Abstract
At least two different narratives have circulated at different times in the West regarding the single life and how it is valued. On the one hand, there is a narrative that depicts the single life as incomplete and single people as invariably lonely. On the other hand, there is another, possibly more powerful narrative, its origins dating from the 1950s and 1960s, in which the single life is represented as exotic, perhaps even threatening because the presence of single people challenges the conventional path from teenage, heterosexual romance(s) to married life with its associated duties and familial responsibilities.
My mother and father had a friend … when I was very young. They decided to invite him to dinner … because poor Barry was single [and] would be missing out on good, home-cooked food. … One of my fears about being gay was that it meant you were single which meant that you did not get to eat as well as everybody else did.
(Isaac, aged 56, Melbourne)
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Notes
U. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love, trans. M. Ritter and J. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 145.
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Mass gay events include circuit parties and leather parties. Cities such as Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney are known for their mass gay parties. In Melbourne and Sydney in the 1980s, these were often known as ‘warehouse’ parties because they were held in derelict buildings, often warehouses located at shipping docks when freight transport was undergoing the transformation from cargo to container. Mass leather parties in Berlin are still held in derelict power stations, for example. The term ‘circuit’ party is a North American expression. See, for example, C. Carrington (2007) ‘Circuit Culture: Ethnographic Reflections on Inequality, Sexuality, and Life on the Gay Party Circuit’ in N. Teunis and Gilbert Herdt (eds) Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice, with a foreword by R. Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 123–47. For more on circuit parties today, see this US-based website, which provides monthly information on mass parties in the Americas and Europe: http://www.justcircuit.com/Home.aspx, accessed 9 October 2012.
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© 2013 Peter Robinson
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Robinson, P. (2013). Single Men. In: Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314680_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314680_3
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