Less Accessible ‘Homospaces’: The Online Gay Scene, Saunas and Social Groups

Abstract

This chapter concerns how middle-aged gay men negotiate interaction in gay spaces beyond the village bar scene. There is often no neat divide between gay and straight space. Groups of heterosexual women can blur the lines of sexuality by heterosexualizing parts of the gay village (Binnie and Skeggs 2004) and, as witnessed in Chapter 5, heterosexual space can be ‘gayed’. Browne and Baskhi (2011) have queried any rigid dichotomization, arguing that LGB&T individuals socialize across a range of spaces, including mixed ones that can signify as neither queer nor normative — where sexual difference becomes of much less consequence. Whilst I hold with this theorizing that portends de-essentializing (and de-territorialization) of spaces deemed gay or straight (Oswin 2008: 90–1), nevertheless, I have treated the two kinds of space separately, as a heuristic device to highlight how the study participants themselves reported negotiating what they saw as differently coded spaces. Specifically, this chapter examines informants’ stories of relations occurring in three kinds of ‘homospace’: the ‘virtual scene’ of gay websites; gay saunas; and gay social/support groups. These spaces are less accessible, or even inaccessible, to heterosexual people, and navigating them requires a fair degree of insider knowledge of gay culture and some commitment to a non-normative (gay or bisexual) identity.