Public Sex/Gay Space

by Leap, William L.

• ISBN13: 9780231106917
• ISBN10: 0231106912
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: COLUMBIA UNIV PRESS

Summary

Male homosexual activity in public and semipublic locations is a central but seldom explored dimension of gay culture around the world. The majority of existing research emphasizes the impersonality of such erotic interaction and underscores the element of danger involved. While never denying the danger of anonymous public sex in the age of AIDS, the contributors to Public Sex/Gay Spacego beyond narrow moralisms about the need to regulate unsafe sexual practices to discuss the significance of sex in public. William Leap has brought together contributions from such fields as anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and history to reinvigorate the discussion on this issue, with twelve essays providing a more nuanced portrait of why public sexual activity is such an integral part of gay culture. The authors present rich ethnographic snapshots of male sex in public places--many drawn from interviews with participants or, in some instances, the authors' personal experiences.Contributors investigate a broad cultural spectrum of gay sexual space and activity: in a public park in contemporary Hanoi, at the beachfront community of New York's Fire Island, and in nineteenth-century Amsterdam, for example. They explore issues such as visibility and secrecy, as well as economic status and social class, and interrogate the historical trajectories through which certain locations come to be favored sites for sexual encounters. Together, they offer insight into the ways in which public sex calls into question the very line that divides "public" from "private."

Author Biography

William L. Leap is professor of anthropology at The American University.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Reclaiming the Importance of Laud Humphreys's "Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places"	p. 23
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places	p. 29
A Highway Rest Area as a Socially Reproducible Site	p. 55
Speaking to the Gay Bathhouse: Communicating in Sexually Charged Spaces	p. 71
Beauty and the Beach: Representing Fire Island	p. 95
Sex in "Private" Places: Gender, Erotics, and Detachment in Two Urban Locales	p. 115
Ethnographic Observations of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Public	p. 141
Self Size and Observable Sex	p. 157
Baths, Bushes, and Belonging: Public Sex and Gay Community in Pre-Stonewall Montreal	p. 187
Homosex in Hanoi? Sex, the Public Sphere, and Public Sex	p. 203
Private Acts, Public Space: Defining the Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century Holland	p. 223
"Living Well Is the Best Revenge": Outing, Privacy, and Psychoanalysis	p. 247
Index	p. 285
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