Jason Orne - Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago

From neighborhoods as large as Chelsea or the Castro, to locales limited to a single club, like The Shamrock in Madison or Sidewinders in Albuquerque, gay areas are becoming normal. Straight people flood in. Gay people flee out. Scholars call this transformation assimilation, and some argue that wegay and straight alikeare becoming post-gay. Jason Orne argues that rather than post-gay, America is becoming post-queer, losing the radical lessons of sex.
In Boystown, Orne takes readers on a detailed, lively journey through Chicagos Boystown, which serves as a model for gayborhoods around the country. The neighborhood, he argues, has become an entertainment districta gay Disneylandwhere people get lost in the magic of the night and where straight white women can go on safari. In their original form, though, gayborhoods like this one dont celebrate differences; they create them. By fostering a space outside the mainstream, gay spaces allow people to develop an alternative culturea queer culture that celebrates sex.
Orne spent three years doing fieldwork in Boystown, searching for ways to ask new questions about the connective power of sex and about what it means to be not just gay, but queer. The result is the striking Boystown, illustrated throughout with street photography by Dylan Stuckey. In the dark backrooms of raunchy clubs where bachelorettes wouldnt dare tread, people are hooking up and forging naked intimacy. Orne is your tour guide to the real Boystown, then, where sex functions as a vital center and an antidote to assimilation.