ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century expansionist preoccupation with control of territory remains internalized in late twentieth-century bodies and sexualities-and well beyond the former imperial centres. This has been the case in the margins of European empires and especially where mechanisms for domination were overextended. Social spaces of ‘nonmetropolitan’ ‘sexual outlaws’ (Owens 1992: 218) have been associated with fecund though highly unstable sites of resistance and community formation. Narratives of homoeroticism, social space, and place can illuminate neglected aspects of territorial domination. Transactions within such peripheries as British Columbia did not escape Victorian controls on erotic expression in public and semi-public places. As nonmetropolitan societies, such as those in British Columbia, reproduced centre-periphery relationships through urbanization, the experience of and impacts on homoeroticized space reiterated unstable and spurious notions of race and cultural superiority. This legacy continues to constrain more conscious efforts to construct homoerotic social space that is both functional, for a range of social needs, and equitable. Until the last decade, native English-speaking and north-western European ethnic experiences have defined and dominated the successful efforts to decriminalize homosexuality and legally counter homophobic discrimination. In British Columbia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emergence of ‘queer nationalism’ (Berlant and Freeman 1993) signalled a widespread dismantling of this cultural, linguistic and racial hierarchy. This decade’s self-consciously ‘multicultural’ ‘queer’1 cultures in Pacific Canada have been increasingly defined by the other major demographic groups in the region, particularly ‘First Nations’ and those with south Chinese and south Asian heritages.
