William Leap

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 Space go 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."

Public Sex/gay Space

Ellen Lewin

William L. Leap

"A companion volume to Lewin and Leap's Out in the field, this study presents lesbian and gay anthropology as a distinct specialization and addresses the theoretical issues that define the emerging field. The essays detail the scholarly, personal, and political factors that affected the emergence of lesbian and gay anthropology; they define the lesbian and gay anthropology's scope and subject matter and consider how feminist anthropology helped define the field, and how transgendered experience, queer theory, race and class studies are promoting a new direction of inquiry.

The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology

Out in Theory

Tom Boellstorff

Language is a fundamental tool for shaping identity and community, including the expression (or repression) of sexual desire. Speaking in Queer Tongues investigates the tensions and adaptations that occur when processes of globalization bring one system of gay or lesbian language into contact with another. Western constructions of gay culture are now circulating widely beyond the boundaries of Western nations due to influences as diverse as Internet communication, global dissemination of entertainment and other media, increased travel and tourism, migration, displacement, and transnational citizenship. The authority claimed by these constructions, and by the linguistic codes embedded in them, is causing them to have a profound impact on public and private expressions of homosexuality in locations as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and Israel. Examining a wide range of global cultures, Speaking in Queer Tongues presents essays on topics that include old versus new sexual vocabularies, the rhetoric of gay-oriented magazines and news media, verbal and nonverbalized sexual imagery in poetry and popular culture, and the linguistic consequences of the globalized gay rights movement.

Globalization and Gay Language

Speaking in Queer Tongues

In this collection of essays, a group of linguists and social scientists examines specific instances of language use, and centers its analysis around the speakers/writers and their contributions to message-exchange within a setting. These prominent scholars create a basis for a bold exploration of homosexual dialogue as an independently developed linguistic construction, by arguing in support of distinctively constructed lesbian and gay languages.

Authenticity, Imagination, and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Languages

Beyond the Lavender Lexicon

Professor Ellen Lewin

Lesbian and gay anthropologists write in "Out in the Field" about their research and personal experiences in conducting fieldwork, about the ethical and intellectual dilemmas they face in writing about lesbian or gay populations, and about the impact on their careers of doing lesbian/gay research.The first volume in which lesbian and gay anthropologists discuss personal experiences, "Out in the Field" offers compelling illustrations of professional lives both closeted and out to colleagues and fieldwork informants. It also concerns aligning career goals with personal sexual preferences and speaks directly to issues of representation and authority currently being explored throughout the social sciences.

Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

Out in the Field

The present volume is the outgrowth of a student research project begun three years ago in which schedules were gathered in a negro-white area of Albemarle County south of Charlottesville and the University. The area was thought to be a rural community when the survey was projected but in working over the assembled material it was found to be composed of several neighborhoods that looked to Charlottesville, or a segment, sector, or section, of the larger Charlottesville community. In other words, while a definite territory is embraced in the Red Hill study, we do not wish to regard the area as a community. -- pg. [1].

--neighborhood Life and Race Relations in a Rural Section

Red Hill

Do gay men communicate with each other differently than they do with straight people? If they do, how is "gay men's English?" different from "straight English"? This work addresses these questions and looks at gay men's English as a cultural and a linguistic phenomenon. This text focuses not on items of vocabulary, word history and folklore but on linguistic practices - co-operation, negotiation and risk-taking - which underlie gay men's conversations, storytelling, verbal duelling, self-description and construction of outrageous references. The author "reads" conversations for covert and overt signs of gay men's English, using anecdotes drawn from gay dinner parties, late-night airplane flights, restaurants, department stores and gourmet shops, and other all-gay and gay/straight settings. He incorporates material from other interviews and discussions with gay men, life-story narratives, gay magazines, newspapers, books and material from his own life. The topics addressed include establishing the gay identities of "suspect gays", recollections of gay childhood, erotic negotiation in health club locker rooms, and gay men's language of AIDS. The text shows how gay English speakers use language to create gay-centred spaces within public places, to protect themselves when speaking with strangers, and to establish common interests when speaking with "suspect gays". It also explores why learning gay English is a critical component in gay men's socialization and the acquisition of gay culture.

William Leap

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