Abstract
Boystown is an engaging urban ethnography of Chicago’s gay neighborhood, though the real action (and analytic focus) often occurs outside Boystown: in a raunchy bar in Roger’s Park north of Boystown, for instance, or on a yacht on Lake Michigan. These spaces outside Boystown, Orne argues, constitute ‘sexy communities,’ or a ‘community bound together by sex’ (p. 55) that are less likely to take place in Boystown’s bars today, which have become largely tourist destinations for straight revelers. Unlike Boystown’s nightlife spaces, which tend to be racially segregated, sexy communities found in spaces like The Hole in Roger’s Park are more racially diverse. Orne uses distinctively sociological theories to grapple with key issues of sexuality and space. Using a Durkheimian framework of rituals and the Bourdieusian concept of habitus, Orne argues that sexy interactions in hybrid social/sexual spaces produce solidarity (what Orne calls ‘naked intimacy’) across social boundaries, which help constitute sexy communities.
Orne draws on ethnographic participant observation, autoethnography, and 28 in-depth interviews collected across three years in Boystown and other queer spaces in Chicago. With an explicit interest in studying sexual racism, Orne follows six class- and race-diverse groups of queer men throughout their nights. This is an innovative design with much promise for analyzing how race and other social processes shape diverse queer men’s experiences across time and space. While Orne states in an informative methodological appendix that he spent more time with some groups than others, he at times underutilizes the experiences and voices of these groups in the text. Readers do not learn much about the individuals in these groups, their social locations, or how their nights in Boystown are shaped by race, class, gender, or other relevant factors such as serostatus beyond that different groups tend to frequent different nightlife spaces. One of the most nuanced chapters chronicles how women experience nightlife in Boystown, providing an important perspective on how sexism and heterosexism operate concurrently in gay districts.
Orne’s lament for the loss of sexy communities in gay spaces and his theoretical and political commitment to spaces that lend themselves to non-private sexual connections echo earlier contributions to queer studies, most notably Samuel R Delany’s (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Delany argues that New York’s now-defunct commercial porn theaters provided critical spaces for interclass (as well as interracial) social contact in an increasingly segregated and inequitable city. I offer Delany’s text as an exemplar of the type of work Boystown aspires to. Orne states: ‘This book is about sex’ (p. 9). Unlike Delany, however, Orne purposefully does not describe sexual interactions in the text. He avoids sex when he chronicles his visits to a gay bathhouse (which, he argues, does not have a sexy community because the bathhouse is not a hybrid space for both sex and sociality) to prevent the book from becoming an ‘erotic novel, a voyeuristic look at the exploits of men out in Boystown’ (p. 98). This is a valid concern, but difficult to reconcile in a book about the ‘power of sex to connect people together across boundaries’ (p. 10). In contrast, Delany’s text is both sexually descriptive and humanizing. He achieves this balance by meticulously describing the unfolding of sexual situations in the theaters and extensively including the voices and biographies of men involved in these interactions, which provides readers with rich context about their social locations and subjectivities.
There is no one way to study something as complex as sex, especially as it occurs across public and private spaces. Orne’s avoidance of sex as data might leave the reader with only an impressionistic portrait of these scenes and how they are interactionally accomplished, but I suspect will also raise productive questions concerning how sexual interactions and the contextual meanings participants attach to them in specific spaces produce sexual communities.
Throughout the book, Orne offers provocative concepts that will surely interest sexualities researchers. Perhaps the most generative is ‘queernormativity,’ which Orne argues is a politics built around queer theory that scholars and laymen alike offer as an antidote to homonormativity. Orne argues, however, that communities with queer leftist orientations can propagate ‘an alternative respectability’ (p. 210) that translates in practice to: ‘Each person is responsible for saying the right thing. Everyone will “check” each other if they don’t say the right thing. Instead of racism as a systemic problem, it is a character flaw. These spaces are just as white as Boystown, but don’t acknowledge it’ (p. 222). Orne tells us this happens in queer leftist spaces, but the book would have benefitted from more empirical support for these claims. What does it look like to be ‘checked’ in these spaces? How does it feel to be checked in the moment? What happens after someone has been ‘checked’? On balance, Boystown is a welcome contribution to the literature that lays out these and many other important, open questions for sexualities scholars to consider in future research.