicated* in
the construction o f those individuals as subjects. Acts o f erasure, cancellation, and even
obliteration initiate and sustain the possibility that a category like “young gay men” can be
mobilized.
This chapter constructs a genealogy o f the young gay male subject, m ost
particularly in relation to this negotiation betw een subjectivity and subjection. In “The
Problem o f Speaking for Others,” philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff suggests that a
genealogy o f the subject “involves asking how a position or view is mediated and
constituted through and within the conjunction and conflict ofhistoricaL, cultural,
economic, psychological, and sexual practices” (115). Because a genealogy which
considers all o f the representatio nal and m aterial practices that mediate and constitute this
subject position far exceeds the scope and design o f this chapter, I have chosen to focus
my attention on one defining event o f this generation o f gay men: the AIDS crisis. I
choose to focus on how AIDS has impacted gay identities/subjectivities because this event
has produced w hat generational scholars term a “period effect.” As political scientists
Stephen Earl B ennett and Stephen C. Craig explain, a period effect occurs “when the
consequences o f an event ripple through alm ost every group in society irrespective o f age”
(6). Period effects work across generational lines to solidify a sense o f collective, o r
group, identity based on a shared experience. O ther examples o f period effects from
recent history include: the assassinations o f John F. Kennedy and M artin Luther King, Jr.;
W atergate; the explosion o f the space shuttle Challenger; the impeachment hearings o f
Bill Clinton; and the death o f Princess Diana.
22
While these events certainly shaped and gave meaning to how individuals (in
general) related to one another and to the social w orld at a particular moment in tim e,
Bennett and Craig note that period effects “will m ost strongly affect those who are coming
o f age at the time it happens” (5). This is so because the youngest generations are in their
formative years, their identities (both individual and collective) still highly malleable.
When the first cases o f w hat later would be term ed “AIDS” were being reported in the
early 1980s, Gen Xers ranged in age from infancy to their early-20s. O f course, this
generation is neither the m ost hard-hit by AIDS-related deaths (though, given recent shifts
in AIDS demographics, it runs a close second to Boom ers) nor the most active in early
political responses to the epidemic. Moreover, because AIDS is an ongoing event, Gen
Xers are not the only group to come o f age during the time in which it is happening. But I
contend that AIDS is the defining event o f Generation X because this group is the first
(and the only) generation which has only and always defined itself (politically, sexually,
morally, etc.) in relation to the epidemic.^
Because AIDS is so enormous, its impact felt in nearly every arena o f public and
private life, a genealogy o f the young gay male subject which considers all o f the
“historical, cultural, economic, psychological, and sexual practices” o f the epidemic would
be impossible to sustain and develop in the space allowed here. For this reason, I have
chosen to further focus my analysis in this chapter by isolating one arena o f the epidemic
in which generational tensions are particularly heightened: the NAMES Project AIDS
Quilt. In generational term s, the Quilt is m ost closely aligned with Boomers, as they
constitute the Project’s creators and major proponents. That the Quilt is a product o f the
“Gay is Good” generation also is apparent in the use o f assimilationist rhetoric (Le., a
“liberal” call for inclusion) to define the purpose and goals o f the project. N ot only does
the Quilt convey a sense o f collectivity among those infected/affected by HIV, but, in so
doing, it also represents the epidemic as “th e great Ieveler.” This agenda sets forth the
notion that “People With AIDS” are just like everyone else despite the real material
23
conditions which suggest otherwise. In general, Generation Xers adopt a more

anti-assimilationist (Le., a “radical” call for recongition o f difference) stance (perhaps most
clearly embodied by Queer Nation’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re Queer, get used to it!”).
Because then: politics often clash w ith those o f the Quilt creators and supporters, Gen
Xers encounter the rhetoric and spaces o f the Quilt as “outsiders,” as objects divested o f
the power/authority to speak ofrfor their experiences. Viewing the Quilt, then, necessarily
requires the young gay male subject to confront generational (as well as sexual) tensions at
the heart o f his identity/subjectivity. By tracing the reading practices which young gay
men deploy in relation to the Quilt, I seek to outline the processes through which these
individuals are produced as (subjected, schizophrenic) subjects.
T he Q uilt: An O rigin Story
The idea for an ADDS memorial quilt originated in November 1985 when
co-founder o f the NAMES Project and long-time gay activist Cleve Jones attended a
memorial parade honoring Harvey M ilk held in San Francisco (Baker 131). Jones recalls
that participants in the memorial parade were asked to bring cardboard placards bearing
the names o f friends, partners, and relatives who had died o f AIDS-related illnesses. For
the duration o f the parade, these placards hung collectively in a central location as a
symbol o f both the human dimension o f an abstracted medical crisis and the increasing
severity and enormity o f that crisis. Jones has stated that together these placards created
“a startling image. The wind and rain tore some o f the cardboard names loose, but people
stood there for hours reading names. I knew then that we needed a monument, a
memorial” (qtd. in Ruskin 9).^
Over the next year and one-half Jones devoted much o f his time and energy to
organizing the NAMES Project—an effort that he initially shared with a friend, Mike
Smith- A t the time, the number o f AIDS-related deaths in San Francisco alone already
had exceeded one thousand, yet the epidemic was still given scant attention from media
institutions and few funds from the federal government because it carried the stigma o f
24
homosexuality, o f recreational drug use, and o f ethnic Otherness (a stigma which the
epidemic continues to carry). With “the threat o f oblivion” looming large over gay men
(Hawkins 756), Jones sought to use the Quilt “to make real the abstraction o f death a n d . .
. to preserve th e memory o f so many friends who had died o f HIV-related diseases”
(Weinberg 37).
The first public display o f the AIDS Quilt occurred on June 28, 1987, during the
San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade. For the initial exhibition, the Quilt
consisted o f a modest 40 panels which were stitched together and hung from the mayor’s
balcony at City Hall. One significant outcom e o f this event was an Associated Press
feature story on the Quilt published in 1987. This report brought national visibility to the
efforts o f the NAMES Project, efforts which, to this point, had been localized in San
Francisco, and undoubtedly contributed to a rapid increase in support o f and contributions
to the Project. By October o f that same year, when the Quilt was first displayed on the
Mall in Washington, D.C., the memorial consisted o f 1,920 panels and “covered the size
o f two football fields” (Jones qtd. in Baker 131). Thousands o f people visited the
exhibition in October 1987 and bore witness to the national crisis known as AIDS. This
mass outpouring o f grief remembrance, hope, and support prompted Jones to begin
regional displays o f the Quilt and to establish the Mall exhibition as an annual event.
By the sixth anniversary o f the exhibition in Washington, D.C., in 1992, the Quilt
had grown so large that its 22,000-plus panels covered an area the size o f twelve football
fields. Because the Quilt had grown so large in such a short period o f tim e, and because
panels continued to pour into the Project’s San Francisco-based headquarters at an equally
rapid rate, Jones decided that 1992 would be the last year that the Quilt could be displayed
in its entirety on the Mall. Since that tim e, the Quilt “has grown from being one
community’s response to being a national and international response to the AIDS
epidemic” (Laabs 100). The smaller regional showings, which initially were held only in
major urban centers, have now branched o u t to include smaller cities and tow ns. Each
25
year, the international AIDS conference in Am sterdam sponsors an exhibition o f a portion

o f the Quilt. Currently there are 53 regional chapters o f the NAMES Project scattered
across the United States and 38 independent initiatives located throughout the world. And
as o f November 1998, the Quilt consisted o f 42,016 panels which collectively recorded the
lives and deaths o f 80,466 individuals. The Q uilt now weighs approximately 53 tons, is
made up o f 48.75 miles o f fabric (roughly the distance between Providence, RI and
Boston, MA), and covers the length, o f 25 football fields (“The NAMES Project AIDS
Quilt”).
“See The Quilt and Understand”
Although the Quilt has changed in size and appearance over its twelve-plus year
history, the stated aim o f its creator has remained relatively unaltered. The purpose o f the
Quilt is most succinctly summarized in the Project’s motto: “See the Quilt and
Understand.” This statement suggests that the Quilt (through the act o f “naming names”)
offers an avowal, an admission o f truth which longs to be both heard/seen and
understood/read. M oreover, the motto rests on the assumption that the “truth” o f the
Quilt is transmitted to its viewers through a relatively simple model o f performance.

According to this model, the Quilt (which operates as the “sender”) encodes and transm its
its message (or, truth) to its viewers (who operate as “receivers”)- In this sense, one can
“see the Quilt and understand” precisely because the artifact is presumed to send one
message which is universally read and understood by spectators without any interference.
Thus, beneath the m otto’s rhetoric lies the assum ption that the meaning, or truth, o f the
Quilt is available to all who have eyes to see. I f there is a singular truth claim professed by
the Quilt, what is that truth claim?
A t the most basic level, the Quilt bespeaks “a national and international
constructive expression o f g rief’ (Gentry 550), a g rief which m ost powerfully resonates in
the loss o f individual lives. As Peter S. Hawkins notes, “the Q u ilt. . . is most profoundly
about the naming o f names” (760). The desire “to preserve the memory o f a life” is so
26
strong and compelling in relation to the AIDS crisis because, as literary critic Timothy F.
M urphy has written, those lives had for too long been relegated to silence and obscurity”
(314). That the panels “are motivated by a desire to name and preserve the significance o f
the person who has died” (314) works to remove the epidemic from the realm o f
abstraction (Le., statistics, diagnosis, symptoms) and to humanize the crisis, fit this sense,
“the Quilt represents a true patchwork o f lives remembered” (Baker 130) in which “each
panel bespeaks an individual life” (Hawkins 772, 774).
To argue (as most critics have) that each Quilt panel “bespeaks an individual life”
is to implicitly identify the Quilt itself as a site ofifor subject formation. I f subjectivity is
predicated on the ability to speak the “truth” o f one’s experiences, then the Quilt produces
the dead as speaking subjects by giving voice to their individual lives in a rhetoric o f
confession. Each Quilt panel thus enacts a confessional utterance. In The H istory o f
SftyiifiKty, Volume 1: An Introduction (trans. 1990), French philosopher Michel Foucault
contends that “[sjince the M iddle Ages at least, Western societies have established the
confession as one o f the m ain rituals we rely on for the production o f truth” (58). To
confess is to disclose, acknowledge, or admit the truth o f one’s experience^). But the
need for confession and the desire to confess also presuppose a prior act o f concealment
(either self-willed or not).** Thus to make the truth visible through an enactment o f
confession is to acknowledge belief or faith in the import and validity o f that experience,
knowledge, or truth. By bringing together remnants o f a life lived (including photographs,

clothing, and mementos), panel-makers encode a loved one’s identity into a series o f signs
and symbols. These signs and symbols constitute a language which speaks of/fbr the dead.
When viewed by a visitor to the Quilt, these signs and symbols not only acknowledge the
individual’s existence, but also provide some insight into the type o f person this individual
was. In this way, the panels function as biographical snap-shots which allow the dead to
speak out against forces o f abstraction and silence and to be rendered intelligible as unique
subjects.^
27
I f the Quilt facilitates confession by “naming names,” then the confessional

utterance stands as only one axis in the process o f subject formation. (Interestingly,
“naming names” is a phrase borrowed from the McCarthy era, here redeployed against the
inquisitors o f that era.) As Alcoff notes, investigations into the process o f subject
formation m ust account for both “the positionality or location o f the speaker and the
discursive context.” She goes on to define the discursive context as “the connections and
relations o f involvement between the utterance/text and other utterances and texts, as well
as the material practices in the relevant environment” (102). The point here is that a
text/panel does not (and, indeed, cannot) signify in a vacuum. Rather, that text/panel is
imbricated in a network o f social forces, texts, and practices which render the text
intelligible and meaningful In part, the meaning o f a text/panel determines and is
determined by the relationship between that text/panel and its spectators. The person who
made a particular panel will draw on a range o f personal experiences w ith and
remembrances o f the person being memorialized in his/her engagement w ith the panel. On
the other hand, for someone unassociated w ith the panel-maker or the person being
memorialized, that same panel might be read in more abstract terms (e.g., as a
representative symbol o f all who have died, as an aesthetically pleasing artifact, etc.). (I
will address this point in greater detail in the following section.) The meaning o f the
text/panel also determines and is determined by the material practices which constitute its
making and display. Here, I want to begin to challenge the assumption that to see the
Quilt is to understand its (universal monolithic) meaning by examining several aspects o f
its design and exhibition which confound a single reading strategy or interpretation.
First, while I agree that the panels are primarily about the desire to remember and
speak for the dead, I also must highlight the feet that biography is only one narrative
encoded on the panels. As cultural critic Judy Elsley notes, “Each panel tells several
stories, all o f them about human love and suffering: first, the story o f the person Mho died
o f AIDS, and then the story o f the person o r people who made the block” (88). Elsley’s
28
point is well-taken, given that panels constitute posthum ous representations o f th e dead
created by/for those who survive, rather than self-authored testimonials.^ This point also
is supported by the feet that each panel-maker must submit a letter about the person s/he is
remembering along w ith the panel block itself^ T hat the panels not only record the lives
o f those who have died, but also the grief suffering, and memories o f those who survive
prohibits spectators from taking a single meaning aw ay from the Quilt. In other words,
spectators must read the Quilt as a “profusion o f memory” (Bellm 35) in which the
experience o f death and the import o f individual lives always are read with and against the
narratives o f hope, community, and survival conveyed through the labor o f quiltxnaking.
Thus, the Quilt cannot be read according to the logic o f “authorial intent” precisely
because it is an authorless text, even as it is written by a myriad o f authors.
In addition to the lack o f a single author, the Quilt also refuses to adhere to a
single design, or pattern. Because the Quilt is assembled and reassembled in different
configurations for its various displays, the Project stipulates the precise dimensions o f each
panel (Le., 3’ x 6’ x 6’, the size o f a human grave); these very practical considerations
necessitate that the Quilt adhere (in part) to an overall uniformity o f design: a patchw ork
sam p ler.^ However, unlike a patchwork sampler, th e Quilt continues to grow alongside
the ongoing epidemic and refuses to take on a definitive shape. As Laabs insists, the Quilt
“maps out the course o f the epidemic” (102), its landscape continually shifting in term s o f
who is represented. When the Quilt began, the m ajority o f panels were made by and for
white, middle-class gay men. Although many critics (m yself included) would contend that
this observation for the most part still holds true, over the past five or so years, the Quilt
has received an increasing number o f panels dedicated to women and people o f color. The
ever-shifting demographics o f the afflicted represented by the Quilt insists on a memorial
that is flexible enough to change its shape and direction in tandem with the epidemic.
Moreover, as Weinberg has written, “The quilt is not fixed in form. N ot only does
it continue to grow in size, but it also is assembled, dispersed, and reassembled” (37).
29
Each display o f the Quilt is unique in how it orders and presents the panels. Which panels
are included/excluded and how panels are juxtaposed direct the gaze o f th e spectator in
particular ways which influence the viewing process. That the Quilt is constantly changing
shape disallows the urge to attach a single meaning to the artifact. Finally, the materials
which constitute it also impact the ways in which spectators read and interpret its
meanings. Hawkins notes that “[u]nlike stone, with its illusions o f eternal witness, cloth
fades and flays w ith time; its fragility, its constant need for mending, tell the real truth o f
‘material’ life” (765). While Hawkins here still seems inclined to read the Quilt as having
a universal meaning (that is, the fragility o f the Quilt speaks to the fragility o f human life),
his point regarding the materiality o f the Quilt is significant to my argum ent here. Seeing a
panel which has faded from years o f displays and exhibitions certainty would convey the
duration o f the epidemic to the spectator in a more significant way than a crisp, new panel.
Implicitly, the lack o f durability o f these panels speaks to the inability o f one meaning to
encompass the variety of narratives, texts, and utterances included in the display.
Finally, that the Quilt is a “traveling exhibition” (Baker 129) facilitates the
production o f multiple meanings. Already I have noted that the Quilt has no fixed
location—it is migratory, homeless, nomadic. Where the Quilt is displayed alters
(sometimes profoundly) how it is read and interpreted by spectators. The first display on
the Mall in Washington, D.C., unquestionably had an enormous impact on how the
epidemic itself was perceived in American culture. Juxtaposing the Quilt with the
W ashington monument and other figures o f American national identity called into question
the ways in which the Reagan administration had responded (or failed to respond) to the
crisis. It also worked to locate the Quilt (and the epidemic) within discourses o f national
identity. However, by the time the Quilt received its final full showing o n the Mall in
1992, the exhibition failed to have the same impact o f that initial display. The radicality o f
the initial display was greatly diminished—in part because spectators had, after six years,
become accustom ed to the display and in part because material conditions o f the epidemic
30
had shifted—such that spectators could term the display retroactive and “70s gay.” (This
criticism derived in large part from the Project’s insistence on levelling out differences
between those who are represented on its panels, a mission which is underscored by the
70s gay rhetoric o f “We’re ju st like everyone else.”) M oreover, a display in Bowling
Green, OH (which occurred in 1995) does not secure the same kind o f national visibility
for the epidemic as a display on the Mall, though all the regional showings could create
their ow n web o f national visibility. The message(s) conveyed in and through the Quilt,
then, vary according to where it is displayed and thus cannot be fixed within a single
paradigm o f Truth. In the final analysis, each o f these m aterial practices associated with
the display o f the Quilt “prevent any clear or conventional response” to the Quilt o r to the
epidemic.
See the Quilt and (Mis)Understand
That the Quilt resists a single narrative o r interpretive frame does not mean to
imply that the artifact is entirety devoid o f meaning; however, this feet does point up the
pressing need for conceiving alternative inodes o f engagement with the Quilt. These
alternative modes o f engagement must account not only for the act o f confession, but also
for the act o f witness. Indeed, as theatre scholar Jill D olan asserts in The Feminist
Spectator as Critic (1991), the performance apparatus (here, the Quilt) “directs the
perform er’s address” and “works to constitute [the audience] as a particular subject
position” (1). While many critics have discussed how the Quilt facilitates acts o f
confession, none have considered how confessional utterances shape and are shaped by
the politics o f their reception. ^ In other words, I contend that the confession always
must be located within and interpreted through the context o f a specific utterance, its
ideological meanings regarded as neither transparent nor monolithic, but rather as
contingent upon the object and location o f its address.
Descriptions o f the Quilt as a site ofrfor the performance o f testimony make clear
how critics traditionally have ignored the import o f reception. As I note above, critics
31
who read the Quilt as only “motivated by a desire to name and preserve the significance o f
[those who have died]” assume a static model o f performance. For such critics, the Quilt
represents a mass graveyard—both as a place o f interment and as a place in which
ideological meanings are circumscribed by the fixity and stillness o f reverence. (This
reading is facilitated in part by the fact that each panel measures the size o f a human
grave.) N ot only does this reading universalize the meaning o f the Quilt but, in so doing,
it also establishes a monolithic viewing position from which to receive that meaning.
In what follows, I want to contour an alternative model o f reception which, as I
argue, is implicit in the design and display o f the Quilt. While this m odel acknowledges
reverence as one potential response to the Quilt, it does not foreclose/invalidate other
ways o f reading. 10 For this reason, I contend that, rather than facilitating a grave
performance, the Quilt enables performances within the grave. By this I mean that instead
o f eliciting a singular, monolithic response from spectators—a grave performance o f
memory and reverence—the Quilt spawns a web o f emotional/political responses. These
performances are constituted in/through a dynamic exchange between speaker and
listener, text and context, and work to produce a range o f ideological meanings and
subject positions.
To understand how the Quilt locates its viewers within a particular subject
position, it is first necessary to specify the speaker-listener relationship established in
displays o f the Quilt. This relationship is played out through a series o f confessional
utterances in which speaker (Quilt/panels) and listener (spectator) oscillate between the
subject and the object o f the confession. As Foucault explains the dynamics o f confession:
The confession is a ritual o f discourse in which the speaking subject also is
the subject o f the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power
relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual
presence) o f a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority
who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in
32
order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. (H istory o f

Sexuality 61-62)
For Foucault, the act o f confession implies a dialectic relationship between speaker and
listener in which subjectivity is predicated on subjection. The speaker’s desire to confess
necessitates the presence o f a listener. This listener is not wholly passive, however,
because his/her presence incites and enables the will to confess. In this way, both speaker
and listener are marked as active/passive agents in an exchange characterized by
reciprocity and negotiation. Because speakers and listeners simultaneously serve as
subject and object o f the confession, the exchange cannot be represented as static
(active/passive) o r unidirectional (sender-message-receiver). Because both speakers and
listeners are actively engaged in the confessional exchange, their interactions cannot be
circumscribed by a single truth claim. Instead, the exchange is constituted by a series o f
confessions in which struggles over ideology shape and are shaped by struggles over
subjectivity.
Because many critics already have carefully delineated the processes through
which the Quilt directs the address o f the panels and constitutes the dead as subjects, here
I want to focus on how spectators are constructed as subjects who bear witness. Critics
typically posit viewers o f the Quilt as unified, coherent, monolithic subjects; yet
Foucault’s discussion o f the confessional exchange assumes a subject-in-process (Le., one
constantly re-made, not bom). For me, this process is most accurately characterized as
schizophrenic. M y use o f schizophrenia is tropic rather than diagnostic, in th at the term
works figuratively to describe subject formation rather than to identify the nature o f
psychiatric disturbance. Three characteristics (which are derived from the
symptomatology o f the psychic disorder known as schizophrenia) define the schizophrenic
spectator: one, the loss o f “normal” associations; tw o, the presence o f “auditory
hallucinations” (or, voices); and three, dramatic changes in affect (or, em otion).
Throughout the remainder o f this section, I will explore the ways in which th e Quilt
33
produces its viewing subjects as schizophrenic using the three characteristics identified
above as the basis for my discussion. In the following section, I will trace a relationship
between schizophrenic spectatorship and young gay male subjectivity.
The first characteristic o f schizophrenic spectators is the loss o f “normal”
associations. Psychologist Remi J. Cadoret notes that in individuals diagnosed with
schizophrenia, “[tjhought processes appear to lose their normal associations, o r usual
connecting links, so that the individual is often unable to focus his [sic] thinking upon a
particular mental task” (481). For schizophrenics, conventional relational markers (such
as chronology, causality, temporality, and spatiality) no longer order cognition; instead,
these markers are distorted (if not entirety ineffectual), creating for the schizophrenic a
fractured sense o f self in/and world. Without these norm al associations to anchor
him-/herself in the social, the schizophrenic wanders aimlessly (and often in isolation)
through a chaotic world in search o f structure, meaning, and purpose.
For the schizophrenic spectator, the world o f performance is fractured and
incoherent, devoid o f the theatre’s usual connecting links (e.g.., consistency o f
characterization, clearly defined genre and generic expectations, chronological/linear plot
structure, etc.). Because the performance apparatus disrupts common epistemological
frames, the spectator continually must (re-)adjust his/her sightlines by defining self and
world according to the specific demands and conditions o f a given performance.
Temporal associations provide perhaps the m ost common means o f ordering
experience. Viewed as a linear progression characterized by movement, change, and
renewal, time structures the historical and the everyday by sequencing, demarcating, and
hierarchizing events around categories like then/now, past/present/future,
short-/Iong-term, and so on. Within the Quilt, this sense o f progression is supplanted by
perpetual repetition o f the present. Elsley has offered a similar observation, noting that
the Quilt operates in a “transitory present” tense, it “exists in a continual state o f
becoming” (194). In one sense, this perpetual present tense derives from the fact that no
34
two displays o f the Quilt are identical. 11 Panels are ordered differently, new names and
panels are added, older panels begin to show signs o f wear-and-tear. All o f these factors
firmly ro o t the Quilt in an ever-changing present tense marked by change but not by
progression.
A perpetual present tense also derives from the feet that the Quilt charts the
progression o f an epidemic that is itself ongoing, incomplete. As cultural critic Thomas
Yingling has written, “the frames o f intelligibility that provide [AIDS] with even a meager
measure o f comprehensibility are notoriously unstable” precisely because the epidemic is
continually unfolding and changing in time (292). Because the Quilt traces the history o f
the epidemic, it too works to destabilize conventional “frames o f intelligibility”--namely,
time and history. The landscape o f the Quilt is re-mapped in light o f advances in
M V -treatm ent, softening/tightening o f social mores, and changes in AIDS demographics.
Its scope broadens, its shape shifts, and its narrative veers onto a different course such
that, upon each viewing o f the Quilt, spectators must experience the event as if for the first
time—though perhaps with a slight feeling o f deja vu, since repetition relies on an inexact
imitation o f the same.
A nother common means o f ordering experience is though spatial, or locational,
associations. From the personal (e.g., home) to the communal (e.g., church), from the
local (e.g., Bowling Green, OH) to the global (e.g., the United States), material locations
anchor us to the world and connect us with one another. Location often reveals
socioeconomic status, education, and personal/political affiliations. Location also orders
the social w orld through architecture, urban planning, zoning, and so on. This type o f
order is achieved by endowing spaces with a well-defined purpose and layout.
Performance, too, is rendered intelligible through spatial associations. The
building in which a performance is housed serves to remove the theatrical experience from
the everyday, establishing for that experience a set o f related, though not identical,
expectations and conventions. Within the theatre, a fixed-feature arrangement (Le., static
35
architectural features like row seating, fixed fecal point, proscenium) is m ost often used as
the architectural plan. This plan cements the actor-spectator relationship and guides the
behaviors o f spectators (e.g., row seating ensures passivity and discourages excessive
noise for the duration o f the theatrical experience). Finally, where a play/performance is
set orients spectators to the stage world by establishing a set o f conventions through
which spectators can suspend their disbelief in the dramatic action and accept the
theatrical “illusion” as “reaL”^ Thus, the exterior and interior designs o f the theatre, as
well as the stage setting, press on and give meaning to the theatrical experience as well as
the spectator’s role within that experience.
By contrast, the Quilt confounds spatial associations and logic by having neither a
fixed purpose nor a coherent design. O f course, as I note previously, the NAMES Project
has set forth an objective, or purpose, for their endeavors. But this objective functions
more as a guideline than as a prescription for spectators, since those who view the Quilt
will bring a unique set o f prior experiences, o f assumptions, and o f goals to bear upon the
viewing experience. Weinberg’s description o f the Quilt as a “vast game board” (37)
clarifies my point about purpose. Games presuppose objectives and rules which govern
methods o f play. While players work within these broadly-defined rules o f permissible
behavior w ith the intention o f fulfilling the central goal (Le., winning), the dynamic,
interpersonal relationships engendered by sport and competition open up the possibility for
chance occurrences. Fates turn on a single roll o f the dice, or the “luck o f the draw,”
rivalries heighten the stakes and intensity o f game playing. Perhaps m ost importantly,
personal goals/objectives intermingle with established rules and mark each instance o f play
as unique. (For instance, whereas one com petitor might participate for “the love o f the
game,” another might—for whatever reason—be obsessed with winning and struggle at all
costs to avoid defeat.) Although personal goals/objectives typically do not serve to
re-write the rules o r the game, they do mark the playing experience as highly subjective.
36
In a similar way, the Quilt operates under a clearly defined purpose—th at is,
spectators are instructed to see the Quilt and to understand the enormity o f death and
destruction which AIDS had wrought on particular communities and individuals.
However, prior experiences and assumptions influence what Quilt spectators see and how
they understand its meanings. A person recently diagnosed as HIV-positive, for instance,
might internalize the will to grief and memory (i.e., “What will my own panel look like?
Who will make it?”) while someone less personalty affected by the epidemic m ight view
the experience as an obligation to political correctness (Le., “I believe in gay rights,
therefore I visit the Quilt.”). My point here is that while every person who visits the Quilt
must, at some point in the viewing experience, engage with the memory o f those who have
died, how the spectator approaches and derives meaning from that experience varies such
that no single purpose can accurately be attributed to the Quilt or to its viewers. In other
words, there is no one reason why spectators attend Quilt displays, just as there is no one
meaning that spectators take away from the experience. Because purpose is unstable
within the Quilt, subject to the desires and agendas o f individual viewers, the experience of
its display fails to provide a fixed sense o f location through a shared text-spectator
relationship or a shared purpose/function; instead, viewers occupy isolated points on a
vast, gridless, three-dimensional plane.
The Quilt further frustrates conventional spatial relationships by refusing to adhere
to a single design o r layout. Typically, spaces are organized around a coherent and logical
architectural plan in order to facilitate optimum navigation by
pedestrians/patrons/spectators. In The Practice o f Everyday Life (trans. 1984), for
instance, Michel de Certeau argues that the planned city is mapped by pedestrians in “the
a c t. . . o f passing by” (97). Movements o f pedestrians within the city, however, always
are ghosted by an awareness o f the gridded netw ork o f streets which constitutes the city’s
plan, even in those instances when the pedestrian transgresses the plan itself. W ithin a
shopping mall, individual stores open onto a central corridor which is flanked on either
37
side by anchor stores. The central corridor guides (but does not wholly determine) the
flow o f mall traffic by encouraging patrons to traverse its clearly defined and easily
maneuvered w alkw ays.^ Finally, performance spaces use layout to convey the rules o f
the experience and the actor-spectator relationship. Whereas some theatres use a
proscenium to separate physically the spectators and the performers, other spaces allow
for a more flexible and interactive experience by blurring the boundaries between house
and stage. In each o f these examples, architectural layout provides a marker for how
spectators are expected to inhabit and/or traverse the space.
Unlike the city, the shopping mall., and the theatre, the Quilt provides few (if any)
signals as to how spectators are intended to navigate its surface. As Weinberg notes, the
Quilt is a “great grid” with “no narrative, no start o r finish” (37). By describing the Quilt
as a “grid,” Weinberg implicitly ascribes to the artifact a controlling logic, a unified
design—what I identify above as a patchwork sampler. This design pattern, however, does
not direct the flow o f spectators in a single stream o f traffic. This is so because, unlike a
Drunkard’s Path or Double Wedding Band pattern in which the individual panel blocks
w ork together to create a unified design across the surface o f the quilt, a patchwork
sampler is constituted by a series o f single panel blocks, each with a unique design,
history, and logic (e.g., a log cabin panel is juxtaposed with a bear’s paw and an Ohio
star). As a result, patrons’ movements are guided by associations and punctuated by
pauses, interruptions, and abrupt changes in course. Some viewers linger over a single
panel for hours, while other viewers move through the Quilt fairly quickly in order to take
in as much as possible. Some begin at one end and methodically work their way to the
other end, while others randomly select their course based on nothing more significant
than the colorfulness or originality o f a given panel’s d e sig n .^ Along the way, certain
viewers momentarily will exit the Quilt to grab a kleenex from one o f the Project’s
volunteers, while others will pause within the immense grid to socialize with friends or
com fort a stranger. The randomness o f engagement is further enabled by the muslin
38
walkways which visually separate the panels, marking each as distinct and disallowing any
sense o f continuity (narrative, spatial) among them. The routes which visitors o f the Quilt
traverse thus are transitory and ephemeral, simultaneously charted and erased in the
moment o f passing by. Like the “madman’’ who “led an easy wandering existence”
(Foucault, Madness 8), spectators aimlessly roam the Quilt, are set adrift o n a modem
“ship o f fools,” w ith no means o f grounding themselves o r orienting themselves to a
spatial order.
The second characteristic o f schizophrenic spectators is the presence o f auditory
hallucinations, o r voices. Cadoret defines these hallucinations as “the perception o f
auditory stimuli, o r sounds, where none are externally present. . . . The voices may not be
intelligible to the individual, but typically they will be understandable to the person and
may repeat his [sic] thoughts or actions, argue with him [sic], or threaten, scold, o r cure
him [sic]” (481). For schizophrenics, auditory hallucinations incite anxiety, confusion, and
(often) paranoia. At times, these hallucinations lead the schizophrenic to conclude that
s/he is under constant surveillance. At other times, the hallucinations cause the
schizophrenic to slip further into a self-contained, isolated world o f delusion and fantasy.
Whatever the outcome, the schizophrenic always possesses a strong belief in the reality
and validity o f the hallucinations, a belief which ultimately intensifies feelings o f confusion,
isolation, and paranoia.
That the Quilt is made up o f “a myriad o f individual voices” (Elsley 192) is
immediately apparent in the number o f individuals who have taken part in its construction
and display. Although the NAMES Project now stipulates that each panel must be
dedicated to only one person who has died o f AIDS-related illnesses, still some panels are
dedicated to m ore than one individual. These panels disallow a fixed focal point for the
spectator by simultaneously giving voice to several life stories within a single quilt block.
Even in those quilt blocks which remember only a single individual, spectators are
confronted with multiple voices—the voice o f the person who has died, th e voice(s) o f the
39
person(s) who made the block, the voice(s) o f the person(s) who stitched the block to
others for a specific display, and so on. Moreover, taken as a whole, the Quilt
demonstrates the w ay in which it places “individual voices . . . in the context o f
community” (Elsley 191). Though these voices may speak in concert w ith one another, it
is more likely that together they will emerge as a cacophonous roar, given the highly
subjective histories and experiences o f the individual remembered, the panel-makers, and
the viewers. For Quilt spectators, then, memories o f a life lived coexist w ith grief over a
life cut short, anger a t institutional apathy and systemic homophobia, faith in the import o f
remembering those who have died, and so on. Each o f these voices vie for the spectator’s
attention, facilitating a gaze that is dynamic, multidirectional, mobile. Because the gaze is
not fixed, the Quilt cannot convey a solitary truth claim to its viewers; rather, spectators
must immerse themselves within the delusion and confusion o f voices, imposing some
sense o f order (however momentary) and making the delusions appear “real” in order to
offset feelings o f confusion and anxiety.

A third and final characteristic o f schizophrenic spectators is dram atic changes in
affect, or emotion. Cadoret explains that schizophrenia often is characterized by “a lack o f
emotional response to a situation that ordinarily arouses emotion, or else the expression o f
an emotion that is inappropriate for the thought content that goes with it” (481). In the
schizophrenic who experiences dramatic changes in affect, emotions seem arbitrary and
abnormal because they challenge socially legitimized responses to a given situation.
Examples o f this type o f behavior would include uncontrollable laughter a t a funeral or
screaming fits in a crowded library.
Clearly, the Quilt’s co-creators had/have specific expectations for how viewers
should respond. However accurate they may be, individuals who fail to respond to the
Quilt with the appropriate degree o f reverence are deemed “misguided.” Two readings o f
the Quilt will offer sufficient evidence o f my claims here. In the first reading o f the Quilt,
cultural critic Robert Davidoff describes the experience o f the Quilt as “overwhelming. It
40
is not like visiting a place o r viewing something, it is being in the Quilt, as if enfolded by
it” (155). At first, D avidoff implies that the Quilt is so expansive in breadth and scope that
it defies comprehension—it is no-place and no-thing. In the middle o f his assessment,
defeat turns into awe as the Quilt wraps this critic into the warm th and security o f its
folds. For me, DavidofFs reading suggests a critic who is consciously aware that he is
pushing the envelope o f how the Quilt traditionally has been read, a critic who, in fearing
that he has overstepped the bounds o f emotional propriety, alters his assessment to fulfill
(rather than challenge) conventional responses.
The second example conies from Weinberg, who has written that “even as the
NAMES Project Quilt honors the dead, its very growth, reflecting the dramatic rise in
HIV-related deaths, suggests to some its ongoing ineffectiveness” (39). Like Davidoff,
Weinberg makes a valid critique o f the Quilt only to beat a hasty retreat. In effect,
Weinberg contends that if the Quilt seeks to raise spectators’ awareness o f AIDS, then its
rapid growth speaks to the ineffectiveness o f its mission. However, Weinberg refuses to
ow n the critique and instead displaces it onto critics neither specified by name nor
referenced in a footnote. Weinberg seems tom between his own astute observations and
his awareness o f what constitutes a “permissible” response to the Quilt; like D avidoff
Weinberg succumbs to the latter force.
I offer extended analyses o f these two readings both to point up how deeply
entrenched the will to reverence is and to convey how difficult (if not impossible) it is to
sustain and perpetuate a single response to the Quilt. Indeed, the Quilt cannot contain the
emotional responses o f its viewers. G rief is undercut by anger, pathos supplanted by
hope. Moreover, the desire to maintain this guise o f reverentiality works against the
Project’s political aims by disallowing critique. Whereas the Quilt once was viewed as a
radical indictment o f institutionalized prejudice within medicine and the media, increased
attention to the epidemic by these institutions has lessened the radically o f the Quilt. In
order for the NAMES Project to continue to fulfill its role as a political and pedagogical
41
tool, it must not only invite critiques o f its endeavors, but also it must integrate those
criticisms into the Quilt project and implement changes which speak to the ever-evolving
landscape o f AIDS. In other words, responses to the Quilt must move beyond reverence
and begin to evidence dramatic, inappropriate shifts in affect.
Resisting Pathology/Pathologizuig Resistance
Spectatorship and subject formation are inextricably conjoined by ideology. To
begin, performance always implies the presence o f an audience, o f onlookers who direct
their gaze at and derive meaning from the event. As performance scholar Susan Bennett
notes in Theatre Audiences: A Theory o f Production and Reception (2nd ed., 1997),
“theatre is an obviously social phenomenon. It is an event which relies on the physical
presence o f an audience to confirm its social status” (86). Within the world(s) o f
performance, spectators participate in the production o f social meanings by referencing the
event through shared cultural norms, codes, behaviors, and assumptions (Le., ideologies)
which structure the practices o f everyday life. “Successfully” reading the performance
event is predicated on the spectator’s prior access to these “culturally and aesthetically
constituted interpretive processes” (92), processes which simultaneously render the
spectator and the event intelligible as social texts. In other words, the performance
apparatus draws on ideological narratives and processes to direct the gaze o f a specified
group o f spectators and to secure the intelligibility o f that group as social subjects, as
1V
active participants in the production and dissemination o f cultural meanings.1
The schizophrenic spectator represents a useful site from which to interrogate the
formation o f young gay male subjectivities because both are posited as outside dominant
ideology. This is not to suggest that either the schizophrenic spectator or the young gay
male subject offers the liberatoiy possibility o f “free play,” since the designation o f
“outside ideology” always is contingent upon an implied ideological center. Instead, my
claim presupposes that all spectatorial and subject positions are ideologically-inflected,
even those (like the schizophrenic and young gay man) which are delegitimized precisely
42
by the ideological apparatus through which they are mobilized and deployed. In other
words, marginal positions located on the outskirts o f ideology are produced and sustained
through a relationship to the ideological center; but because this relationship is posited as
a negative, the schizophrenic and the young gay man are simultaneously divested o f the
power/authority to speak ofiTor their experience and obscured as social actors. Since
neither can reference and interpret his/her experiences through shared cultural values,
beliefs, and assumptions, both are subjected to the paternalistic power and authority o f
dominant ideology, which stamps a definitive meaning onto those experiences. (Here,
“dominant ideology” refers to any apparatus o f cultural pow er that works simultaneously
to produce young gay men as subjects and to subject the lived experiences o f those
individuals to the power and authority o f others—from federal laws designed to regulate
the expression o f same-sex desire to representations like The Talented Mr. Ripley (2000)
which demonize young gay male sexuality and subcultural practices within the gay
community which invalidate the lived experiences o f young gay men.] Schizophrenic
spectators are instructed to see the Quilt as a monument o f grief and memory; gay Gen
Xers are ordered to relinquish their shared sense o f apathy and complacence and to
embrace the strong work ethic and sense o f social consciousness evidenced in Boomers.
Like the “true” madman, then, the schizophrenic subject has “entered a phase o f silence
from which it [is] not to emerge for a long time; it [is] deprived o f its language; and
although one continue[s] to speak o f it, it bec[omes] impossible for it to speak for itself’
(Foucault, Mental Illness 69).
While all visitors o f the Quilt are positioned as schizophrenic spectators, the model
o f schizophrenic spectatorship which I outline above is particularly useful for explicating
the relationship between young gay men and the social order o f contemporary America
because the lived experiences o f gay Gen Xers are characterized by similar distinguishing
features: that is, the loss o f “normal associations”; the presence o f “auditory
hallucinations”; and dramatic changes in affect. To begin, dramatic shifts in the economy
43
over the past thirty years have robbed many G en X ers o f even the m ost basic ways o f
valuing lived experience, such as through education, profession, home ownership,
marriage, and family. For instance, increases in the cost o f college tuition coupled with
drastic tightening o f financial aid options have worked to limit this generation’s access to
higher education. Those Xers who do struggle through college (often w ith the aid o f high
interest loans which many project we will never be able to repay) must, upon graduation,
face a significantly depleted job market—itself partially the result o f downsizing and
streamlining and partially the result o f the enorm ous number o f Boomers o n the “career
ladder” ahead o f us (H oltz 149)—and the probability o f never working in o u r chosen
professions. Indeed, in a 1992 poll o f one thousand Xers, Music Television (MTV) found
that two-thirds o f this group “considered a lack o f jobs or economic opportunity to be the
single greatest obstacle feeing their generation” (H oltz 149). Set adrift in the service
sector, working long hours for low pay in dead-end jobs, Xers possess few hopes o f
owning our own homes, finding job security, moving away from our parents’ homes, or
establishing our ow n “families” (however broadly that term is defined). G ay Gen Xers
experience an added sense o f disconnection not only because (like all “sexual
nonconformists”) w e forge same-sex sexual relations which are not sanctioned by our
heteronormative dominant culture, but also because, in our relationships, w e are regarded
(by Boomer gay men, by the dominant culture, etc.) as both beautiful and stupid, as
desirable and deadly. In short, Gen Xers often lack access to the most basic opportunities
which other generations not only have taken for granted but also have used to orient
themselves to and locate themselves in the world.
This decline in economic resources feeing my generation has (I think, rightfully so)
spawned in many G en Xers a sort o f “defeatist mentality” (most clearly illustrated in the
film Reality Bites). Having been “raised on images o f politics and governm ent gone
sour: Vietnam, W atergate, the $500 billion S&L scandal, and Iran-Contra” (Nelson and
Cowan xv), Gen X ers evidence little faith in the workings o f democracy and even less o f a
44
willingness to alter the system. (This point perhaps is m ost persuasively argued by citing
the enormous decline in voter registration and participation in members o f our generation.)
The m ost pressing problems lacing Americans in the contemporary historical
moment—national debt, homelessness, AIDS, poverty, racism, and so on—appear too large
and diffuse in scope to understand, let alone solve. Furthermore, given the material and
psychic disconnectedness which m ost Gen Xers experience in relation to American
culture, even those who do express an interest in altering current conditions often lack the
resources (economic, political, material) with which to effect even local (let alone global)
changes in policy and practice. Gay Gen Xers lace a unique index o f experiences, many o f
which I discuss at length in the following chapters. For instance, w e undoubtedly are
implicated in the history o f the AIDS epidemic, though we consistently are denied a voice
in the writing and recording o f that history (Chapter 2). We lack access to modes o f
cultural and artistic expression (as well as access to funding for such expression) through
which w e might begin to counteract the harmful representations which fetishize and
demonize our bodies and desires (Chapter 3). Armed with scant resources and little time
and energy to devote to any “cause,” Gen Xers more often than not “unplug and walk
away” from the problems facing us (Nelson and Cowan xv), accepting this sense o f
disconnectedness as our lot in life (Chapter 4).
To Boomers and beyond, this “defeatist” mentality appears unseemly, if not
blatantly self-destructive. Like the schizophrenic, Gen Xers are perceived to suffer from
dramatic changes in affect, to express emotions not appropriate to the material conditions
o f our lives. We have been called “lazy” and “apathetic” for our “unwillingness” (rather
than our inability) to become involved in struggles over m aterial resources. Our widely
accepted “laziness” is blamed for the marked decline in standardized test scores and for
the m arked decrease in the quality o f education in this country, though no one seems
willing to discuss how these trends might have been produced out o f significant budgetary
cuts in education. Similarly, gay Gen Xers are scolded for their seemingly wanton
45
disregard for safe-sex education, our willful acts o f forgetting that AIDS remains a
significant and deadly force in our everyday lives. The “voices” around us seek to
threaten (telling us that if we do not heed their advice, we will die), scold (chiding us for
our narcissistic and hedonistic behaviors, telling us how unlike our gay “brothers” we are),
and cure (offering us the wisdom o f their experience). Thus, young gay male subjectivities
are characterized by and founded on a deep sense o f disconnection with the social world
(Le., lack o f normal associations), a disconnection which not only produces defeatism and
cynicism (Le., dramatic changes in affect), but also which spawns cultural narratives o f
laziness, apathy, and hedonism (Le., “auditory hallucinations”).
My use o f the schizophrenic spectator to trace the formation o f young gay male
subjects initially might appear to perpetuate, rather than unravel, dominant ideologies
around subjectivity and sexuality. On one band, the linkage seems to reiterate the binary
distinctions o f active/passive, subject/subjected, legitimate/illegitimate, by referencing a
coherent, whole subject within the ideological center. On the other hand, the linkage
seems to propagate unproblematically the myth o f homosexuality as pathological by
reading gay identity through mental illness. On both fronts, my reading might appear to
imply the need for a “cure” imposed from the outside in order to incite “an authentic
awakening, where the dream [of delusion] disappears before the images o f perception”
(Foucault, Madness 184). While my argument here certainly presupposes the need for a
cure, I contend that that cure must come from within the schizophrenic subject. In order
to challenge dominant ideologies o f heteronormativity and homonormalcy, young gay
men cannot ignore how those ideologies shape/determine their subjectivities. Stated
another way, young gay men must acknowledge the ways in which they are divested o f the
power and authority to speak even before they begin speaking; they must pathologize
resistance before they can resist pathology.
Marginal critics working within an ideological apparatus that supports their
marginality always run the risk o f further sustaining, rather than dismantling, the power
46
external to themselves. This is, o f course, the critical conundrum at the center o f
investigations into subject form ation: that Is, “how to take an oppositional relation to
pow er that is, admittedly, implicated in the very power one opposes” (Butler, Psychic Life
17). As Butler writes:

That agency is implicated in subordination is not the sign o f a fatal
self-contradiction at the core o f the subject and, hence, further p ro o f o f its
pernicious o r obsolete character. But neither does it restore a pristine
notion o f the subject, derived from some classical liberal-humanist
formulation, whose agency is always and only opposed to power.
I would suggest that no historical or logical conclusions follow necessarily

from this primary complicity with subordination, but that some possibilities
tentatively do. (17)
For Butler, that the subject is complicit in its subjection neither obfuscates the knowability
o f the subject nor implies a regressive, liberal humanist subject-power relationship. In
other words, agency is never only predicated either on a “fatal self-contradiction” from
which the subject cannot escape his/her own subordination, o r on an either/or dichotomy
in which one either claims pow er o r is subjected to it. Rather, “this primary complicity
w ith subordination” suggests “a reiterated ambivalence at the heart o f agency” (18) which,
through the very repetition o f the conditions which engender subjection, opens up the
possibility o f subjectivity. This possibility stands as an isolated, ephemeral moment in
tim e, a tentative (rather than certain) hope contingent upon the historical and material
conditions which govern and are governed by a specific deployment o f power.
Because the conditions which enable the possibility o f agency cannot be
generalized or universalized, here I want instead to suggest some o f the implications o f
this possibility for the young gay male subject. In the three chapters which follow, I will
explore more fully some specific instances in which the ambivalence at the center o f
47
subjectivity works to challenge (and perpetuate) prevailing cultural narratives regarding

young gay men.
The schizophrenic subject allows, first, for a more nuanced analysis o f
intergenerational differences by identifying generational traits/characteristics as products
o f historical processes, rather than as fixed, unchanging properties o f the (collective) self.
As Bennett and Craig note in “Generations and Change: Some Initial Observations,” “The
problem [with much o f the scholarship about generationality] is that no one has yet
managed to figure out what the ‘mind-set’ and ‘common attitudes’ o f Generation X
actually are. Stereotypes abound, but the collective identity o f gen-Xers—sociologically,
culturally, politically—remains elusive” (3). The validity o f this claim can be ascertained by
perusing articles/books about Generation X and noting the prevalence o f descriptions
which fix this group (o f 50-plus million Americans) into ahistorical and overdetermined
cultural narratives. In general, Gen Xers are described as unconditionally apathetic and
lazy, though few critics seem willing to examine the specific economic and cultural shifts
which have enabled these traits to emerge.
For gay Gen Xers, the stereotypes often are even more insidious. We are
described as inherently amnesic and self-destructive in relation to the AIDS crisis, without
any consideration o f how these characteristics are products o f a deep sense o f historical
rupture facilitated by the epidemic. (I discuss this point at length in Chapter 2.) Our
youth is traffiked in a sexual economy that simultaneously fetishizes and demonizes it as
an object o f desire; however, the dual impetus to fetishize/demonize youth never has been
examined as one product o f a larger movement toward the disembodiment o f intimacy
which has characterized gay male communities since the onslaught o f AIDS. (See Chapter
3.) Finally, young gay men are posited as apolitical, as “post-gay.” But this trend cannot
be isolated from larger social forces which have led to a (further) feminization o f gay men
(as, for instance, AIDS buddies) and a concom itant privileging o f the personal/emotional
over the political/rational. (See Chapter 4.) The schizophrenic subject unravels
48
generational stereotypes by locating generational identities and subjects within a netw ork
o f historical forces and trends. Not only does the trope o f schizophrenia account for the
malleability and materiality o f subject formation, but also it allows critics to forge new
causal/temporal narratives which explain what law student Geoffrey T. H oltz term s “the
why behind Generation X,” instead o f scapegoating Gen Xers and intensifying
intergenerational conflicts.
I f generational identities are not fixed and unchanging, then neither are
inter-/intragenerational conflicts. Historicizing subject formation necessitates drawing
causal/temporal/spatial lines o f relation between individuals, institutions, and ideologies.
That these lines o f relation forge links between and among generational subjects suggests
that, even when these links are posited as oppositional, generational relationships are
characterized by conflict and. affinity. By acknowledging both fractures and affinities, gay
men can move beyond an us/them dichotomy and (re-)build communities on the basis o f
shared historical experiences (Chapter 2), shared desires (Chapter 3), and shared politics
(Chapter 4). These communities would neither heal current generational conflicts by
identifying shared commitments to sexual nonconformity, nor necessarily decrease these
tensions by recasting them in sexual, rather than generational, terms. Instead, shared
commitments would create what philosopher M orris B. Kaplan terms “multivalent senses
o f community that encompass both majoritarian moralities and the voluntary associations
o f sexual and other nonconformists” (36). As Kaplan explains this multivalent sense o f
community: “in modem societies the individual is situated in a plurality o f institutional
settings, emerging from a complex o f overlapping institutions and negotiating among them
in the conduct o f her life” (39). In other words, relationships among gay men can never
only be defined in generational terms precisely because intergenerational conflicts/affinities
shape and are shaped by the “plurality o f institutional settings” within which they are
negotiated and played out. The trope o f schizophrenia recognizes the plurality o f contexts
49
and “voices” through which generationally-inflected subjects are continually mobilized,

deployed, conjoined, and factioned.
Finally, because schizophrenic subjects are characterized by ever-shifting affinities
which enable the production o f communities (however tentatively delineated), they open
up the possibility o f mobilizing and sustaining a shared political agenda/program. My
claim here rests on the arguably simplistic assumption that “united w e stand, divided we
fell,” but, again, unity presupposes neither singularity o f purpose nor uniformity o f goals.
I do recognize that as material conditions shift, so too do the politics and parameters o f a
given community. Groups faction over ever-evolving political issues and the import o f
those issues to self and community. From this fectioning derives a cluster o f different,
though related, goals and reactions. Political communities are dynamic entities which
engender social change not through a static, unified response, but rather through a
multiplicity o f responses (some deemed appropriate, some not). These multiple responses
continually re-define the issue and its consequences by facilitating a dialogue between
individuals.
The use o f dialogue to mobilize and sustain political communities is especially
important for gay men in the current historical moment due to a wide-spread
depoliticization o f gay rights movements. In part, this depoliticization can be evidenced in
the false promises o f equality professed by assimilationists who focus on securing the same
rights as heterosexuals (e.g.., marriage, military service, etc.) but fail to address and
dismantle how these “rights” are themselves embedded in structures o f institutionalized
homophobia. The move toward a depoliticized gay rights movement also can be
evidenced in the prevalence o f attacks waged against the “enemy within” (i.e., young gay
men). Like the assimilationists, those who internalize political strife ignore how internal
conflicts always are imbricated in a host o f external conflicts (a point which the
schizophrenic subject foregrounds).
50
Conclusion
Young gay male subjectivity is founded on an internal contradiction, a
rhetorical/material madness, which simultaneously mobilizes, sustains, and cancels out the
possibility o f agency. The epigraph to this chapter, which is taken from Foucault’s
Madness and Civilization (trans. 1988), suggests that the “madman” is nomadic and
unintelligible. Banished from “normal” society, in exile on its margins, he can only ever
locate and know him self in the vast, “fruitless expanse” o f delusion and insanity. This
chapter has sought to describe the processes through which the young gay male subject
comes to locate, know, and understand himself in/through the arena o f (generational)
madness. In the three chapters which follow, I seek to contour the “fruitless expanse” o f
madness within which the young gay man so often finds himself.
51
CHAPTER n .
(R EC O N STR U C TIN G “A PLACE WHERE HISTORY HURTS”:
GAY BATHHOUSES, AIDS AMNESIA, AND TRAUMATIC HISTORY
“To lose history is to lose place, identity, and meaning. ” —Ada Louise
Huxtable, The U nreal Am erica: Architecture and Illusion, p. 25
Introduction
Projects o f historical recovery often are mobilized by instances o f trauma and pain.
Events like the assassination o f John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam W ar, and the explosion o f
the space shuttle Challenger m ark historical ruptures, wounds that cause substantial and
lasting damage to future generations. Traumatic histories document and record these
ruptures by tracing “the structures and fractures o f a culture” (Sturken 3). Although the
structures and fractures which shape a culture are omnipresent, they are more apparent
during moments o f crisis because, in moments o f crisis, contestations over individual and
collective identities are particularly heightened. By examining historical “structures,”
historians seek to understand the complex nexus o f lived experiences which facilitate
trauma and to ensure (through documentation o f their workings) that these specific events
and practices are not repeated. B y locating the cultural “fractures” created in/through
crisis, historians participate in the long and arduous process o f healing traumatic damage.
Since the early 1980s, American history has been circumscribed by the trauma o f
AIDS. Because the epidemic has been established as coterminous with various
manifestations o f cultural Otherness, it often has been used to exploit extant stress
fractures in the structures o f American culture. Clearly, AIDS has heightened deep-seated
cultural fears and prejudices based on patterns o f drug use, sexual practices, race/ethnicity,
and illness. The epidemic also has brought to the fore previously unexamined fractures
within and among co mmunitie s. Gay male and lesbian communities, for example, have
factioned on the issue o f closing bathhouses and sex chibs to halt the spread o f HIV, an
issue which implicitly revitalizes debates regarding the role o f sexual practice in defining
52
identity. Finally, as a deeply somatic health crisis which violates and (ultimately) destroys
the body’s system o f defense, the epidemic has contributed to a general shift in bodily
logics by underscoring the permeability and violability o f the body to the transmission o f
HIV and to the gaze o f the physician (immunologist, epidemiologist). *
As a traumatic event, AIDS transcends (and, thus, demarcates) the limits o f
traditional historiographic models. Admittedly, one could rightfully argue that any
historical event transcends traditional models o f historiography precisely because those
modes o f inquiry have been exposed as partial, historically-contingent, incomplete. But
the AIDS epidemic more completely reveals the inadequacies o f traditional
historiographies because so much o f its “evidence” has been destroyed, and because so
much o f its history is somatically perceived and thus located in what cultural critic Elaine
Scarry terms the invisible and unsharable landscape o f bodily pain (3,4). In its
foundational moments, then, ADDS constitutes a history o f loss. History, too, is
predicated on loss; that is, historians often only conceive o f an object as “historical” once
it has succumbed to the passage o f time o r to the inevitable demands o f mortality. The
loss o f historical objects typically presupposes the need for an archive, a record o f
historical objects which, once narrativized, is transformed into Official History. Yet
because AIDS was/is associated with persons/groups already on the margins o f American
society, its archives were/are purged rather than exhumed. The purgation o f “ADDS
archives” is perhaps most clearly evidenced in the apathetic and/or moralistic rhetoric
which characterizes early accounts o f the epidemic in medical and media sources.
Caught between a reverential need to remember and a systemic compulsion to forget,
AIDS has given rise to lay experts and oral histories. By displacing historians as the
official gatekeepers o f American History, lay experts mark AIDS knowledge as
provisional, fragmented, local, and ongoing. By displacing a singular historical record,
oral histories m ark AIDS knowledge as “multiple and discontinuous” and underline, as
53
cultural critic Cindy Patton has written, that “(T]t is hazardous indeed to seek a single logic
underlying AIDS discourse” (Inventing AIDS 1).
Although many critics have persuasively argued claims similar to Patton’s,
traditional models o f historiography continue to exercise a strong influence over the ways
in which AIDS history is documented and recorded. Journalist Randy Shilts’ epic
investigative account o f the American AIDS crisis from 1980-1985, And the Band Played
On; Politics. People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1988), provides a telling example o f how
histories o f ADDS have entered the ofBcial historical record guided by these traditional
models. From the onset, Shilts makes clear his investments in chronology and causality
(two characteristics o f OfBcial History) by framing AIDS as “a drama o f national failure,
played out against a backdrop o f needless death” (xxii).^ In effect, And the Band Played
On seeks to contain AIDS history within a single, seamless narrative in which
“institutional indifference,” scapegoating, and failures to confront AIDS “for what it was,
a profoundly threatening medical crisis” (xxiii), contributed to the spread o f HTV and
fostered “needless death.” To prove his point, Shilts focuses only on the structures o f
AIDS history and foils to account for the fractures and discontinuities within his narrative
o f national failure.^ In so doing, he reproduces the self-same narrative which he seeks to
deconstruct with only minor alterations in the dramatis personae. The dramatic conflict
still centers on straight society versus gay men; the predominant themes still concern
scapegoating, blame, and apathy. The only significant difference between Shilts’ account
and those perpetuated by medical and media institutions is that the target o f the blame is
shifted from gay men to straight society.
Within the past five years or so, a different (albeit familiar) chapter o f the AIDS
crisis has entered the annals o f American History and again demonstrated the need to
conceive o f the epidemic as a traumatic history with multiple and discontinuous narratives
outlining the structures and the fractures o f American culture. Headlines such as “Sex,
54
drugs, and bathhouses are back...” (Advocate July 8, 1997), “Barebacking: Are We
Turning Our Backs on Reality?” (Advocate A pril 13,1999), and “Choosing Unsafe Sex:
Risky Behavior on the Rise Among Gay Men” (O ut Post February 3-16, 1999) proclaim
this new development in the history o f AIDS in bold letters on the covers o f local and
national gay publications. Inside these newspapers and magazines, journalists report that,
after several years at the beginning o f the 1990s, during which time the rates o f HTV
transmission among gay men had “leveled o f f ” transmission rates are again skyrocketing.
These increases, the reporters inform their readers, can be attributed to a rise in risky
sexual behaviors among young gay men—behaviors including, but not limited to,
barebacking (or, anal sex without a condom), swallowing semen during oral sex,
participating in unsafe sex (anal and/or oral) w ith multiple partners.
While I do not deny the severity o f this current state o f affairs or the validity o f
much o f the scientific d ata currently available on the topic, I am suspicious o f the ways in
which these trends in HIV transmission are being documented and interpreted because
most o f the reports fail to ask crucial questions which might provide a m ore complete
understanding o f the problem and expedite its eradication. N ot one report has seriously
interrogated the historical, (sub)culturaL, and social forces which have enabled the
resurgence o f these dangerous behaviors, the construction o f young gay m en as
particularly susceptible to risk, and generational divides within gay male communities.
Instead, reporters seem bent on rehearsing the same narratives o f blame which
characterized early reports o f the epidemic and Shilts’ book, only this time the dramatic
conflict is posited between generations o f gay men. Such historical narratives seriously
compromise the ability o f gay men to mount and sustain collective responses to the AIDS
epidemic, to homophobia, and to other form ations o f institutionalized oppression.

In this chapter, I examine the generational fractures created in and through this
current moment o f crisis by explicating the cultural, historical, and architectural politics
surrounding one space at which these debates are being played out most vehemently: gay
55
bathhouses. I want to suggest that within these debates, bathhouses function as, w hat
cultural critic M arita Sturken has termed, a “technology o f memory,” as “[an object]
through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (9). Because
bathhouses (along with sex chibs and circuit parties) often are explicitly linked to rapidly
rising rates o f HIV infection among young gay men, these spaces produce and transm it
meanings (Le., cultural memories) about generationality, risk, and sexual practices. While
these memories should not be conflated with Official History, they are nonetheless
“essential to its construction” (4), even in those instances when memories are most subject
to systemic erasure. Reading gay bathhouses as sites for producing/performing cultural
memory, then, not only reveals much about the ways in which young gay men relate to
and remember the AIDS crisis, but it also provides insight into how Official AIDS History
is constituted and (potentially) contested by the specific demands o f loss and trauma. This
reading strategy recognizes the AIDS epidemic as constituting a traumatic history—that is,
not only a history played out through instances o f profound loss and devastation, but also
a history which, because o f its ongoing nature, so completely shatters conventional frames
for comprehending “the past” (e.g., temporality, spatiality, chronology, linearity). In order
to outline a model o f traumatic historiography, I first trace the parameters and conditions
o f the current moment o f crisis (Le., rising rates o f HIV-infection among Gen Xers), then I
demonstrate how this “crisis” is manufactured around and sustained through bathhouse
culture, and finally I offer an alternative way o f reading the crisis and its relationship to
bathhouse culture, one which m ore adequately addresses (and self-consciously seeks to
heal) the generational fractures which mark our communities and histories in this historical
moment.
“AIDS A m nesia” and the Politics o f Forgetting

In the spring 1999 issue o f V olunteer The Newsletter for Volunteers and
Supporters o f Gav Men’s Health Crisis. Stephen Soba poses a question that, in recent
years, has preoccupied much o f the time and energy o f the gay press: “Are HIV
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prevention messages reaching a new generation o f gay men?” (7). Even a cursory glance
at the extant literature on this topic would reveal a unanimously negative response to
Soba’s question. In February 1999, OUT P o st Detroit’s bi-weekly gay newspaper,
revealed that the number o f young gay men who reported having unprotected anal sex
rose from 35 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 1997 (“Risky Behavior” 11). This same
source also reported that, in Atlanta, rates o f HIV transmission had increased 50 percent
between 1997 and 1998 and that, in New York and San Francisco, more than 20 percent
o f HIV-positive men had engaged in unprotected sex with an HIV-negative partner or
with a partner whose HIV status they did not know. While this shift in AIDS
demographics is still too newly emergent for medical experts to understand fully its
breadth and scope, these local statistics appear to be indicative o f a nationwide trend: that
is, gay men ages 18-35 (roughly the span o f Generation X) are increasingly prone to take
unnecessary sexual risks which significantly contribute to rapidly rising rates o f
seroconversion.
Although the causal links between unsafe sexual practices and HIV transmission
are by now clear, the reasons that young gay men are particularly susceptible to these
unsafe sexual practices are less so. In feet, reports on this topic confirm that a web o f
related factors have contributed to the current shift in rates o f HTV transmission. Richard
Elovich, director o f HIV prevention at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, suggests that the
development o f pro tease inhibitors and cocktail treatments has facilitated the mind-set
among young gay men that they “may not get sick—or, if they get sick, they won’t die”
(qtd. in H eitz 33). Along similar lines, journalist Michaelangelo Signorile recently argued
that this trend can be traced to shifts in cultural representations o f persons with AIDS and
HIV education.^ He contends that a “culture o f hope” (through which persons with AIDS
have “come to feel better about themselves”) has “overtaken [the] fear” characteristic o f
early attem pts at HIV education, thus making “the reality o f sickness and death__
abstract and removed for a whole new generation o f young adults” (Signorile, “don’t fear
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the fear” 55). O ther critics have linked the resurgence o f unsafe sexual practices to an
increased desire for intimacy among a generation “devastated by loss” (Gallagher 34).
Such critics suggest that because young gay men have come o f age alongside the
epidemic, because “AIDS has been a part o f (young men’s] gay worlds since day one”
(Rofes 20), bonds o f intimacy between members o f this generation are especially tenuous
and the increase in unsafe sexual practices enacts a defiant response to the lack o f intimacy
felt by many Gen Xers. Still other critics link the trend to nostalgia, to a longing for the
mythical and romanticized “sexual revolution” o f the 1970s which, for m ost young gay
men, has attained the status o f urban legend, both alluring and unverifiable.
As the “causal factors” are documented to demarcate this current moment o f crisis,
cultural memories are formed. Sturken defines cultural memory as “a field o f cultural
negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (1). In this sense,
cultural memories might be understood as collectively constituted narratives acquired
through the accumulation o f representations in order to describe an event, practice, or

phenomenon. Unlike Official History, cultural memories do not seek to frame events,
practices, o r phenomena by a single, seamless Truth claim. Rather, they foreground
contestations over the meaning o f events, practices, and phenomena through the
proliferation o f multiple, discontinuous, and changeable narratives. H ence, each o f the
aforementioned critics puts forth his understanding o f the crisis—its causes, its effects—by
interpreting the “facts” in a way that will la id credibility to his own tru th claims without
necessarily invalidating, but perhaps supplementing, the claims o f others. The narratives
above offer a tentative outline o f the current crisis and stage a negotiation over how the
crisis “should” be represented in Official History. These narratives cannot be conflated
with official historical discourse, since they are produced through negotiations and, thus,
subject to change. But they cannot be wholly distinguished from official historical
discourse either, since the process o f negotiation also stages a jockeying for control over
which version o f these events will be remembered in/by History.
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While cultural memories share some important commonalties w ith the

aforementioned causal analyses o f contemporaneous events, there also are some
noteworthy differences between the two which, if explored briefly, m ight m ore clearly
explain my use o f the form er in the context o f this chapter. Both causal analyses and
cultural memories seek to gam er meaning from an historical event—to identify the
conditions o f its origin, to speculate about its enduring implications fo r the “present.” To
do so, each project offers an interpretation o f that event. But whereas causal analyses
strive to frame definitively th e event in such a way that its “relevance” appears both
self-evident and incontestable, cultural memories—because they are subject to forgetting,
erasure, and revision—offer a m ore malleable and self-reflexive interpretation o f the event.
To illustrate, each o f the aforementioned critics provides a causal analysis o f a current
event, or shift, in the history o f the AIDS epidemic. Alone, these analyses cannot produce
a cultural memory o f the event because their explanations are asserted as Fact, as Truth.
By contrast, in this chapter, I outline a cultural memory o f this event by juxtaposing
various “readings” o f its causes, not in order to assert my own Truth claim, but instead to
chart a dialogue within the vast network o f historical and cultural forces out o f which this
trend has emerged. Because cultural memories are multi-voiced, partial, and malleable,
they can m ore accurately record the contested and ongoing historical trajectories o f an
epidemic whose impact is felt in a multiplicity o f private and public arenas.
Although this crisis has facilitated the construction o f multiple and discontinuous
cultural memories, a narrative o f young gay male denial frequently prevails in how the
crisis is documented and remembered in official historical discourse. This narrative o f
denial signals a willful forgetting o f the continuing severity o f the AIDS crisis in order to
justify risky and unsafe sexual practices. Journalist Tony Valenzuela offers a pointed
assessment o f the links being draw n between young gay men and denial, noting that
“[rjecent tim es have witnessed a mushrooming o f media attention and debates over how
young gay men are living through the epidemic, and the pundits involved often
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characterize 20-somethings as hedonistic, narcissistic Circuit Party travelers suffering from

some form o f amnesia around the AIDS epidemic” (87).^ Here, Valenzuela uses
“amnesia” as a trope to describe the narrative o f denial- Typically, amnesia denotes a
partial or complete loss o f memory induced by trauma (physical or psychological). A
traumatic event severs the subject for a linear, chronological, causal paradigm o f
temporality (as professed by Official History) such that the subject knows and understands
the present but cannot comprehend the conditions o f its making. In this sense, the
amnesic subject is not ahistorical because, in his present (re)actions, he poses and enacts
cultural memories- But because he is severed from the past, because he has no context
within which to evaluate his present circumstances, he is unable to narrate and interpret
these memories as History. The trope o f amnesia, then, locates young gay men within a
double bind: on one hand, instances o f unsafe sexual practice and seroconversion render
them active subjects in the creation o f cultural memories; on the other hand, young gay
men’s (willful?) disregard for HTV prevention renders them passive objects in the
documentation and re-telling o f this crisis.
As I stated above, I am less inclined to enter debates regarding the validity o f
specific “facts” as I am to consider the politics surrounding how and why certain cultural
memories are forgotten and remembered in the construction and transmission o f Official
History. Often I agree that denial on the part o f young gay men has much to do with the
resurgence o f unsafe sexual practices and the increase in seroconversion rates. However,
because I cannot speak to how wide-spread this denial might be, I instead will focus on
the processes through which this narrative o f denial has come to dominate in discussions
o f the crisis and the effects that this narrative has had on conceptions o f generationality,
community, and AIDS for young gay men.
I want to suggest that the perpetuation o f a narrative o f denial is itself an act o f
forgetting, an act endemic to the construction ofhistory and memory. In his essay
“Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic W orld,” performance theorist Joseph
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Roach notes that “cultures select what they transmit through memory and history” (47).
Sturken, too, recognizes that “[fjorgetting is a necessary component in the construction o f
memory,” and goes on to suggest that “[w]hat we remember is highly selective, and how
we retrieve it says as much about desire and denial as it does about remembrance” (7).
B oth Roach and Sturken contend that negotiations over cultural memory always are
politically charged, as much about the desires and denials o f the historian who looks back
as about historical accuracy and truth. They also implicitly suggest that the processes
through which cultural memories become Official History are ideologically inflected.
Thus, to perpetuate a narrative o f AIDS denial which implicates young gay men as
“amnesic,” historians must systematically invalidate and/or forget other cultural memories
o f this crisis which suggest alternative causal factors. Through these acts o f exclusion,
historians reveal (however implicitly) their desires for and stakes in a version o f AIDS
history which heals the wounds created by trauma through scapegoating and blame and
not through a thorough investigation o f the structures and fractures which constitute and
are constituted by that traumatic event.
In the following sections, I trace the processes through which a cultural memory o f
denial by young gay men has come to stand as Official AIDS History. I begin with the
assumption that the processes o f memory derive from the interactions o f individuals, that
memories are themselves co-created. Clearly, the ways in which young gay men
produce/perform their sexual identities ascribe particular meanings to the AIDS crisis.
And, in the introduction to this project, I argue that the production o f identity and the
production o f space are mutually constituting. Thus, I want to examine the architectural
and historical politics surrounding one space in which cultural memories o f denial are
produced and given meaning through performances o f young gay male identity:
bathhouses. I contend that an extended understanding o f bathhouse history and politics
not only reveals the ideological underpinnings o f Official AIDS History, but also offers a
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model through which that history can be contested and resisted and a traum atic history o f
AIDS can emerge.
“W rapped in a Timeless Cocoon”
Contemporary gay bathhouses are firmly rooted in rich cultural and architectural
histories which extend to ancient civilizations. From the luxurious Rom an thermae built
primarily to maintain personal and public health to Native American “sw eat houses” built
primarily to enable physical and spiritual rejuvenation, the “sweat bath” has been
“practised for ages by both civilized and savage races” (Cosgrove 1). In America, gay
O
bathhouse culture originated in appropriations o f Roman, Turkish, and public baths.
Throughout the latter half o f the nineteenth century, such appropriations gave rise to what
historian George Chauncey has term ed “gay-tolerant baths”—that is, bathhouses in which
“limited homosexual activities]” w ere permissible if patrons could engage in those
activities “without drawing the attention o f other bathers” (209). Chauncey further notes
that, by 1902, N ew York City already had witnessed the emergence o f bathhouses that
“catered to gay men by excluding nonhomosexual patrons and [by] creating an
environment in which homosexual activity was encouraged and safeguarded” (209).^
Despite the multi-layered cultural histories which gay bathhouses possess, critics
often have argued that, within their walls, these institutions orchestrate a timeless, even
ahistoricaL, atmosphere. Writing about bathhouses in New York City in 1985, New
Republic columnist Philip Weiss argues that the baths “seemed calculated to wrap events
into a timeless cocoon” (13). Weiss cites architectural features (such as uniform black
walls, artificial lighting, and absence o f windows) to prove his claim that the baths foster a
repetitive social order grounded in “the absolute similarity o f one h o u r . . . to any other”
(13). Here, Weiss articulates a commonly-held (mis-?)understanding o f th e baths that has
prevailed in the United States for nearly a century: that is, bathhouse tem porality operates
according to a circular, rather than a linear, order and events are tenuously linked by
association (to sights, to smells) rather than by causality. Gay bathhouses thus represent,
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at least for Weiss and bis ilk, self-contained, isolated worlds through which gay men are
permitted to escape momentarily the constrictions o f time and history.
Two predom inant factors have enabled this understanding o f bathhouses (as
ahistorical) to retain a strong foothold in the American cultural imaginary. The first factor
is the function o f gay bathhouses. Gay bathhouses exist to facilitate sexual encounters
between and among men and, therefore, have no perceived civic use-value. To illustrate
this point, I need only to contrast the function o f gay baths to the function o f American
public baths. In W ashing “The Great Unwashed” : Public Baths in Urban America.
1840-1920 (1991), historian Marilyn Thornton Williams suggests that, from the
Progressive E ra forward, “the demand for public baths was part o f the wider demand for
public health reform” engendered by a mass influx o f immigrants, an overcrowding in
urban slums, the rapid spread o f disease in slum areas, and the lack o f private bathing
facilities among immigrant populations (2). In their design and implementation, then,
American public baths sought to play a vital role in the acculturation o f immigrants. By
preaching a “gospel o f cleanliness” (138), urban reform ers advocated a particular version
o f the American Dream which linked personal cleanliness and health to the middle-class
values o f social advancement, material wealth, and self-respect.^
Once bathhouses emerged as sites for facilitating (homo)sexual encounters, the
spaces became m ore ornamental and less utilitarian. Gay bathhouses make no claims to
community building and personal advancement; instead, these spaces promote themselves
through a rhetoric o f leisure and pleasure. As journalist Perry Deane Young explains in a
1973 Rolling Stone article, “’Steambath’ is actually a misnomer when it applies to gay
baths. For it is a dull man, indeed, who goes to a gay bath to bathe. In fact, nobody ever
used the actual baths in the old gay baths and surely there were ‘baths’ operating which
didn’t even have baths” (50). According to Young, gay bathhouses do not require bathing
facilities in order to fulfill their objectives, though m ost such spaces typically include
bathing facilities in order for owners to maintain the guise o f a legitimate establishment.
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Because patrons participate in gay bathhouse culture for the purpose o f sex (as opposed to
the purposes o f relaxation, rejuvenation, etc.), bathing facilities represent set dressing
rather than a means to an end. Showers, saunas, whirlpools, and other accouterments
borrowed from more traditional (read mainstream) baths serve as backdrops for sexual
liaisons in gay establishments. Quite often these bathing facilities enable patrons to act out
sexual fantasies with a sports o r locker room motif—fantasies which would otherwise be
proscribed in “real” locker room settings. ^ ^ Gay bathhouses thus trade in illusion, selling
their patrons an inverted social order in which specific objects/spaces complement (rather
than fulfill) the pleasures and designs o f their users.
I f gay bathhouses are perceived to be “anchored in illusion” (W eiss 13) and
pleasure, then claims which posit an antithetical relationship between such spaces and
prevailing conceptions o f time and history might initially appear justified. American
notions o f time and history are, in large part, shaped by the economic mode o f
production—capitalism. Through this frame, history is viewed as a progression towards an
individual/collective goal (i.e., accumulation, consumption, profit) which, over time, is
achieved through the labor o f production; as a result, time (i.e., the means to an end) is
itself commodified. Gay bathhouses stand in opposition to the values o f labor, production,
and consumption which are inherent to this view o f time and history. Patrons visit the
baths to escape o r take refuge from the realm o f labor and work. Once inside, they
endlessly pursue ephemeral, bodily pleasures which produce no tangible “goods” or
“services” (i.e., gay sex is non-reproductive); rather, these pursuits produce only an
orgasm w ith neither a use- nor an exchange-value. Thus while gay bathhouse patrons do
engage in acts o f consumption (e.g., oral/anal sex), production (e.g., self-as-commodity,
orgasm), and labor (e.g., cruising), these acts do not contribute to individual/collective
advancement toward a tangible goal; instead, these acts instill in patrons a seemingly
insatiable hunger for the cycle o f “connection, fulfillment, and abandonment” (Betsky 164)
which can only ever be achieved in a perpetual present tense.
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A second factor which has given rise to criticisms o f timelessness and ahistoricity
is architectural design. I use the term “architectural design” loosely to encompass the
location o f bathhouses within the city, the exterior “appearance” o f these spaces, and their
interior layout These architectural features create an atmosphere o f isolation, disguise,
and anonymity' and w ork to fold bathhouses into the dark recesses o f the city. In this way,
architecture establishes the bathhouse as a closet space—as occupying an unacknowledged
and unrecognizable zone in the planned city. Bathhouses thus do not “exist” in time,
space, o r history because they do not adhere to the laws o f (heteronormative) urban
planning.
In the city, bathhouses typically occupy marginal spaces, ghettoized in either gay
or red light districts. Sam’s Baths in Reno, Nevada, for example, is housed in a run-down,
multistoried structure more than ten blocks south o f the strip. Because this structure is
situated so for outside o f the heavily trafficked areas o f downtown Reno, and because the
area between downtown Reno and Sam’s Baths boasts o f a high crime rate, this space is
not readily accessible by fo o t By contrast, the Unicom Health Chib is located in the heart
o f Chicago’s gay d istrict Boys Town, and is thus readily accessible by foot o r by L-train.
Still, because Boys Town is separated from downtown Chicago by the Chicago River, the
Unicom, like Sam’s Baths, requires potential patrons to invest tim e and money in travel to
penetrate its shroud o f isolation.
If geographic isolation impedes attem pts o f patrons to access bathhouses, then
these attempts are further confounded tty exterior architectural features designed to
disguise the functions and uses o f the space. As sex researchers M artin S. Weinberg and
Colin J. Williams note in the co-authored essay “Gay Baths and the Social Organization o f
Impersonal Sex,” gay bathhouses “are usually m uted in appearance, with no external
indication o f what they are except a cryptic sign such as ‘Men’s Health Chib’” (128).
During a trip to N ew Orleans in October 1997, the effectiveness o f these “masking
techniques” was impressed upon me when I spent roughly forty-five minutes searching for
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the city’s only bathhouse. The bathhouse was distinguished from other, identical
structures lining Tolouse Street only by a small, green plaque affixed above the door’s
mail slot which read “Club N ew Orleans.” The nondescript, muted facade o f “Club N ew
Orleans” (and o f m ost other bathhouses) works to discriminate between patrons and
outsiders by retying on the prior knowledge (through gay travel guides, hearsay, etc.) o f
its patrons for admittance to the space. Moreover, th at the function o f the space is
misleadingly represented on its exterior enables the bathhouse to remain nestled within the
urban landscape, an unimposing and unremarkable frame which is undetectable to the
naked (read uninitiated) eye.
Inside gay baths, architects wrap patrons in a blanket (or, rather, towel) o f
anonymity. The entrance is constructed like a series o f nesting dolls. Patrons pass through
a sequence o f locked doors, depositing forms o f identification and other possessions in a
locked box along the way. Once they have checked their “worldly personas” at the door,
patrons enter into a “circuit o f space” (Betsky 163) marked by darkened mazes and red-lit
corridors. Here, the rem oval o f patrons from everyday life is complete (through the
absence o f clocks and windows). Moreover, lighting decisions underscore the importance
o f secrecy, discretion, and anonymity by discouraging acts o f verbal communication.
Anonymous, mute bodies drift aimlessly through the space leaving, at best, a puddle o f
semen to mark their passage. For a moment, these bodies appear to transcend the limits o f
individual identity or the possibility o f a lasting relationship (both concepts so bound to
notions o f time, space, and history) to create an ephemeral, bodily space o f pure orgasm
and pleasure.
Urban planners strive to create an ordered, user-friendly city in which spaces are
accessible, recognizable, and functional. Architects set forth a blueprint o f this ideal city
in their designs, but pedestrians ground that city in real time and history by walking in and
engaging with its sp a c e s.^ Bathhouses dare to imagine a space beyond the city limits,
outside traditional conceptions o f time, history, and architecture. This space beyond is
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unplanned, unmapped, its existence and inhabitants subject to erasure o r relegated to

1
oblivion. It is not surprising, then, that bathhouse patrons often are perceived to be
“wrapped in a timeless cocoon” since bathhouses themselves traditionally have been
regarded as a bacchanal “no-man’s land” (or, a “know-man’s” land, since the initiated can
find the baths).
Closing th e Baths
D ining the mid-1980s, proposed legislative initiatives designed to close the baths
made explicit a link between gay bathhouses and the AIDS epidemic. Within the highly
charged political debates surrounding these initiatives, the baths frequently were criticized
as breeding grounds for A ID S .^ In November 1985, for example, then governor o f New
York Mario Cuomo drafted a set o f guidelines “designed to shut down the gay bathhouses
and sex clubs” (Schulman 10). The following month, the New Y ork City Health
Committee “voted unanimously in favor o f Resolution 1985, calling for the closure o f
bathhouses and other public establishments where ‘certain high-risk sexual practices’
occur” (114). A t the heart o f these (and related) initiatives by city officials across the
nation was the contention that bathhouses advance the spread o f HIV among patrons by
knowingly foiling to enforce safer sex guidelines handed down by the Centers for Disease
Control. The mandatory closing o f gay bathhouses thus was necessary, Cuomo and his
followers argued, because doing so would radically decrease, if not eradicate, the
ever-rising numbers o f HIV-infected persons in the United States.
To support their claims and to justify the implementation o f such precautionary
measures, closing advocates invoked an insidious logic which foreshadowed the way in
which this moment would be preserved and remembered in/by History. Weiss provides
insight into the causal logic underlying the rhetoric o f closing advocates when he observes
that “[a] m an could live round the clock in [the baths] and pretend that day, night, the East
Village, and AIDS did not exist” (13). For Weiss, Cuomo, and others, the baths enable
the spread o f HTV by fostering a timeless and ahistorical social order. Such spaces, we are
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told, encourage patrons to enact a willing (and willful) suspension o f disbelief whereby the
theatricality o f this Active world is perceived to be more “real” than the m ateriality o f its
counterparts outside. Because these initiatives understood participation in bathhouse
culture as a willing and willful act o f forgetting (however momentarily), they also worked
to solidify the construction o f sexually active gay men as am nesic.^ Closing advocates
thus take their place as arbiters o f AIDS History by establishing themselves as prophets.
Armed with the gift o f foresight, these seers professed their predictions o f inevitable ruin
and destruction as Truth. That these predictions w ent unheeded by those who most
desperately needed to hear and understand the “Word” (i.e., bathhouse patrons) not only
lent credence to the validity o f their arguments, but also (in the absence o f other, informed
predictions) advanced this narrative to the ranks o f Official History.
I f an examination o fthe closing initiatives reveals how AIDS amnesia and
bathhouses came to be conjoined in the history o f the epidemic, then an examination o f the
debates over these initiatives reveals much about what’s at stake in AIDS historiography.
Already I have outlined the position o f the closing advocates. On the other side o f the
debates were those who viewed the bathhouses as key sites for educating gay men about
safer sex (and other modes o f prevention) and/or who viewed the initiatives o f Cuomo and
others as an endangerment to the civil rights o f gay people. Nancy Roth, a member o f the
Gay Rights National Lobby, responded to these debates in 1985 by arguing that
“[bjathhouses don’t spread AIDS, people spread A ID S By focusing energy on
closing the baths, which is not a terribly effective health measure, we are diverting energy
from education” (qtd. in Schulman 103). Here, Roth makes a compelling argument for
why Cuomo-like initiatives would not solve the problem o f rapidly rising rates o f HIV
infection. She disputes the “logic” that closing bathhouses will cease the spread o f HTV by
arguing that where HIV transmission does (or does not) take place is less easily regulated
and changed than how transmission transpires. By shifting the focus o f these debates from
Reproduced with permission o fth e copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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questions o f space and location to question o f behavior, Roth mobilizes a platform o f

education which she proposes as a more effective solution than absolute prohibition.
Although Roth was not alone in her objections to the bathhouse closing initiatives,
ultimately she and her cohorts w ere efiaced from Official AIDS History, a feet that is m ost
clearly evidenced in the mass closings o f the baths in major urban centers during the latter
half o f the 1980s. Yet when these debates are re-examined, w hat becomes immediately
apparent is that there were many proposed courses o f action to curb rates o f transmission,
multiple cultural memories o f w hat this moment in the AIDS crisis supposedly meant to
gay men and to American culture in general. Why, then, are the debates over bathhouses
persistently narrated from the perspective o f those who advocate regulatory measures?
W hat ideological forces enable one historical narrative to advance and others to be excised
in the telling and documentation o f AIDS History?
Clearly, the rise o f closing advocates to the ranks o f historical gatekeepers speaks
to the continuing prevalence o f certain conceptions o f gay male identity in/on American
culture. These narratives reproduce overdetermined cultural assumptions about sexually
active gay men (i.e., gay sex = death) to maintain rigid distinctions between those at risk
and the general public, thus placating dominant cultural fears o f contagion which were
particularly heightened during the m id-1980s.^ By suggesting that gay male identity is
only and always about sexual practice, these advocates also worked to depoliticize gay
men, to revoke the increased visibility and agency afforded them by the AIDS crisis. This
link between gay male identity and sexual practice further sustains the guilty/innocent
binary by infantilizing bathhouse patrons as selfdestructive, hedonistic children who m ust
be patronized (i.e., taught the “error o f their ways”) by an all-knowing and angst-ridden
heteronormative culture. At least for legal, medical, and media institutions, the issue is
(and always has been) sexual orientation, not the epidemic and its prevention. And by
locating the spread o f HIV firmly and conclusively in gay bathhouses, this version o f
Official AIDS History identifies gay m en as the source o f the problem (Le., AIDS) and
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ultimately seeks to discriminate against gay men and to restrict consensual (homo)sexual
practices.
A rchitectural N ostalgia
Those critics who read bathhouses as devoid o f history implicitly situate these
spaces within the context o f a larger movement in postmodern architecture—w hat architect
Ada Louise Huxtable terms “the Disney-fication o f America.” In The Unreal America:
Architecture and Illusion (1997), Huxtable contends that the postmodern landscape is
densely populated by “entertainment environments” “conceived apart from a received
tradition” (69). Like Main Street, U.S.A. at W alt Disney World, these postm odern
environments nostalgically revisit and m isappropriate the motifs, designs, and structures o f
previous periods to create a past which, though it never existed, is nonetheless salable
precisely because it has edited and sanitized “the substance o f history” (19). Bathhouses
are notoriously artificial and repetitive in their designs and uses. They constitute imagined
environments which fabricate, package, and m arket sex as “themed entertainment.” In
terms o f design, these spaces are neither innovative nor unique; rather, they borrow on
and replicate the designs and motifs o f a “monolithic prototype” such that bathhouses over
time have shared a relatively “uniform look” (Lindell 77). This “uniform look,” coupled
with the emergence o f a “Disney-fied” America, lends credence to claims that the
resurgence o f bathhouses in the latter half o f the 1990s reflects a nostalgic hearkening
back to a romanticized past (Le., the “sexual revolution” o f the 1970s) which never
existed.
I do not disagree with critics who posit bathhouses as nostalgic spaces; in fact, I
find this reading both persuasive and useful to my project here. However, I do take issue
with those critics (and they are many) who unproblematically conflate nostalgia and
ahistoricity. By its very definition as a longing for something that is not present, nostalgia
is deeply tied to history and memory. N ostalgia enacts the production o f memory, is itself
the impetus for and manifestation o f particular form s o f memory. Unlike other forms o f
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(cultural) memory, though, nostalgia typically is not perm itted to participate in

negotiations over how History is documented and recorded because it is too often
understood as a highly sentimental and subjective process o f recovery which
mis-remembers the past (a criticism which, I would wager, few accounts o f History could
withstand). Critics who negate the historical groundedness o f nostalgia abide by an
unwavering faith in rigid (and false) distinctions between objective History and subjective
memory and in the illusory guise o f impartiality and omniscience. Here, I contend that the
repetition o f a “uniform look” for bathhouses represents an act o f nostalgia—a
self-reflexive gesture backwards in time which reveals a desire to comprehend (rather than
a denial of) how the past has come to bear upon the present. By opting to (re-)visit the
baths, then, young gay men produce/perform cultural memories and thus cannot rightfully
be regarded as amnesic, even if the production o f those memories is not consciously
acknowledged by individual patrons.
Nostalgia is a particularly useful frame through which to re-conceive the current
crisis among young gay men as a traumatic history because nostalgic memories are always
and only enabled by the traum a o f loss. (Specifically in regards to the current shift in
AIDS history which I identify above, the loss for Boomers implicates the “death” o f
hedonism and sexual promiscuity, o f optimistic self-discovery performed sexually, and so
on.) By this I mean that nostalgia is predicated on an act o f disappearance (from time,
from history). The initial act o f disappearance induces pain in the subject(s) who
experiences it, a pain which the subject(s) continually seeks to alleviate through rehearsing
and re-living that moment in the present. Rehearsing this act through nostalgic memories
can only ever partially recover that which has disappeared, since memories are subject to
forgetting, editing, and sanitizing. In effect, nostalgic memories are driven by revisionist
impulses, punctuated by doubt, and wracked with the question, “Did it really happen that
way?” Together, these characteristics reproduce history as a kind o f “Choose Your Own
Adventure” narrative in which details, chronology, and denouement morph (however
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slightly) with each act o f reading/recovery. This is not to suggest that nostalgic memories
create a history marked by the absence o f historical specificity. Rather, it is to argue that
nostalgic memories enact a painful return home (the literal translation o fth e term
“nostalgia”) to a place that is simultaneously familiar and strange, comforting and
disorienting, safe and risky. N ostalgia thus creates a “place w here history hurts,” even if
the memory is itself a source o f pleasure for the subject who remembers, because the act
o f recollection is fleeting and the object being recalled appears only to disappear.
The movements o f patrons through the spaces o f the baths symbolically trace the
processes o f nostalgic memory. A s I note above, bathhouses encourage patrons to
wander, o r cruise, their spaces in an alm ost aimless fashion. Yet in his article “Public
Space for Public Sex,” visual artist John Lindell explains that this “notion o f drift,” which
is “so essential” to bathhouse culture, is achieved through a design feature termed the
Gruen Transfer. According to Lindell, the Gruen Transfer allows bathhouse patrons to
“[browse] in search o f something vaguely determined” (75). N o longer driven by a
“destination-oriented mentality,” the patron ambles along guided by impressions and
desires which are continually re-conceived in the present moment o f cruising. That the
concept o f Gruen Transfer has long served as an organizing principle for gay baths works
to connect young gay men who visit the baths in the late-1990s to other gay men who
have used and inhabited the spaces in the past. An engagement with the past, for instance,
begins w ith the unspoken rules for bathhouse behavior.^ Through hearsay or written
accounts, young gay men are instructed on how to interact w ith these spaces and with one
another in these spaces. Upon visiting the baths, these same m en incorporate the
guidelines into their behavior and, in so doing, can potentially gain a better understanding
o f how these specific behaviors emerged to meet the needs o f a particular group o f gay
men in a given historical moment. They will do so by adapting the rules and guidelines to
meet their own needs, the desires o f their partners, and the circumstances o f the sexual
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moment. The gaps between the rule and the lived experience thus open up sites for the
production o f nostalgic memories.
O f course, not every patron approaches the baths in search o f a forgotten, or
mis-remembered, past. As dance historian Susan Leigh Foster suggests in the introduction
to her edited collection Choreographing History (1995), a historian m ust “[want] to
consort w ith dead bodies, [want] to know from them” (6). Although the reasons which
propel historical recovery vary according to individual interests and goals, I want to
suggest th at young gay men must consciously approach these spaces as sites for producing
memory and history o f this current crisis. I f we are to retain any semblance o f power over
how we are defined in relation to our orientations, one another, other generations o f gay
men, and AIDS, then we must produce nostalgic memories through everyday lived
experiences in the baths. Further, we m ust use these nostalgic memories to produce
history differently, to contest the roles which we traditionally have been assigned.
Because o ur isolation and demonization in AIDS History is, in large part, determined by a
misplaced causality between baths, sexual practices, and AIDS, these spaces represent the
most logical site from which to begin to speak out o f our silence and “amnesia.”
Producing nostalgic memories is always an act o f translation whereby some
remnants o f the past are lost. Yet this loss need not be absolute since, as architect Mark
Wigley asserts in The Architecture o f Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1996), “[t]he
question o f translation is alw ays a question o f survival” (1). Survival o f the past in
nostalgic memories requires the historian to encourage discontinuities, to allow for
multiple meanings and interpretations, and to acknowledge lapses and ruptures in
chronology, temporality, and causality. Reading the nostalgic memories produced by gay
men in and through the spaces o f the baths might allow a traumatic history o f AIDS to
survive the painful act o f translation—a history which incorporates, rather than disavows,
the relationships which young gay men have to the epidemic.
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W riting Traumatic History

In the current moment o f crisis, gay bathhouses often are viewed as antithetical to
attempts at remembering the effects o f the AIDS epidemic on/in gay male communities.
This assertion relies on the assumption that the baths encourage wanton sexual practices
and thus counteract the crusades for education, health, and safety which have consumed
much o f gay men’s time and energy since the 1980s. These critics further contend that
bathhouse patrons selectively remember (if not actively forget) the mass devastation and
death which AIDS has brought to bear on us and our communities. Almost without
exception, these critics identify young gay men as those persons who are m ost prone to
this type o f amnesia. Why do so many critics (m ost o f whom are gay Baby Boomers)
draw explicit lines o f relation between the baths, the rising rates o f HIV infection, and
AIDS amnesia? Does the resurgence o f baths in the late 1990s signal an uncritical and
ahistorical regression to an earlier moment? Is it only indicative o f “AIDS amnesia”? Or
is it a more self-conscious gesture towards a generationally-mflected logic o f AIDS and
gay male identity? What other struggles over the meanings of generationality, gay male
identity, and AIDS are embedded within the widely-accepted rhetoric o f amnesia? And
what do these struggles tell us about how we might begin the heal the fractures which
mar(k) our communities?
One unacknowledged point o f contestation fueling the rhetoric o f amnesia is a
larger anxiety around the marked decline in national resources. Over the past twenty odd
years, this anxiety has consistently been projected onto Gen Xers, who are identified as
“slackers,” “fack-ups,” “the decline o f [American] society’s greatness” (Howe and
Strauss, G e n X 7). In effect, Gen Xers are blamed for problems which we did not create
but problems w ith which we must nonetheless deal. For example, critics o f Generation X
often cite lack o f ambition as an explanation for why we represent “the only generation
bom since the Civil W ar to come o f age unlikely to match [our] parents’ economic
fortunes” (7). Implicit in this rhetoric o f blame is a mournful lament for “what might have
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been” which is bom out o f a romanticized fabrication o f what actually was. W hen older
generations unconditionally lump all Gen Xers into the unskilled, unmotivated service
sector o f Ronald McDonaldland, they ignore the fact that “the Reagan-era prosperity7*
(99) which allowed them to “[reap] the benefits o f Social Security COLAs, runaway
Medicare spending, S&L bailouts, senior saver discounts, unlimited mortgage deductions,
CEO golden parachutes, and tax cuts for $ 100,000-plus households” (37) has directly
influenced the current conditions which they so adamantly critique. In short, amnesia
allows older generations to disavow their responsibilities in creating this generation o f
“slackers” and to selectively remember only the effects (Le., economic prosperity, job
security) and not the conditions (Le., Reaganomics) o f their own making. 1R
The rhetoric o f amnesia surrounding young gay men operates in a similar manner.
I f Gen Xers in general are blamed for national economic decline because o f their
unwillingness to subscribe to (an outmoded version of) the American Dream professed by
Boomers, then young gay men are blamed for a decline in HIV prevention because o f our
unwillingness to learn from the mistakes o f older gay men. Relying on empirical
knowledge garnered from years o f commitment to safer sex education campaigns, older
gay men often adopt a paternalistic attitude toward their younger counterparts. Though
they bill their advice as “education,” the underlying message is all too clear: that is, we
[older gay men] know what it is like to live amidst AIDS; you [younger gay men] do not
and, failure to heed our warnings, portends your doom.
This assertion is not intended to invalidate experiential knowledge o r to ignore the
continuing need for prevention education. I also do not want to shift the axis o f blame to
implicate older gay m en as the source o f this current crisis. Instead, my assertion sets
forth a call for older gay men to remember their struggles to articulate/live gay identities
with and against the epidemic and for them to recognize that while our struggles may be
similar to theirs, they are not identical. For example, although older gay men had to adjust
their patterns o f sexual practice to accommodate AIDS, younger gay men have only ever
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known and practiced the anxiety-ridden form o f sex bom o u t o f the epidemic. I want to
see a more concerted effort on the part o f all gay men to acknowledge that different
responses to AIDS and sexual practice are based on ever-changing conceptions o f gay
male identity, sexuality, and risk. I w ant gay men to abandon a rhetoric o f scapegoating
and blame and to recognize that if education alone could halt the spread o f HIV, then it
would have done so long ago. In other words, though I do not deny the obvious decline
in HTV prevention among young gay men, I think we must w ork toward a multi-layered
critique o f this problem which encourages dialogue across generations and winch
distinguishes unsafe sex as only one condition (rather than th e source) which has given rise
to the current state o f affairs.

Another point o f contention underlying the rhetoric o f amnesia concerns the
politics o f (gay) identity. A t least since the mid-1980s, bathhouses have served as a stage
on which gay men have debated the role o f sexual practice in defining their individual and
collective identities. This is not a new debate, though the threat o f increased
governmental intervention into consensual (homo)sexual practices brought about by AIDS
clearly raised its stakes. A ttacks on gay bathhouses both in the mid-1980s and in the late
1990s reveal a passionate attachm ent to puritanical notions o f sexuality and to an
assimilative model o f gay identity. On the surface, these attacks seem designed to
maintain public health and safety. But this objective serves only as a thin veil over the
more insidious desire to regulate and control gay male sexual practices by instituting
universal monogamy as the only legitimate manifestation o f sexuality. ^ Moreover, by
restricting gay male sexuality to the realm o f monogamy, these regulatory moves
demonstrate the predominance o f an assimilative model o f identity politics which
“emphasizjes] the similarities betw een homosexuals and heterosexuals” (Escoffier 42). At
issue in this current crisis, then, is not simply the rising rates o f unsafe sex and HIV
transmission among young gay men. This crisis also reveals a struggle over the very
meanings o f gay identity played out between a generation which came o f age having to
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justify its “choice” by proclaiming “We’re ju st like everyone else” and another generation
which defiantly resists assimilation by shouting “We’re here, w e’re Q ueer, get used to it!”
Finally, th e rhetoric o f amnesia invokes questions o f ownership in relation to the
AIDS epidemic. All too often, young gay men are perceived to be divorced from AIDS
because they are not HDTV-positive, because they did not live through the first wave o f
devastation, because (if they are HIV-positive) they did not learn from the past. Mark
King, education director for AID Atlanta, summed up this position well when he
attributed the current crisis to the fact th at “(young gay men] did not have the front-row
seats to death and dying that made older men change their behavior” (qtd. in “Risky
Behavior” 11). W hat’s at stake in this (and similar) assertions) is no t ju st the question o f
whose experience o f AIDS has been m ore horrific and devastating. King’s assertion also
reveals a deep concern for who “owns” the epidemic, who is authorized to write its
history, and how should/must this history be written. In part, these concerns register
desires to revere those who have died, to remember struggles for AIDS research funding,
and to come to term s w ith the ruptures created in/through traum a. All o f these are valid
and important projects which must be safeguarded at all costs. However, safeguarding
these projects need not equate to the absolute negation o f “battle wounds” and “scars”
endured by those who were, for the m ost part, too young to serve as a front-line o f
defense throughout the 1980s. In the end, all gay men must realize th at AIDS has
impacted each o f our lives in profound and significant ways, has spun a history so complex
and interwoven that it cannot be narrated by any one person o r from within a single causal
or temporal logic. AIDS undeniably constitutes a history o f illness, death, and loss. But it
also constitutes a history o f community-building through activism. Sadly, in the midst o f
the current crisis over young gay men, the desire to build and sustain communities has (on
all fronts) been displaced by finger-pointing and holier-than-thou posturing.
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Conclusion
As a young, HIV-negative gay man who w rites about ADDS, I have been made
aware o f these generational divides in a number o f instances. During the Lesbian and Gay
Theatre (LGT) pre-conference in August 1997,1 challenged the artistic director o f a
prominent gay theater in Chicago on the potentially harmful ramifications o f producing a
play which clearly perpetuates the equation o f gay sex and death. He curtly replied to my
concerns by saying that I could not possibly understand his rationale for producing the
play given that I am not part o f a generation whose members felt thankful to live to see
their fortieth birthdays. In this instance, generational affiliation was understood as
affording a great deal o f privilege in the construction and dissemination o f AIDS
knowledge.
In the summer o f 1998,1 experienced similar generational tensions when I
delivered a version o f Chapter 3 at the annual meeting o f the Association for Theatre in
Higher Education. After the presentation o f papers, an HIV-positive Boomer in the
audience promptly stood and questioned my assertion that AIDS has worked to
symbolically stigmatize all gay men (regardless o f serostatus) as toxic and abject. He
argued that since I obviously am HIV-negative (a highly problematic assertion—since I did
not self-disclose my sero status in the context o f the paper—which relies o f visibility as a
marker o f HIV diagnosis) I would not really know what it feels like to be infected and
toxic—a point which I m yself foregrounded in th e paper. On one hand, those tensions
were fueled by a perceived disparity between my serostatus and that o f my interlocutor
which presumably provided him access to a body o f knowledge that was unavailable to
me. On the other hand, these tensions were generated precisely by the
generationally-inflected values which privilege certain modes o f experiential knowledge
and negate others. Specifically, I was being instructed in a less-than-po lite manner that
writing about the experience o f youth (and presumed) sero negativity is less valuable than
living through the experience o f age and seropositivity.
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These two incidents demonstrate how deeply ingrained generational tensions over
AIDS history are and make clear that these tensions cannot be easily dislodged. Y et one
final incident shows that dialogue between generations, though difficult, is not impossible.
I have been a member o f the LGT focus group for nearly four years. During the
first LGT pre-conference I attended, which was held in New York City in August 1996,
what was immediately noticeable was the virtual absence o f graduate students and young
faculty members (Le., representatives from Generation X). What was also fairly obvious
was that this pre-conference was an elaborately orchestrated cocktail party intended to
provide older gay men and lesbians a space for communion and sociability. To that point,
I can only assume that no one questioned the absence o f young gay men/lesbians or
seriously discussed measures to broaden the group’s demographics. At that
pre-conference, I met another gay male graduate student who, I soon discovered, shared
my concerns. Together, we decided that we could choose one o f three courses o f action:
one, we could remain in the group and silent, allowing the members to proceed in then-
usual fashion; two, we could abandon the group as a hopeless (though potentially worthy)
cause; and three, we could remain with the group and struggle to have our concerns both
heard and addressed. In the end, both o f us opted to remain and to struggle.
Over the next two years, my friend (Eric) and I pursued many avenues for change,
including serving on the pre-conference planning committee in 1997 and acting as chairs
o f that committee in 1998. Throughout this tim e, we held a number o f panels and
engaged in many informal discussions on issues in/around generationality. Nearly all o f
these debates ended in heated arguments derived precisely from the generational splits
which we, in talking, sought to heal. One consistent point o f contestation was the label
“Q ueer” and its effectiveness as a marker for ou r group’s identity. Many o f the older
members adamantly refused to consider the term because they had experienced it as a
pejorative one used to vilify them and their sexual orientations. By contrast, m ost o f the
graduate students and young faculty members preferred ‘Q ueer” as a marker o f identity
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due to its presum ed inchisivity and political power. All o f th e discussions over the term
ended in a stalemate, neither side willing to concede to the other’s point o f view.
A t the pre-conference held in San Antonio in August 1998, we held a panel titled
“What’s In A Name? Gay? Lesbian? Queer?” which was intended to examine w hat’s at
stake in the debates over identity politics and terminology. In many respects, the panel
only reiterated the same arguments which we, as a group, have had over and again. But
one presentation in particular affirmed for me why initially I chose to remain with the
group and struggle to be heard. The presentation was delivered by a gay man in his 50s
Mho I highly respect as a person and as a scholar. He began with a story which recalled
one o f his earliest memories—being called “queer” by a classmate. This story was intended
to explain why he so dislikes the term “queer.” Then, he announced almost
m atter-of-factly that his forthcoming book would have the term “Queer” in its title. He
explained this discrepancy by stating simply that he finally had understood the possibilities
that queer opened up and was willing to employ it strategically if a situation arose where
such a m ove might be politically beneficial. At that moment, I too understood some o f
why my opponents had been arguing against the usage o f “Queer.” To this point, I had
unconditionally embraced the term “Queer” and the idea that words can be re-signified in
ways that reverse their meaning. The childhood recollection offered by my colleague
reminded me that the process through which we re-signify w ords can, indeed, happen at
the level o f discourse, but that that process happens much m ore slowly at the level o f an
individual’s history and memory.
In the large scheme o f things, this incident was a very small and highly personal
move to heal the divides, a move which went largely unacknowledged. I should also note
♦hat, as a whole, the group still remains generationally factioned on this (and many other)
issues. B ut w hat this incident does quite clearly show is that w e are not doomed to
rehearse these divides ad infinitum. This incident shows that dialogue can happen across
generational fractures through the investments o f time and labor. This incident shows that
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both Boomer and X er gay men are guilty o f propagating narratives o f Official History,
though the Boom er versions typically are more readily accepted and m ore widely
disseminated. Finally, this incident shows that if older gay men relinquish some o f their
patronizing attitudes and if young gay men abandon their obstinate self-posturing, then
perhaps someday w e might be able to re-structure supportive communities and collective
histories precisely through the fractures which currently prohibit them.
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CHAPTER HI.
“REACH OUT, REACH OUT AND TOUCH M Y-SELF’:
BODIES, TECHNOLOGIES, AND QUEER PERFORMATIVTTY ON
GAY MALE TELEPHONE SEX LINES
“The disem bodim ent o f intimacy does not affect ju st the phone sex
participant o r the cyber space user: it affects a ll who live in the m odem
w orld D isem bodim ent does not destroy real intimacy, nor does it destroy
reality or the im portant distinctions between real s e lf and fantasy—it
m erely challenges the human spirit to rise above the lim itations and
possibilities o f both reality andfantasy. ” —Am y Flowers, The Fantasy
Factory, p . 124
Introduction
There is a fragility and a vulnerability o f the “live” that marks performance as
dangerous, ephemeral, m ortal. Live-ness ensures that “perform ance’s only life is in the
present,” that “performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated” (Phelan,
Unmarked 146). In this sense, the quality o f being (a)live distinguishes performance a&
performance. Yet as a product o f the live, performance resists the critic’s urge to
document, record, and know it; thus, the self-same characteristics which define and
delineate performance impede attempts at definition and delineation. Like a fine piece o f
parchment paper yellowed w ith age, live performance withers and crumbles under the
endless probings o f critical fingers which seek to Same and document it. That
performance is at once understood as and obscured by this process o f decomposition
raises crucial questions for any researcher who identifies the “live” as her/his object o f
study. If live performance stages itself as a “disappearing absence” (Phelan, “Reciting”
20), where and how do w e locate its remains? How do (Do?) we contour a form whose
very (a)live-ness is predicated on decay?
One central site a t which performance studies scholars often begin to exhume the
remains o f the live is the body. In her 1992 essay “Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and
Pleasure in Feminist Performance,” theatre scholar Jeanie Forte argues that in live
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performance “the body is undeniable,” “[it] m ust be acknowledged, when it becomes

visible/palpable through inhabiting tem porally a process that depends fundamentally on its
presence” (251). Performance theorist Peggy Phelan echoes Forte’s assertions in her
1993 essay “Reciting the Citation o f Others; or, A Second Introduction,” noting that “the
living performing body is the center o f sem iotic crossings, which allows one to perceive,
interpret, and document the performance event” (15). Both Forte and Phelan recognize
the centrality o f the performing body in attem pts to fix (however provisionally) the
parameters o f the live. That performing body is both a discursive and a m aterial text, able
to produce meanings through its language and its presence. * As critics examine how that
body occupies and traverses space, engages with others in space, and manipulates its
presence through language and gesture, they begin to “perceive, interpret, and document
the performance event.” Thus, the “meanings” o f performance derive from (re)tracing the
movements, o r the semiotic crossings, o f the performing body within the ftam e o f the live.
Tracing the “semiotic crossings” o fth e performing body necessitates an
examination o f how materiality is marked on that body. As theatre scholar Jill Dolan
insists in Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender. Sexuality. Performance (19931. “[i]n
visual representation the [body-as-jflesh can never be represented w ithout gender and
sexuality” (186). Dolan’s observation serves as a useful reminder that the performing
body enters representation already mediated by its own materiality. Inscriptions o f race,
class, gender, sexuality, age, and so on, engage the body in a process o f signification, o f
meaning-making, even before one word is uttered or one action is initiated. H ow the
performing body perceives and inhabits the world o f performance, then, is intimately tied
to how that body is marked, read, and interpreted within the larger cultural context o f that
performance.
In contemporary American society, the wide-spread proliferation o f information
technologies has radically altered these common understandings o f the m aterial body. As
Donna J. Haraway notes in her important book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
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Reinvention o f Nature (1991), “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly

ambiguous the difference betw een natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing
and externally-designed [,]” body and machine (152). Haraway suggests that the erosion
o f these binary distinctions has worked to (re-)produce the body as a cyborg—a
“cybernetic organism, a hybrid o f machine and organism, a creature o f social reality as
well as a creature o f fiction” (149). Clearly, the cyborg remains grounded in the material
world, “a creature o f social reality,” precisely because its reproduction as human-machine
is executed by the engagement o f a body with technology. Since machines are not
autonom ous, cannot produce cyborgs without the manipulations o f their users, the cyborg
inevitably is tied to its material counterparts. B ut the cyborg also is an invention, “a
creature o f fiction.” This is so because, in the interlacing o f body and technology, the
machine acts for/as its user by executing his/her commands.
Because the cyborg is p art machine, it has opened up the possibility that material
inscriptions o f identity marked on the body can be concealed (either partially or
completely) and materiality itself can be refashioned. One evening in the summer o f 1998,
while I was watching MTV’s Tx>veline. this point was made clear to me by a caller o fth e
program . The caller was a heterosexual woman who had been frequenting gay male chat
room s on the internet masquerading as a gay man. Over the course o f several months, she
had m et and befriended “another” gay man who had recently requested a meeting in “real
life.” The caller voiced her panic and confessed that she had phoned Loveline seeking
advice on what course o f action to take. For me, this caller clearly demonstrates how, in
the cyborg, machinery supplants the material. Since th e (machinery ofthe) internet is not
visibly marked by identity and ideology in the way that this caller’s (material) body
obviously is, the internet opened up a space in which this caller could “pass” as someone
else. In passing, the caller produced new meanings about her material body. These new
meanings were certainly grounded in the lived realities o f this caller’s fears o f intimacy and
her belief that “gay men make better friends than straight men”—this much she revealed
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during the phone call. But these new meanings also reveal the cyborg as “a creature in a
post-gender world,” a creature that “has no origin story” materially inscribed upon its
cybernetic body (150), a creature whose materiality longs to be re-w ritten. The cyborg
thus exposes the material body as a site o ffe r contestation and (potential) revision.
I f the body (cyborg, material, o r otherwise) constitutes a textual rendering o f
cultural ideologies, then the malleability o f the cyborg suggests that these ideologies can
be refrained, contested, altered. The cyborg has become a fruitful location from which to
theorize and practice various marginal identities for precisely this reason. The cyborg
provides a means through which social change can be imagined, if not (necessarily)
realized, by manipulating the meanings o f materiality. In creating cyborgs, marginal
individuals use “social realities” (o f misogyny, homophobia, racism, and so on) as a
springboard to fictionality and illusion; in effect, these social realities are refashioned in
the cyborg, often rendered less harmful, dangerous, risky.^ The cyborg thus calls into
question all the categories o f “difference” which proponents o f identity politics hold so
dear. I f for instance, a heterosexual woman can, in the creation o f a cyborg, effectively
pass as a gay man (and we must assume that the request for a “real life” meeting is
evidence o f her success), then what do the categories o f “man,” “woman,” “heterosexual,”
and ‘hom osexual” mean? Perhaps the cyborg actualizes what social constructionists have
long understood: that is, “the very notion o f identity [and materiality] as a coherent and
abiding sense o f self is . . . a cultural fantasy rather than a demonstrable feet” (Jagose 82).
Because the cyborg has re-fashioned the material body, it also has altered the
relationship^) between performing bodies and the live. In traditional performance venues,
materiality mediates the live. In the virtual and techno logized spaces which the cyborg
traverses, the live is mediated by materiality and illusion, by social reality and fiction To
comprehend fully the liberating possibilities o f the cyborg, spectators must account for the
(dominant) cultural narratives which circumscribe material bodies as well as the ways in
which those narratives are re-constructed in/through the body o f the cyborg. Tracing the
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“semiotic crossings” o f the cyborg, contouring the param eters o f the virtual live, thus
necessitates an awareness o f how material bodies are made to mean and how cyborg
bodies transgress those circumscriptions to chart new horizons for marginal identities.
Feminist critics (among them, Haraway and Anne Balsamo) have been quick to
realize (and theorize) the cyborg’s potential to re-w rite limiting cultural narratives.
However, other marginal critics have virtually ignored the cyborg’s implications for
political work toward a m ore democratic and equitable society. In this chapter, I will
explore how gay men’s deployments ofthe cyborg on telephone sex lines (can) w ork to
contest prevailing cultural narratives around generationality, sexual orientation, and AIDS.
Implicit in this project is a need to refine the parameters o f liveness and embodiment to
reflect the performance dynamics unique to telephone sex lines. I will specify these
dynamics by detailing the parameters and findings o f a participant-observation study which
I conducted during the summer and foil o f 1997.^ The study took place on a gay male
telephone sex line based in Antigua and known as “The Pipe Line.” As this study
progressed, I became increasingly aware o f how reading the line as a site of/for
performance not only raises general questions about the boundaries o f liveness and
embodiment, but also offers a means through which cultural narratives that simultaneously
fetishize and demonize young gay men can be challenged and re-worked.
Some o f the questions which guide my study include: How do young gay male
bodies make sense in/to contemporary American culture? W hat specific narratives engage
in an ideological tug-of-war over representations and significations o f these material
bodies? To what extent do dominant cultural assumptions about sexuality and
generationality influence constructions olTby those bodies on telephone sex lines? Do
these cyborgs only w ork to perpetuate dominant cultural narratives? Or does the virtual
live engender (and even encourage) other possible narratives? What types o f
interactions/performances produce such sites for possibility? And if these sites for
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possibility do facilitate the production o f alternative cultural narratives, how do critics

begin to chart the counter-discourses which they produce?
Refashioning the Body/Reconfiguring the Live
Clearly, telephone sex lines are circumscribed by the live. However, if live
performance can be traced in and through the transmutations o f material bodies, then
telephone sex lines trouble common understandings o f the live by staging materiality as
what Dolan has termed “a noncoincidence o f body and language, a postmodern
dissociation o f presence and discourse” (Presence and Desire 77). In effect, telephone sex
lines produce in their speaking subjects a crisis around the metaphysics o f embodiment,
whether this crisis is acknowledged by individual callers or not. By virtue o f placing a call,
the subject summons someone to appear, both on the other end o f the line and on his own.
But because it is the voice and not the body which actually appears on the line, the
“image” o f the body being (re-)presented by the voice is marked out as a masquerade.
However deeply the voice and the body are interrelated, the voice always will
mis-recognize its own corporeality on telephone sex lines. The musculature o f its metre,
the tactileness o f its timbre, and the physicality o f its pitch allow the voice to exceed
(however momentarily) the boundaries o f the material body.
On the lines, this struggle between the voice and the body frequently stimulates
debates over the real-ness o f the image. Over and again callers ask one another to
authenticate that they are in their bodies who their images claim to be. Callers inquire:
“Are you realty 6’4”?”; “Do you realty have threesomes with your twin brother?”; “Are
you realty wearing a cum-stained jockstrap?”; and “Do you really have nine inches?”
These and other similar questions not only reveal how the body is refashioned as a
“dissociation between presence and discourse,” but they also demonstrate how live-ness is
reconfigured as a site o f possibility and play. In the absence o f material inscriptions, the
body gains the freedom to perform in the virtual live, “to explore alternative ‘selves’ or to
reveal fantasies” (Carlson 114).
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In the worlds o f gay telephone sex, ray “alternative self” or image, is Scott.
Although Scott is both the subject and the object o f my desires, he always registers as a
counterfeit o f me because his image constantly eludes the attempts o f my m aterial body to
become i t Scott is a nineteen year old college jock; I was (at the time o f this research) a
twenty-four year old graduate student whose only participation in sports consisted o f a
daily regimen o fth e Jane Fonda workout in high school physical education class. Scott
bills himself as “young, hung, and lookin’ for fun”; I bill myself as “married, settled, and
set-in-my-ways.” Scott’s interactions on the lines are characterized by arrogance and
determination, though he himself is none too bright; I pride myself on intellectual
engagement w ithout being overbearing and inflexible. The differences between Scott and
my-self reveal how the technologies o f telephone sex mediate materiality, compelling the
body to participate in what Phelan terms “an active vanishing” (Unmarked 19). Through
the process o f mediation, the “real” body is radically refashioned and reproduced as the
“representational” image.
Despite these obvious and note-worthy differences between Scott and m yself I do
not w ant to posit an absolute rupture between the body and its image, between the real
and the representational. This is so because, as performance theorist Lynda H art argues in
Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (1998), any debates which
polarize the real and the representational ultimately ignore that “we are always already in
representation even when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies” (emphasis
added) (91). If, as H art contends, the real and the representational are mutually
generative, then the image o f Scott can never wholly obfuscate my material body. O f
course, this acknowledgment does not negate that the image stages an active
disappearance o f the body. Rather, it suggests a m ore complex and dynamic configuration
o f the body in which this “active disappearance . . . requires at least some recognition o f
what and who is not there in order to be effective” (Phelan, Unmarked 19). Read this
way, Scott can never only be a representation o f my material body because that materiality
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is itself always trapped within a representational economy. This representational economy

produces m y body as a marker o f the relationship between my identity as a gay man and
dominant cultural narratives regarding gender, homosexuality, and desire. Thus Scott is a
representation twice removed whose presence on telephone sex lines must be perceived,
interpreted and documented in relation to cultural narratives about generationality and
sexuality which discipline my m aterial body.
Disciplining the Body
Although the specific cultural meanings associated w ith gay bodies have shifted
over time, what has remained consistent is an attempt by the dominant culture to discipline
a body viewed as infected, infectious, and infecting. Certainty, as Cindy Patton has
written in Inventing AIDS (1990), gay bodies and desires historically have been regulated
by institutions o f medicine and science (129). This truism perhaps never has been more
accurate an assessment o f how our bodies are made knowable and understandable in
American culture than it has in relation to the ADDS epidemic. In his book Disease and
Representation; Images o f Tllness from Madness to AIDS (1988). literary critic Sander
Gilman argues that cultural fears o f contamination and infection by a diseased Other
necessitated the containment o f the AIDS epidemic within particular bodies. Moreover,
Gilman contends that the emergence o f AIDS in the United States among “such groups
that were immediately and visually identifiable” (266) facilitated the containment o f this
deadly epidemic in a recognizable and representative iconography o f disease: that is, risk
groups.
Historian William Haver elaborates on this iconography as it specifically pertains to
gay men in his book The Body o f this Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time o f
AIDS (1996). Haver suggests that cultural constructions o f the epidemic have
emphasized the erotics o f the sexually active gay male body and its connections to death.
He notes that “etiological constructions o f AIDS situate the origins o f HIV infection, and
therefore the essential fatality o f the body, in material erotic relations” (11). N ot only,
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then, are gay bodies isolated as containers o f a particular affliction (regardless o f

serostatus), but also gay male sexual practices are written as inherently infected,
infectious, and infecting. AIDS thus conjoins eroticism and death in the body o f the
sexually active gay man.
Cultural constructions o f this sexually active gay male body are further marked by
a preoccupation with questions o f age and generationality. Specifically, cultural
productions from within and outside o f gay male communities trade on the buff,
scantily-clad forms o f Generation X gay men and fester what I term “the cult o f the pom
star.” For Generation X gay men, the cult establishes youth as a highly conflicted identity
category, at once fetishized and demonized. While this cult is operative in sites ranging
from Broadway to Hollywood and advertising, I want to examine its workings in relation
to one venue which perpetuates the cult with a vengeance: that is, the gay pornography
industry.
Gay pornography constitutes an industry whose very success depends on its ability
to chew up and spit out young, b uff and beautiful bad boys on a regular basis. Take, for
instance, gay pom star Joey Stefano. In 1989 at the age o f twenty-one, Stefano began his
rise to stardom w ith the film Buddy System II. Over the next five years, Stefano
cultivated an image o f himself as an insatiable bottom and gained a wide following for his
on- and off-screen performances. In 1994, however, Stefano’s rise to stardom was
abruptly halted by his death from a drug overdose. For me, Stefano stands as the
penultimate example o f how the young gay male body is disciplined and codified in
representation by “the cult o f the pom star.” In posthumous accounts o f his life and
death, Stefano is depicted as a “legendary beauty” (Isherwood 9) whose hunger for drugs
and “exhaustive pursuit o f sex” “could be satisfied only in death” (203). He used beauty
and sex to gain attention and attain legendary status. He took excessive and unsafe sexual
risks, a fact seemingly supported by an HTV-positive diagnosis revealed in 1993. In short,
Stefano often is represented as an oversexed, doped up, self-destructive party boy whose
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drive for a “great fuck” and a “good buzz” always superceded any awareness o f risk, safer
sex, or AIDS.^ These narratives o f sexual excess, risk, and inevitable seroconversion and
death built up around many posthumous accounts o f Stefano’s life sustain “the cult” as a
chief determinant in understanding the lives and experiences o f all young gay men. “The
cult,” then, not only valorizes youth and beauty, but it also uses those attributes to vilify
the bodies o f young gay men.
How w e read performances ofTby gay bodies on telephone sex lines certainly is
influenced by these dominant cultural constructions which link the young gay body, sex,
and death. In foot, cultural critic Anne Balsamo has argued that the interfacing o f bodies
and technologies o ften works to heighten and perpetuate such disciplinary measures. In
Technologies o f the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women f!996). Balsamo seeks “to
describe how certain technologies are ideologically shaped by the operation o f gender
interests and, consequently, how they serve to reinforce traditional gendered patterns o f
power and authority” (10). Whereas some critics might be tempted to unconditionally
champion the technologies o f cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, and cyberspace for their
abilities to unhinge the gendered body from its limiting cultural inscriptions, Balsamo is
cautious. This caution arises from her contention that technology reiterates, rather than
refashions, these already extant cultural narratives in order to enact “new strains on and
threats to the m aterial body” (2).
The technologies o f telephone sex may at tim es contest dominant cultural
conceptions o f sexual normality, but they also inevitably “are invested with cultural
significance in ways that augment dominant cultural narratives” (Balsamo 10).^ W e need
only to take a cursory glance at advertisements for telephone sex lines to witness how “the
cult o f the pom star” is used as a marketing strategy for these services.^ In both
mainstream and gay pornography magazines, glossy images o f youthful, toned physiques
lure reading eyes into advertisements by offering the promise that this body can be owned
for only $4.99/m inute. Copy for these advertisements often works to reinforce the traffik
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in young gay men either through a suggestive telephone number (such as 1-473-WET
BOYS) or through brief descriptions o f the service which emphasize the youth o f callers
(e.g., “natural goodness,” “Handle With Care,” “Eager to Learn,” and “Wild Boys”).
I chose the Pipe Line as the site for my research precisely because advertisements
for the line foreground its embeddedness within the cult. In the summer o f 1997,1 was
perusing the classified section o f the Advocate when an advertisement for a telephone sex
service captured my attention. Its design was simple—unaccompanied by glossy images o f
partially- o r completely-nude men, by flashy color schemes and creative layout, or by a
playful mnemonic device to aid callers in remembering the phone number (such as
1-900-WETBO YS, 1-900-HOTLTHR, or 1-900-MEATRACK). But its pointed sales
pitch was compelling to one who works at the interstices o f sexuality, spatiality, and
generationality. Reading simply “Young Guys Want to Meet You!,” the advertisement
foregrounds how the bodies o f sexually-active, Generation X gay men are commoditized
in American culture, how those bodies are manufactured as commodity-fetishes to be
packaged, sold, and consumed in this virtually) safe sexual arena.
At the same time, the advertisement suggests that intimacy with young gay male
bodies is only permissible when desire is itself mediated in/through a technological medium
committed to the “disembodiment o f intimacy” (Flowers 1), when the risks o f physical
contact are annulled. By linking young gay male bodies to telephone sex lines, this
advertisement implicitly targets those bodies as a source o f the panic, fear, and risk which
circumscribe physical intimacy in the contemporary moment and suggests that these bodies
are most desirable, and least dangerous, when the palpability o f touch is offset by the
absence o f tactility. Thus, the advertisement and the service traffik in and perpetuate a
sexual economy through which young gay male bodies are at once fetishized and
demonized.
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Refashioning the Body/Reconfiguring the Live (Reprise)

To this point, I have followed Balsamo’s paradigm fairly closely in my reading o f
telephone sex lines. Now I want to diverge into an as yet unexplored assumption which
undergirds this paradigm in order to suggest an alternative way o f reading the mergings o f
gay bodies and telephone sex technologies. Whereas Balsamo primarily is concerned with
how the interlacing o f technologies and bodies “illustrates a technological colonization o f
women’s bodies” (78), I am interested in the possibilities for (re-)signification which are
opened up within the discursive field when gay bodies interface with the technologies o f
telephone sex. Interestingly, Balsamo herself recognizes that new technologies
potentially can “establish a set o f possibilities for [their] further development and
deployment.” She goes on to suggest that these “[possibilities shape ongoing ideological
struggles” (10). However, because Balsamo identifies her focus elsewhere, this aside
raises more questions than it provides answers. In what follows, I will outline some o f the
possibilities for young gay male embodiment which are opened up by interactions on gay
telephone sex lines.

I w ant to suggest that these possibilities can be found precisely in performative
reiterations o f dominant cultural narratives which strive to write and discipline the body
into a recognizable and representative iconography o f gender and sexuality. In
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory,” Q ueer theorist Judith Butler argues that in order for gender and sexuality to
achieve fixity in meaning, they must be reiterated in a series o f stylized acts. These
stylized acts w ork within/against extant codes o f codified gender behavior to locate a
subject within a state o f gender/gender confusion. But because the meanings o f gender
and sexual orientation can only ever be sedimented through their repetition, Butler goes
on to argue th at these identity categories always are in the process o f being re-written.
This is so because individual performances o f gender and sexual orientation cannot
completely replicate other, prior performances—there always will be something left over
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and in excess o f these prior performances. Gender and sexual orientation are
performative, then, because they re-enact “a set o f meanings already socially established”
and “[they enact] interpretations within the confines o f [these] already existing directives”
( 1102).
Butler’s m odel o f the performative suggests that every (en)act(ment) o f gender or
sexuality both reiterates and re-imagines cultural norms. For Balsamo, those
re-imaginings are fraught and perilous because they breed ever-more insidious forms o f
discipline and control which manifest themselves at the level o f the body. Butler, at least
in this early writing, seems to hold out for the possibility that those re-imaginings can
work to undo and contest the fixity o f sedimented cultural meanings. This process o f
undoing and contestation can only ever be partial since bodies are too firmly anchored in
these dominant cultural narratives to easily erode o r transgress them; but, in its
deployments, this process does permit bodies the pow er and authority to imag(in)e
themselves other-wise. In these imaginings, m aterial bodies resist the subjection imposed
upon them by dominant cultural narratives and stage this struggle over meaning across the
“body” o f the image.
On the Pipe Line, this struggle over the meaning o f the image is not immediately
apparent. As callers enter the Pipe Line, they are asked to record a “hot, descriptive into”
no longer than one minute which is “clear, direct and to-the-point.” In particular, callers
are instructed to describe “what they’ve got and w hat they want” because “the most
specific and revealing messages get the best response.” These introductory messages
document the image for other callers and, thus, mediate interactions between one material
body and another. Given only one minute in which to advertise themselves and their
services, callers necessarily must rely on recognizable icons, o r stereotypes, as the basis
for their images. The use o f these stereotypes can be glimpsed by quickly scanning
messages placed by other callers and noting the predominance o f for instance, hairy
trucker tops, long-haired surfer dudes with big boards, fag-bashing Neo-Nazis, and rugged
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ferm boys in bib-overalls and cowboy boots. Such stereotypes fix the image within
conventional, formulaic, and overdetermined cultural narratives and limit the cyborg
body’s ability to undo/contest larger cultural meanings which discipline and control its
material counterpart outside o f the confines o f the Pipe Line.
In many ways, Scott is a regression to and a reiteration o f earlier gay iconography
(i.e., the clone) who perpetuates harmful dominant and sub-cultural narratives around
gender, age, and body image (though, as I argue below, this feet does not negate the
possibility o f performative self-feshioning). In Gay M acho: The Life and Death o f the
Homosexual Clone (1998), sociologist M artin P. Levine suggests that the clone w as “a
specific constellation o f so cio sexual, affective and behavioral patterns that emerged among
some gay men in the urban centers o f gay American life” (7) during the decade o r so
between Stonewall and AIDS. The 70s-style clone is marked by excess and linked to
promiscuous sex and hard-core recreational drug use. Through the image o f the clone,
Levine contends, “gay men enacted a hypermasculine sexuality as a way to challenge their
stigmatization as failed men” (5).
By accentuating prevailing codes o f masculinity, the clone works to intensify rigid
gender distinctions. Because this performance o f hypermasculinity is enacted to challenge
claims o f feminization waged against gay men by the dominant culture, the clone stages a
rejection o f femininity and thus reinforces the subordination o f women in the male/female
dichotomy. M oreover, the emphasis on “hedonism and excess” in representations o f the
clone sustains “the creation within the heterosexual mainstream o f [a] unilateral ‘gay
lifestyle’ stereotype” (Signorile, Life Outside xix). This stereotype spills over into gay
male subcultures and becomes a barometer to determine levels o f access to particular
subcultural communities. The youth, stamina, and vigor o f the clone perpetuates form s o f
ageism already rampant in gay male communities and cultural productions. His
impeccable, god-like physique also supports what journalist Michelangelo Signorile term s
“the cult o f masculinity” in which “parties, drugs, and gyms [rule gay men’s] lives” (27)
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and enforce a type o f “body oppression” on any gay man who foils to live up to this rigid
ideaL In short, my use o f the clone as a template for the image o f Scott partially can be
read as an act o f discipline and control which solidifies, rather than dismantles, codified
narratives o f appropriate gendered and sexual behavior.
Although the introductory message does impede performative self-fashioning, it
does not entirety foreclose that possibility. This is so because, while introductory
messages are fixed and unchanging (at least for the duration o f a call), interactions incited
by those messages are contractual performances in which the image is subject to
negotiation and revision. In “Kinship, Intelligence, and Memory as Improvisation: Culture
and Performance in New Orleans,” performance theorist Joseph Roach argues,
“Perform ance. . . entails a compact between actors and audience. . . , a compact that
promises the production o f certain mutually anticipated effects, but the stipulations o f the
compact are often subject to negotiation, adjustment, and even transformation” (219). In
effect, images set forth the rough draft o f a contract whose term s and conditions will be
negotiated and finalized in the scene, or encounter. As they circulate among other callers,
introductory messages work to forecast the parameters o f potential one-on-one
encounters by identifying the type o f “scene” which the caller seeks (e.g., bondage, “family
fun,” locker room scene, etc.) and by locating the caller in a particular role within that
scene (e.g., master/slave, uncle/nephew, coach/quarterback, etc.). By forecasting the
boundaries o f a potential one-on-one encounter, callers w ork to ensure the fulfillment o f
“certain mutually anticipated effects.”
When one caller initiates an encounter with another caller, he tentatively agrees to
the term s and conditions proposed in another’s image. By accepting this invitation for a
one-on-one encounter, the other caller recognizes the potential for complimentarity
between his image and the image o f the initiator. But the tw o images joined together in a
given encounter rarely (if ever) form a “perfect match.” Rather, in the encounter, each
caller brings his own terms and conditions to the bargaining table and the scene itself is
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established as a site for negotiating where and how these images overlap and what kinds
o f meanings these images take on within (and outside of) the param eters o f the scene.
That the images and their contract are constantly contested and renegotiated within the
scene ensures the endless production o f meanings and opens up the possibility that sexual
images, bodies, and desires can signify beyond their fixity to enact performative
self-fashioning. The possibility o f performative self-fashioning, then, arises from tensions
between the fixity o f the image in the introductory message and its mutability within the
scene.
Performing (In) the Virtual Live
Because I can only ever speculate about the specificities o f these negotiations in
relation to other callers, I want now (and for the remainder o f this chapter) to turn to one
specific encounter which I had on the line. By describing this encounter, I seek to
demonstrate how the theoretical model which I have worked through above actually plays
itself out in some telephone sex practices. Specifically, I want to address how this scene
which I describe works to unsettle prevailing cultural narratives around generationality,
intimacy between men, gay male embodiment, and sexual performance in a moment o f
AIDS by challenging the fixity o f “the cult o f the pom star.”
One evening in early November 1997, Scott cruised the images o f other callers
looking for a young, aggressive top to engage in a familial fantasy scene between brothers.
After listening to and rejecting approximately twelve messages, Scott encountered Evan.
Evan described himself as “22, brown hair, brown eyes, big lips to suck dick, 7 1/2 c u t”
Scott chose Evan because Evan’s image possessed many o f the attributes which Scott
implicitly requested in his introductory message. The sparseness o f Evan’s description
offered Scott a virtually blank slate onto which he could inscribe the m arker o f “big
brother.” M oreover, the other caller’s refusal to assign specific desires and roles to Evan
signaled the possibility that Evan willingly would be cast in the role and scene o f Scott’s
choice. Yet there also was a forcefiilness to the other caller’s choice o f explicit
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descriptors which indicated that Evan would actively engage in the encounter and not just
act as an audio voyeur. For these reasons, S cott issued an invitation to Evan for a
one-on-one encounter, which. Evan readily accepted- I do not presume to know the exact
reasons why Evan accepted the invitation. I can only assume that the term s and conditions
which Scott set forth in his image and invitation were as intriguing to Evan as Evan’s own
introductory message was to Scott.
Evan and Scott spent the first several m inutes o f the interaction clearly defining the
parameters o f the scene:
Evan: Hey, little bro’. W hat’s up?
Scott: N ot much, big brother.
E: Are you in bed already?
S: Yep. I ’m really tired.
E: Y ou didn’t give me a good-night kiss.
S: I’m sorry. I forgot.
E: D on’t you love your big brother?
S: Yes, I love my big brother very much.
E: Maybe I’ll just have to come into my little brother’s room and give ‘em
a good-night kiss...to make sure that he really loves me. W ould that be
OK?
S: I guess.
The consistent use o f “role markers” (like “big brother” and “little bro’”) w orked to
establish a relationship between Scott and Evan that would be binding for the duration o f
the encounter. M oreover, Evan’s aggressive questions coupled with Scott’s tentative
replies traced the boundaries o f Scott and Evan’s images, locating Scott in the role o f
innocent, passive younger brother and Evan in the role o f the experienced, aggressive
older brother. By consistently rehearsing the boundaries o f the image, the o th er caller and
I revealed our fears o f intimacy (bom out o f cultural narratives which write our bodies as
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toxic and abject) and expressed the need to code this encounter as “safe.” The bounded
images stood as a prophylactic between the other caller and myself; effectively shielding us
from the risk o f live, one-on-one contact which the line claims to engender.
The scene itself took place in Scott’s childhood bedroom. Throughout the scene,
Evan posed questions about w hat Scott would and would not permit. These questions
worked to foreground the scene as a site ofrfor the negotiation o f its meanings and to
mark the contract as a shared endeavor. Evan began by gently rapping on the door and
whispering, “Can I come in, little brother?” When Scott whispered back, “Yes,” Evan
slipped into the room and crossed the floor to Scott’s bed. Evan asked, “Can I get into
bed with you?,” and Scott nervously replied, “Sure, com e on in.” They described their
pajamas, each in his turn, and then Evan shifted the discussion to sex. He made inquiries
into Scott’s sexual experiences: Do you jack off? D o you enjoy it? What do you
fantasize about? Then, he began the seduction: Have you ever wondered what I look like
naked? Can I see you naked? Can I unbutton the top o f your pajamas? Can I slip out o f
my pants? Do you want to slip out o f yours?
By posing such questions, Evan set forth the other caller’s terms and conditions
for the encounter and asked for Scott’s approval. By responding to the questions, Scott
voiced my own stance on these issues. The questions thus served as a means through
which the boundaries betw een Evan and Scott could be reiterated (by referencing a shared
familial bond) and reimagined (by pushing the limits o f that bond toward a deeper form o f
brotherly love). But the question-and-answer form at which Evan used to guide the
writing o f the contract also solidified boundaries between the other caller and me precisely
because our engagement w ith the contract was always only mediated in and through our
images.
Hidden behind the image-as-prophylactic, I felt “safe” to perform all sorts o f
sexual acts on/to/with Evan. Because I could justify this experience as “research” o r as
‘ju st talk,” I could “cheat” o n my partner without considering the acts adulterous.
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Because no bodily fluids were exchanged and no flesh was breached, Evan and Scott
could engage in oral and anal sex without broaching the topic o f “protection.” The guise
o f safety built up around this encounter was further heightened by our chosen “roles.”
Implicit in Evan’s role as big brother was the need to act as “protector,” to use his
increased wisdom (gained through age and experience) to foresee risks and to act
responsibly in shielding his little brother from harm. That I do not have a brother in “real
life” worked to intensify my feelings o f security by divorcing the encounter from social
reality and by marking the scene as pure invention. In effect, I could abandon my
inhibitions in the creation and playing out o f this encounter because real world
consequences were offset by a carefully choreographed theatricality. Moreover, if?when
this make-believe world struck too close to the material one, I felt safe in the knowledge
that I could disconnect, annulling any obligation I had to the contract or to the other caller
at a moment’s notice. In effect, by maintaining clear and rigid distinctions between body
and image, material and cybernetic, Evan and I encoded this encounter as “safe.”
O f course, desire for safety always presupposes the fear o f risk. One o f the most
persistent fears driving interactions on the lines is the fear o f young, sexually active gay
male bodies. To be sure, the lines and their callers fetishize youth. The validity o f this
assertion can be ascertained by listening to messages placed by other callers and noting the
prevalence o f 19 year old college guys who sound m ore like fathers (and, in some cases,
grandfathers) than “flat boys.” I f this piece o f empirical evidence is coupled with the fact
that the majority o f telephone sex callers are adult white males ages 25-40 (Nadel 102),
then it seems safe to conclude that many callers are lying about their age. And given that
the cybernetic image exists for the sole purpose o f representing a caller’s physical
attributes/attractiveness to other callers, I thmk it also safe to conclude that the prevalence
o f these lies proves that youth is a highly valued and valuable commodity trafSked
between and among callers on the lines. Youth is, in short, a fetish object.
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However, the incessant (yet often unacknowledged) desire to sustain a guise o f

safety also w orks to vilify youth and to sustain the cult o f the pom star. Already I have
suggested that the lines facilitate the construction o f inviolable, impenetrable cybernetic
bodies. In so doing, the lines suggest that w hat lies beneath the technologized surface
(i.e., the m aterial body) is risky, dangerous, and perhaps even toxic. Because these bodies
are risky, they must be contained, rendered safe, in the image o f the cyborg. Such
underlying assumptions are particularly harmful to young gay male callers precisely
because their identities are always circumscribed by the cult in larger cultural arenas. One
o f the most harmful effects o f the cult is that it discourages intimacy between and among
young gay men; because they are always marked out as toxic and abject, these bodies are
to be looked at but never to be touched. Telephone sex lines sustain the cult by clothing
the (dangerous) material body in a (safe) cybernetic suit.
I f the image was only and always impermeable, then telephone sex callers could
not participate in performative self-fashioning and work to contest the cult o f the pom
star. But my interaction with Evan exposed the cybernetic image as porous, permeable,
leaky. At a crucial point in the scene, Evan asked, “Do you want to touch me, Scotty?”
Although the question was directed at Scott, it was I who heatedly responded, “Yes.” To
this point, I had maintained a clear and rigid distinction between the other caller and
myself—he was the object o f study, I was the “ethnographer.” While he (presumably)
stroked his “rock-hard cock,” I sat stroking the keys o f my laptop. At this moment,
however, I was overtaken by the thoughtfulness and generosity which Evan showed in
making sure that I was a willing participant in the scene, so much so that I breached the
contract agreed upon by Evan and Scott by displacing the image-as-prophylactic with raw
flesh.
With the image-as-prophylactic momentarily removed, I became cautious,
weighing every action against its real and imagined ramifications. Primarily, I feared the
consequences o f intimacy, o f blurring the boundaries between cyborg and m aterial bodies.
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I worried that I might become too attached to the image o f the other caller and too
detached from my own, thus making the line between “ju st talk” and “adultery” more
difficult to draw. Through this attachment, I also feared that I might reveal too much
personal information and allow a potential stalker access to my “real life.” I feared that I
might develop an insatiable hunger for the uninhibited intimacy fostered by this encounter
and either become addicted to telephone sex lines or open my material body up to real
dangers by seeking similar forms o f intimacy in the everyday.
These fears reveal something o f what it means to be a young gay man in
contemporary America. On the lines, the presence o f young, sexually active gay male
bodies clearly does not presuppose the risk o f AIDS in quite the same ways as the
presence o f their material counterparts. But my fears o f intimacy do derive from a cultural
logic o f AIDS through which young gay bodies are at once fetishized and demonized. The
equation o f youth and risk carries over into my interactions on the lines and shapes my
willingness to engage in certain kinds o f intimate behaviors. That the cult governs my
body and desires even in this virtual(ly) safe space also gives lie to the common belief that
AIDS is a remote and abstract force in the lives o f Generation X gay men (an issue which
I explore more fully in Chapter 2). I f the cult is always and already operative in the bodies
and desires o f young gay men, then this encounter reveals how young gay men must use
the cult to “suggest a way out o f the maze o f dualisms in which we have explained our
bodies. . . to ourselves” (Haraway 181). By opting to experience and (give) voice (to)
my desires for intimacy in a space which both foregrounds and perpetuates the cult, I
denied neither the prevalence o f risk nor the import o f safety. Instead, I discovered in the
virtual live a space in which the risks o f living and loving in a moment o f AIDS perhaps
can be more rewarding than the resigned safety o f acceptance.
Conclusion
Over the course o f my study, callers like Evan proved to be the exception rather
than the rule. I make this point to further qualify my assertion that telephone sex
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encounters produce counter-discourses to harmful and oppressive dominant cultural

narratives. Few encounters dare to imagine the transformative potential o f the cyborg,
and fewer still activate this potential to realize social change. Indeed, more often than not,
encounters only worked to cement the cult as a determining factor in writing the bodies,
desires, and experiences o f young gay men. Callers sustained and perpetuated the cult by
insisting that the encounter was only a means to an end (i.e., ejaculation), by projecting
their desires for a beautiful and dangerous “tw ink” onto their partners, and by
disconnecting upon orgasm.
My encounter with Evan was different, however, because it encouraged a
self-reflexive process o f negotiation through which alterations in the cybernetic contract

could imagine (if not realize) revisions o f the social one. Following the climax o f the
encounter with Evan, there was a lingering. Neither the other caller nor I did the old
one-two (Le., go as you come). The lingering was punctuated by awkward silences and
botched, post-coital attempts to compliment the other. Many times I have revisited the
scene, wondering: What was that lingering about? Why didn’t one o f us just hang up?
Did we need to bring the scene to some other resolution? Was it Evan, Scott, the other
caller, or I who longed to say something in that moment? What might I have longed for?
For me, this clearly was a moment in which my material and cyborg bodies dared to
intermingle, to blur. No longer in the representational image, but not quite in the “real”
me either, I took pleasure in imaginatively re-writing the cult (by remaining on the line)
and I took seriously the ramifications o f doing so (by contemplating my intentions in
silence before articulating them in words). The space between was a space o f longing and
desire, o f power and authority. It seems to me that what I longed for was the possibility
o f remaining in the virtual live, in that moment when the bodies o f Scott, Evan, the other
caller and I m erged, were temporarily suspended together, intertwined with one another.
The longing was, for me, about the desire to linger in that place in which the real o f our
desires to touch and be touched are not compromised by the feet that all o f us are living
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with AIDS (in many senses o f the term “living”). The longing was, finally, a desire to
continue to reach out and touch one another in profoundly real and somatic ways, ways
that are indeed bounded on either side by the contract, but ways which are not limited by
the materiality o f the body or the illusions o f the image.
O f course, the cult o f the pom star is too deeply ingrained in the cultural imaginary
for it to be dislodged by one momentary, ephemeral act in the virtual live. Indeed, the
transformative potential o f telephone sex lines rests precisely on the absence o f material
consequences and the ability to disconnect at a moment’s notice. Under these conditions,
anything is possible. Unfortunately, the material world is circumscribed by restrictions and
limitations which do not (necessarily) apply to the virtual live. The disparities between the
material and the virtual certainly lessen the impact o f my encounter, but they cannot annul
the hopeful possibilities which it engendered. The virtual live promises intimacy, albeit
disembodied intimacy. It provides options for how we experience our sexuality and
identity which are influenced, but not wholly determined, by narratives o f sexual excess,
seroconversion, and death. And, finally, the virtual live promises that I can reach out and
touch someone, even if the one I experience tactilely is always and only myself.
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CHAPTER IV.
“KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN, EXPECT THE WORST, AND
HANDLE IT ON YOUR OWN” :1
POST-GAY POLITICS/TEAROOM TRADE/STRATEGIC COLLECTIVES
Sociologists engage in the study o f deviant behavior because man reveals

h im selfbest in his back alleys. It is there that we m ay see the raw
undergirding o f the social structure—and, perhaps, observe our own
weaknesses reflected in the behavior we fe a r and berate the m ost. —Laud
Humphreys, Tearoom Trade, p . 166
Introduction
Consider the following incidents:
1. Several years ago, a Los Angeles police officer embarked on a crusade to clean
up the city through a strict enforcement o f “public decency” laws. The focus o f this
officer’s crusade was a public bathroom which reputedly served as a cruising ground for
men seeking sex with other men. Using his own 18 year old son as bait, the officer hid in
a crawl space above the bathroom and watched through an air vent as his son encouraged
other men to engage in sexual acts w ith him. When another man solicited a sexual
encounter, the father would come out o f hiding and arrest the man.
2. In February 1998, a reporter from a Seattle news program entered a public
bathroom. Unbeknownst to the other m en present in the bathroom at that time, the
reporter had strapped a mini-video cam era to his ankle which he used to record a series o f
sexual acts which occurred in the facility. The footage later was broadcast on the news
program and, as a result, police surveillance o f the bathroom was heightened. In the
following weeks, similar news stories w ere run in New York, San Diego, and other cities
across the U nited States.
3. In April 1998, pop singer George Michael was arrested outside o f a park
bathroom in Beverly Hills and charged with misdemeanor lewd conduct after he
masturbated in front o f an undercover police officer. According to Michael, his behavior
was prom pted by the undercover officer who initiated a sexual encounter by masturbating.
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4. This past summer, campus police at Oakland University installed a surveillance

camera in one o f the men’s bathrooms at South Foundation Hall after a student
complained about the sexual activity occurring there. Following the installation o f the
camera, police arrested two men who w ere suspected o f having sex with other men in the
restroom. One man is charged with indecent exposure, a charge which carries a maximum
one-year felony sentence; the other man is charged with gross indecency, a charge which
carries a maximum five-year felony sentence.2
Despite many sociological studies which characterize tearoom sex as impersonal,
these incidents clearly demonstrate how the choice to participate in tearoom trade projects
the individual into a social/sexual/political fbrcefield.3 In tearooms, sexual acts always and
already are implicated in the social, impacted by and circumscribed to it, even in the
absence o f police surveillance and entrapment tactics. Fears o f discovery, revelation,
ridicule, and arrest not only heighten the intensity o f the sexual act, but they also w ork to
locate that act within a social milieu in which panic around (homo)sexual encounters
operates simultaneously as an incitement to and as a condemnation o f such clandestine
behaviors. If tearoom trade is both driven and denounced by regimes o f
heteronormativity, then, contrary to popular sociological opinion, it can never only be
impersonal, ‘ju st sex,” precisely because its ramifications extend beyond the moment o f
orgasm, producing a series o f actions and reactions which ripple through multiple arenas
o f private and public life.

Given that the majority o f individuals engaged in tearoom trade self-identify as
married heterosexuals, my rationale for devoting an entire chapter o f this study (which
focuses on self-identified gay men) to tearoom s and the activities which they engender
might not be immediately apparent. Several factors have compelled me to undertake a
serious and sustained inquiry into tearoom sex and its impact on the formation o f gay male
communities. First, public bathrooms historically have served as a strong force in the
organization and maintenance o f gay male communities. Before the advent o f gay-specific
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sites (like bathhouses and bars), tearooms provided gay men a somewhat safe and
secluded space in which to m eet and have sex with other men. Given the social restraints
which over time have proscribed overt manifestations o f homosexual desire, tearooms
represented one o f the only venues in which some gay men could socialize with one
another, feel as if they were part o f a larger community. M oreover, as historian George
Chauncey has noted in his important book Gay New York: Gender. Urban Culture, and
the Making o f the Gay Male World. 1890-1940 (1994), tearoom s offered gay men “an
enticing sense o f the scope o f the gay world and o f its counterstereotypical diversity,
which led some o f them to decide to explore that world further” (200). For many gay
men, then, tearooms have served as an introduction (however controversial) to the gay
community, as a point o f departure for exploring the range o f diversity o f gay identities
and experiences.
Second, whether or not gay men participate in tearoom sex, none could, I think,
persuasively contest the point that the regulation o f tearoom trade has had serious
consequences on how gay desire is experienced and perceived in other venues. A rhetoric
o f “public decency” often masks the homophobia undergirding initiatives to curb tearoom
sex; however, the slippery and sporadic way in which this rhetoric is put into practice
clearly belies claims o f a universally agreed upon moral normative. In other words, the
regulation o f tearoom trade is not about transcendent notions o f indecency as they pertain
to any act o f public sex, otherwise there would be stricter penalties for and more frequent
arrests o f heterosexual couples who are caught petting and making out in automobiles.
(After all, an automobile is, by law, not a private space.) These acts o f surveillance are,
rather, about specific manifestations o f (homo)sexuality which, whether private or public,
must be policed through the implementation o f entrapment procedures and through the
enforcement o f juridical power. And although direct lines o f causality cannot be drawn
between, for instance, surveillance/entrapment techniques used in tearooms and the events
surrounding Bowers v. H ardw ick (1986), the blatant invasion o f Michael Hardwick’s right
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to privacy certainly finds a strong legal precedent in the former.4 I f even such tenuous
lines o f association can be drawn, and if the regulation o f tearoom sex reverberates in
nearly every arena o f gay life (from the bathroom to the back room to the bedroom), then
an examination o f how tearoom trade functions within the cultural imaginary and across
the social landscape is o f absolute necessity to our political, personal, and physical survival
as gay men.
I f tearoom s remain exclusively under the purview o f sociological inquiry, as they
have since the publication o f Laud Humphreys’ seminal study Tearoom Trade: Impersonal
Sex in Public Places (reprint ed., 1975), then we must continue to have a very
narrowly-defined understanding o f how these spaces function in the cultural imaginary and
in the everyday. Humphreys’ classic ethnographic study hinges on the assumption that
sexual encounters in men’s public bathrooms are characterized by impersonality and
detachment. Although Tearoom Trade has served as a springboard for a number o f other
critical ventures exploring (homo)sexual practices in public places, not one o f these
projects has problematized Humphreys’ basic premise (that is, tearoom trade is
impersonal). In this chapter, I want to put a different spin on Humphreys’ findings, not
only to contest his implicit assertion that tearoom trade is “just sex,” but also to outline a
model for collective political action against increasingly oppressive regimes o f
homophobia.
O f course, “impersonal sex” is not inherently problematic and apolitical. Indeed,
“no strings” sex could be undertaken as a political act against the normative notion o f
committed sex in a long-term relationship that underlies many heterosexual and
homosexual relationships as an ideal. But my point here is that “impersonal” as it is
conceived and deployed by Humphreys and his followers is both problematic and apolitical
precisely because the term reifies rather than deconstructs traditional binary oppositions
which pit “no strings sex” against long-term commitment. In so doing, Humphreys and his
followers equate (whether consciously o r not) “no strings sex” and “homosexuality,” thus
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condemning both through the reinscription o f universal monogamy and heterosexuality as

not just a moral normative, but also a moral imperative.
This chapter is not intended as a call for gay men to engage in tearoom sex, though
it certainly is not an edict against such behavior either. Rather, I want to suggest that
tearoom sex provides a useful model for building and sustaining “strategic collectives,”
that the literal structures o f tearoom behavior outline a symbolic model for forging
political alliances and affiliations in other public venues. By “strategic collective” I mean
to imply a community (o f sorts), one which is built upon the foundation o f radical sexual
practice and which uses th at foundation as a springboard for m obilising political responses
to puritanical and prohibitive paradigms o f sexual normality. A strategic collective
demands specificity; it is taken up within a historical/temporal frame as a means o f
combating a particular moment o f crisis, a unique set o f material conditions, through the
deployment o f specific program s and polemics. The efifectivity o f the collective derives
precisely from its malleability, its willingness and capability to adapt to the ever-changing
struggles which dot the political and material landscapes that its members occupy.
Through a close reading o f Humphreys’ text, I seek to articulate some o f the
conditions and parameters o f strategic collectives. My argument here is neither that every
act (o f tearoom sex) is necessarily political, nor that all tearoom participants understand
the political ramifications o f their acts in the same way. Indeed, as I note later in this
chapter, a large portion o f tearoom participants are violently homophobic in their everyday
lives and thus these participants’ personal biases preclude the expression o f pro-gay
polemics in the larger social arena. Instead, I am suggesting that those participants for
whom acts are always and only underscored by an awareness o f their consequences, for
whom the choice to engage in tearoom trade is a deliberate and conscious reaction to
maniacally repressive regimes which police sexual expression, articulate through their
behaviors in tearooms strategies and courses o f action which gay men and lesbians can use
to combat similar instances o f homophobia in other cultural arenas. Thus, the tearoom s
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are not necessarily the site at which strategic collectives form, but rather the site at which
the conditions for strategic collectives are most clearly illustrated (if not realized).
Some o f the questions which guide my study include: W hat does the adjective
“impersonal” mean in the context o f Humphreys’ study? How is it defined/deployed and
to what ends? More importantly, how is (Is?) Humphreys’ argument for impersonality
and detachment undercut by the meticulous documentation o f his systemic observations?
That is, at what points in the text is the assumption o f impersonal sex problematized and
undone by the very “evidence” through which it is supposedly constituted? How do (Do?)
these tensions between the basic tenets o f Humphreys’ study and the assumptions
undergirding his data speak to a “politics o f the personal”? And what impact (if any) does
this “politics o f the personal” have on the formation o f communities within and outside o f
the tearooms? That is, how does (Does?) a politics o f the personal facilitate the formation
o f strategic collectives? And how do (Do?) these strategic collectives allow gay men to
organize across lines o f difference (generational, racial/ethnic, sexual, etc.)?
T ow ard a Politics of the Personal
Part ethnography, part personal diary, Tearoom Trade documents the findings o f a
year-long participant-observation study o f sexual encounters in public bathrooms. Over
the course o f the study, Humphreys gained access to these hidden behaviors by posing as a
voyeur-lookout, or watch queen, a role which the author describes as “superbly suited” for
his purposes because it allowed him to move freely about the tearoom and observe all o f
the activities without “alarming [his] respondents,” “disturbing the action,” or participating
in the encounters in an “overtly sexual” manner (28). Between April 1966 and April 1967,
Humphreys witnessed 120 sexual acts in 19 different park bathrooms around St. Louis,
many o f which he recounts in explicit detail in Tearoom Trade. Over time, he also gained
the trust and cooperation o f tw elve insider informants (Le., men who frequented the
tearooms); their insights supplement and give shape to Humphreys’ first-hand
observations. One year after his primary research was completed, Humphreys used license
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plate numbers (which he recorded during the participant-observation study) to identify,

locate, and interview (under the pretense o f a public health survey) a random sample o f 50
tearoom participants.
The book begins with the assertion that tearoom sex is both widespread and
impersonal. As Humphreys notes near the opening o f Chapter 1: “Many men—married
and unmarried, those with heterosexual identities and those whose self-image is a
homosexual one—seek impersonal sex, shunning involvement, desiring kicks without
commitment” (2). Throughout the book, Humphreys interweaves personal observations,
interviews w ith informants and other participants, and sociological theory in order “to
describe the social structure o f impersonal sex, the mechanisms that make it possible”
(14). By detailing what rules govern tearoom sex, what roles participants play, what
rituals sustain the action, what risks are involved, what types o f people participate, and
how those participants relate this behavior to the rest o f their lives (14-15), Humphreys
provides an exhaustive and probing account o f this “widespread but rarely studied form of
[impersonal] human interaction” (2).
Tearoom Trade has served as a point o f departure for a number o f other critical
ventures which interrogate the social implications o f public (homo)sexual encounters;5
however, while these other studies test the applicability o f Humphreys’ findings to
alternative venues (highway rest areas, truck stops) and to other geographical locales
(Canada, California), none o f the projects challenge/problematize Humphreys’ central
thesis (Le., tearoom sex is impersonal). In “Tearoom Trade: A Research U pdate,” for
instance, sociologist Frederick J. Desroches “attempts to replicate” Humphreys’ work by
“comparing data on tearoom activities—gathered two decades later, using different
methodologies, and in a different country—w ith the behaviors described by Humphreys in
his innovative research” (39). Drawing on police case materials and interviews with law
enforcement personnel in five Canadian cities, Desroches focuses his attention on three
areas o f comparison: 1) the location o f tearooms; 2) the means through which “players”
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discover and gain access to “active” tearooms; and 3) the types o f people who participate
in tearoom trade. In the end, Desroches’ conclusions bear a striking resemblance to
Humphreys’. As Desroches writes, “The behavior o f players reveals remarkable
consistency over tim e, from community to community, and across national boundaries.
Many men, the m ajority o f them married and primarily heterosexual, continue to visit
out-of-the-way public washrooms in search o f last, impersonal, and exciting sex despite
the risk to family, friends, job, and reputation” (60).
Similarly, in “Cruising the Truckers: Sexual Encounters in a Highway Rest Area,”
sociologists Jay Corzine and Richard Kirby describe the highway rest area as a “sexual
marketplace” in which sexual acts are characterized by a “lack o f commitment between
partners” (172). These researchers go on to argue that the lack o f commitment evidenced
in rest area sex is indicative o f a larger shift in American culture in which “sex increasingly
becomes an activity separated from other social roles” (172). In many important ways, the
findings o f Corzine and Kirby mirror the findings o f Humphreys; Corzine and Kirby’s
observation, for instance, suggests, as Humphreys opines, that “sexual aberrance is a
routinized part o f [many men’s lives], isolated from the rest chiefly by means o f
information control” (122). In “Life in a Parking Lot: An Ethnography o f a Homosexual
Drive-In,” sociologist Meredith R. Ponte more clearly marks her indebtedness to
Humphreys. She suggests, for instance, that sexual encounters in a California parking lot
represent, “in Claud [sic] Humphreys’ phrase, ‘impersonal sex in impersonal places,’
which, along w ith increasingly impersonal religion and impersonal business transactions,
accompanies expanding bureaucracy” (8). My point in rehearsing the arguments o f
Humphreys’ followers is to demonstrate how the central tenets o f his w ork have, for
almost three decades, gone unchallenged.6
In what follows, I propose an alternative reading o f Tearoom Trade, one which
points up what I view as a blatant contradiction in Humphreys’ logic. Although
Humphreys consistently and unconditionally conflates “tearoom trade” and “impersonal
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sex,” he also acknowledges that public bathroom sex is “consequential” because it “has the
capacity ‘to flow beyond the bounds o f the occasion in which it is delivered and to
influence objectively the later life o f the bettor’” (45). H ow can these encounters be both
impersonal and consequential? If these encounters imply repercussions on/to the
individual participants, how can they rightly be understood as ‘ju st sex”? The simple (and
complex) answer to these questions is that, in the context o f Humphreys’ study,
“impersonal sex” functions as a misnomer for what actually happens in tearoom settings.
My assertion here is not intended to invalidate the data recorded or the conclusions
reached in Tearoom Trade: rather, I seek to point out the ways in which Humphreys’ text
has been widely m isunderstood and to illuminate some o f its broader applications to
programs which vie for the rights o f gay and lesbian people. By reading Humphreys’
descriptions o f public bathroom sex with/against his definition o f impersonal sex, I want to
suggest that these encounters force participants to negotiate a “politics o f the personal,” to
weigh the sexual rewards against their social penalties and to embark on a course o f action
that both determines and is determined by the social identities o f the participants.
For Humphreys, the impersonal nature o f tearoom sex is implied by several aspects
o f the encounters which he observed. First, the number and variety o f potential sexual
partners offered in tearoom s identifies this space as a site for “instant” and “disposable”
sex—that is, sex w ithout the unnecessary and tedious expectations o f commitment and
attachment (152, 153). Second, Humphreys cites “the mechanism o f silence” (i.e., the
unwillingness o f participants to engage in verbal communication) as a means through
which to satisfy “the demand for privacy,” “to guarantee anonymity,” and “to assure the
impersonality o f the sexual liaison” (13). W ithout the aid o f verbal communication to
convey their wants and desires, tearoom participants have formalized a set o f rules and
modes o f behavior which not only shape tearoom encounters, but also “provide a
protective code” (48) fo r shielding participants from revelation, arrest, scorn, and physical
abuse. A third and final aspect o f tearoom trade which Humphreys uses to buttress his
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argument for “impersonality” is the structure o f the sexual encounters. Tearoom sex
typically involves a rapid succession o f sexual acts; in feet, Humphreys confides (with
what some might argue is a bit too much zest) to his readers that he once “watched a
fellator take on three m en in succession in a half hour o f observation” (10). That these
acts ensure a high level o f physical (with the aid o f a glory hole)7 and/or emotional
(through the prohibition o f kissing and foreplay) detachment among participants lends
credibility to Humphreys’ thesis.
While a number o f Humphreys’ central points regarding the impersonality o f public
bathroom sex are compellingly argued, there also are many places in the text at which
these arguments are undone by the very evidence through which they are supposedly
constituted. The choice to engage in tearoom sex, for instance, incites in many
participants a crisis around sexual identity. For the 54 percent o f Humphreys’ respondents
who self-identified as married heterosexuals, simply entering the tearooms with the intent
to have sex with other men necessitated processes o f self-reflection and rationalization. In
order to maintain a heterosexual self-image, these participants often would refuse to
partake in specific sexual acts (such as kissing, foreplay, and acting as the fellator or
recipient in anal intercourse) which, in their minds, would mark them as “queer” (47, 116,
118). Furthermore, by comparing their tearoom encounters to other homosexual
experiences which “took place in a masculine world where it is permissible” to participate
in “carefully limited sexual fevors” (116) (such as the armed forces, prison, or prep
school), these men could reconcile their homosexual experiences with their heterosexual
identities. Thus, while Humphreys insists that tearoom encounters are orchestrated to
eschew any reference to o r connection with the individual’s “personal” life, these acts o f
self-reflection and rationalization reveal how the self is always in jeopardy for many
tearoom participants, how heterosexual identity must be guarded against and isolated from
homosexual acts.
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N ot only are there psychological ramifications to participating in tearoom trade,

but also there are physical dangers. In one particularly telling anecdote, Humphreys
recalls “an encounter in which mild harassment from youngsters turned to an exchange o f
name-calling and thence to violence” (99). The incident began when four youths “ran in
and out o f the restroom to disrupt the action.” Within thirty minutes, the group had
“swelled to eleven” and the situation escalated from lewd comments and gestures to
physical violence (the toughs barricaded the door and proceeded to throw stones and
bottles at the men through the bathroom windows). Though none o f the men were
seriously injured, this incident clearly demonstrates the kinds o f physical abuse which
potentially accompany tearoom sex. Additionally, men who frequent tearooms open
themselves up to disease, both STDs and AIDS. Given that the tearooms encourage
furtive, anonymous sex shrouded by silence, it would be a gross understatement to argue
that these spaces are not “bastions o f safe sex.” Indeed, it seems more appropriate to
argue that tearooms encourage the flagrant and wanton disregard for the health and safety
o f those who frequent them. By consistently and self-consciously striving to safeguard
themselves against physical abuse and disease, tearoom participants acknowledge that
sexual acts always are constituted by an interplay between the personal and the social.
In the tearooms, physical dangers are compounded by the knowledge that these
acts are criminal and by the threat o f intervention by law enforcement personnel While
surreptitious surveillance tactics have been deemed unconstitutional in several important
low- and high-court decisions,8 they still happen with an alarming regularity. (To prove
this point, I need only point out the anecdotes which opened this chapter or direct the
reader’s attention to the web site www.cruisingforsex.com, which catalogues reader’s
experiences with police entrapment and surveillance in public bathrooms.) Moreover, if
men are arrested for having sex in public bathrooms, they not only face severe fines,
outrageous legal fees, and the possibility o f imprisonment, but they also must endure the
consequences o f public revelation. Take, for instance, the case o f Gregory Palmer o f
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Little Rock, Arkansas. On January 30, 1998, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran a story
about eight local m en who had been arrested for “public sexual indecency” (a
misdemeanor) on its front page. Under the headline “24 Men Are Cited in 3-Day Park
Sting,” the article listed the details o f the sting as well as the names and addresses o f those
arrested. Following the publication o f the story, Palmer (one o f the men arrested)
committed suicide rather than free “his partner, his family, and the humiliation o f a public
hearing and possible conviction” (Stubbs 41). To be sure, not all men arrested for “public
indecency” commit suicide; but those who do not face equally devastating consequences,
such as public ridicule, the loss o f jobs, the break-up o f long-term relationships, and the
loss o f custody o f children.
That tearoom sex carries with it these various and varied consequences for/to the
individual suggests to me that the experiences o f public bathroom sex are both deeply
personal and profoundly political, that these experiences foster what I have term ed “a
politics o f the personal.” Stated differently, public bathroom sex reveals how personal
experience can (but does not necessarily) breed political involvement, or, as cultural critic
Michael W arner suggests in his introduction to Fear o f a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and
Social Theory (1993), how “[qjueers do a kind o f practical social reflection ju st in finding
ways o f being queer” (xiii). By propelling same-sex desire into a public arena, tearoom
sex enacts a challenge to homophobic and oppressive notions o f sexual normality and
public decency. M oreover, the choice to participate in these “deviant” sexual acts
necessitates that the individual negotiate his homosexual desires in relation to a web o f
social, political, and legal forces, all o f which adamantly vie for the regulation and
containment o f marginal sexualities (Le., all sexualities outside o f “vanilla” heterosexual
intercourse). These acts also expose “the raw undergirding o f the social structure”
(Humphreys 166) by insisting that a maniacally homophobic culture confront its fears and
prejudices regarding homosexuality (defined both as an identity and as an act). A “politics
o f the personal,” then, concerns more than simply the individual’s right to choose where,
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when, and how he engages in consensual sexual acts; it demands an awareness o f how
“[s]exual desires them selves. . . imply other wants, ideals, and conditions,” how those
desires “have implications for any area o f social life” (W arner vif). It can facilitate an
awareness o f larger social structures which proscribe and restrict the expression o f
(homo)sexual desire. It can encourage individuals to recognize the ways in which sex
matters beyond orgasm and pleasure. And it can imply the possibility that through such
acts o f contestation and struggle, queer people potentially can use the everyday as a site
for restructuring the social.
Broken Lineages/Ungrateful Sons
Given that Gen Xers are widely criticized for their apparent “indifference to public
afiairs, withdrawal from participation [in the political process], and general lack o f
awareness o f things political” (Bennett and Rademacher 22), theorizing a “politics o f the
personal” seems like a crucial project in the context o f this study. N ot only might such a
project expose the gross generalizations and misunderstandings o f the
generationally-specific forms that politics takes, but also it might serve as a call to action
for those members o f Generation X who actually do conform to the stereotypes, who are
politically indifferent. Voting statistics from the past decade or so bear out the validity o f
some critiques. In Generations: The History o f America’s Future. 1584-2069 (1991), for
instance, economist N eil Howe and political satirist William Strauss cite a public poll
which found that “only 12 percent o f [Gen Xers] mentioned voting as an attribute o f good
citizenship” (333). L aw student Geoffrey T. H oltz offers clear and compelling evidence o f
this “poor voter turnout” among Gen Xers, noting that “[v]oter participation among
eighteen- to twenty-year-olds has fallen by a third since the 1972 presidential election,
while participation by older adults has remained about the same” (198).
In addition to alarmingly low voter turnout, Gen Xers also are considered “largely
oblivious to the people and activities that constitute the public realm” (Bennett and
Rademacher 37). Citing a 1994 ANES survey, political scientists Stephen Earl Bennett
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and Eric W. Rademacher note that while all generations evidenced a serious lack o f
interest in and knowledge o f contemporary politics, “Xers were much less knowledgeable
than older people on matters relating the Congress, presidential candidates, the political
parties, public policies, and various constitutional features o f the U.S. government” (37).
In Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan’s book, Revolution X: A Survival Guide for Our
Generation (1994), this critique serves as an implied point o f departure for the duo’s
endeavor to “[empower] our generation” through a “new and different approach to
awareness and activism [that] can help fix America” (xxi). W ritten in inflammatory yet
accessible prose, Revolution X “lays out the tools you need to start getting control over
your future-including suggestions for personal and collective actions that do make a
difference, and realistic, concrete solutions to some o f the most difficult challenges feeing
our generation” (xxii).
I f Xers in general have been criticized for their political indifference and civic
apathy, then gay Gen Xers have been even more susceptible to these charges. In part,
critics who characterize gay Xers as apolitical bolster their arguments precisely through
the perpetuation o f stereotypes such as the ones which I have described in previous
chapters (Le., “AIDS amnesia,” “the cult o f the pom star”). As cultural critic Eric Rofes
writes in Dry Bones Breathe: Gav Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures
(1998):
Commonly seen as young, white, muscular, affluent, and hedonistic,
[circuit party travelers] are excised from the daily fabric o f their lives and
fixed permanently in one o f three sites: the circuit event, the gym, or the
sex club. They party, dance, and [have] sex. They become men without
jobs, families, meaningful relationships, o r cultural or political concerns.
(189)
Here, Rofes not only provides a clear definition o f the “circuit boy” stereotype which has
come to represent all young gay men, but he also outlines some o f the more harmful
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consequences o f fostering these stereotypes in cultural representations. Two o f these

consequences are particularly telling in light o f my argument here: 1) that young gay men
are perceived to lack “meaningful connections” to one another or to gay/lesbian
communities; and 2) that young gay men are unconcerned about and uninvolved in
struggles for the ju st and fair treatm ent o f gay and lesbian people. That these observations
are unstably built upon the logical fallacy o f hasty generalization seems to have escaped
the notice o f most critics; instead, these critics espouse such generalizations as
incontestable truth without recognizing, as even the most cynical o f generational scholars
have, that “[w]e may have to w ait the passage o f time to know whether [certain] traits are
a product o f generational experience (thus, in all probability, enduring) or o f age per se
(thus transitory)” (Bennett and Craig 17).
My intent here is not to debate the validity o f these generalizations, to test their
applicability to political activities and commitments o f gay Xers. Rather, I assume that
whether or not the characterizations o f young gay men are “accurate” (i.e., empirically
verifiable), they have nonetheless impacted the shape and direction o f contemporary gay
politics. One o f the most noticeable effects o f these generalizations is the emergence o f
“post-gay” political discourse. In “Going Post-Al,” Out magazine senior editor Elise
Harris describes “post-gay” as “less a movement than a mood” (82), one which ultimately
threatens to jeopardize the future efifectivity o f gay and lesbian rights movements by
renouncing “mass market kitsch” (such as freedom rings and pride flags) as sentimental,
by abandoning the possibility o f a multi-issue political platform, or by supporting programs
and initiatives which work tow ard the assimilation o f gay men and lesbians into the
heterosexual mainstream.
As with any phenomenon that has been graced with the theoretically hip and savvy
moniker o f “post-” (like postmodern, postcolonial, or post-feminist), “post-gay” intimates
a sense o f rupture, specifically a breakdown o f gay and lesbian communities as a result o f
political factioning. As Harris writes, the “post-gay” phenomenon offers a persuasive
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reminder that “[t]he community we had imagined—solidarity between feminist gay men
and sex-radical lesbians—hasn’t taken” (82). M ore often than not, this sense o f rupture is
posited in generational term s, with one o f the central points o f contention being that “[t]he
warriors o f yesteryear cannot tell the younger generation what to do with th e freedoms
they have inherited” (86). In other words, within the post-gay phenomenon, gay Boomers
and beyond are sentimentally revered as the “warriors” o f gay and lesbian liberation whose
hard-won gains are (once again) misappropriated and ill-used by Xers.
The persuasiveness o f post-gay rhetoric hinges precisely on its effective
deployment o f two generational narratives: broken lineages and ungrateful sons. In
“Generational Difficulties; or, the Fear o f a B arren History,” feminist cultural critic Judith
R oof suggests that the paradigm o f generationality, conceived as “a tem porally bound
cause-effect narrative [that] creates a perpetual debt to the past” (71), often operates in
feminist discourse as a “critical fantasy.” As R oo f explains, “This generational fantasy
locates responsibility and credit for the future in the past; children who do not follow the
program become wayward and disrespectful and threaten to erase the past’s meaning and
accomplishments as well as thwart feminism’s future” (83-84). Viewed as both property
and legacy, the past is understood to be infinitely generative o f the future which, though
as-yet-unknown, also is posited as an always and already. While this narrative o f
generationality may “[assure] feminist pioneers that they are indeed part o f a trajectory—a
passionate journey—that has always been leading somewhere” (69-70), it also establishes
succeeding generations as unworthy heirs who inevitably will fail to fulfill th e inflated and
unreasonable expectations produced by revisionist generational histories.
One o f the most contentious issues surrounding the post-gay phenomenon
concerns “conformity in thought, values, look, and lifestyle” (Signorile, “Ex-Gay” 77). As
journalist Michelangelo Signorile has w ritten, post-gay represents “a movement in which
gay people [reject] the consumeristic and commercial trappings o f the gay ghetto” (75).
In other words, post-gay politics evidence a radical break with the political legacy o f the
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“gay is good” generation by insisting on an equivalency between gay men and lesbians and
their heterosexual counterparts. From Chastity Bono’s charge that ABC’s Ellen was “too
gay” to non-political marches on Washington, D.C., and debates over gay marriage,
domestic partnerships, and gays in the military, the post-gay pull toward assimilation is
omnipresent. These events/debates are so troubling for many gay men and lesbians
because they imply a regressive polemic. N ot only do many contemporary (post-)gay
activists reject the political legacy o f their predecessors by refusing to proudly and
unequivocally assert their sexual difference (and, thus, come to be perceived as “ungrateful
sons”), but also much o f their rhetoric finds a precedent in the pre-Stonewall homophile
organizations, which “fought to have homosexuality recognised as a natural human
phenomenon” (emphasis added) (Jagose 22). In short, in this “post-gay” moment, the
critical fantasy o f generational legacy has fostered a political nightmare o f discontent,
fracture, and animosity—a political nightmare driven by the generational narrative o f
broken lineages.
To animate this critical nightmare, to enable it to “express the parent’s angst” over
“the dissolution o f heritage” (R oof 85), there must be an antagonist, a scapegoat onto
which all o f the preceding generation’s fears and anxieties may be projected. Enter gay
Xers.9 By rejecting the markers o f “gay” and “lesbian” for the more inclusive (and, some
would argue, politically viable) “queer,” we appear guilty o f disrespect and ingratitude,
unable (or unwilling) to understand the historical conditions which disallow some
members o f our communities from seeing the “liberating” possibilities o f that particular
identity marker. At the same time that we are criticized for being too tunnel-visioned in
what constitutes gay identity (by suggesting, for instance, the establishment o f a Queer
nation), our political affiliations are deemed too diffuse to mobilize an effective political
program. That many gay and lesbian Xers insist that sexual orientation is neither a
singular nor stable means o f locating themselves in the social suggests that we take for
granted the right to come out (Le., to proclaim “I am gay and I am proud!”) and the
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responsibilities o f doing so. Moreover, as HlV-infection rates continue to climb among

gay Xers, we are perceived to be mindless o f the prevention efforts o f previous
generations, unmoved by their horror stories, unconcerned for the future o f gay and
lesbian communities, consumed only with self-pleasure. Collectively these (and other
related) events have inadvertently given rise to generational fantasies which fracture gay
communities by pitting ungrateful sons against their selfless fathers.
In several important ways, tearoom trade operates according to the (generational)
logic o f broken lineages and ungrateful sons. Chapter 6 o f Tearoom Trade introduces the
concept o f “aging crisis,” which Humphreys defines as a correlation between increased age
(or the appearance o f increased age) and the sexual activities in which an individual is
permitted to engage in the tearooms. Humphreys notes, for instance, that as tearoom
participants age, “gaining weight around the middle and losing hair” (108), not only will
they be forced to seek trade more frequently (instead o f being sought as trade), but also
they will be forced to accept less “active” roles in the sexual encounters (either as fellator
in oral sex or as recipient in anal sex). Given that the majority o f tearoom participants (at
least according to Humphreys’ estimate) self-identify as married heterosexuals, this shift in
sex role necessitated by the aging process is experienced as a “crisis” because it disallows
rationalization (e.g., “I don’t give head, therefore I am not gay!”) and it exposes the
incommensurability o f their homosexual acts and their heterosexual self-identities.
By noting a direct correlation between tearoom experiences and a participant’s
(presumed) age, Humphreys implicitly identifies tearoom trade as generationally-inflected.
Undergirding the generational politics o f these encounters are the mutually constituting
narratives o f broken lineages and ungrateful sons. In the tearoom circuit, older
participants (both heterosexual and homosexual) often are suspicious and, at times, even
fearful o f young men. As Humphreys writes, “(pjenetration o f the encounter’s boundaries
by persons who are obviously minors . . . results in the disruption o f the action” (98)
because “teen-agers may cause police intrusion on the tearoom scene even when they are
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not acting the decoy role” (9 7 ).10 On the other hand, men who are undergoing (or who
already have undergone) the aging crisis are deemed less sexually attractive, if not entirely
repulsive, and branded with the label “troll.”
Based on Humphreys’ observations regarding the aging crisis, I have come to
conclude that, at any given tim e, there are three distinct “generations” (defined less in
terms o f birth year than in term s o f physical characteristics o f aging) o f self-identified
heterosexual men engaging in tearoom trade. These generations neither overlap nor
transition smoothly from one to another; rather, each is severed from the one that
precedes it, marked by a unique set o f concerns, objectives, and experiences. For the
heterosexual participant who remains “active” in the tearooms from youth to late
adulthood, there is no continuity o f experience, no sense o f progression, only irrevocable
change. In other words, he experiences his tearoom “career” as a broken lineage.
M oreover, because tearoom trade perpetuates the demonization o f youth and maturity (at
times, in equal measure), the experiences inevitably facilitate fracture and discord between
generations.
Just as not every tearoom participant experiences generational shifts in the same
way (after all, our bodies age at different rates), neither does every participant experience
the aging crisis on equal footing. For self-identified gay/bisexual men, “taking the insertee
role is neither traumatic . . . nor related to aging” (123). Because these men do not have
to reconcile acts and identities, they typically are more versatile in the sexual roles they
play throughout their careers as tearoom participants and thus do not experience the aging
process as a crisis per se. ^ Instead, given that alternating between the roles o f “insertor”
and “insertee” does not pose a challenge to the self-identified gay/bisexual man’s
gendered/sexual identities in quite the same way that it does to self-identified heterosexual
men, gay/bisexual men’s experiences in the tearooms are over tim e marked by a greater
degree o f linearity, progression, and continuity. What I am suggesting is that if we follow
Humphreys’ observations to their logical conclusions, then we m ust understand tearooms
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as sites which implicitly foster a genealogy o f gay generations. By “genealogy” I mean

that tearoom trade draws lines o f relation among similarly self-identified (gay/bisexual)
men by emphasizing a continuity o f experience, not across the life cycle (since even gay
men can become “trolls”) but among different generations. Reading tearoom trade as a
genealogy also recognizes the import o f ancestry and the dynamic interplay betw een and
among succeeding generations. To be sure, a genealogy insists on marking the
contributions o f the past to the present. In relation to tearooms, for instance, a genealogy
underlines how these experiences derive precisely from a passionate attachm ent to and a
strict enforcement o f heteronormativity both in the past and in the present. B ut a
genealogy also would recognize how the present both re-interprets the past and impacts
the future. By viewing the poetics o f tearoom trade as a genealogy, then, we might begin
to destabilize the seemingly intractable narratives (o f ungrateful sons and broken lineages)
which fracture our communities and render ineffectual our political programs.
The trope o f genealogy also might provide a proactive means o f responding to the
post-gay debates. As Harris (somewhat optimistically) contends, “Post-gay impulses
suggest a healthy desire to have gay culture become visionary and generative rather than
reactive and defensive” (86). However, Harris goes on to argue that, in order for gay men
and lesbians to tap into the “visionary and generative” potential o f post-gay polemics,
“[t]here must be new animating fantasies. Gay identity and rhetoric have always been
strategic and provisional. We can adapt them to changing times” (184). Because we
currently exist in a moment marked by a dramatic increase in hate crimes and heightened
governmental regulation o f sex between m en,12 political interventionist initiatives must
target precisely those sites which are most heatedly debated, most staunchly policed. In
other words, for our politics to be both visionary and generative, sites like the tearooms
must serve as the animating fantasies behind our politics. I f we are to continue to live and
love as gay and lesbian people in an ever-increasing homophobic culture, then we can no
longer both participate in and decry tearoom trade. We can no longer turn a blind eye to
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the insidious ways in which gay men and tearoom sex are being conjoined under the law.
And we can no longer ignore how the regulation o f tearoom sex is used as a justification
for increased surveillance and control o f sexual expression in other (less public) sites. We
must, instead, critically interrogate the practices o f tearoom sex in order to determine
what (if anything) they have to offer us in our efforts to mobilize a polemical platform
around the right to sexual nonconformity and (public) sexual dissent. We must, in short,
target tearoom trade behaviors as symbolic models for building strategic collectives.
Enacting Sexual Dissent/Building Strategic Collectives
In this final section o f the chapter, I want to identify and describe briefly some o f
the characteristics o f strategic collectives as they are made manifest in tearoom trade. In
addition, I will speculate about the benefits o f these collectives not only to a re-conceived
understanding o f tearooms both in the cultural imaginary and in the everyday, but also to
the establishment o f politically efficacious gay and lesbian communities. I take as a point
o f departure the notion that political efifectivity derives precisely from a steadfast
commitment to what Queer cultural critics Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter have termed
“sexual dissent.” In Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (1995), Duggan and
Hunter define “sexual dissent” as “a concept that invokes a unity o f speech, politics and
practices, and forges a connection among sexual expressions, oppositional politics, and
claims to public space” (5). By using everyday acts o f public sexual nonconformity as a
springboard for creating (and mobilizing) a constellation o f oppositional discourses and
practices, gay men and lesbians not only acknowledge that “sexual expression [in any
form] is political” (5), but also potentially can stage tactical interventions into sedimented
structures o f heteronormativity in order to secure the right to free (homo)sexual
expression among consenting adults.
A strategic collective insists first on a unity o f purpose among its members; it
must, at the moment o f its inception, set forth clearly defined goals and objectives which
its members can then work tow ard. Tearoom trade, too, m ust operate in accordance with
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a collectively-defined purpose; this purpose is typically, though not exclusively, defined as

orgasm. As Humphreys writes, “sex necessitates collective action” (59). To initiate a
sexual encounter and to bring that encounter to fruition in the “payoff’ stage o f
game-playing, tearoom participants must communicate their desires and intentions to one
another and then use those desires/intentions as the basis for scripting a contract that will
be binding to all those involved for the duration o f the interaction (65-69). A gentle
tapping o f the foot by one participant indicates his interest in initiating a sexual encounter
with another participant. I f the other m an responds—by tapping his foot, by slipping a
toilet paper note under the partition, or by exposing his erect penis—then the initiator often
can safely assume that consent has been granted and the gaming rituals can begin.13
While much o f the collective action in tearooms centers on sex, there are other,
related objectives which drive and m otivate the men to band together under a single
“cause.” In a description o f his role as “watchqueen,” Humphreys hints at a couple o f the
“non-sexual” agendas which unite tearoom participants:
The very fear and suspicion encountered in the restroom s produces a
participant role, the sexuality o f which is optional. This is the role o f the
lookout (“watchqueen” in the argot), a man who is situated at the door or
windows from which he may observe the means o f access to the restroom.
When someone approaches, he coughs. He nods when the coast is clear or
if he recognizes an entering party as a regular. (27)
Through the use o f ritualized communication and collective action, tearoom participants
consistently define and fulfill their collective objectives. These objectives involve sexual
gratification, shielding the tearooms from “outsiders” and “straights,” protecting
participants from physical abuse/arrest, and ensuring a noncoercive sexual environment.
That these objectives can and do shift from one moment to another based on
specific environmental or material conditions (e.g., the arrival o f a “straight,” an invasion
by law enforcement officers) suggests that strategic collectives reject a single-minded,
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tunnel-visioned political program in favor o f one that is contingent, ever-changing. The

benefit o f this kind o f flexibility is that, “in avoiding the twin dangers o f narrow
identity-based, single-issue politics on the one hand, and universally utopian projects on
the other” (Duggan and H unter 4), strategic collectives insist on “a politics sensitive to
specific local and historical contexts” (4).
Second, these collectives must work from an epistemology which emphasizes the
essential similarities among members while eliding (momentarily) the noticeable and
noteworthy differences in their backgrounds and identities; they must, in the w ords o f
Third World feminist critic Chela Sandoval, self-consciously forge “a new theory and
method o f oppositional consciousness” which “demands that oppositional actors claim
new grounds for generating identity, ethics, and political activity” (9). In “U.S. Third
World Feminism: The Theory and Method o f Oppositional Consciousness in the
Postmodern World,” Sandoval suggests that “oppositional consciousness”
requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently
commit to a well-defined structure o f identity for one hour, day, week,
month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform th at identity
according to the requisites o f another oppositional ideological tactic if
readings o f power’s formation require it; enough grace to recognize
alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race,
gender, and class justice, when their readings o f power call for alternative
oppositional stands. (15)
Oppositional consciousness rests on the precept th at while identity is neither stable nor
unchanging, specific components temporarily can be isolated and foregrounded in order to
form political alliances and coalitions across/among traditionally prescriptive and limiting
identity formations. (This is what many feminist critics have termed “strategic
essentialism.”) 14 Alliances founded on the notion o f oppositional consciousness are
temporary, taken up to combat a particular set o f ideological forces and then abandoned
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or reconfigured once the targeted axis o f power shifts. These alliances also recognize that
the necessity o f building bridges across difference derives precisely from the diffuse yet
integrated distribution and deployment o f power regimes. Rarely do social institutions or
ideologies target a specific group o f people based on a single identity category; rather,
oppressive ideologies typically impact a vast network o f individuals and groups, each with
different histories, standpoints, and political motivations. To adopt an oppositional

consciousness, then, necessitates compromise: the ability to recognize commonalties
among the various and varied forms o f social marginality and to struggle together to
alleviate similarly constituted (though differently experienced) oppressions.
Tearooms provide a clear and persuasive model for how oppositional
consciousness can be realized in the everyday. At its most basic, a tearoom constitutes
(and is constituted by) a diasporic community crosscut by racial, sexual, class identities
and united by a shared belief in the right to free (homo)sexual expression. Because
tearoom s “are accessible, easily recognized by the initiate, and provide little public
visibility” (Humphreys 2-3), they attract men from a wide-variety o f backgrounds and
identities, men who otherwise might share very few public spaces, political commitments,
or personal characteristics/behaviors. Through the forms o f rationalization described
above, for instance, self-identified heterosexual men can admit to commonalties with
gay/bisexual men: namely, their shared desire to engage in “no strings” sex with other
men. However, these alliances are momentary, given that many o f the most frequent
tearoom participants are also the staunchest proponents o f their regulation.15
Oppositional consciousness thus demonstrates how identity categories deemed fixed,
natural, and transcendent can be denaturalized in order to “make a case for freedom o f
association (to form relationships) and freedom o f speech (acknowledgment or assertion)
for everyone, rather than ask for ‘rights’ for a fixed minority” (Duggan 190). By bringing
differently-oriented individuals together under a common political rubric without
necessarily resolving all o f their differences, oppositional consciousness works to localize
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and historicize struggles against oppression. For gay and lesbian rights movements,
oppositional consciousness potentially might offer a means through which to bridge the
racial, class, generational tensions that currently faction our communities by uniting us
under the common denominator o f our shared sexual nonconformity.16
Finally, for our strategic collectives to prove effective in their efforts to intervene
in homophobic discourses and practices, they must orchestrate “tactical reversals.” In
“Queering the State,” Duggan defines “tactical reversals” as political tactics “that work to
destabilize heteronormativity rather than to naturalize gay identities” (190). Aimed at
“exposing the myriad ways that state apparatuses promote, encourage and produce
‘special rights’ for heterosexuality” (189), tactical reversals encourage a reevaluation o f
public debates over sexuality by shifting the terms o f those debates in order to uncover the
agenda and motivations which undergird them. A tactical reversal differs from the related
project o f reversing, or reclaiming, the negative (e.g., when gay men or lesbians adopt the
term “queer” to imply “positive,” rather than pejorative, connotations) in that it is both
self-reflexive and materially-grounded. On one hand, a tactical reversal involves not
simply a shift in the terms of public debate, but a shift which considers how the history o f
that debate impacts the stakes in and implications o f the current shift. In addition, a
tactical reversal recognizes that discursive strategies alone do not an effective political
intervention make. Instead, tactical reversals draw lines of relation between and among
discourses and practices, epistemologies and ontologies, to facilitate a political program
that responds to the myriad forces (discursive, material, ideological) which press on and
give meaning to the everyday.
Tearoom trade represents a tactical reversal in part because it distorts the function
and purpose o f public space. Many o f the sites at which such activities occur (parks, road
side rest areas) were built in the first half o f the twentieth century for the purpose o f
personal “elimination.” By inserting sex into these public venues, the participants
implicitly acknowledge that sexual expression is both a public and political concern. That
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the sexual activities being made visible in/through these sites are homosexual in nature
poses a challenge to regimes o f juridical power which distribute public space and political
cache based on rigid notions o f sexual identity (Le., the heterosexual/homosexual binary)
and on notions o f a transcendent m oral normative (i.e., the privilege afforded to
heterosexuality, the pervasiveness o f heteronormativity). M oreover, tearoom trade
suggests a reconfigured idea(l) o f w hat constitutes “appropriate” gendered/sexual
behavior among males in the public arena. In design, public bathrooms encourage and
perpetuate a cool detachment among their male patrons—notice, for instance, the
wide-spread use o f partitions between urinals and the absence o f a “social” area as is
typically found in women’s public bathrooms. This detachment is fueled, o f course, by
larger anxieties around homosexuality which “intimate” (though non-sexual) relationships
between heterosexual men often incite and by the threat which such relationships pose to
an already unstable heterosexuality. Tearoom trade exposes these anxieties, unmasks the
threats which motivate them, and points to alternative (and potentially less restrictive)
relationships between masculinity, sexuality, and public space.
Conclusion
I realize, o f course, that my argument here is likely to be misrepresented as
advocating a mass exodus to tearoom s in the name o f “sexual justice.” I also recognize
the potential for this argument to be used by right-wingers and other anti-gay and -lesbian
groups for programs that oppose precisely those agendas which I have set forth. I am
even willing to accept that there are some among my fellow sexual nonconformists who
might brand me a “traitor” to the movement for “airing our dirty laundry” in such a public
forum. M y (arguably optimistic) hope, however, is that this chapter will be read and
understood as it was initially intended: as an impassioned call for gay men and lesbians to
look to our own “back alleys” and to observe therein “our own weaknesses reflected in
the behavior we fear and berate the most” (Humphreys 1 6 6 ).^ We must join together in
a common fight for sexual justice, not because “coalitions” are theoretically hip or because
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that appears to be the “politically correct” project in the immediate present, but because it
is physically and emotionally dangerous not to.
In O ctober 1998 while attending a Queer Studies conference in Reno, NV , I
awoke one morning to discover the headline “Gay Student Beaten, Left to Die” splashed
across the front page o f the newspaper placed outside m y hotel room door. Like many
gays and lesbians, I w ant to resist the urge to use M atthew Shepard as either a rallying cry
or a posterboy for the regulation o f hate crimes. And yet that is, in part, precisely my
intent here. Why do I dare to tread such politically volatile ground? I tread this volatile
ground because M atthew Shepard’s murder garnered wide-spread media coverage and
mass outpourings o f public sympathy and support o f gay and lesbian people. I tread this
volatile ground because Matthew Shepard’s m urder propelled hate crimes (sexually-,
racially-, and gender-motivated) into the public arena and forced governmental officials
and representatives to take a definitive stand on the issue. I tread this volatile ground
because M atthew Shepard’s murder was so horrific and brutal that I don’t ever w ant any
gay or lesbian person in this country to forget the degree o f hatred and violence which our
bodies and desires can incite. And I tread this volatile ground because, in the afterm ath o f
Matthew Shepard’s murder, many prominent gays and lesbians have reduced the event to
trivial questions (like “Why did Matthew Shepard get in that truck?”) or simple-minded
debates over how America has come to be “a culture that worships victimhood” (Savage
62).
Two m onths after Matthew Shepard’s m urder, noted community organizer and
attorney Urvashi Vaid contributed an article to The Advocate which posed the question:
“Is it possible for GLBT politics to exist w ithout an uncompromising commitment to
feminism, antiracism, and social justice?” (96). A provocative question, to be sure, but
ultimately a misguided one given the target o f V aid’s criticism. Towards the opening o f
her article, Vaid writes:
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M atthew Shepard’s murder generates massive media attention, grassroots

protest, and outrage; it gets more attention in New York City than the
murders o f six gay men o f color killed in the city since the summer. In the
same week I receive an E-mail message from a gay friend who attended the
Black Radical Congress, telling me a Kenyan woman in Alabama has
possibly been lynched; no major media cover the news. A pro-choice
doctor is murdered in a suburb ofB uffalo, N.Y., and no major gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender organization speaks out. (96)
From the onset, I should mark my unflagging support o f the larger investments underlying
Vaid’s criticism here. As I have gone to great lengths to note in this chapter, I hold fast to
the belief that political movements and initiatives can only ever be effective if they
organize around the complex and integrated set o f identity-based concerns which
constitute any issue. However, I would not presume (as, I think, Vaid does) to establish a
hierarchy o f privilege or importance in relation to hate crimes. She implies that gay and
lesbian organizations have propelled M atthew Shepard’s murder to the forefront o f their
political platforms only to efface other, related incidents. But what Vaid fails to recognize
is that it is dominant media institutions (driven largely by a passionate attachment both to
“whiteness” and to heteronormativity) and not gay and lesbian organizations which have
given such weight and attention to the murder o f M atthew Shepard. I wonder why, in
Vaid’s infinite logic, she does not consider that the attention afforded to Matthew
Shepard’s murder might be used as a means for making visible the breadth and scope o f
related hate crimes (such as the ones she enumerates).
What I also find particularly disturbing about Vaid’s article is her call, a little later
on, for “a movement brave enough to stand for basic human rights” (96). Obviously, this
assertion begs the question: What constitutes “basic human rights”? Is my understanding
o f “basic human rights”—as a white, (upwardly?) middle-class, young gay male
academic—the same as that o f my lower-middle class, African-American, transsexual
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friend who can only make a living doing “drag”? Here, Vaid seems to fell prey to the
self-same traps for which she criticizes her opponents. She asserts a monolithic (and
prescriptive) idea o f “oppression” and calls for its eradication through an equally
monolithic (and prescriptive) idea o f “human rights.” Furthermore, she evidences the
post-gay impulse o f “offering critiques but rarely envisioning how to get from here to
there” (Harris 86). How is it possible for gay men and lesbians to form political alliances
under the rubric o f “basic human rights” when the source o f oppression and the purpose o f
intervention are so vaguely determined and defined? How can we “form a broader base o f
understanding” o f how modes o f oppression are interlocked when the voice in the
darkness is telling us that all oppressions are equal in all moments and all situations?
I make no apologies for my tone in this conclusion (which some may read as
unduly harsh or critical), given my belief that struggles for “basic human rights” touted by
such a politically visible and viable figure as Vaid are so damaging to the future o f gay and
lesbian rights movements. We need to understand that “basic human rights” is in actuality
a misnomer for the kind o f hair-splitting, intemally-corrosive polemics which currently
have led to stagnation and dissension in our communities. We need to begin to find ways
o f relating to one another that both encompass and supersede sexual acts. (And this
criticism does not just fell onto the shoulders o f gay men!) Our political programs must be
localized, as products o f and responses to specific historical conditions, without losing
sight o f how the local and the global are mutually generative. Our strategies must be
visionary, outgrowths o f our everyday relations and practices which look to the future
with both hope and skepticism. We must ultimately view ourselves as occupying multiple
positions in a vast and hugely complex network o f social forces and relations, positions
which, though unstable and ever-shifting, nonetheless connect us to one another in
profoundly real and politically useful ways.
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CONCLUSION
LAST DANCE:
A MANIFESTO FOR GENERATION QUEER
“When I was young I thought as you got older yo u left behind each person
you ’d been. O f course looking back you could remember it, or trace it,
ju s t as you would m ark out where you had been on a road map. You could
see the roads you ’d taken and the ones you hadn ’t. But it would be a
record o f the past, only that. Now I know th a t’s not true. You can’t leave
the past behind, yo u carry it with you all the time. ” —Karen Kijewski,
Honky Tonk Kat p. 78
Introduction
Traditionally, concluding chapters offer the author an opportunity to look back and
reflect upon what has come before—to tie up loose ends, to answer any unanswered
questions, and to gesture toward future applications o f the present work. As I begin to
write this chapter and to contemplate the prospect o f bringing closure to this study, I
realize (perhaps for the first time) that this project has finally and undeniably come to an
end. Y et I also understand that the journey which Stages o f Sexuality records disrupts the
conventions o f the critical endeavor, exceeds the scope o f these pages, and resists the
logic o f narrative closure. I f for gay and lesbian people, there’s no place called home,
then this study (which seeks to trace young gay men’s experiences o f homelessness across
the social landscape) can only ever be incomplete, its author only ever halfway home.
In place o f a traditional conclusion, then, I offer a manifesto. The manifesto,
which is typically understood as a public declaration o f principles or intentions, especially
o f a political nature, seems like an appropriate way to end the present study for several
reasons. A conclusion, for instance, intimates closure by asserting the “outcome” o f a
particular study w ith a certain degree o f authority and truthfulness. The author expounds
on the “original contributions” o f his/her study, lending to the conclusion a
self-congratulatory aura and establishing for him-/herself some critical cache. On the other
hand, a manifesto implies a sense o f beginning, offering a loose set o f guidelines and
“belief’ (rather than Truth) statements upon which to ground future political activities. It
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is forward-looking, community-oriented, and open-ended~a map o f a utopia not yet

realized.
I have titled my manifesto “Last Dance” partially in deference to Donna Summer,
whose music has served as a constant source o f inspiration throughout the course o f this
writing, and partially because the “last dance” works as a powerful m etaphor for Queer
spatial experiences. On one hand, the last dance is an event—a single, ephemeral moment
framed in time by the music which underscores it. It happens only once (that is, once per
night). I t is located somewhere in betw een the warm glow o f strobes and the stark glare
o f overhead lights, between the real w orld and home. On the other hand, the last dance is
an ontology, a state o f becoming both tied to and existing in excess o f the event which
precipitates it. Driven by the burning rhythm o f the night, the body comes alive—every
muscle, joint, and nerve summoned to attention, moving in time and space, inhabiting for
however b rief a period o f time this place that cannot endure. The body’s only concern is
the music; its only regret is time. M y sense o f “home” is very similar to the last dance—it
is a place that is both exciting and scary, tangible and ephemeral, a place that is made that
much m ore precious by my awareness that it will last only for the duration o f a song.
So, without further ado, let’s dance this last dance tonight...
T here’s No Place Called “Home”
E ach o f the chapters o f this study affirm (albeit in different ways) that, for gay and
lesbian people in general (and for young gay men in particular), there’s no place called
home. Chapter 1 deals with the ideological and historical frameworks through which the
category o f “young gay man” has been simultaneously deployed and denigrated, the means
through which the “young gay man” has been both produced as a subject and subjected to
regimes o f power external to him self In Chapter 2 ,1 examine the ways in which young
gay men have (o f late) been located a t the center o f AIDS history while, at the same time,
they have systematically been denied a voice in how that history is documented,
remembered. The argument in Chapter 3 centers on the contradictory logic (at work in
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many cultural representations) which writes the bodies o f young gay men as fetish and as
abjection. And, in Chapter 4 ,1 explore the complex arena o f contemporary gay and
lesbian politics, specifically explicating the generational polemics around the post-gay
phenomenon and noting the ways in which post-gay discourses reproduce overdetermined
cultural narratives about young gay men (Le., we are hedonistic, lazy, apathetic, apolitical)
which severely restrict our participation in political arenas.
In part, my assertion that “there’s no place called home” is enabled by the spaces
on which I have chosen to focus in this study. The NAMES Project AIDS Quilt, the
bathhouse, the phone sex line, and the tearoom all are locations constituted tenuously in
time, asserting their claims on the social landscape only for the brief period o f time during
which they are inhabited. The Quilt, for instance, is nomadic and migratory, neither
occupying a fixed location nor playing to a monolithic audience base; although the
bathhouse and the phone sex line maintain (somewhat) stable locations in space, they are
nonetheless subject to regimes o f heteronormativity which obscure/conceal their presence;
and tearooms appear—a contorted, mirror-image o f “reality”—only to disappear upon
orgasm. While the spaces on which I have chosen to focus in this study clearly point up
the experiences o f social dissociation, restricted social mobility, and invisibility to the
public gaze (experiences which, in the introduction, I specifically attribute to my
understanding o f “homelessness”), other spaces which are not explored in the context o f
this study (such as bars, sex clubs, adult bookstores, and even community centers and gay
ghettos) produce (to varying degrees) similar effects on bodies because “the deadly
elasticity o f heterosexist presumption” (Sedgwick 68) continues to govern social relations.
Homelessness thus constitutes the chief determinant o f Queer spatial experiences.
I f gay and lesbian people cannot identify any one location as “home,” then Queer
critics must w ork to articulate more precise and accurate definitions o f that term , ones
which account for the lived experiences o f social dissociation, restricted social mobility,
and invisibility to the public gaze. We cannot surrender to a romanticized conception o f
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“home” (i.e., a singular haven o f shelter) wherein gay men and lesbians constitute the
implied “center” (no m atter how compelling that notion may be) precisely because, in
doing so, we ignore the material inequities and systematic acts o f exclusion which
characterize the lived spatial experiences o f gay men and lesbians. Our revised definitions
o f “home” must recognize that while home is not one space but many, it is also not only
tied to physical location. By this I mean that “home” is as much a state o f being (Le., a
journey) as it is a material place. To define “home,” Queer critics not only m ust examine
the architectural and institutional politics surrounding the spaces which we inhabit, but
also must chart the routes which we take to arrive at that space. In this regard, Queer
critics might begin to consider what discourses o f migration, nomadism, and diaspora have
to offer us in our efforts to understand spatial experiences, since those discourses are
founded on definitions o f space as kaleidoscopic and definitions o f lived experience as
homeless.
Queer critics also must strive to produce new models for how gay and lesbian
people inhabit space. While these models (perhaps inevitably, given that they will be
conceived by academics) must be theoretical in nature, they should derive from lived
experiences in and engagements with social space. In other words, theory and practice
m ust be conceived as mutually generative o f Queer spatial studies, lest we succumb to the
w orst form o f narcissism by offering anecdote as scholarship or we abstract material
inequities by producing theory-for-theory’s-sake. In this regard, Queer critics might
examine more fully the interrelationships between spatial studies and performance studies,
since the medium o f performance always and already foregrounds the issue o f materiality
by tracing the movements o f bodies in space and time.
Spatial Practices/Identity Politics
Spatial practices are cross-cut and impacted by a range o f identity-based concerns.
Stages o f S exu ality assumes that generationality constitutes a key factor in shaping the
lived spatial experiences o f young gay men, primarily because cultural productions (from
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the m uch touted “boys in their underwear plays” to phone sex advertisements to
pornography and mainstream films) in the current historical moment seem bent on
packaging young gay male identities and sexualities in a perpetual state o f
disempowerment. In each o f the preceding chapters, I focus my attention not on proving
or disproving the validity o f specific cultural stereotypes about gay Gen Xers, but rather
on demonstrating how those stereotypes determine and are determined by lived experience
(regardless o f whether they can be empirically verified).
Chapter 1 exposes the gaps between how we are represented and how we live in
order to outline a model o f schizophrenic spectatorship, a model which I argue accurately
traces the formation o f young gay male subjectivities. In Chapter 2 ,1 tackle the issue o f
“AIDS amnesia” as it pertains to young gay men, ultimately suggesting that this phrase
reveals m ore about other generations’ stakes in AIDS History than it does about Gen
X ers’ responses to the epidemic. Chapter 3 focuses its attention on the representational
economy through which young gay male bodies are both fetishized and demonized (i.e.,
“the cult o f the pom star”), arguing that “the cult” disallows intimacy between and among
young gay men. Finally, in Chapter 4 ,1 contend that the post-gay phenomenon (which has
been explicitly linked to gay Gen Xers) has served as the impetus for further generational
factioning and political stagnation in gay and lesbian communities.
In this present study, I explore one axis o f young gay male subject formation—that
is, the intersections o f sexuality and generationality. Admittedly, this approach is

somewhat limited, given that it elides questions o f how the afEliational imperative to
generation is recast in light o f differing socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, educational, and
national backgrounds. In future studies, the category o f “generation” must itself be
further interrogated, deconstructed, in order for Queer critics to understand more fully the
range and complexity o f young gay male experiences. Stages o f Sexuality might provide a
useful point o f departure for these more nuanced investigations into generationality, a
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sounding board against which to test the applicability o f my conclusions to the experiences
o f Others within this generational unit.
Spaces that Matter
A third assumption o f this study is that there are (political, material, psychic)
consequences to the ways in which young gay men inhabit and traverse space, that our
actions are ideological, that those actions produce social meanings about our bodies and
desires. In Chapter 1 ,1 argue that the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt facilitates a model o f
spectatorship characterized by the loss o f normal associations, the presence o f auditory
hallucinations, and dramatic changes in affect; I further contend that this model is
indicative o f how young gay men experience themselves in/and the world. While this
model o f spectatorship encourages a profound sense o f homelessness in young gay men by
disconnecting them from the social, by permitting others to narrate our experiences, and
by disallowing generationally-specific responses to current crises, it also provides a site
from which young gay men can begin to understand (and potentially rectify) the disparities
between convention and lived experience. Chapter 2 suggests that by patronizing the
baths (institutions so embedded in cultural narratives o f sexual excess, hedonism, and
self-pleasure), young gay men (unwittingly?) participate in the construction and
dissemination o f cultural narratives which posit us as amnesiac in relation to the AIDS
crisis; however, I also argue that a self-reflexive examination o f our movements within the
bathhouse might open up new avenues for articulating our relationship to the ADDS crisis
and its history. In Chapter 3 ,1 suggest that by calling telephone sex lines (a medium
founded on the principle o f disembodied intimacy), young gay men not only participate in
the traffik o f our bodies and desires, but also, in the interplay betw een voice and body
which the line encourages, we potentially open up new relationships to our bodies and to
one another. And Chapter 4 argues that tearoom sex, considered by many critics to be
impersonal and without consequence, symbolically traces a model for building affinities
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between and among generations o f gay men, a model which might begin to heal the
generational divides which have currently led to the stagnation o f gay politics
To be sure, we must continue to be seduced by the poetics and the erotics o f
space, but we cannot lose sight o f the polemical implications o f those seductions. There
is, indeed, something very mysterious and compelling about cruising the darkened,
labyrinthine mazes o f the bathhouse, something electric and very alive about openly
masturbating at a urinal in the tearoom, and something slightly dangerous and defiantly
liberating about the desires which are spoken but not seen on telephone sex lines. Amidst
the pleasurable seductions o f space, however, we must always and consciously consider
how spatial practices imply material consequences. We must resist the urge to posit
spatial practices as inherently and inevitably liberating, transgressive, and playful and,
instead, focus our attention on both the pleasure and the pain o f asserting ourselves and
our desires in space. We cannot forget that for every pleasurable act o f tearoom sex, there
are several other acts o f harassment and/or violence perpetrated against gay and lesbian
people. I realize that the will to pleasure is so strong for gay and lesbian people because
so much o f our everyday lives is concerned with injustices and inequities. But to willfully
forget is to condone not only our further marginalization in the social, but also to
participate in the acts o f violence against us and our own. To achieve these ends, Queer
critics must regard space as overlain with multiple and contradictory cultural narratives
(neither wholly transgressive nor wholly damning), narratives with ideological implications
that can only ever be teased out through a multivalent approach to spatiality which
considers spatial practices alongside representations of space and representational space.
“Home is the place you get to, not the place you came from”
I still pine away for a pair o f mby red slippers like Dorothy Gael’s, even though I
am by now more than aware that they cannot make good on their promises. This past
Christmas, my friend, Annie, gave me a Hallmark Keepsake ornament in the shape o f
Dorothy’s magical slippers. The ornament immediately earned a central place atop my
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com puter monitor, comfortably nestled among a Princess Leia ornament, an 8 x 10

autographed photo o f Kevin Spacey, and my collection o f Eeyore (o f Pooh feme)
paraphernalia. It appears small, might even be unnoticeable at first glance. But I am
always aware o f its presence, as it looks dow n upon me while I am writing. It serves as an
incentive to continue to produce critically-engaged and politically-conscious work, despite
those colleagues o f mine (and they are many) who continually trivialize this and like
projects. It serves as a goal, one always unattainable, but one tow ards which I always find
myself pushing. And it serves as a rem inder o f where I have traveled, where I am headed,
and where I never can go.
There’s no place called hom e...there's no place called hom e...there’s no place
called home.
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End N otes
Introduction
I realize, o f course, that the distinctions o f “private” and “public” are arbitrarily
made. As Dangerous Bedfellows note in the introduction to Policing Public Sex (1996),
“[i]n this day and age, you can’t avoid public sex even if you stay at home. From
accidentally catching your neighbors naked or fucking, to casually flipping channels at two
in the morning and catching a pom star sucking some voluptuous young woman’s tits or
fondling some beefy young man’s dick, you live in a w orld filled with voyeurs, peeping
toms, and sophisticated visual consumers. In many o f the places Americans call home, sex
is neither here nor there. It’s always on the line” (13). While I whole-heartedly agree
(especially in the aftermath o f Bowers v. Hardwick) w ith these authors’ assertion that the
lines between private and public are continuously being re-drawn to make the public
sphere increasingly more wide-reaching, I choose not to deal with the issues raised by the
private/public debate at any great length because they are only marginally related to my
project here. For some o f the more provocative inquires made into the questions which
these debates pose, see: David Bell, “One-Handed Geographies: An Archeology o f Public
Sex,” in Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites o f Resistance. Eds. Gordon
Brent Ingram, et. aL, Seattle: Bay Press, 1997, 81-87; David Bell, “Perverse Dynamics,
Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation o f Intimacy,” in mapping desire: geographies o f
sexualities, Eds. Bell and Gill Valentine, London: Routledge, 1995, 304-317; Pat Califia,
Public Sex: The Culture o f Radical SexTPittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1994; Dangerous
Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex, Boston: South End Press, 1996; Gordon Brent
Ingram, et. aL, “Placemaking and the Dialectics o f Public and Private,” m Queers in
Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites o f Resistance. Eds. Gordon Brent Ingram, et. aL,
Seattle: Bay Press, 1997, 295-300; and William L. Leap, ed., Public Sex/Gav Space. New
York: Columbia UP, 1999.
Cultural criticism has been taken to task for a number o f supposed faults. In
“Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” Queer theorist Lauren Berlant notes that
cultural critics often are critiqued because they “seem always to know w hether a cultural
event is a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent thing; they are often accused o f having no
patience for reading or research or for appreciating beauty; they are said to take too much
rhetorical pleasure in studying political pain; they appear greedily to critique professional
protocols while also seeking their protections and rew ards” (105). In addition to these
fairly general criticisms, cultural studies work also often incites a sense o f panic in more
traditionally-oriented scholars when it deals with w hat Berlant terms “sexy knowledge”
(107). Independent scholar Amy Flowers offers a very persuasive explanation o f the perils
in conducting such work, noting: “Sex work can be a difficult and uncomfortable topic.
To have researched working at phone sex has only slightly less stigma than having been a
phone sex worker. Any association with sex work seems to sully the reputation, leaving
the researcher vulnerable to prurient interest, paternalistic censure, and general
trivialization” (13).
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'I
As one type o f periodization, generational designations do not constitute an

exact science but rather are interpretations made by a specific critic based on her/his
understanding o f how a cluster o f historical events impacted a given group o f people. The
eight essays included in After the Boom: The Politics o f Generation X (1997), for
instance, each identify a different period o f years to define the Generation X birth cohort.
Nonetheless, I use the 1960-1981 frame for this particular study because it is the most
commonly-used designation among generational scholars.
In Welcome to the Jungle; The Why Behind “Generation X” (1995), law student
Geoffrey T. Holtz explains the rationale for using the year 1960 as the beginning o f this
generation:
In late 1960, the G.D. Searle Drug Company o f Skokie, Illinois, m arketed
the first commercially produced birth control pill, Enovid 10. Never before
was it so easy to not have children. America’s attitude toward its youth
would undergo a great transformation in the following two decades. As
the true children o f the 1960s, this generation would grow up in the midst
o f . . . a time when the young adult Boomers were experiencing a
tremendous euphoria through “the moment” in the universities, “finding”
themselves in various self-help groups, and living the sexual revolution. As
children, we were unable to participate directly in these endeavors, but
many o f us experienced them as a nightmarish breakdown o f political
leadership, a troubling dissolution o f family structures, and a chaotic
education in schools with confusing, directionless objectives. (2)
An interesting depiction o f the dissolution o f family structures during this particular
historical moment can be evidenced in one episode o f the television program That 70s
Show, in which Donna Pensiotti (usually an intelligent teen) fails English class and begins
smoking in order to gain the attention o f her self-interested “swinger” parents, Bob and
Midge.
The early-1980s are typically targeted as the ending o f Generation X and the
beginning o f what has been termed the “Mftlenial Generation” because, in those years,
America underwent another shift back toward tradition and “family values.” As Howe and
Strauss explain in 13th Gen (1993):
Around 1982, when “Baby on Board” signs first appeared on car windows,
social trends started shifting away from neglect and negativism, and toward
protection and support. The abortion and divorce rates receded somewhat,
teacher salaries gained ground, and a flurry o f new books chastised parents
for having treated kids so poorly in the 1970s . . . . Congress endorsed this
trend by making all children bom after September 30, 1983, automatically
eligible for Medicaid—but not those bom before. (14-15)
These observations here might at first appear more than a bit stereotypical, in
that they suggest that gay space is erotic whereas lesbian space is familial. Yet a
comparison o f social scientific investigations into the uses o f gay and lesbian bars lend
some credibility to my observations. In Buddy’s (tellingly subtitled Meditations on
Desire), philosopher Stan Persky weaves “a series o f tales, matter-of-factly relating erotic
encounters which originated in Buddy’s” (9), a gay bar located in Toronto, Canada. On
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the other hand, in her essay “Invisible Women in Invisible Places: The Production o f
Social Space in Lesbian Bars,” political organizer Maxine Wolfe contends that “[fjn a
world where most o f us cannot openly exist, lesbian bars provide a momentary safe
separate place to meet other lesbians. They can be the place where people thrown out o f
their families can create a new support network or where lesbians can do things they might
get hassled for somewhere else, such as playing pool or dancing with other women” (319).
I think it is also telling that the majority o f gay studies into spatiality center on locations at
which sexual acts take place (e.g., bathhouses, public bathrooms, highway rest areas, etc.),
whereas the majority o f lesbian studies into spatiality (which are much fewer in number)
center on spaces in which long-lasting communities were established (like specific
neighborhoods, resort areas, etc.).
In “"Lost in Space: Q ueer Theory and Community Activism at the

Fin-de-Millenaire,” Gordon Brent Ingram, et. aL write:
To be queer and to be involved in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or
queer politics at this end o f the millennium is to walk cautiously across
both the hyperspace o f theory and the often brutal environmental and social
realities o f sites, neighbourhoods, and regions. In these dizzying
Dantesque journeys, nothing is "pure;” not the planet at this period in tim e
and not theoretical determinations—they will continue to shift and
proliferate, as they should. (13)
Chapter I: Performing (In) The Grave: Schizophrenic Subjectivities and the NAMES
Project AID S Quilt
• While experience is not wholly determined by cultural conventions, the two

always exist in relation to one another, even in those instances in which experience
appears to break with convention. Historian Beth L. Bailey explains that conventions
constitute “public codes o f behavior and systems o f meaning that are both culturally
constructed and historically specific. While convention may not determine actions, or
exist in a one-to-one relationship w ith individual experience, it does structure experience.
Convention supplies a frame o f reference; it is a public system that lends meaning to
private acts” (6). In relation to subject formation, conventions are generated and solidified
in/through the narratives built up around identity categories. These narratives/conventions
work to locate individuals in the social world, to press on and give meaning to their
experiences. Again, conventions cannot entirely determine experience because individuals
can and do break with convention; however, such acts o f transgression still are read and
interpreted through the conventions being transgressed. Indeed, the notion of
“transgression” assumes the prior establishment o f a norm, or convention, which is being
violated and surpassed. This interplay between experience and convention is further
elaborated on by my discussion o f performativity in Chapter 3.
• Some o f the more interesting (and telling) monikers used to define this
generation include: “Yuppie Puppies”; “the Doofus Generation”; “the Tuned-Out
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Generation”; “the Numb Generation”; “the Blank Generation”; and “a generation

without a soul.”
“Generation X” was first used as the name o f a 1970s punk band fronted by
Billy IdoL The label gained wide-spread use as a description o f this generation after the
publication o f Douglas Coupland’s novel o f the same name.
O f course, this is not to suggest that all individuals who can be classified under
the loosely-defined rubric o f “Generation X” have experienced the epidemic (or any event
during our lifetimes) in the same way. In the early 1980s, for instance, the oldest Xers
(then just entering their 20s) experienced AIDS as an as yet unknowable and always fetal
health crisis. D ue to advancements in treatm ent options and further research into the
origins o f HIV-infection, the youngest Xers (now on the verge o f their 20s) experience
AIDS as a chronic, but often manageable, m edical condition. Differences o f experience
from within a generation point up the need to address not only generational affiliation, but
also cohort affiliation. Generational scholar Susan A. MacManus defines a cohort as “a
group o f individuals bom within the same tim e interval, usually five or ten years” (114).
Because Stages o f Sexuality represents the first book-length study to work at the
interstices o f sexuality and generationality, such a nuanced inquiry fells outside o f the
scope and design o f this project. However, an investigation into the various and varied
experiences o f cohorts within Generation X constitutes a topic for further/future research.
As a “national memorial,” the Quilt is unique in that is honors those who have
died by disease, not war. Since the emergence o f the NAMES Project, other
disease-related national memorials have sprung up, m ost notably a quilt honoring women
who are living w ith or who have died from breast cancer. Cultural critic M arita Sturken
interrogates the role(s) which war- and disease-related memorials play in the construction
o f national memory in Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the
Politics o f Remembering. Berkeley: California UP, 1997.
The confession represents a particularly useful site at which to investigate

sexuality for tw o reasons. First, as Foucault notes, “[t]he confession was, and still
remains, the general standard governing the production o f the true discourse on sex”
(History 63). Second, the confession operates under a double bind similar to the one
which Eve Kosofisky Sedgwick identifies at the heart o f lesbian/gay subjectivity. As
Sedgwick w rites in her important book Epistem ology o f the Closet, “a lot o f the energy o f
attention and demarcation that has swirled around issues o f homosexuality since the end o f
the nineteenth centu ry . . . has been impelled by the distinctively indicative relation o f
homosexuality to wider mappings o f secrecy and disclosure, and o f the private and the
public” (71).
Again, this is not to suggest a binary relationship between subjectivity and

subjection, betw een agency and subordination, since, as I argue above, the two always are
mutually constituting. Here, I use this over-simplified understanding o f the confession to
illuminate how the Quilt typically is read and not to offer my own reading o f the artefact.
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Village Voice columnist Michael Musto provides a compelling counterargument to the

claim that the Quilt gives voice to the dead in “La Dolce M usto,” Village Voice. 25 Oct.
1988, 46.
O
°* For an interesting analysis o f the psychological implications and the
representational dilemmas around art which purports to speak for the dead, see: Elisabeth
Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death. Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
9- Joe Brown’s book. A Promise to Remember: The NAMES Project Book o f

Letters (New York: Avon, 1992), gathers together and reproduces hundreds o f letters
which were submitted (with panels) to the Project. N ot only does this book demonstrate
the multiple ways in which panel-makers have responded to the Quilt, but also it
potentially offers a point o f departure for an analysis o f how panel-makers are produced as
subjects- Unfortunately, such a project foils outside o f the scope o f this chapter.
The Quilt also draws on established quilting genres, including: mourning quilt
(which honors the dead); memory quilt (which celebrates the life o f one who has died);
and friendship quilt (which is made collectively by a group o f friends/relatives, each o f
whom contributes one quilt block). For a more detailed description o f the history o f these
(and other) quilt forms, see: R uthE . Finley, Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who
M ade Them. New York: Charles T. Branford Co., 1957; and Marie D. Webster, Quilts:
Their Story and How to Make Them Garden City: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1915.
* 1* That the Quilt (and its creators) is(/are) concerned with reception is perhaps
most clearly evidenced in the “open panel” portion o f its display. The “open panel” is a
blank sheet on which visitors can write their own messages.
Elsley has made a similar observation o f the Quilt, noting that the artefact
“quite literally invites a reading—the panels are the leaves o f an enormous textile text.
Speaking its complex visual, verbal, and nonverbal language, the NAMES Project quilt
sets about claiming power for people with AIDS by creating a story o f their own making,
for the victims, the panel makers, and even those who come to see the quilt” (189).
Although Elsley (unlike most o f the Quilt’s critics) does acknowledge a complex
performance dynamic at work in displays o f the Quilt, her analysis ultimately recapitulates
(rather than challenges) a single, conventional interpretation whereby the Quilt is
understood to speak for the dead. Thus, my work here builds on Elsley’s basic premise by
tracing the “complex visual, verbal, and nonverbal” rhetorical processes implied in the
design and displays o f the Quilt.
Given that the AIDS Quilt constitutes a site of/for cultural performance, this
observation may not seem particularly surprising, or even note-worthy. As performance
theorist Peggy Phelan writes in Unmarked, all performance “occurs over a time which will
not be repeated. It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as ‘different’”
(146). While I agree with Phelan’s assertions here, I also would contend that the Quilt
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exacerbates this sense o f nonrepeatability which characterizes performance in general by

so profoundly altering performance conditions (e.g., location, make-up o f performance
apparatus, etc.) upon each “new” display.
For my understanding o f performance spaces, I am indebted to Susan Bennett,

who discusses how architecture “will impose ideologically on performacnes and the
audience’s perception o f them” (129), in Theatre Audiences: A Theory o f Production and
Reception, 2nd ed., London; Routledge, 1997. (See esp. pp. 127-136.)
For a provocative examination o f the flaneur’s role in mall culture and

architecture, see: Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern.
Berkeley: California UP, 1993.
For some stunning visual images o f the Quilt’s panels, see: The NAMES
Project Foundation, Always Remember: A Selection o f Panels Created ByiandJEor
International Fashion Designers, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1996.
For my understanding o f how “texts” interpellate the reader/spectator as the

subject o f their address, I am indebted to Catharine Belsey, who charts this process in
relation to readers o f classic realist novels in Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.
Chapter II: (Re-) Constructing “A Place Where History Hurts Gay Bathhouses, AIDS
Amnesia, and Traumatic History
For my understanding o f these shifts in the cultural logics o f the body, I am

indebted to Emily Martin, who discusses their influence on conceptions o f bodily,
economic, and social fitness, in Flexible Bodies: The Role o f Immunity in American
Culture from the Days o f Polio to the Age o f AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
For more extensive investigations into historiographic models which are

“protected by a continued adherence to commonsense empiricism and realist notions o f
representation and truth” (1), see: Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader,
London: Routledge, 1997.
3- F or a detailed discussion o f the relationship between “pow er and the conditions

o f silence,” see: Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge, 1990 (esp.
Chapter 6); Lee Edelman, “The Plague o f Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and
AIDS.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1(W inter 1989), 301-317; and Paula Treichler, How
to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles o f AIDS. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
4- For an interesting deconstruction o f Shilts’ history o f ‘T atient Zero” (the gay

French-Canadian flight attendant targeted as the source o f AIDS in N orth America), see:
Zero Patience, dir. John Greyson, with John Robinson, Normand Fauteux, and Dianne
Heatherington, Cinevista, 1994.
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For a discussion o f some criticisms which have been waged against Shilts’
book, see: Jim Miller and Pamela Abramson, “The M aking o f an Epidemic,” Newsweek
19 Oct. 1987:91, 93.
6■ In Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education W ent Wrong fDuke UP. 1996),
Cindy Patton offers a m ore detailed and sustained analysis o f safe-sex education
campaigns in the United States. In effect, Patton traces the evolution o f safer-sex
education alongside two competing desires among the American public: one, to hah the
spread o f HIV; and tw o, to control the public’s response to the epidemic. These two
desires, Patton argues, gave rise to a “national pedagogy” o f AIDS which often found
itself at odds with more localized efforts at education. This is so because the “national
pedagogy” frequently peddled misinformation about the epidemic through the venues o f
media, science, medicine, and legislation in order to curb public fears o f wide-spread
contagion and infection.
Given that Valenzuela recently has emerged as one o f the most vocal and
visible proponents o f “barebacking,” his ability to judge accurately and fairly the claims o f
his opponents might seem, at best, questionable. Valenzuela appeared on the cover o f the
February 1999 issue o f Poz magazine, for instance, naked and smiling, “atop a saddleless
horse, w ith a cover line that refer[ed] to the ‘boys who bareback’” (Signorile, “don’t fear”
53). He also attended a meeting on barebacking in N ew York City in January 1999 at
which he revealed, “It’s not my experience to lose h alf my friends and feel the debilitating
effects o f the virus. I can’t help but feel that the idea o f either getting HTV or transmitting
HTV is not that horrible. I don’t have a reaction to it the way people who have had so
much loss around it [ . . . . ] I wish I could say that to people and not be heard as defiant,
irresponsible, delusional” (qtd. in “Risky Behavior” 11). Despite his obvious investment in
barebacking and his implicit participation in perpetuating the stereotypes which I seek to
unravel in this chapter, Valenzuela’s assessment appears accurate and fair when read
alongside the arguments o f his opponents. I use Valenzuela here, then, because he
provides a clear, concise, and accurate summary o f his opponents’ position, while also
inflecting that summary through his own experience as a member o f Generation X (with
the trope o f “amnesia”).
Some o f the m ost influential studies o f Rom an and Turkish bathhouses include:
Richard Barter, The Turkish Bath. Bradford, Yorkshire: J.M . Jowett, 1858; Johannes
Sipko Boersma, Mutatio Valentia: The Late Roman Baths at Valesio. Salento.
Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1995; John Le Gay Brereton, The Turkish Bath in Health
and Disease. Sheffield: F. Re-printed from the “Sheffield Argus” for F. Smith, 1859;
Alfred William Stephens Cross, Public Bathsand W ash-houses. London: B.T. Batsford,
1906; Janet DeLaine. The Baths o f Caracalla: A Study in the Design. Construction, and
Economics o f Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome. Portsmouth, RI: Journal o f
Roman Archeology, 1997; Inge Nielsen, Thermae e t Balnea: The Architecture and
Cultural History o f Roman Public Baths, Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1990; O.F. Robinson,
Ancient Rome: City Planning and Administration. London: Routledge. 1992; Tony Rook,
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Roman Baths in Britain. Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire., UK; Shire Publications,

1992; Judith Anne Testa. Rome is Love Spelled Backward (Roma Amor); Eqjoving Art
and Architecture in the Eternal City. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1998; and Fikret K.
Yegul, Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: M IT Press, 1992.
For more extensive historical accounts o f the development o f American gay

bathhouses and bathhouse culture, see: Allan Berube, “The History o f Gay Bathhouses,”
in Policing Public Sex. Eds. Dangerous Bedfellows, Boston: South End Press, 1996,
187-220; George Chauncey, Gay N ew York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making o f
the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. N ew York: BasicBooks, 1994 (esp. Chapter 8); Charles
Kaiser. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History o f Gay Life In America Since World
W ar TI. N ew York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1997; and Ira Tattleman, “The Meaning at
the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse,” in Queers in Space: Communities/Public
Places/Sites o f Resistance, eds. G ordon Brent Ingram, et. aL, Seattle: Bay Press, 1997,
391-406.
1®' Interestingly, Williams suggests that, in practice, the public baths were largely
unsuccessful in meeting the stated goals o f urban reform and acculturation. She notes, for
instance, that often “the bath patrons used the public baths for their own purposes, not just
to be clean but also for relaxation and relief from summer heat” (135). In feet, Williams
cites statistics which reveal that public baths were most frequently patronized either during
summer months or when bathing fecilities were connected to recreational facilities. I
highlight this discrepancy between stated and actual functions o f the public baths to make
the point that if public bath patrons could (and did) adapt the uses o f these spaces to meet
their ow n needs, then (as I will argue below) gay bath patrons could experience these
spaces as more than “timeless cocoons.”
11* For a compelling reading o f “athletic homoeroticism,” see: Brian Pronger, The
Arena o f Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meanings o f Sex. New York: St.
M artin’s, 1990.
12- For more on how the pedestrian simultaneously “walks” and “maps” the
spaces o f the city, see: Michel de Certeau, The Practice o f Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
Rendall, Berkeley: California UP, 1984.
13* Two contemporary films—Pleasantville and The Truman Show—offer

interesting inquiries into the limits o f the planned city and the anxieties produced by the
spaces which lie outside o f its domain. Both films take place within a city circumscribed
by the conventions o f television. In Pleasantville, the possibilities for mapping the city
already have been imagined (since the city is the fictional setting for a sit-com which has
entered re-runs). In The Truman Show. Truman constantly contests the limits o f the city
(since the program takes place “live”), but to no avail; the producers are always one step
ahead o f him, thwarting his advances toward escape through an ingenious series o f
theatrical effects and narrative tw ists. What I find interesting about these two films is the
feet th at both center on characters who are unwittingly (and, in Truman, unknowingly)
149
placed within the planned city and both create plots in which these characters long to
escape their confinement. In PleasantvilleTthe brother voices his desire to venture beyond
Main Street. Truman wants to leave the city in search o f his “true love” (who was ejected
from the set when she tried to reveal to Truman the “truth” about his life). Neither film.,
however, allows viewers to imagine the spaces which exist outside o f the confines o f the
city. While the residents o f Pleasantville are forever changed by the end o f the film and
they can re-w rite the storylines which they have been given, they still cannot venture
beyond the end o f Main Street. In Truman, viewers are assured by Truman’s last line that
he will leave the dome and enter the “real” world. But because he remains perched on the
threshold to the outside as the screen fades to black and the credits begin to roll, the
boundaries o f the city remain intact and the marginal spaces linhnaginRd/nnimaginahle
In “Let Them Eat Fat,” Harper’s Magazine columnist Greg Critser draws a
telling analogy between bathhouses and fast-food restaurants in order to examine the
class-based dynamics o f obesity. As he writes, “If childhood obesity truly is ‘an epidemic
in the U.S. the likes o f which we have not had before in chronic disease,’ then places like
McDonald’s and Winchell’s Donut stores, with their endless racks o f glazed and creamy
goodies, are the San Francisco bathhouses o f said epidemic, the places where the high-risk
population indulges in high-risk behavior.” What I find interesting about Critser’s analogy
is the blatant and uncritical propagation o f cultural narratives which causally link
bathhouses and AIDS by way o f gay male sexual practice. That the analogy is stated
matter-of-factly, and that its meanings are assumed to be both self-evident and factual,
demonstrates the pervasiveness and the sedimentation o f the bathhouses=AIDS
amnesia=infection equation in the American cultural imaginary.
The rhetoric o f anti-bathhouse proponents shares some similarities with

anti-drug initiatives (like Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign) o f that same period.
Perhaps this rhetoric was bolstered by the wide-spread use o f amyl nitrate (or, poppers)—a
synthetic drug used to heighten sexual pleasure—among bathhouse patrons. For an
interesting fictionalized depiction o f the effects o f poppers on gay male sexual practice,
see David B. Feinberg, Eightv-Sixed. N ew York: Penguin, 1989 (esp. Chapter 2, pp.
18-28).
During the mid-1980s, Americans witnessed this heightened awareness o f the

epidemic as the dominant culture was forced to take notice o f AIDS in unprecedented
ways. The death o f 1950s film legend Rock Hudson as a result o f AIDS-related illnesses
early in 1985 brought national visibility to the epidemic and instituted a moment o f “AIDS
chic” among such popular culture icons as Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, and Madonna.
By October o f that same year, there already were 14,288 documented cases o f
HTV-infection in persons outside o f “the gay male community and the world o f drug
addicts” (Engel and Sawyer 1). Around the same time, parents o f children infected with
HIV caused panic in communities across the nation when they refused to remove their
children from the public educational system. Schools were boycotted; private homes
occasionally were firebombed. As infection rates continued to climb at alarming rates,
rumors o f quarantine and mandatory tattooing o f HIV-infected persons began to circulate.
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[For a provocative fictional rendering o f these issues, see: Jed A. Bryan, A Cry in the
Desert. Austin: Banned Books, 1987. Also, for a more complete discussion o f the debates
regarding mandatory tattooing, see: Victor Navasky, “Stigmatizing the Victim,” The
Nation. 12 April 1986: 505.] Thus, by 1985, the message regarding this shift in AIDS
awareness was clear: “heterosexual awareness equaled AIDS hysteria” (Schulman 109).
17
* For an entertaining parody o f the rules for bathhouse culture, access: “Rules
o f the Baths” at <http://www.flexbaths.com/bathruIzJitrtf>.
1ft
i0 ' Admittedly, Howe and Strauss w rote and published this book during a
moment in which the full impact o f the economic and political shifts o f the 1980s was still
being realized. Given that my analysis here concerns events which are taking place over
one decade later, readers might question the relevance o f Howe and Strauss’s claims to
this argument. Based on my fairly extensive research into the issue o f generationality,
however, I realize that the somewhat generalized observations made by Howe and Strauss
in the late-1980s still accurately reflect the lived experiences o f many Gen Xers. To be
sure, the import attached to specific issues has altered—for instance, as all Gen Xers have
by now reached age 18, the issues o f child care and education have been eclipsed by
concerns over the enormous decline in voter registration and participation. B ut the
cultural and historical forces Howe and Strauss identify remain at the center (as the
impetus, if not origin) o f the ever-evolving index o f generational concerns.
* The discourses o f health and safety used to close the baths also bear striking
similarities to the discourses initially used to isolate and contain AIDS within the bodies o f
sexually active gay men. In order to close the baths, city health inspectors had to prove
that the structures were unsafe, that they posed a risk to the health o f their patrons and
(oftentimes) o f city residents in general. As p ro of o f these “risks,” health inspectors
scrutinized the interior o f the spaces and cited structural flaws and maintenance
deficiencies. In January 1989, for instance, police in Boston raided a gay bathhouse after
receiving complaints o f unsafe group sex happening at the club. Once inside, the police
“ordered it closed after discovering violations o f the city’s safety and sanitary codes”
(Canellos and Thomas 13). In an official report o f the incident, Deputy Commissioner o f
Health and Hospitals George Lamb cited a number o f violations (including unlit exit signs,
broken shower nozzles, a missing shower curtain, and unlicensed selling o f food and
beverages) as reasons for the closing. Absent from these debates around the closing o f the
Boston bath is any question o f the functions o f this particular club. Yet by turning the
architectural designs against the structure itself as evidence that the bathhouse “[did] not
meet building code standards” and thus should be condemned, Lamb and his followers
implicitly waged an attack against sexually active gay male bodies much like the one
waged in/through the construction o f risk groups. In both, gay bodies (or, the
bathhouse-as-body) stood as the embodiment o f HTV.
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Chapter HI: “Reach Out, Reach Out and Touch M y-Self”: Bodies, Technologies, and
Queer Performativity on Gay Male Telephone Sex Lines
*• This, o f course, is not to suggest that language is the only way in which the
body can be understood. There are, to be sure, many instances in which the body resists
being understood in language. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking o f the
World (1985), Elaine Scarry contends that pain, as an entirely somatic experience, cannot
be wholly contained, expressed, or perceived in language. As Scarry writes, “Physical
pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate
reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes
before language is learned” (4). Although Scarry later argues that “to be present when a
person moves up out o f that pre-language and projects the facts o f sentience into speech is
almost to have been perm itted to be present at the birth o f language itself’ (6), she still
contends that the language o f confession has only “begun to become capable o f providing
an external image o f interior events” (8). Thus, while I recognize that the body can never
be wholly known o r understood in language, and that there are many instances in which
the body resists or destroys the explanatory functions o f language itself language remains
an important (albeit flawed) paradigm for apprehending the body and its meanings. This is
especially true for telephone sex lines, where language is foregrounded as the site at which
the body is made visible.
The cyborg is not only a site o ffo r playful subversion. As Haraway notes, the
cyborg “is an argument for pleasure in the construction o f boundaries and for
responsibility in their construction” (150). In effect, Haraway here acknowledges that any
transgression o f previously established boundaries always and simultaneously entails a
recapitulation o f limits. In other words, the cyborg both transcends previously established
boundaries and represents the limits o f a newly defined order. The pleasure and
playfulness o f subversion, then, always is bound to responsibility for its just and equitable
deployment.
3- In his landmark study Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places f 19751.
sociologist Laud Humphreys suggests that the participant observer “is interested in people
as they are, not as he thinks they ought to be according to some standards o f his own”
(21). Thus, for Humphreys, the first goal o f his “ethnography” o f tea rooms is “objective
validity—to avoid distortion o f the data either by [his] presence and [his] presuppositions”
34). As a branch o f anthropology devoted to the description o f specific cultures and
societies, ethnography represents a science o f looking. To practice ethnography is to gaze
upon the Other and perceive through difference (both the ethnographer’s and the O ther’s)
the meanings o f difference. The gaze o f the ethnographer (typically an “outsider” as
opposed to a “native”) presupposes not only that there is something to look at (in/on the
Other), but also that the something to-be-looked-at will be made visible by its marked
difference, by the absence o f a clear referent to the w orld o f the ethnographer. To the
ethnographer, a rose is (never) a rose is (never) a rose precisely because in order to
successfully perform his job, that is, to collect data from afar as the “objective observer,”
he must perpetuate and reify certain kinds o f essential differences between himse lf and his
152
subjects. (This type o f essentializing is evident, for instance, in scholarship on

“tearooms”—discussed in Chapter 4—in which critics always mark their status as
“watch-queens” o r “passive observers.”) He must, in Humphreys’ terms, remain the
objective voyeur. M y study here, however, does not assume objectivity as a viable subject
position and instead seeks to interrogate the following questions: What hapens when the
ethnographer and the O ther are one? What are the consequences and implications o f
blurring the border betw een self and other, between object and subject?
Recently, reports on the sexual practices o f young gay men confirm a

resurgence o f unsafe sexual acts (like barebacking) and a high incidence o f
seroconversion. While I do not want to ignore the severity o f these trends, I must
question the way in which such reports tend to scapegoat individual actions without
considering the larger social structures within which such behaviors take place and are
sanctioned. (Partly, this is the project I undertake in C hapter 2.) For more elaborate
discussions o f these trends, see: John Gallagher, “Bad Press?,” the Advocate, 3 Feb.
1998,42; Ted Gideonse, “All Sex, All the Time,” the Advocate. 26 May 1998,24-39;
Jeff Jacobson, “Dirty Dancing,” Out, April 1998, 118-121, 179-180; Dan Savage, “The
Thrill o f Living Dangerously,” Out. March 1999, 62, 64, 116; and Kate Shingle,
“Barebacking? Brainless,” the Advocate, 3 Feb. 1998, 9.
5. While I go on in the paragraph to note specifically how these lines package and
sell youth and beauty through the cult o f the pom star, some general observations could be
made about how telephone sex lines package and sell sexual orientation through prevailing
cultural narratives. For instance, that these lines are operative 24 hours a day, 365 days a
year, reinforces the notion that gay men possess an insatiable sexual appetite and that they,
like the lines, are “always open for business.” Also, both mainstream and gay magazines
typically obscure advertisements for these services by placing them under a vague heading
(such as, “Introductions”) in the classified section. The placem ent o f these ads works
subtly to isolate the caller and to mark his desires as dubious and shameful. Often these
acts o f isolation and shaming play on the feelings o f low self-esteem and inadequacy which
initially propelled the caller to seek solace in the lines, thereby intensifying the caller’s
sense o f degradation and marginality. The lines themselves disallow physically and
emotionally intimate interactions by placing images as barrier between two (or more)
callers. This attem pt to regulate and inhibit intimacy is significant particularly when both
o f the callers are men precisely because it solidifies regimes o f heteronormativity. The
disembodied voices which ghost telephone sex lines thus reinforce dominant cultural codes
o f appropriate gendered and sexual behavior, pacify heterosexual male fears o f
femininzation, and foster notions o f gay male bodies as always and already infected.
6. At the August 1998 meeting o f the Association for Theatre in Higher

Education, Eric Severson delivered a paper (titled “Dicks on Parade”) which specifically
sought to address these issues in relation to the recent proliferation o f “boys in their
underwear plays.” Severson framed his reading o f Ronnie Larsen’s Making Pom w ith the
question, “How does M aking Pom use the naked gay male body to sell itself?” In effect,
Severson suggested that M aking Pom (and other similar plays) uses the nude gay male
153
form as a means to (financially) “legitimize” gay theatre and as “an attem pt to get gay men
back in the theatre.” While Severson’s skeptical argument clearly is in tension with my
own (which reads that body as a possible site for interventions into dominant discourses
and practices), I think both positions produce potentially fruitful insights into these
debates. While a dialogue between these two positions falls outside o f the scope o f this
particular project, it does constitute one site for future research.
7. Here, I do not want to posit a false bmarism between gender and sexuality
studies. To be sine, many feminist and Queer critics have posited gender as “the property
o f feminist inquiry while the proper study o f sex and sexuality is located elsewhere” (Weed
vii), namely within the emergent fields o f Queer theory and gay and lesbian studies. Yet,
as Judith Butler notes in her essay “Against Proper Objects,” ‘T o restrict the proper
object o f feminism to gender, and to appropriate sexuality as the proper object o f
lesbian/gay studies, is either to deny this important feminist contribution to the very sexual
discourse in which lesbian and gay studies emerged or to argue, implicitly, that the
feminist contributions to thinking sexuality culminate in the supersession o f feminism by
lesbian and gay studies” (11). In effect, Butler here recognizes the interconnectedness o f
sexuality and gender studies and attem pts to demonstrate the perils o f ignoring this
interconnectedness by attributing to each a distinct and proper object o f study. My use o f
Balsamo’s work here acknowledges this essentializing trend and attem pts to situate my
own queer work in relation to work with a markedly (but not exclusively) feminist
methodology.
Chapter IV: “Keep Your Eyes Open, Expect the Worst, and Handle It On Your Own
Post-Gay Politics/Tearoom Trade/Strategic Collectives
*• This phrase, taken from William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book Generations, is
proposed by the authors as a survival credo for Xers. I use this phrase as the title o f this
chapter first because it reflects the dominant cultural stereotype o f Xer politics (that is, we
are apathetic and lazy) which I seek in this chapter to combat. I also chose this phrase as
the title o f the chapter because it is driven by a proactive and practical logic which
recognizes that in order for any kind o f change to happen in the way that Gen Xers are
perceived and in the way that we live our everyday lives, then we must make that happen
amidst and through the very obstacles which seemingly impede our progress. A similar
logic is at work in my model for strategic collectives, which I outline later in this chapter.
For more on the events described in these opening anecdotes, see: Adam
Davidson, “TV Report o f Public Sex Stirs Debate on Journalism Ethics,” available at
<http://Avww.nlga.org/alternatives/sum98/pubsex.html> (Nov. 23, 1999); Peter Galvin,
"Boy Will Be Boy,” the Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine. 23 June
1998: 103-1 111; Ted Gideonse, “All Sex, All the Time,” the Advocate: The National Gay
and Lesbian Newsmagazine. 26 May 1998: 24-24-27, 29-39; “Smile for the Nice
Officer,” E sopk 27 Apr. 1998: 12-13; “Two Accused o f Sexual Activity in Oakland
University Bathroom,” Cruise Magazine 13 Oct. 1999: 7; Barry W alters, “Older and
154
Wiser,” the Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine. 24 Nov. 1998:
71-73; Judy W ieder, “All the way Out: George Michael,” the Advocate: The National
Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine, 19 Jan. 1999:25-25-41; and Dan W oog, “Walls o f
Repression,” the Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine, 16 Feb. 1999:
38-41.
3- “Tearoom” refers to any public bathroom in which sex between men occurs.
Although the etymological roots o f the term are not certain, several critics have offered
speculations. H istorian George Chauncey suggests that the term is an abbreviated form o f
“toilet room” (Gay New York 197) while Humphreys argues that the term derives from
British slang usage o f “tea” to denote “urine” (2 fh2).
In the 1986 decision o f Bowers v. Hardwick, the United States Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality o f Georgia’s anti-sodomy statutes and ruled that the right to
privacy does not extend to homosexual sex. For a detailed explanation o f the Hardwick
case and ruling, see: Arthur S. Leonard, Sexuality and the Law: An Encyclopedia o f
Mqjor Legal Cases. New York: Garland, 1993, 153-164. For a provocative reading o f the
Queer cultural politics surrounding this decision, see: Lisa Duggan and N an D. Hunter,
Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995 (esp. pp.
80-100).
Other such studies which are not specifically referenced in the context o f this
chapter include: Ralph Bolton, ‘Tricks, Friends, and Lovers: Erotic Encounters in the
Field,” in Taboo: Sex. Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, eds.
DonKulick and M argaret Willson, London: Routledge, 1995, 140-166; Edward W.
Delph, The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978;
Erich Goode and Richard R. Troiden, “Correlates and Accompaniments o f Anonymous
Sex among Male Homosexuals,” Psychiatry. 43(1980), 51-59; John Howard, ‘T he
Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in
Post-World W ar II Atlanta,” Radical History Review. 62(1995), 66-187; and Richard R.
Troiden, “Homosexual Encounters in a Highway Rest Stop,” in Sexual Deviance and
Sexual Deviants. Eds. Erich Goode and Troiden, New York: William M orrow and Co.,
Inc., 1974,211-228.
6- My point here is not that Humphreys’ w ork has gone unchallenged, but rather
that the critiques have focused on methodological (rather than content) issues. Indeed,
within the field o f sociology, Tearoom Trade has become a key point o f contention in
debates over the ethics o f research methodologies in studies which use human research
subjects. For more on the methodological and ethical concerns which Humphreys’ study
has raised, see: Glenn A. Goodwin, “Laud Humphreys: A Pioneer in the Practice o f
Social Science,” Sociological Inquiry, 61.2(M ay 1991), 139-147; Peter M . Nardi, “‘The
Breastplate o f Righteousness’: Twenty-Five Years After Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom
Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Journal o f Homosexuality, 30.2(1995): 1-10;
and Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade, reprint ed., New York: Aldine D e Gruyter, 1975,
pp. 175-232.
155
A “glory hole” is a small fist-sized hole drilled o r cut into the partitions which
divide individual stalls in tearooms. The hole “is placed about hip high for the average guy
and is large enough to place a man’s penis through to let the person on the other side
perform whatever sexual activity he pleases on it”
(www.cruismgforsex.com/gholeFAQ.html).
O
In People v. Triggs (1973), for instance, the California Supreme C ourt ruled
that the surreptitous surveillance o f public bathroom s by law enforcement officials is
unconstitutional Likewise, in Kolender v. Lawson (1983), the United States Supreme
Court offered some protection to the individual tearoom patron’s right to due process by
invalidating a California court ruling “that authorized the police to arrest anyone if he
‘loiters . . . upon the streets . . . without apparent reason o r business a n d . . . refuses to
identify him self or to account for his presence w hen requested by a peace officer so to
do’” (Leonard 175). For more on these and related court decisions regarding acts o f
public sex, see: A rthur S. Leonard. Sexuality and the Law: An Encyclopedia ofM qjor
Legal Cases. N ew York: Garland, 1993 (esp. C hapter 2, “Criminal Law and Sexual
Conduct”); and Richard A. Posner and Katharine B . Slibaugh, A Guide to America’s Sex
Laws, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996.
For more detailed accounts o f the issues alluded to in this paragraph, see: Tom
Beer, “A N ew Shot at Activism,” Out. May 1999, 40, 120; “Boy Troubles,” O ut. April
1998,118-121, 179-180; John Cloud, “Taking the Initiative” Out, February 1999,36-40;
Paula Ettelbrick, “Why Be PoliticaL..,” Out, M arch 1999,48, 52; David Kirby, “Does
Coming Out M atter?,” the Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine. 13
Oct. 1998, 67-70; Jesse McKinley, “Dirty Dancing,” Out, May 1998,90-95, 136; and
Dan Savage, “Too Chicken to Come Out?,” O ut. February 1999, 34.
10* While Humphreys uses the terms “m inor” and “teen-ager” to describe the
young men who incite suspicion and fear in the “inner circle’ o f tearoom trade, it is clear
that he uses these term s loosely to refer to anyone who ranges in age from m id-teens to
late-20s, many o f whom qualify neither as “teen-agers” nor as “minors.” Perhaps this
indicates a wider mapping o f generational tensions betw een and among gay men, one
which precedes both AIDS and Generation X and thus points to commonalties in gay
experience across lifecycle and generation.
11 * This is not to suggest that self-identified gay/bisexual men avoid any sort o f
crisis around age since, as Humphreys writes, for these men, the aging crisis “will take the
nightmarish form o f waning attractiveness and the search for a permanent lover to fill
[their] later years” (123). But it is to recognize th at the aging crisis will, for this group o f
men, “have no direct relationship with the tearoom roles” (123). For a more extensive
analysis o f how the aging process impacts gay experience, see: David Groff, ‘T f Looks
Could K ill” Out, April 1998:49-52; Brendan Lem on, ‘Losing Face?,” Out, A pril 1998:
106-110,179; and Brendan Lemon, “Male Beauty,” the Advocate: The National Gay and
Lesbian Newsmagazine. 22 July 1997, 29-31.
156
19
Sex Panic!, an ad hoc group formed in the spring o f 1997, represents one
organization which seeks to oppose the anti-sex political wave sweeping across America.
Li some ways, Sex Panic! offers a practical example o f the concept o f “strategic
collective” which I describe in this chapter (specifically in its efforts to organize around
and intervene into local political struggles which are crosscut by the interlocked forces o f
racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia). However, because Sex Panic! is so closely
linked to the academy (and to the field o f Queer theory), it cannot build the kind o f
tactical, cross-difference coalitions which I outline here as effectively as more grass-roots,
materially-grounded organizations. For more on Sex Panic!, see: Michael Bronski,
“Behind the Sex Panic! Debate,” The Harvard Gray and Lesbian Review. Spring 1998,
29-32; Michelangelo Signorile, “Sex Panic! and Paranoia,” O ut, April 1998, 57-61; and
N orah Vincent, “Between W ord and Deed,” the Advocate: The National Gay and Lesbian
Newsmagazine, 13 April 1999, 88.
I O
I use the adverb “often” to qualify my statement here given a couple o f legal
loopholes which still permit police officers to “entrap” tearoom participants without
jeopardizing an arrest. For instance, police officers can engage in these (and other, more
overt) initiating rituals without their behaviors being considered entrapment. Moreover,
police officers do not have to disclose that they are “undercover,” even if they are asked
by a tearoom patron, “Are you a police officer?” For more o n the legal issues surrounding
tearoom trade (both general concerns and state-specific laws), access:
<http://cruisingforsex.com>.
For a compelling critique o f the political viability o f “strategic essentialism,”

see Lisa Duggan, “Queering the State,” in Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture.
by Duggan and Nan D. Hunter.
15* This past October in Elkhart, IN, for instance, law enforcement officials
initiated a crackdown on public sex in area park bathrooms. The crackdown was
spearheaded by a task force o f the Elkhart City Park Board which was headed by Park
Board president Donald Ray Rink. The following month, police arrested Rink in a park
bathroom in an outlying area o f Elkhart and charged him w ith “public indecency” after he
was observed having sex with another man. Rink pleaded guilty to the charges. For more
on this story, see: <http://www.cruisingforsex.com/columnKG/columnKG.htmt>.
1^* One o f the m ost significant drawbacks o f strategic essentialism is that it can
too often work to perpetuate extant hierarchies o f privilege and marginality, even among a
group o f socially marginal individuals. By this I mean that the use o f strategic essentialism
to organize across and among individuals within gay and lesbian communities could result
in the propagation o f white gay men’s concerns and objectives and the elision o f the
concerns o f other, less visible persons and groups among our ranks. However, if strategic
essentialism is deployed in conjunction with the other tactics that I outline in this section,
then its proponents are m ore likely to offset these limitations.
157
Following the broadcast o f actual footage o f public bathroom sexual

encounters on news programs across the country, the op/ed pages o f the Advocate were
filled with letters from outraged readers. I f the Advocate and its readership can be
regarded as the voice o f “mainstream gay” America, and I think that it can, then these
letters clearly demonstrate the degree to which out gay men are repulsed by (and ignorant
o f the implications of) tearoom trade. One reader admits that after hearing about the
incidents he was “amazed, ashamed, but, unfortunately, not shocked.” This same reader
went on to add that “It’s stories like these that make me realize why the Christian
Coalition wants us dead.” Another Advocate reader wrote, “As a gay man, I have to
wonder why anyone has to act like a dog in heat and can’t control the impulse to lower his
knees to a urine-soaked floor to suck some dick that has been who knows where in the
past 24 hours.” One final, Aesopian reader offered this moral to sum up the situation:
“The unfortunate feet is that there would be nothing for TV to expose if w e gay men did
not have this ‘dirty secret’ to hide.” (These letters can be found in the M ay 26, 1998,
issue o f the Advocate, p. 4.) What I find striking about these letters is that while most o f
their authors are outraged by the public airing o f this “dirty secret,” they direct their
attention inwards, at the men among us who are committing these acts, and not at those
legal institutions which use morality and public decency as means o f infringing on our right
to privacy and free sexual expression.
158
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INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality o f th is reproduction is dependent upon th e quality of th e

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced

Bell & Howell Information and Learning

Submitted to the Graduate College o f Bowling Green

Vivian M . Patraka, Advisor

Emily Freeman Brown

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Brussel; Darius O. Williams; Emily Lanik-Parr; Theresa Bushman; Lisa Fiorelli;

CHAPTER m . “REACH OUT, REACH OUT AND TOUCH M YSELF’: BODIES,

(Le., “gay men”) based on interrelationships between/among sexual orientation,

[T]he land [the madman] w ill come to is unknown—as is, once he

Investigations o f subject formation are particularly vital projects for marginal

For marginalized people, to achieve subjectivity is to claim a subjugated

formation and history, however, it remains a relatively unexplored dimension o f identity

conditions which suggest otherwise. In general, Generation Xers adopt a more

year, the international AIDS conference in Am sterdam sponsors an exhibition o f a portion

Quilt is transmitted to its viewers through a relatively simple model o f performance.

knowledge, or truth. By bringing together remnants o f a life lived (including photographs,

I f the Quilt facilitates confession by “naming names,” then the confessional

order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. (H istory o f

offset feelings o f confusion and anxiety.

17). As Butler writes:

I would suggest that no historical or logical conclusions follow necessarily

subjectivity works to challenge (and perpetuate) prevailing cultural narratives regarding

and “voices” through which generationally-inflected subjects are continually mobilized,

epidemic, to homophobia, and to other form ations o f institutionalized oppression.

“AIDS A m nesia” and the Politics o f Forgetting

through the accumulation o f representations in order to describe an event, practice, or

While cultural memories share some important commonalties w ith the

characterize 20-somethings as hedonistic, narcissistic Circuit Party travelers suffering from

unplanned, unmapped, its existence and inhabitants subject to erasure o r relegated to

questions o f space and location to question o f behavior, Roth mobilizes a platform o f

(cultural) memory, though, nostalgia typically is not perm itted to participate in

W riting Traumatic History

to the current state o f affairs.

performance “the body is undeniable,” “[it] m ust be acknowledged, when it becomes

Reinvention o f Nature (1991), “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly

possibility do facilitate the production o f alternative cultural narratives, how do critics

is itself always trapped within a representational economy. This representational economy

then, are gay bodies isolated as containers o f a particular affliction (regardless o f

Refashioning the Body/Reconfiguring the Live (Reprise)

telephone sex lines.

However, the incessant (yet often unacknowledged) desire to sustain a guise o f

encounters produce counter-discourses to harmful and oppressive dominant cultural

self-reflexive process o f negotiation through which alterations in the cybernetic contract

Sociologists engage in the study o f deviant behavior because man reveals

4. This past summer, campus police at Oakland University installed a surveillance

o f private and public life.

condemning both through the reinscription o f universal monogamy and heterosexuality as

plate numbers (which he recorded during the participant-observation study) to identify,

N ot only are there psychological ramifications to participating in tearoom trade,

consequences o f fostering these stereotypes in cultural representations. Two o f these

responsibilities o f doing so. Moreover, as HlV-infection rates continue to climb among

as sites which implicitly foster a genealogy o f gay generations. By “genealogy” I mean

a collectively-defined purpose; this purpose is typically, though not exclusively, defined as