The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030660734
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Fig. 9.3Tinder application

(Source Tinder (2020). Used with permission)

Queer men have long used subcultural codes, from fashion items like a single earring or colored handkerchiefs, to language and slang such as Polari, to assist in identifying each other in public. Now this peer identification is expedited through digital algorithms in users’ pockets and executed in real-time. Kane Race (2015: 271) captures the distinctive qualities of the spaces created by this location-based technology when he argues that apps are ‘participating in the construction of a specific sphere of sociability and amiable acquaintance among men in urban centers that prioritizes sex as a principle mechanism for connection and sociability’. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to suggest that these apps influence how users conceive of urban spaces and how they navigate for social or sexual opportunities in ways that echo traditional histories of flâneurie or homoerotic cruising in the metropolis (Turner 2003; Delany 1999), whether in terms of an initial shared gaze of interest or traversing the district or neighborhood in search of brief physical sexual contact. By opening up supposedly ‘straight’ sites for queer encounter, these apps thwart the heteronormative status quo that often undergirds public urban space. Even the most intimidating sports bar can play host to a same-sex encounter, if the 4G reception allows. App users can thus use the technology in their hands to queer dominant norms in ways that can feel novel and refreshing when outside of established gay neighborhoods.

However, while this queer overlay of otherwise heterosexual space is in many ways welcome for its capacity for opening up new spaces and places for non-heterosexual encounter, it inevitably lessens the centrality of what were formerly go-to queer venues and neighborhoods. It is certainly worth thinking about ‘how gay men experience the division between dating apps and other online gay venues, and moreover, the division among user groups clustered around different dating apps’ (Wu and Ward 2017: 8). It is also pertinent to consider which sexual minorities are most able to capitalize on the potential of digital platforms for their partner seeking. As recent scholarship demonstrates, lesbian and queerer online partner-seeking networks suffer from some of the same marginalization as their physical counterpart spaces (Ferris and Duguay 2020; Duguay 2019; Murray and Ankerson 2016).

In addition to these inequalities, perhaps the yet more urgent need is to get a better grasp on how app users experience the division between dating apps and offline venues. More than their novel disruption of ostensibly heterosexual (and heterosexist) physical spaces with their virtual matchmaking abilities, these apps offer users the chance to find partners without needing to be physically rooted in any kind of gay neighborhood at all. David Harvey’s (1989) theory of time-space compression is usually applied to contemporary global flows, but if we conceptualize the city as a huge space to be processed and queer nightlife, for example, as a ‘portion’ of time, location-based apps compress the two variables so that from one spot on a night out the app user can survey thousands of meters in radius, and do so in mere seconds.

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