Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

This study examines male-to-male social-sexual activity in the subaltern world of male sexual spaces. The importance of such spaces is examined regarding opportunities, mutual exchange, safety, etiquette, status, safer sex practices, substances, negotiation, and navigation of sexual expression through social-sexual activity and time-limited communal engagement for sexual pleasure and affirmation. This contrasts greatly from normative societal expectations, partly due to core queer cultural premises being that of sex and sexuality and partly due to the ongoing oppression towards queer men. The establishment of spaces designed as social-sexual places for queer men to engage with each other, serves several socio-cultural needs that link local and global experiences. Additionally, the public and private spheres of such spaces are somewhat blurred, yet through social etiquette navigable. Through methods of hard copy and online content analysis and observational-participatory submergence in the subaltern world of gay male sexual spaces such as bathhouses, circuit clubs, fetish balls, sex clubs, backrooms, and dark rooms, studied is a self-monitored subculture that creates its own tribal rituals at various odds with both mainstream societal and LGBTQ movement norms. By deviating from and resisting such norms, this tribe demonstrates how it maintains a core drive of their liberated sexuality outside of mainstreamed sexual governance. Premised on both spatial theory and queer liberation theory, the former focusing on the deconstruction of space and place with regard to the creation and preservation of male-to-male social-sexual activities, the latter supporting self-defined queer social-sexual expression from intimacy to fetish and kink.