Falling under the rubric of "post-gay," recent changes in gay life challenge theoretical accounts of collective identity by creating effects that, while acknowledged, have not yet been articulated using a parsimonious and portable framework. Consistent with conventional wisdom, LGBT activists construct collective identity using an oppositional "us versus them" formation during those times when they strategically deploy their differences from heterosexuals. But what happens when activists seek to emphasize their similarities to straights, as they are motivated to do during a post-gay moment? Drawing on interview and archival data of a college LGBT student organization, this article argues that in a post-gay era, activists construct collective identity using an inclusive, distinction-muting logic of "us and them." The shift from opposition ("versus") to inclusion ("and") implies that activists today are motivated less by drawing boundaries against members of the dominant group and more by building bridges toward them. The article concludes with critiques of and implications for post-gay politics.

Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are “gayborhoods” destined to disappear? This book provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future. Drawing on a wealth of evidenc—including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than 100 original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America—the book argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways. Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, the book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.

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Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize samesex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

Research on sexuality and space makes assumptions about spatial singularity: Across the landscape of different neighborhoods in the city, there is one, and apparently only one, called the gayborhood. This assumption, rooted in an enclave epistemology and theoretical models that are based on immigrant migration patterns, creates blind spots in our knowledge about urban sexualities. I propose an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes spatial plurality. Drawing on the location patterns of lesbians, transgender individuals, same‐sex families with children, and people of color, I show that cities cultivate “cultural archipelagos” in response to the geo‐sexual complexities that arise from within‐group heterogeneity. Rather than inducing spatially singular or scholastic outcomes, as some scholarship predicts, subgroup variations produce diverse yet distinct types of queer spaces. The analytic frame of cultural archipelagos suggests more generally that we cannot categorize urban or social worlds using simple binaries such as “the gayborhood” versus all other undifferentiated straight spaces. Thinking in terms of plurality provides a more generative approach to advance the study of sexuality and space.

Journalists, activists and academics alike predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are unsubstantiated or overly deter mined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the obser vation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in today's socalled 'postgay' era. Assimilation expands the residential imag ination of gays and lesbians beyond the boundaries of a specific neighborhood to the entire city itself. Furthermore, as sexual orientation recedes in centrality in everyday life, residents opine that few care if a person selfidentifies as gay or straight. These two respective mechanisms of expansion and cultural sameness bring existing economic wisdom into dialogue with a cultural and political perspective about how our shifting understandings of sexuality also affect the decisions we make about where to live and socialize.

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or "infighting"), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a "resinous culture framework" that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being "an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members," as it was once provocatively described.Culture is "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language" (Williams 1976: 87), one that has "acquired a certain aura of ill-repute...because of the multiplicity of its references and the studied vagueness with which it has all too often been invoked" (Geertz 1973: 89). Although the "cultural turn" buzz has subsided and despite efforts to move beyond it (Bonnell and Hunt 1999), the "cacophony of contemporary discourse about culture" (Sewell 1999: 35) continues unabated. 1 Conceptual debates over what the term means persist, which then have consequences for how to study it (Jepperson and Swidler 1994). One common route analysts pursue is to isolate what are called "cultural dimensions" from a distinct "social life." Examples range widely from how meaning-making and symbols affect Theor Soc