Virtually Gay Ghettos

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At this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, two panelists diverged on whether new media aids or undermines the process of gay liberation.

Robin Bellinson, a doctoral student at Kent State University, argued in a panel on reality television programming that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) community might just find a silver lining to the often “heteronormative” depictions of gays in such shows.

“Certainly with respect to queer representation, Reality Television is changing the culture on the economic landscape of entertainment. But does this matter if queer representation in reality programming is not also changing the cultural and economic landscape of the reality it purports to represent?” she asked.

Speaking of LGBT approaches to visibility politics, she said that “Ultimately, LGBT groups believe these more authentic representations result in an increase in social tolerance or acceptance and a reduction in discriminatory practices.”

According to Bellinson, the “truth effect” of Reality TV provides a fertile avenue for social change, and the eventual social and political “enfranchisement” of the LGBT community. She argued,

“Reality Television presents the real world in which is as if [it] is acceptable and ordinary to be lesbian or gay and perhaps to some extent bisexual or even transsexual. The truth effects of perceived reality hold a real sway to social aspects of the public sphere and [may] change mainstream social perceptions of reality queer and thus theoretically open a door for juridical and political changes in the public sphere as well.

But, she argues, this does not mean Reality TV is a true representation of queer life. “I certainly do not claim that reality programming actually represents reality. Although unscripted, queer individuals in reality television are certainly less than the full truth,” she said. She pointed to an example where in Welcome to the Neighborhood a gay couple with an adopted son were awarded a house in an expensive neighborhood; Bellinson quoted them as saying “we proved to the judges [that] we’re a regular family. We can raise a child and we know the Bible as well as they do. We’re as normal as normal can be. We’re soccer dads in suburbia.”

“These examples lean strongly toward a heteronormative moral standard,” she said.

Speaking at panel on “Queer Uses of New Media,” Professor Matt Bell characterized the rise of online gay spaces as reflecting the ongoing need for gay “flight” from reality, a process which once led to the establishment of gay ghettos in San Francisco, New York City, and Hollywood.

“The notion associated with the gay ghetto that appears to be still more forcefully repeated in the internet age is the notion of flight, of flight from this place, from this skin, from an intolerable here and now,” argued the Bridgewater State College assistant professor of English. Referencing Martin Levine’s Gay Men: the Sociology of Male Homosexuality, Bell noted that Levine’s “gay ghettos” have four distinct criteria:

1. “ institutional concentration in gathering places and commercial establishments which, in the case of the gay ghetto, take the forms of bars, restaurants, bath-houses, bookstores, and movie-houses;”

2. “a cultured area with distinct language, clothing, customs, which for Levine means a gay-arket, gay fashion, and the customs of gay cruising for sexual contacts;”

3. “ socially isolated, segregated from the larger community,” and

4. “must contain a substantial minority residential population. It is not enough that gay users congregate in a certain space and share a certain culture—they must live there.”

“For my purposes, according to this definition, internet simulations of gay space cannot in any literal way be understood to function as a gay ghetto,” he said.

Online spaces have begun to supplant the traditional roles of the gay ghetto, he argued. He said,

“Nowadays, people looking for information about gay politics, for example, instead of obtaining it through flyers distributed on street corners or by word of mouth, can access it through forums such as Independent Gay Forum or blogs such as Toll Road. The sexual contacts once made in bath-houses, parks, and streets now often take place through online dating services and chatrooms where whole sexual relationships can be conducted virtually, from the casual wink through the refusal to accept messages the next day.”

“Any positivist description of this transition would bely its sheer strangeness,” Bell argued. “To call the transition either progress or regress, for example, would surely miss entirely the force of the internet’s displacement of the gay ghetto.”

“A kind of non sequitur, the shift of gay space onto the internet marks both a radical departure from the social form of gay liberation and a strange repetition of it.”

“If the decline of the gay ghetto inspires in us a pang of regret or mourning or frustration or rage, then the news it tells us is not that the work of gay liberation has been stalled with the decline of the gay ghetto, but that the work of gay liberation has never properly begun,” he concluded. Professor Bell is publishing “When Harry Met Harry,” in the 2009 collection Shakesqueer.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.