ABSTRACT
The singularity or distinctive significance of the culture and institutions of Mardi Gras, dance parties, and the spectacular practices of gay, lesbian and transgender inner city subcultures is becoming apparent only now as they transform and disappear. Recent years have seen a substantial loss of interest in the large-scale dance party, for example, a form that had come to comprise one of the primary sources of independent revenue for gay and lesbian cultural, political and health institutions. In Scott's analysis, the vision of the bathhouse is not the transparent revelation of some truth about homosexuality, but an event that makes it possible for Delany to see, understand, imagine, differently. Nor is it merely a matter of representation, if representation is understood as immaterial: existing only in language, capable of being willed into existence or willed away at whim. Moira Gatens has written that the political imagination is always attached to bodies distinct, specifically engendered bodies.
