Abstract
“This is a book about sex” (p. 9). And whew! In Boystown, Jason Orne delivers on this statement. From down into the Hole at the Jackhammer bar, to a boat party with upper-class gay men called “the plastics,” to clubs such as Roscoe’s and Sidetrack, the reader travels through Boystown—the Chicago gayborhood—and other peripheral queer spaces to experience the effects of assimilation on gay and queer life. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Orne traces the “queer lessons of the night”—the backrooms, online hookup apps, leather families, and drunk afternoons—to see what queer culture and its celebration of sex can teach us about society. At the same time, Orne documents how assimilation is altering the gayborhood and the spaces that foster sex and connections across differences. Boystown asks: as heterosexism recedes and the gayborhood may no longer be as relevant, how does the neighborhood change and how does this change reshape gay and queer ways of life?
In tackling this question, Orne turns to Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle. As assimilation takes place, certain gay sexuality—the good gay—is accepted and enters the circle, while queer sexualities are pushed further to the peripheries. Because many gay people are moving out of the gayborhood, Boystown is sold to new audiences (e.g., heterosexual women) to keep the neighborhood alive. Through heritage commodification, Boystown offers up normalcy at the expense of alternative sexualities. This selling of a type of “authentic” gay experience whitewashes the neighborhood and alters the gay habitus of some gay men. This habitus is more respectable, culturally straight, and within the inner charmed circle. Simultaneously, people of color are seen as not part of the neighborhood, as the perception of who belongs has changed. The commodified gay lifestyle saves Boystown, but at a cost.
One cost is the loss of sexy communities. Sexy communities are hybrid spaces, wherein naked intimacy is present. And naked intimacy is comprised of ritual moments of collective effervescence, whereby people are “uncrowned” and stripped of certain markers of individuality. This naked intimacy breaks down racial and other barriers. Broader than families of choice, sexy communities are an alternative kinship in which networks of people are connected through naked intimacy in social spaces that have erotic potential. But through becoming a theme park for tourists to consume a particular gay lifestyle, Boystown pushes sexy communities out (spatially, as in out of the gayborhood, and analytically, as in to the outer limits of the charmed circle).
Concurrently, heterosexual women come to this “Gay Disneyland” to enjoy the pleasure of gay spaces and to escape the sexism of straight spaces. A major line of tension, however, is that heterosexual women may go “on safari,” gawking at gay men and consuming gay spaces without understanding the political purposes of the spaces. This tourist gaze can disrupt sexual connections, as gay men are aware of and uncomfortable with heterosexual women staring at them. In effect, fostering sexy communities within these assimilated spaces becomes more difficult.
Despite the astute analysis of the relationship between gay and queer men and heterosexual women, Boystown fails to deliver on other analyses around gender. For example, do sexy communities and naked intimacy allow for connections across lines of gay and queer masculinities and femininities? And how is assimilation potentially reshaping masculinities and femininities among gay and queer men? Is there a relation between embodiments and enactments of gender and gay habitus? And perhaps most importantly, what can the queer lessons of the night teach us about men, masculinities, and gender more broadly? Given that this book is about gay and queer men, the often absent discussion about masculinities and gender is a missed opportunity to more deeply explore the compelling and alluring thick descriptions of Boystown.
Nonetheless, Orne’s narrative nonfiction style makes for a pleasurable read, and the keen insights in the book are essential for sexualities scholars and urban ethnographers. Embracing the body, the erotic, and the connective power of sex is a call to combat normativity and oppression. Furthermore, bringing sex back into our research may be crucial to analyzing power and inequalities. In these endeavors, Boystown paves a brave path forward.