Tracks to gay elsewheres: cultural attachment and spatial imaginaries

Introduction

In 1984, UK band Bronski Beat released Smalltown Boy, a synth-pop anthem cemented in gay cultural history through lead singer Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto voice and an MTV video that captures a moment and feeling that resonated then and resonates still. Premised on the incompatibility of gay identity with the eponymous small town, the music video is representative of an archetypical understanding of the city as the site that orients queer migration narratives. In 2012, Australian artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen Allkins collaboratively restaged this music video in outer suburban Sydney in their video artwork Boytown. Rather than suggest a unidirectional journey from the straight suburban periphery to a metropolitan centre imagined as the site of a gay homecoming, Boytown problematises the assumed queer-friendliness of the city while retaining sensitivity to its pull. Aural and visual samples from a wider pool of 1980s hits score Boytown’s updated narrative of suburban isolation and escape. Cultural attachment in Boytown resolves around two sites: narratives of queer urban migration and soundtracks to suburban alienation. In this article I argue that queer spatial imaginaries cohere in the dual attachment to expected narratives of queer escape to the city and the suite of media and cultural references that mark suburban place and time.

Smalltown Boy and Boytown each represent different modalities of cultural attachment to narratives of place and sexuality. The city has long been a central focus for studies of queer space. Variously defined as the site of gay occupancy and contact, the queer pull of the city has operated as an active force for gay, lesbian and queer lives as well as a symbolic referent that informs queer spatial imaginaries. ¹ The suburbs, by comparison, are often invoked as a place to be escaped from or returned to once sufficiently coupled. Work using a suburban vantage critical of the city’s centrality applies pressure to these logics, ² but indeed also sometimes relies on distinctions between an always queer urban space and non-queer space that only incidentally harbour queers. ³ The distinction between city and suburbs as a generalised queer semiotic is underwritten by local mythologies around place; individual cities are complex places that maintain different and localised understandings of queerness. ⁴ This article first explores the geographic context of Boytown before unpacking the gay spatial imaginary it draws from in its reimagining of Smalltown Boy. Rather than rehash established critiques of the exclusions and blindspots in the escape-and-homecoming narrative suggested in the music video for Smalltown Boy, ⁵ I focus on mobilising queer cultural geographies that complicate emblematic forms of gay urbanity, in particular ghettoisation. ⁶ This allows me to explore the impact of material and temporal changes in gay and queer urban enclaves on the symbolic function of queer spatial imaginaries. I argue that encountering these changes via media and art examples provides a counterpoint to statistical models that are a dominant tool in mapping queer populations and their geographic diffusion. ⁷

Work on connections between art and geography highlight either the documentary potential of visual art or the open possibility and (sometimes literal) perspectival shift that inhere in some mediums, such as photography. ⁸ A further distinction between art as an object of geographical study and creative practice as a mode of geographic inquiry is captured by Harriet Hawkins as a distinction between ‘dialogues’ and ‘doings’. ⁹ While the creative practice side of geographical engagement is beyond the scope of this article, ¹⁰ the critical affordances of encounters between geography and art are expanded in Boytown. I argue that the interconnections between art and its associated connections to visual, media and cultural artefacts is not merely an additive way to understand cultural geographies but rather signals intertwined geographic and aesthetic registers. The multiplicity of place is certainly not new in geographic thought. ¹¹ The focus on relays of signification between Smalltown Boy and Boytown and the queer urban and straight suburban narratives they traffic in, however, suggest the gritty contours and lingering significance, to paraphrase Knopp, ¹² of narratives of queer migration and gay ghettoisation that only resolve from non-queer and non-urban vantages. In Boytown, the explicitly gay lyrics and imagery of Smalltown Boy are paired with other songs and music videos that connote queerness but also directly relate to suburban images of youthful alienation. The attachment to urban narratives and images is supplemented by this distinctly suburban attachment that expands the horizons of gay spatial imaginaries beyond older gay or newer queer enclaves and beyond a reliance on statistical concentrations to instead highlight attachments and histories excluded from conventional figurations of urbanity. I argue that cultural reference and circulation as they intersect local geographic, gender, class and race logics are a crucial site for exploring the threads that tie together the queer and the suburban. ¹³ In their recent work, Bain and Podmore ¹⁴ have developed a rich understanding of how suburban queerness manifests relative to and often in contrast to urban structures of visibility. The queer suburban here is oriented by ethnographic studies of LGBTQIA+ individuals and groups that illustrate how suburban location plays a constitutive role in shaping activism and group formation. The aesthetic dimension foregrounded throughout this article adds a different methodological entry point. The cultural artefacts examined illustrate how the dynamism of suburban cultures and geographies structure interpretations of queer migration narratives and inner-city gay and queer locales. This article brings together a creative geographic dialogue with geographies of sexualities attuned to the queer suburban. ¹⁵

Boys and trains in Campbelltown

Boytown was commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of Transmission (2012), an exhibition pairing contemporary Australian artists and musicians. The resulting work is video artwork meets narrative music video, with imagery and sound sampled from MTV clips of the 1980s. Campbelltown Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre located in south-western Sydney. Campbelltown, like many Sydney place names, operates across geographic scales as a city and local government area as well as a suburb. The City of Campbelltown (the local government area, with a population of around 157,000) is a conglomeration of suburbs within the greater Sydney metropolitan region (of around 5 million people) and is connected by rail and highway arteries to the inner city. ¹⁶ Campbelltown has a largely Anglo population with over 60% born in Australia and over half citing their ancestry as Australian, English, Scottish or Irish. ¹⁷ At the same time, Campbelltown has one of the youngest populations in Sydney with a median age of 34 compared to the state average of 38. Some areas of Campbelltown have a median age as young as 23. ¹⁸ Rates of poverty and unemployment are likewise high in certain areas (such as the suburb with low median age), while other areas are working-class, formerly working-class and with some lower-middle and middle-class areas. Fifty kilometres south-west of inner-city Sydney, Campbelltown has a diverse population but one that, in 2012, can be described as predominantly white and young and dispersed. This is a version of Campbelltown that conforms to expectations but one that is, like all expectations drawn around statistical models, not the full story. Campbelltown’s whiteness in particular is less monolithic or segregated than my own use of statistics might suggest.

The more complex racial character of Campbelltown is largely absent from Boytown, an absence which signals dominant spatial imaginaries dividing Sydney into white and non-white ethnic areas. These divisions were seemingly confirmed in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey in 2017, the survey mechanism designed to gauge public appetite for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. While the Yes’s had it (61.6%), ¹⁹ Greater Western Sydney (GWS) came under intense national scrutiny; 12 out of only 17 electorates that voted no (out of 150 total electorates nationwide) were in GWS. Australia’s homophobia was seemingly contained, and distinctly suburban. The initial public debate veered racist and saw the results as confirming not the incompatibility of queers with suburbs but the incompatibility of migrant, ethnic and refugee communities – concentrated in other western and south-western suburbs – with an Australia imagined as tolerant and white. Subsequent commentary clarified that religion rather than ethnicity was a driving rationale for voters. ²⁰ Nuance aside, here was evidence of GWS’s homophobia. Complicating this picture is an important site for further research but is most relevant here in indicating how spatial imaginaries are contoured by statistics in some instances and skirt them in others. At the time of the survey, Campbelltown straddled two federal electorates with most of the city limits within Macarthur, which voted yes (by a slim 52.1% margin) with the other electorate, Werriwa, voting no (63.7%). Yes-leaning Campbelltown avoided the national spotlight trained on ethnic difference and so underlined its proximity to whiteness. Tolerant inner-city Sydney returned some of the highest yes votes in the country, and so underlined its friendliness to same-sex couples. The different but not mutually exclusive experiences of suburbia as geographic or class-based stigma and/or ethnic and cultural stigma are themselves indications that particular social investments underwrite spatial figurations of sexuality. Introducing Boytown, nevertheless, benefits from this particular spatial picture. While many of the works in Transmission responded to the site of the gallery or its surrounds, Boytown placed itself at the intersection between place and sexuality.

Boytown takes its cues to queer place from Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy. The original 1984 music video follows Jimmy, the diminutive lead singer of Bronski Beat, as he navigates life in and ultimately out of his small town. Set in a recognisably regional England, the video begins by following the curves and lines of merging train tracks. The rusted brown rails and geometric patterning of the tracks foreshadow the train motif that recurs throughout the clip. When we first see Jimmy he is alone on a train. The 5-minute video is replete with images of movement as Somerville heads to a local pool where he cruises speedo-clad divers with two male friends (the other members of Bronski Beat). After a scene where Jimmy is chased, cornered and then beaten off-screen by the man he cruised, police escort him home which leads to a coming out scene that ends in his being kicked out of the house as his mother cries and his father begrudgingly gives him a handful of cash. Jimmy’s narrative arc comes full loop when we once again see him on a train, no longer alone but sharing food and laughing with his friends, clearly headed to some unspecified gay elsewhere.

The Bronski Beat video pivots on the idea of gay mobility. The train occupies a central function insofar as it links small towns and big cities. In both its lyrics and imagery, Smalltown Boy visualises the central tenet of what Jack Halberstam has dubbed ‘metronormativity’. ²¹ Put simply, metronormativity is the idea that finding a gay identity necessitates leaving the provincial spaces (homes and towns) in order to arrive at a metropolitan or urban centre. Supplementing physical movement is the symbolic function of the city that dominates ways of recognising and engaging with the specificity of queer lives lived elsewhere. Smalltown Boy resonates with the idea of metronormativity for three reasons: the centrality bestowed on the train, the resonance of its lyrics and imagery for contemporary questions of gay locatedness and its representation of a unidirectional movement towards a city that never quite appears. The Bronski Beat video confirms the limitations of the small town and the abstract promises of an (urban) elsewhere.

Boytown re-situates the queer journey from provincial England to greater Sydney in 2012 where it follows the story of a suburban boy. This suburban boy visually recalls the smalltown original: the slight, young, white, blond Somerville. Like Somerville, this figure is also gay. However, instead of being outed through circumstance, Sydney Jimmy chooses to come out to his mother. After coming out, both Jimmys catch a train to the city in their respective videos. In Boytown however, Jimmy also runs away from the city the train delivers him to.

Statistical limits

Pivotal to most popular and expert accounts of queer belonging is the city as a space of visibility. ²² This city is conceived relative to gay, queer and queer-friendly areas (gayborhoods/ghettos/enclaves) that support queer life. The city’s allure is, however, part mirage, an imaginary construction that holds its place in popular culture whether or not it still supports gay migration. ²³ In an era when inner-city real estate markets and widespread cultural awareness around homosexuality mean that gay constituencies are subject to demographic dispersal, the definitional ambiguity and assumption of gay invisibility that previously attached to the suburb is necessarily revisited. Of course, not all suburbs are alike. The cold, wet, post-industrial Northern England town that features in Smalltown Boy does not have much in common with the outer-western Sydney ‘burb that features in Boytown’. However, the crucial narrative difference is that in the original video the provinces are the site of homophobia, the city assumed to be a place of its respite, whereas in the reimagining this state of affairs is problematised.

Opening with Deborah Conway’s throaty refrain ‘You’re not the only one’, sampled from Australian band Do-Ré-Mi’s song Man Overboard, Boytown presents a young male figure whose dialogue-free narrative arc both mimics and departs from the original, not least in its setting. The video follows Jimmy as he runs to catch the train at Leumeah (a suburb of Campbelltown), then his awkward encounters with a young woman, Kate, and the attendant at a local suburban bowling alley. The visual narrative then follows Jimmy home where he comes out to his mother in a scene that ends more ambiguously than the parallel scene in Smalltown Boy. After the encounter with his mother, we next see Jimmy back on a train that takes him to Kings Cross. A montage of images referencing sex and commerce signifies the ambiguous promise of the Cross, the former centre of Sydney’s vice scene and once centre of its night-time economy: the train station, the Coke sign, a mass of people on the streets, an oversized Calvin Klein underwear ad. Before we know it, Jimmy is running again, running through Kings Cross at night. This night-time footage of running is then spliced with the daytime scene of Jimmy running to catch the train we saw earlier. This is where the video leaves us: Jimmy keeps running until the end title – ‘Boytown’ – cuts onto the screen.

In Boytown, Kings Cross, one suburb over from Oxford Street and the historical centre of gay Sydney, acts as a spatial metonym for the larger idea of a gay city. It is both a distinct spatial referent and part of a greater symbolic whole. This conceptualisation of the city through the visually conjured space of Kings Cross speaks to the ways in which the urbanisation of homosexuality is both physical and imagined. ²⁴ Accounts of the gay male territorialisation of urban centres suggest the gay city is constructed through population density, urban affordances and the broader social milieu of the city. ²⁵ These early accounts, largely oriented around statistical and ethnographic mapping of gay populations and their urban consolidation, is supplemented by work of a different order that tracks the symbolic resonance of these spaces for physically distant gays and lesbians. ²⁶

Boytown focuses on the relationship between the south-western suburbs of Sydney and the inner city, particularly the inner east, an area centred around Kings Cross. These two spaces are presented as physically distant yet interpenetrating spaces across which gay subjects move back and forth via an infrastructural network of suburban trains. The distinct cultural and geographic character of the south west concentrates the question of how different spatial experiences exert a particular pull on lived identities and the sexual imaginaries they harbour. Historically, the urbanisation of homosexuality in Australia and its geographic centralisation around inner-city venues and meeting spots, particularly around ‘the Golden Mile’ of Oxford Street that runs through the inner-east suburbs of Paddington and Darlinghurst, is a demonstrated socio-cultural phenomenon. ²⁷ The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which is the statistics branch of the Australian Government, provides a useful corroboration of this conflation of city with homosexuality via the Australian Census, a national count held every 5 years. The ‘Same-Sex Couples’ section of the ‘Australian Social Trends’ report from 2013, states ‘Same-sex couples were more likely to live in large cities or towns than in rural and regional areas of Australia’. ²⁸ This observation is further supported by the statistical breakdown of the Sydney suburbs, which registers the dispersal and concentration of male and female same-sex couples. All 10 suburbs with the highest concentrations of either were inner-city, inner-east or inner-west Sydney. Same-sex male couples were shown to congregate territorially within 10 suburbs with concentrations ranging from 17.9% to 10.1% of the population. Same-sex female couples were shown to have higher concentrations in the inner suburbs but in a more dispersed pattern of residency across the 10 suburbs that registered concentrations ranging from 6% to 3% of the population. ²⁹ Additionally, male same-sex couples were more common in the inner-city and inner-east suburbs of Sydney (the top three locations being Darlinghurst, Potts Point, Surry Hills), with female same-sex couples more common in the inner west (St Peters, Newtown, Erskineville). ³⁰ Despite their sanctification of the couple form as the only numerically relevant block, these numbers help to map out the social terrain and, as the byline to that same 2013 Australian Social Trends report puts it, ‘paint a picture of Australian society’. At this level, homosexual urbanity is a quantifiable thing. However, the quantification of same-sex coupled occupancy can mask the role played by inner-city space for wider queer populations who defy such easy statistical capture. ³¹

The symbolic resonance of these historical and demographic realities is supplemented by spatial imaginaries presenting the queer inner city and the straight outer suburbs as constitutively oppositional. ³² Suburbs are positioned as bastions of the normative. While different suburban points on the penumbra radiating out of inner Sydney occupy this relative to their class and ethnic character, the symbolic distinction between the queer city and straight suburbs maintains self-fulfilling structures of expectation that unevenly respond to changing urban realities.

Oxford Street – while still the centre of gay Sydney in terms of residential populations, bars and shops – has changed significantly since the days of gay liberation. Garry Wotherspoon’s seminal 1991 account of the territorial nature of 1970s gay culture also includes a sense that growing legal, social and cultural acceptance of homosexuality presages spatial changes: he identifies why it was that the gay ghetto came to be centred on Oxford Street in inner-east Sydney before hinting at ‘the seeming decline of Oxford Street as a focus of the homosexual subculture’. ³³ This decline is documented in his updated Gay Sydney which cites extensive scholarship on the changes on Oxford Street and in the gay community at large. ³⁴ Much of the scholarship on the decline of the gay ghetto as general socio-cultural phenomenon is animated by concern for the normalisation of homosexuality and the incorporation of a previously outlawed gay subculture into culture at large. ³⁵ A more policy-oriented approach to Sydney queer spaces would also include the NSW State Government’s implementation of what became known as Sydney’s lockout laws introduced in 2014 and lifted in 2021. The laws, ostensibly aimed at reducing alcohol fuelled violence, imposed strict licensing regulations which time-limited entry to venues within the lockout zone (aimed primarily at Kings Cross, the zone also included Oxford Street and most of the Central Business District). The effect of these laws, among other things, has been to hasten the demise of inner-city nightlife and dance culture. ³⁶ The laws have also impacted queer enclaves outside the zone of enforcement in other parts of the more diffuse queer constellation that is inner Sydney. The process of ‘de-gaying’ that the influx of straights was felt to have on Oxford Street from 2009 ³⁷ has been replicated in the queer inner-west suburb Newtown. The changing nature of gay territorialisation and the meanings that stem from it helps account for the unfolding spatial narrative in Boytown that remains attentive to the continuing relevance of older gay neighbourhoods. ³⁸

In the Australian remediation of the British original the possibility of sexuality is invested in the relationship between mobility and place rather than in the promises of the destination itself. Attention to the personal and social effects of movement as well as investment in movement itself are familiar in queer cultural geographies. ³⁹ In Nash and Gorman-Murray’s ⁴⁰ analysis this attention to movement helps redirect attention from singular gay neighbourhoods to the ‘movements, representations, and practices’ that animate relationships between old and new queer neighbourhoods. Amin Ghaziani captures the diverse and numerous queer spaces throughout the city in his framing of queer urban areas as cultural archipelagos. Ghaziani ⁴¹ argues that awareness to this multiplicity allows a more considered exploration of emerging queer spaces and their relationships to older gay spaces and institutions (and by extension imagery and symbolism). Elsewhere, Gorman-Murray and Nash ⁴² indicate that connections to these different gay/queer spaces can helpfully be conceived as ‘moorings’ that ‘“reground” individual and collective experience’. These conceptualisations are predicated on visible (socially, culturally, representationally) queer spaces. The relationship between urban and suburban areas continues along older lines of ‘inside/outside’. ⁴³ What goes into making a city queer is undoubtedly expanded when zooming out of focus on older gay neighbourhoods and appreciating forms of intraurban movement. Cultural attachment to these spaces and narratives, however, persists. In Boytown, this attachment – present in the unquestioned gravitational pull of the city on newly out Jimmy – is given texture by the songs, music videos and bands of 80s suburban youth. Suburban spaces, often thought to be evacuated of queer meaning, are here vital to indigenising queer urban narratives. Representations themselves travel and inform relationships to place within contemporary cities where particular sites carry their own identities. ⁴⁴ These outer suburbs are included in the circuits of movement and mooring throughout a queerer greater Sydney, rather than within and between inner east and inner west areas.

Changes to gay urban space incite different reactions, including anxiety and concern for some and ambivalence for others. ⁴⁵ The spatial changes of gay occupation across Sydney play out through the interplay of demographics, policy and representation where the idea of community rather than its demonstrated practice is the central force behind queer spatial imaginings of the city. ⁴⁶ While same-sex couples occupy an expanded inner city in relatively large numbers, this demonstrable urban occupancy is not enough to maintain idealised versions of community. The implications of policy changes (such as the lockout laws) shift vernacular understandings and experiences of space (including around personal safety). Statistics falter when accounting for spatial imaginaries. While demographics are beholden to physical and socio-cultural change, imaginaries are slower to shift. ⁴⁷ Sydney’s gay ghetto demonstrates how changes in gay territorialisation do not necessarily result in the evacuation of cultural meaning from place. This enduring meaning is demonstrated in Boytown where Jimmy still journeys to the city in search of the promises of elsewhere. While Boytown is tied in many ways to the spatial contexts of the 2012 moment, it is also anchored by cultural attachments that transcend this particular time.

Running nowhere

Halberstam’s account of metronormativity encapsulates the model of movement where queers gravitate towards established territories. Podmore ⁴⁸ has critiqued this version of metronormativity for ignoring and obscuring lesbian urbanisms that are not tethered to early accounts of gay urban territorialisation. Additionally, insofar as metronormativity functions according to a spatial story that sees gay movement as unidirectional towards the city, it also obscures other movements within and across urban and rural areas. ⁴⁹ Tongson ⁵⁰ shifts away from not only migration stories but also the gay urban enclave as a node in the networks of mobility traced by suburban queers of colour. Tongson’s intervention into metronormativity expands the term so that it can incorporate intra-urban mobilities. Tongson makes visible the infrastructural networks that facilitate gay belonging and subjection through the interrelated notions of location and mobility epitomised in suburban forms such as the commute. Boytown participates in this reimagining of gay urbanity by mapping intra-urban metronormativity onto the infrastructural corridors traversed by suburban commuters. The model of queer migration identified by Halberstam and the model of queer commutes identified by Tongson are not consecutive steps along a linear trajectory but rather articulate a laminated mapping of space, cultural attachment and movement that is captured in relays between Smalltown Boy and Boytown.

In many ways Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy is an exemplary metronormative text built around migration and the young, gay, white, male experience. When a police officer brings Jimmy home after he has been beaten by the man he cruised at the pool, he is effectively outed to his parents. The scene reads as one of confrontation and belated confirmation. Jimmy walks away and the visuals immediately cut to reveal him heading away in the train. His actual destination is incidental since it is clear he is symbolically headed towards the queer city. His father’s response proves that the eponymous small town and the heteronormative family home are both exclusionary sites that reject sexual difference. However central this metronormative narrative may have been in Western gay culture for a large part of the 20th century, it fails to fully articulate the multifaceted realities of queer movement within contemporary cities and their feeder environments.

Boytown remediates the metronormative narrative laid down in the Bronski Beat video along the culturally and geographically specific coordinates of contemporary Australian gay urbanity. Although the greater Sydney story contains similar elements that direct our attention to processes of gay identity-building, namely cruising and coming out, it maps a more ambiguous structure than the UK original. Jimmy’s gay identity is hinted at when he is cruised by the attendant at the Campbelltown City Bowl, who is played by Mudie Cunningham, and later by the man on the bench in Kings Cross, played by Allkins. The editing of the latter scene conveys Jimmy’s rising anxiety about being out of place in the city. In addition to the many paratextual elements pointing to the gay framing of the video, such as the description on the artist’s website and the accompanying catalogue, the main signpost of gay identity is the coming out scene between Jimmy and his mother, which is staged as a visual homage to Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach (1986) which, like the rest of Madonna’s catalogue, has a connotative rather than denotative relation to gay identity.

Both Jimmys negotiate coming out to their families and both experience a ‘compulsion toward elsewheres’ that is facilitated by a transport network. ⁵¹ Instead of representing the grind of a daily commute, the transport system holds out the promise of sexual escape. Where Smalltown Jimmy and Boytown Jimmy diverge is their relation to their particular elsewheres. Smalltown Jimmy begins his metronormative journey by leaving home and pitching himself, in the company of friends, towards the hopes and affordances that elsewhere offers. In Boytown, Jimmy gets off a train to be greeted by the oversized station sign that declares he has arrived in Kings Cross. After walking down the main street looking this way and that, being looked at and cruised, being curious then scared, Jimmy runs away from this confusing world. Boytown Jimmy, as Miller, ⁵² the curator of Transmission, suggests, ‘escapes an alienating world to find himself in an alien one, running nowhere fast’. This conceptualisation of gay belonging as the need to negotiate potentially alienating worlds is a significant addendum to the narrative of metronormativity. Gorman-Murray ⁵³ confirms the general structure of this addition when he argues that ‘the search for sexuality-affirming places remains important, but this can only be realized through accepting that multiple sites may need to be experienced and “tested”, and so continuing movement is often inevitable’. Boytown offers a critique of the canon of gay metronormativity by also suggesting that it is not so easy to opt out of it, a conclusion drawn elsewhere by Herring. ⁵⁴ Rather than showing the young gay man refusing the lure of the city, Jimmy’s spatial moorings are left vague. He is left endlessly running between urban and suburban space. This juncture signals the ways in which gay belonging is negotiated across infrastructural networks. This visual allegory enables us to think about gay attachments to place that might encompass both city and suburban space. These crossed allegiances and imaginaries continue to exert a pull on queer lives that are not registered in methodological models that track gay territorialisation in terms of occupancy alone.

Smalltown Boy visualises the under-recognised relationship between metronormativity and infrastructure as a matter of connectedness. Likewise, infrastructure is at the heart of Boytown. The video rescales the metronormative narrative of gay flight to the city around the motif of the train to highlight the connection and disconnection between outer-suburban space and inner-city space. Herring has emphasised the role of infrastructure in narratives of queer becoming. He looks at the streets and highway systems, which form and connect locations such as New York and San Francisco, as well as the way these are mythologised as part of a global gay imaginary. ⁵⁵ Transportational infrastructure, Herring ⁵⁶ states, ‘has often formed the base to metronormativity’s stylistic superstructure’. Queer urbaneness, in Herring’s account, illustrates how aesthetics infuse the movement along these pathways and the cities they lead to. Boundaries of style and taste get overlain onto the city to exclude unfashionable others. ‘Urbanised queer identity’, for Herring, ⁵⁷ ‘manifests itself via sartorial stylistics’ and functions as a ‘disciplinary regime’ that can sometimes operate ‘as geographic stigma’. In addition to sartorial taste hierarchies, other aesthetic and taste logics underpin geographic and generational encounters. In a similar vein to Herring, Larry Knopp and Michael Brown note,

it seems quite apparent that queer migrants to large metropolitan areas, as well as to smaller and nonmetropolitan ones, do not arrive as tabulae rasae when it comes to their various forms of resistance. Rather, they bring with them world views, values, traditions, memories, and experiences which then inform, in important ways, their cultural and political activities in the places to which they migrate. ⁵⁸

Migration aside, suburban queers indeed resist these narratives with their world views, values, traditions, memories, experiences and tastes but also imbibe them in the same way.

Tracks of the 80s

What Boytown makes clear is that pathways of belonging are often ambivalent rather than the one-way streets imagined by metronormativity. ⁵⁹ The metropolitan discovery that Boytown makes is at once a comment on gay demographic shifts across urban areas and a claim to the role of suburban and exurban places in constructing ideas of queer community and belonging. Indeed, Mudie Cunningham and Allkins’ sampling of Smalltown Boy and other 80s music is part of a contemporary remapping of gay space in its exurban forms. These new cognitive maps fold physical mobility (transport and infrastructure) and cultural mobility (access and consumption) into place (city, suburbs, homes) in order to reveal the ways in which gay belonging is premised on the delineation of space that includes intra-urban circuits as well as the inner-city territories previously valorised in histories of gay and lesbian space. ⁶⁰

Central to the relationship between queer infrastructure and spatial imaginaries are the intermediary forms that supplement material infrastructures. Chief among these intermediary forms in Boytown is music. The role of music for connecting youth is not only central to this suburban queer becoming but also emblematic for suburban youth more generally. ⁶¹ Tongson testifies to the importance of many often-denigrated parts of suburban life, including television and driving around with friends. For Tongson, music is also one of the most significant sites for suburban queer sociabilities. In Tongson’s framework, music becomes a central part of ‘a queer suburban aesthetic that revels in strange echoes’ and traverses Top 40 hits, post-punk, pop and ska among other genres to provide a cultural mode of engagement that fosters gay identity and allows the ‘forging [of] an alternative narrative about space and identity’. ⁶² Music unfolds as a mechanism layering desire, geography and real and imagined movements of people. This sonic effect comes through in Tongson’s analysis of Los Angeles Latina dyke performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP). Tongson ⁶³ argues that BdP’s use of songs by British band The Smiths and devotion to frontman Morrissey draws ‘interracial, interspatial, and intersubjective desire from the past on into the present’. For Tongson,

When the BdP sing and move along to Morrissey . . . they, among many other Latinos in Southern California, are singing a history of the suburbs as a place where empires collide, and where gender and sexuality is interpreted through the lens of imperial desires. ⁶⁴

Histories of whiteness, obsession, youth and class can be read into Boytown as a case of suburban queerness. Australia’s own colonial context infuses the transnational echoes – aurally and visually remixing our current UK/US entanglements – and yet does not supplant the specific outer suburban Sydney resonances attached to these sounds and images in the video. ⁶⁵ Narratives of escape are augmented by and only resolve around cultural references that are marked by generation and place. Boytown’s reimagining of Smalltown Boy illustrates that these musically marked cultural geographies themselves become points of cultural attachment.

In Boytown, music signals the ways in which sexual imaginaries shift and coalesce around particular objects or spaces. While there are explicit musical echoes of Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy in addition to the explicit visual allusions that drive Boytown, the 2012 video mobilises a more extensive 80s soundtrack that references teenage alienation and heartbreak, as well as Australian suburbia more generally. Mudie Cunningham and Allkins came together in a pairing of artist and musician. Allkins, the musician of the pair, describes his artistic career as coterminous with his gay identity which began in the metronormative surrounds of an inner-city gay club that allowed him to discover ‘real gay, real music, sex, everything’. ⁶⁶ Gay identity, space and music here align. Mudie Cunningham also highlights the pull of gay metropolitan and global forms, from American and English music to iconic camp figures. Music and pop cultural references have punctuated his career from his reimagining of Bette Midler’s Oh Industry (2009) to his remake of Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours (2016) in a queer take on Australian nationalism and beach cultures. This joint artistic backlog informs Boytown’s soundtrack and infuses its queer spatial imaginary with a deeply personal sound that is also more generally resonant, something shared or tuned into by numerous gay men around the world.

The coming out scene between Jimmy and his mother is an instance of the doubled register of personal and resonant effects insofar as it combines a sense of originality coupled with a sense of imitation. The set up loosely recreates the scene from Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach where Madonna’s character tells her father she is pregnant by her mechanic boyfriend. While the figure of ‘papa’ is swapped out for Jimmy’s mother, and the house swapped for an apartment complex, Jimmy wears a striped long-sleeve shirt not dissimilar to the one Madonna wears in the original. Both figures contemplate their forthcoming disclosures while their parents sleep on the couch (the father with a newspaper, the mother with a copy of Woman’s Day – an Australian weekly magazine targeted at women). Both parents take the news as a shock, looking away when told, before heading off to a separate room. The direct visual parallels stop here. Jimmy heads to Kings Cross while Madonna’s character waits in her room until her father enters to reconcile with a hug. Boytown trades the anxiety/resolution narrative of Papa Don’t Preach for an open-ended story arc that signals continued uncertainty. This shift opens up questions about changing forms of familial, spatial and communal belonging that parallel the spatial anxieties punctuating the urban/suburban split.

While Papa Don’t Preach and Smalltown Boy form the main visual referents in Boytown, the video draws its aural referents from a wider pool. In addition to sampling Smalltown Boy, the video includes samples from 80s hits, all of which had some level of success in Australia. The list of sampled titles includes Man Overboard by Do-Ré-Mi (1985), Ghost Town by The Specials (1981), Breakaway by Big Pig (1988), Smalltown Boy, Heaven (Must Be There) by The Eurogliders (1984) and Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush (1985). The sampled lyrics comprise an experiential map of queer suburbia. ‘You’re not the only one’ opens the video with the invocation of suburban ennui, ‘I’m bored staring at the ceiling/I’ve watched the wallpaper peeling from slamming doors’. Then as Jimmy first boards the train, he tentatively looks back while the lyric from Ghost Town plays: ‘This town is coming like a ghost town’. The metaphorical resonance is supported by Mudie Cunningham’s ⁶⁷ artist statement where he suggests the video ‘deals with growing up gay in the suburbs and the desire to escape elsewhere’. This sense of the need to escape is reinforced lyrically as the video progresses. ‘I can’t break away’, we hear, then ‘I don’t want to live in this place’. As Jimmy returns home to dinner, Somerville’s voice prepares us for the coming out scene: ‘to your soul, to your soul’. The musical timbre then changes as we shift back onto the train. A deep rhythm pulsing with a scratchy sound follows as Jimmy steps out into Kings Cross circa 2012, then the music speeds up and a fast drum pounds out as we see Jimmy start running again to the lyric, ‘If only I could, I’d be running up that hill’. The visual and aural samples that Boytown synchronises give rhythm to Jimmy’s experience of being out of place in both the suburbs and the city. While punctuating the main narrative of the video, these 80s samples signal the way suburban attachment underwrites expected narratives of queer movement. Individual and collective connections to queer narratives of place are marked sonically. Boytown’s remix ties together suburban alienation and being in the closet as a matter of similarity. The asynchronous echoes of camp 80s music and post-punk suburban rock suggest the importance of cultural forms as a matter of not only shared sexuality but also shared attachment to and experience of place.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that the emergent focus on suburban queerness benefits from attention to how cultural narratives of gay, lesbian and queer urbanity are embedded and reimagined via music and art. Sydney is a city with a well-established and documented queer inner-city, it is also a city that is carved up according to racialising logics of dwelling, movement and community. Cultural attachment plays an important role in localising dominant social narratives of gay life. This does not capture all gay, queer and non-white experiences of suburban queerness but does signal one way that attachment to international media and local place modify metronormativity along suburban lines. Queerness in this instance cannot be disentangled from suburbanness. This article has drawn attention to one way geographies of sexualities can look to creative circulation and practice as sites of cultural attachment that supplement extant queer suburban approaches tethered to suburban development, occupation and home-making. ⁶⁸ An approach sensitive to geography and aesthetics instead offers a way into the connections between urban and suburban without becoming another story of fatalistic urbanism or immutable suburbanism.

The sustained dialogic focus on Smalltown Boy and Boytown demonstrates possibilities of the aesthetic register for exploring permutations of narratives of sexuality and space. Boytown encapsulates one kind of queer suburban aesthetic by highlighting the energising circuits of attachment and movement that characterise belonging. The video interprets queer urban migration narratives through its suburban Sydney context, including responding to meanings that flow from Sydney’s queer urban archipelago and images and sounds that mark suburban place and time. Metronormativity is rescaled to become a central component of the suburban milieu that characterises everyday life across Sydney. Rather than a unidirectional, rigid metronormativity based around migration to the gay city, Boytown problematises the centrality of the city and instead folds the suburbs into its infrastructural account of belonging. The changing spatio-temporal nature of gay territorialisation however does not sever its continuing symbolic pull. Nor do the shortcomings of metronormativity itself. Boytown represents the friction that flows from this narrative but also signals that attachment to the city goes beyond identifying actual forms of gay and queer urbanisation or gay and queer movement. Links emerge between material and representational approaches to gay and queer urbanity by considering the connection between physical movement and cultural attachment. Buoyed along by up-beat samples of gay- and suburban-inflected music from an 80s soundtrack, Boytown is an aesthetic intervention into mythologies surrounding firm distinctions between place. Instead, Boytown offers an alternative, more ambivalent way of conceiving sexuality within the spatial and cultural flows of cities-that-sprawl that sees people connected to the places they leave, the places they go and the cultural narratives and forms that help them make sense of departure, transit and arrival.