Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Abstract

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small‐city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small‐city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red‐state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small‐city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big‐city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

Rural identity and LGBTQ public opinion in the United States

“…While rural areas and small towns are sometimes collapsed into a single measure within the extant political geography scholarship (Wuthnow 2018), work suggests that small towns are somewhat distinct from rural areas in terms of their demographic composition and their political values (Vidich & Bensman 1968). Contemporary work also points to small towns having somewhat friendlier LGBTQ cultures than rural areasfor instance, hosting more Queer spaces such as gay bars (Mattson 2020). Therefore, I opt not to collapse rural and small-town identifiers into a single measure of rural identity.…”

(Homo-)Sexuelle Lust jenseits der Metropole

“…In Mittelstädten und ländlichen Gebieten gibt es nach wie vor nur eine begrenzte queere Infrastruktur, aber auch einen Mangel an relevanter Recherche über die LSBTIQ+-Szene. Daraus ergibt sich die Aufforderung, Stadt im Sinne von Robinsons (2006) "ordinary cities" zu untersuchen, und zwar nicht nur bezogen auf den Globalen Süden, sondern auch durch die von Wu (2016) und Mattson (2020) bei ihren Untersuchungen des LSBTIQ+-Lebens in US-amerikanischen Kleinstädten vorgeschlagene Brille der Stadtsoziologie. Über die Forschung zu gayborhood und die gay villages hinaus haben Forscher_innen betont, wie ländliche Gemeinschaften Räume schaffen, die temporär (Gray 2009), stim-mungsvoll (Brown-Saracino 2011 und in vielen Fällen weniger sichtbar sind (Kazyak 2012).…”

Negotiating Organizational Identity: The Communicative Resilience of Small-Town Gay Bars

“…A recent Psychology Today article entitled "Is it last call for the gay bar" points to the closing of a 40-year-old gay bar in Australia (Gerace, 2017). Mattson (2019) argues that this glorification of gay bars is based on data in a few major metropolitan cities. In other words, such discourses are premature and ignore the queer experiences in less populated cities.…”