ABSTRACT
Through the marking of ethnically, culturally and sexually othered spaces as cool and sexy in recent decades, cultural and sexual differences have become increasingly commodified for mainstream consumption. Scholars such as Cara Aitchison et al. (2000), David Bell (2001), Leslie Moran et al. (2003), Dereka Rushbrook (2002) and Stephen Whittle (1994b) note the popularisation of gay parades and gay bars amongst straights, often as part and parcel of the broader commodification of gay cultures. Most accounts frame the expansion of heterosexual presence in gay venues within the production and consumption of symbolic cultural economies in late capitalism. Scholars in gay and lesbian and/or queer geographies, sometimes quoting directly some of their informants (e.g. Moran et al. 2001), interpret the presence of straights in queered spaces as, at best, diluting the queerness of these spaces or, at worst, as a straight spatial re-appropriation tending towards the complete dissolution of such spaces and their users’ identities as queered. I do not want to deny that increased straight presences may threaten gay bars’ long-term viability in the face of powerful structural factors that contribute to the fragility of many gay or lesbian venues. Instead, I want to draw attention to the limitations of such interpretations since they overemphasise the commodification of spatialised sexual differences as mere temporary fads (see for example Whittle 1994b) at the expense of closer attention to the diversity of gay spaces and modes and contestations of straight presence in them. For example, Rushbrook (2002), in analyzing how entrepreneurial city governments now promote queered urban areas as tourist attractions, erases the differentiations between straight locals and tourists. She also downplays the diversity of motivations for straights to go to gay bars in favour of focusing only upon an unreflective visual consumption of queerscapes by tourists-voyeurs.
