Essay by Jose Arriaza /
“I have never felt ‘connected’ to gay culture in any meaningful way, nor have I ever wished to become so. I left the first pride parade I ever attended disgusted. Men dressed scantily and sexually, leather and harnesses worn as if they intended to go to the derby and wound up confused on 5th Street instead. The truth is that gay culture appears to me to center too heavily on sex, with a lack of community outside of this. The further issue with this is that it is forced onto us by other gay men within this ‘community.’” – Ean Hill, Unpopular Opinion: The Issue With ‘Gay Culture’
I remember feeling outraged after reading Ean Hill’s Maroon-News article. Partly because he is right: Hill writes about his disconnect with gay culture, particularly regarding its heavy emphasis on sexuality and lack of community beyond sexual expression. Sex is an indisputable pillar of queer community formations and always has been. But what he gets wrong is not only that there are other ways to build a queer community other than sex but that a community that prides itself on sexual freedom is not inherently a bad thing.
Earlier this month, my gay friends and I discussed this article nonstop. I became even closer to the queer community at Colgate after returning from my study abroad trip to London this past fall, where I lived in Farringdon and had access to many queer spaces. London is also where I first downloaded Grindr and frequented gay bars in Soho with my friends. “Did you see that article published in The Maroon-News?” one says. He places his books down on the coffee table where we have our weekly Sunday meetings, which is fittingly called The Pussy Den. Laying on the table are a weed pipe, some candy wrappers, and tons of condoms courtesy of the Shaw Wellness Center. Before I could respond, I noticed the many flyers and posters we had plastered on the walls for last week’s party, Freak Nite. The rest of the QTPOC members come ushering in, talking about the article as they enter the door.
Featured in The Maroon-News is an image of the Pink Haus, which became Colgate’s first-ever LGBTIQA+ housing space in 2021. The establishment of the Pink Haus was a result of many student leaders fighting for a queer space on campus, driven by a need to seek refuge from the confines of a predominantly white and heteronormative campus society. Like so many other queer people on campus, the only way to find other queers pre-Pink Haus was through Grindr or weekend visits to Trexxx in Syracuse. Since Lyosha Gorshkov became a faculty member as the Director of the Office of LGBTQ+ Initiatives, the university has made unprecedented progress. We now have drag shows every year. A radical Sex Museum co-sponsored by the Shaw Wellness Institute, Haven, Integrated Health Services, and multiple student organizations. Vigils dedicated to the hundreds of transgender and gender-expansive individuals who have died from brutal acts of violence in 2023 alone. But, to Hill, public displays of sexual expression are too disgraceful–their progressive strides are ignored.
Conversations about the oversexualization of the queer community are nothing new. This discourse reemerges every year when videos taken during the Folsom Street Fair of men giving blowjobs and clusters of gay men waiting for their turn to be pegged by a leather daddy go viral on Twitter, with San Francisco being a city now controlled by banking and service industry skyscrapers and dot-com storefronts. Gay culture is inextricable from sex, from 1950s hustle bars, where ostensibly straight clients paid a fee to bartenders to facilitate encounters with gay workers, to molly houses, such as London’s The White Swan located in Clare Market, which were gathering places for sodomites.
There is a recursive pattern of people within the gay community ignoring its sexual past, its ties to queer and trans life, or the undeniable fact that sexual freedom is something we have always embraced, but, as Kerwin Kaye writes in 2014’s Male Sex Work and Society: “The shifts in male prostitution associated with gay liberation led to a significant reworking of the meanings associated with prostitution…for the first time, it became a possible means of affirming one’s sexual identity. Indeed, for a brief time, the gay-identified prostitute came to represent the new spirit of gay liberation.” And it is those deviant, criminalized queer bodies who have given us the many freedoms we have today.
Take, for instance, the infamous Christopher Street Pier. Once part of New York City’s industrial waterfront. It slowly evolved into a vibrant social hub for the LGBTQ community, providing spaces for cruising and other queer community formations. Its significance was amplified by its protection from NYPD surveillance, which specifically targeted low-income queer and trans people of color. Queer icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera famously lived on the pier during the height of the AIDS epidemic, with Rivera living there for years until her passing in 2002.
The cruising scene reflects the appropriation of the pier for various activities, including cruising, sex work, shelter, and the establishment of queer community. The piers officially closed in 2001 and were completely revamped throughout the early 2000s, slowly developing the area into the apolitical and gentrified Greenwich Village waterfront that stands there today. “Key to the gentrification mentality,” novelist and historian Sarah Schulman argues, “is the replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones.”
Long histories of displacement and gentrification have shaped the pier’s legacy. In 1996, the Hudson River Park Conservancy, a subsidiary of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, demolished over a dozen dwellings in the pier, including Sylvia Rivera’s home, to create a boulevard, trees, a seven-lane highway, and pathways for pedestrians to facilitate the daily commute of white-collar workers as part of a larger sanitation project of a place that was once considered dangerous and uncivilized. But it was here, in 1970, that Sylvia and Marsha founded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), championing the rights of trans sex workers and the LGBTQ+ community in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots. Despite facing backlash, exemplified by what queer writer Lisa Duggan terms as new homonormativity, Rivera’s impassioned plea during the 1973 Gay Pride Rally in New York reflects the ongoing fight for recognition and justice:
I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken.
I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job.
“I have lost my apartment for gay liberation,” she yells amid deafening boos by crowd goers who accused her of mocking womanhood because of her trans identity. “And you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all?” She shouts, “Revolution now! Gay power!” as she is escorted off the stage. After the rally, Sylvia, feeling defeated, dissolved STAR and withdrew from activism for a span of two decades.
On most days during high school, I would walk home from school for around forty-five minutes, wearing the same threadbare gray Nike hoodie that made the walk seem endless under the scorching Miami sun. At 18, I started developing small, red, and rough bumps all over my body due to an overproduction of keratin, a protein that forms the outer layer of the skin. I was already overweight, had jagged, crooked yellow teeth that withheld me from smiling in photographs, and stretch marks resembling the sinuous patterns of estuaries as seen from outer space. And, when volunteering over the weekend at a local elementary school, the children I encountered would often point and stare at my red bumps, with faculty members and other volunteers my age having to pretend they did not hear the children expressing their unease towards the repulsiveness of my body.
There is a provincial nature in defining your own self-worth based on your physical appearance, but it did not feel that way at the time. It felt morally wrong to be out in public as an unattractive person because our world is socially characterized by oppositional characteristics that all adhere to systems and logic of domination: rich and poor, male and female, tall and short, attractive and unattractive. I learned to live with being unattractive by detaching my mind and physical body the best I possibly could, whether it is by refusing to look at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth or wearing clothes that would successfully render me invisible, but the slightest glimpse of my reflection would follow me wherever I would go. These walks home would disorient me as I tried to race against time, trodding along to avoid hurtful comments from strangers as much as I could. There would be times when it would simply not work, from hearing comments such as “Damn, this motherfucker is ugly!” to “Look at him! He walks like a girl!” To this day, I am unsure if these comments were because of my hair, my acne-ridden skin, or protruding love handles.
All of this to say is that not once did I ever think about having sex or having a romantic relationship during my high school years because my body was not even worthy of being looked at, let alone touched. It has been years since I was out in public without a long-sleeved shirt that covered my bumpy flesh. Years since I could sustain the wrecked weight of seeing my naked body with the lights on. It was in moments when I would wake up from cold sweats, barely breathing, back curved against the vinyl foam mattress, waking up from dreams of making love like the many other people around me who are no strangers to the warmth of somebody else, that I could not escape from the human desire to explore my sexuality. I do not know how I got here, but maybe it is the want for a future where I was no longer an outsider or pretend to believe in the falsehoods of safety found in hiding.
The days leading up to Colgate were fervent. I went from self-righteousness to self-interest, passionate to ambivalent, hopeful to contemptuous, to race against time’s curvature before I walked out the door. I explored every inch of my body, caving into every experience imaginable. Endless memories passed through me at all times—the present felt monotonous and incomparable to this warped landscape I put myself in. I lay on my bedside, fixating on the blemishes on my bedroom walls and how the room manages to become smaller and smaller every second that passes by until it is time to go through this inexorable routine again, ending dreams with death. So, I let death in, allowing myself to think: “What have I done?” “Why did I choose to go so far?” Time used to include moments of reflection, small moments of joy and laughter with my friends, meditative silence, and meticulous routines that were supposed to get me through the day, but now everything led to the moment where I finally stepped into adulthood.
We were passing Lake Moraine when I started feeling overwhelmed at the thought of being in a completely new environment because, from the moment I first said my goodbyes to my mother and siblings until the ride starting from the Syracuse airport, I maintained a calm disposition in front of my father, so I tried to broadcast my fears over casual conversation. These mountains remind me of Rio Hondo, I say, which made me want to crawl under, knowing that I mentioned this because my inexperience in life made my several trips to Guatemala the only frame of reference I had. I was 18, and all I could think of was all the things I had done wrong. I have lived these past years with no chances of growth, breaking, begging to be bruised, waiting for the moment my name and body is worthy enough to be remembered.
And, at any minute now, I would lose sight of all that was familiar to me—for the next few years, my name will be Jose, not José Carlos. I will be from Miami, the neighborhood across Interstate 95 from Wynwood, and living in a constant state of alternative nows. My present jagged by reminiscence and anticipation, the past by afflictions, and the future by recursive memories. My father and I are finally exchanging words in the car. The pasture does remind me of back home, he begrudgingly replies. Your grandparents will be so excited to know that you will be studying in New York. They want to call and say they love you.
It was the summer of 2021. Wild bergamot flowers decorate the roadsides on our way to Hamilton. Skin glistening underneath the bright summer sky. Large, beautiful trees surround us. I let my head out the window and put the sun in my mouth. My father brings all of my belongings to the fourth floor of Pinchin Hall, and once it is time for him to leave, that is when I finally start to tear up. It is no longer nighttime, where I am sitting alone in the dark staring at the galvanized steel rooftop of the mobile home I grew up in. Instead, I will be in my dorm, dreading the between dreams of the dying, the one that tells me I will feel out of place or am undesirable, or that I want to fall in love for the first time. I keep myself busy with survival.
The ride to Hamilton has been very peaceful. It has been a long time since I had a prolonged conversation with my father, not because I do not love him, but because I never know what to say. But, in the little conversations I have with him, he always reminds me that my extended family loves me—but this love never felt sincere, at least not until I knew they loved the facets of myself that have yet to be explored or had a socially constituted definition. In other words, I needed to know if he loved me even if he knew I was queer.
Professor Stern was one of my first professors here at Colgate, who taught Challenges of Modernity during the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) Summer Institute. One of the texts we read in his class is famed science fiction author Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which offers poignant psychogeographic reflections on the redevelopment of Times Square, juxtaposed with vivid recollections of his experiences as a Black gay man frequenting the neighborhood’s porn theaters from the 1960s to the 1990s. Delany criticizes the assimilationist aims of homonormativity by offering a humanized perspective of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, which critics perceived as immoral because of its acceptance of commercial and non-commercial sex. He also condemns the domestication and privatization of queer life to further the possibilities of culture, of identity, and of sex when heterosexual relationships are no longer the tenet for sexual exploration.
Born in 1942 in Harlem, New York, Samuel Delany is known primarily for his contributions to the genres of science fiction and fantasy and, before publishing Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany wrote radical depictions of race, sexuality, and gender that envisioned future worlds during the New Wave movement in the 1960s. He was a formative writer for many authors, including Octavia Butler, who was a student in one of his writing workshops, with his influence being rooted in his attention to imagined societies and vivid descriptions of daily life that distort the future from the present.
Delany recalls spending “thousands and thousands of hours” in porn theaters, examining its architectural design and subcultural practices, with many of his encounters being more social than sexual. These interactions are initiated by nearness—by finding yourself next to someone in the theater or on the street—rather than compelled by any external mandate, dissolving any forms of social stratification. To Delany, cruising parks and porn theaters, or any form of landscapes that initiates contact, allow queer individuals to form idiosyncratic relationships with one another: “I propose that in a democratic city, it is imperative that we speak to strangers, live next to them, and learn how to relate to them on many levels, from the political to the sexual,” he writes.
Times Square is now a palatable capitalistic tourist attraction, and acceptable considerations of what queer spaces should be and how queer people should behave have radically also shifted since Delany’s descriptions of people living on society’s margins, who are rendered as excess by the processes of capital, especially queer communities, with their inextricable connections to violence, AIDS, indecency, and drugs. He is not arguing to reinstate porn theaters, but asks us to be respectful of a past that may be useful for creating future possibilities. In his memoir, Delany writes on identity being disjunctive and illusory, arguing against the notion of identity being an absolute subject: “I have often pondered on the terms ‘gay culture,’ ‘gay society,’ ‘gay sensibility.’ [B]ut at the intuitive level…gay society has always seemed to me an accretion of dozens of…minutiae, whole rhetoric of behavior.” His openness in discussing the role sex and desire play in community formations is unconventional—how revulsion from certain kinds of sex is shaping the city, and now campus culture. No matter how exhausting being at a predominantly white and affluent institution is, there are many freedoms being at Colgate’s campus has given me. I am now able to meander around without having to constantly worry that a stranger would call me a slur under their breath or would not question me for having turquoise-colored nails. There is no way I could come to terms with exploring these newfound modes of sexual expression without reconciling with the restraints of my physical body. What is sexual freedom if it feels wrong to exist in your own body? What I learned from being at Colgate is that the queer experience is a constant yearning for an experience that is possible somewhere else. I could have sex with people who would want someone like me in Atlanta, dress up as ambitious as I want to be in New York City, and be as provocative as I can with my sexual expression in San Francisco.
My first glimpse of a queer community was when I befriended Kyrie, a queer, Black, gender-nonconforming person known for his vibrant personality, eccentric clothes, and inability to assimilate into the heteronormative culture dominating Colgate. We would spend nights watching RuPaul’s Drag Race in his apartment, where he was loud, colorful, simply joyous to be around. While in public spaces around campus, we would abashedly talk about gay porn stars or the men we found attractive, which was deviant to other students who felt uncomfortable hearing stories of queer men discussing social norms that would be commonplace in places like pre-gentrified Times Square. Although hookups and casual sex are a standard convention of Colgate among heterosexual couples, Kyrie was different because he was a queer man who unapologetically engaged in hookup culture without shame or second thoughts. What is particular about Colgate is that only a select few are able to enjoy that newfound sexual freedom.
He was a person who mirrored the queerness I have always wanted to emulate but have always been afraid to because of my undesirability, admiring him for his openness about his sexual encounters with men and feelings I have never felt. Have you ever been in love before? It is a Sunday afternoon. We are supposed to be working on an assignment for our transnational feminist geography class, but we spend our time eyeing the men who walk past us at the library, sneering at each other after seeing someone we find attractive. Yes, I say, hoping he does not ask me to elaborate, but luckily, he eyes a man he recently had sex with, allowing me to refrain from providing further details for now. That’s the person I told you about. We had sex after the DU party last night, tucking his smile underneath his pink polyester sweater.
It’s already dark by the time we start working on our assignment. We are reading about Jasbir Puar’s understanding of Foucault’s theory of the body as an ontological transgressor. For Foucault, having a monstrous body, or what he calls a “natural form of the unnatural,” reflects power’s capacity to reproduce itself in different forms and contexts. We are almost an hour into the readings for tomorrow’s class, and suddenly, Kyrie waits for me to answer. I peer into the window, hoping to avoid the question once again. It was not uncommon for us to have hour-long conversations at the library on the fifth floor. There were times throughout the year when we would sit down, the room would be abnormally crowded, and we would leave once we were the only students there until the conversations became ephemeral. He knew everything about me because I had no sense of self, and he was powerful beyond measure. Inexperience loses its charm after some time. It’s not endearing or remarkable to live without knowing the many unwritten rules that are second nature for others.
Despite many efforts by queers to appease the status quo of how queers should behave, dismantling the power sex has on queer community formation is unimaginable. My friend once asked me over lunch: “Don’t you think it is weird that you are friends with Kyrie, who has sex with so many people all the time?” Yet his bravery, and the bravery of queers who act and behave like him, and his resilience against the heteronormative culture on Colgate’s campus is necessary more than ever. Behind the actions of a flamboyant queer wearing a two-piece and some fishnets on the way to Freak Nite is always another queer who wishes they could be the same one day. With every public conversation about sexual acts is a person from the South who has never learned how to have queer sex. With every radical act of public sexual expression is an invitation that allows another queer man to slowly become closer to actualizing their undisclosed sexual fantasy.
References
The Colgate Maroon-News, Unpopular Opinion: the Issue with Gay Culture by Ean Hill,
published February 16th, 2024
Kerwin Kaye, Male Sex Work and Society, edited by Victor Minichiello and John Scott,
Harrington Park Press, 2014
Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, University of
California Press, 2012
Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” Materializing
Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana
D. Nelson, Duke University Press, 2002
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, New York University Press, 1999
Jose Arriaza (he/him) is a student and writer from Miami, Florida. He is studying Geography and LGBTQ+ Studies at Colgate University as an OUS and Benton Scholar. At Colgate, he is a core member of LASO, QTPOC, and the publicity director for WRCU 90.1 FM.
