Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities

Contrasting Identities, Belongings and Wellbeing

Eleanor Formby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317602408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The phrase 'LGBT community' is often used by policy-makers, service providers, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people themselves, but what does it mean? What understandings and experiences does that term suggest, and ignore? Based on a UK-wide study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this book explores these questions from the perspectives of over 600 research participants.

Examining ideas about community 'ownership'; 'difference' and diversity; relational practices within and beyond physical spaces; imagined communities and belongings; the importance of 'ritual' spaces and symbols, and consequences for wellbeing, the book foregrounds the lived experience of LGBT people to offer a broad analysis of commonalities and divergences in relation to LGBT identities.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective grounded in international social science research, the book will appeal to students and scholars with interests in sexual and/or gender identities in the fields of community studies, cultural studies, gender studies, geography, leisure studies, politics, psychology, sexuality studies, social policy, social work, socio-legal studies, and sociology. The book also offers implications for practice, suitable for policy-maker, practitioner, and activist audiences, as well as those with a more personal interest.

1 Introduction

The word ‘community’ derives from the Latin com (with or together) and unus (the number one or singularity) (Delanty, 2010). As Delanty (2010) and others have argued, the term is widely used in popular and academic discourse, but is also contested. It has been suggested, for example, that “community … means all things to all people” (Dalley cited in Crow and Allan, 1994: xv), and that “it seems to describe everything, and therefore nothing” (Mayo, 1994 cited in Day, 2006: 19). Whilst sociologists and others may have poured scorn on the concept, the term remains much used and ‘abused’ within politics and policymaking (Day, 2006). This partly explains my interest in the notion of community when it is applied to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people. This book is therefore an exploration of the concept of ‘LGBT community’. In the UK, government documentation has begun to refer to LGBT communities in the plural (e.g. see Government Equalities Office, 2010), which at least seems to acknowledge the diversity amongst LGBT people, even if this acknowledgment is not then (re)enacted in practice. To denote the necessary caution required in any use of the word ‘community’, following Crow and Allan (1994), throughout the rest of this book I invite readers to place mental scare quotes around the word.

In the mid 1990s, Weston (1995: 280) suggested that television and film often presented gay characters as “bereft of community”. Though widespread images of the ‘tragic gay’ (Monk, 2011) still exist, I would argue that there is now also—at least in certain policy and practice arenas—a contrasting assumption that LGBT people automatically belong to ready-made communities. There are parallels here with other ‘minority’ groups, for instance, Mallett and Slater (2014) have pointed to disabled people’s dissatisfaction with the homogenising term ‘disabled community’. Frost and Meyer, in their study (2012: 40), explicitly told their participants that when using LGBT community they were not referring to particular areas or social groups but “in general, groups of gay men, bisexual men and women, lesbians, and transgender individuals”. In other words, they were using community as a proxy for people or population. However, some people may have LGBT friends but not see these as forming a community, whilst others may feel part of one or more communities but these may not include any (other) LGBT people. The assumption of any (singular) LGBT community in existing research is therefore problematic. How people see and experience their own sense of belonging to any particular community can be spatially and temporally specific—as I will go on to explore—and may contrast with how others, including researchers, perceive and describe this (assumed) belonging/community.

Whilst identity is a factor, whether implicitly or explicitly, in much of the literature I discuss in this book, existing work tends to draw on particular understandings of community (see below), with varying degrees of acknowledgment of this. Some of these understandings are of course influenced by authors’ subject disciplinary backgrounds and/or epistemological standpoints. However, there are also examples of work where community is used and discussed with little engagement with what community might have meant to study participants, or study authors. I would argue that any research that seeks to examine community must first address how community is conceptualised in order to identify if and how understandings are shared. This is not to suggest that any particular viewpoints are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but to acknowledge that the concept is open to interpretation. In Rothblum’s (2008) study linking community to lesbian and bisexual women’s experiences of stress and support, for example, community itself was not clearly defined, but appears to have been understood, or interpreted, as women’s friendship groups and immediate geographical social networks. In her later article, Rothblum (2010) asked participants how they understood (their) community, dividing participants up into ‘founders’, ‘finders’ and ‘flounderers’ according to their roles and respective ‘success’. Her participants tended to relate community to people or organisations, linking these to support, similarity and/or physical proximity. Despite these somewhat problematic examples, there are many other scholars who question the use of the term community. Rothenberg (1995), for instance, critiqued some geographers’ use of community and neighbourhood interchangeably, whilst Hines’ (2007) research with transgender people also indicated that community cannot be assumed based on shared identity or collective participation, as both are likely to be more complex and varied than is sometimes presumed.

This book draws on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project on understandings and experiences of LGBT communities (ref AH/J011894/1). In this introductory chapter I give an overview of the research aims and methods (with further detail on participants and research methods within in an appendix), but first I provide a broader context for how community has been conceptualised in previous research. Existing literature can be loosely divided into several common patterns of usage, largely revolving around communities understood as spatial, cultural, imagined, based on friendships and personal connections and/or as virtual. In this opening chapter I begin by outlining each of these understandings within both a general and LGBT research context. Though the book looks at the concept of LGBT communities as a whole, I do draw on individual work that has examined ‘gay communities’, ‘lesbian communities’ and so on.

Spatial Communities and ‘Gay Ghettos’

Typically, community has been understood to be highly spatialised (Delanty, 2010). Having something ‘in common’ has often been related to shared geography, hence ‘territorial’ and ‘place’ communities (Willmott, 1986). This tradition emerged within early sociological studies of particular localities, such as Lynd and Lynd’s study of ‘Middletown’ (Muncie, Indiana) in the United States in 1929 (Day, 2006). To some degree, the tradition continued in the development of community studies, and more recently community re-studies, which seek to update and revisit previous studies/locations (Crow, 2012; Phillipson, 2012). Sometimes these communities are known as ‘communities of fate’ because people are unable to choose where they are born (and probably where they are raised), though clearly some people have more ability to choose where they (continue to) live as adults. The notion of certain places providing a space where particular people can enjoy relaxing with other people ‘like them’ was noted 50 years ago (Patterson, 1965 cited in Crow and Allan, 1994), and whilst problematised, continues to this day (Ghaziani, 2014).

Drawing on spatial understandings of communities, early work on homosexuality emerging within geography and urban sociology in the late 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on specific geographical areas, often in America. Frequently these were known as ‘gay ghettos’ (Bell and Valentine, 1995a; Binnie, 1995; Levine, 1979; Rothenberg, 1995; Valentine, 1993a), ‘gay Villages’ or more recently and particularly in the US, ‘gayborhoods’ (Brown, 2014; Ghaziani, 2014; Reiter, 2008). As representations of ‘gay communities’, these locations were/are densely populated with gay housing and businesses, with some writers linking this to broader patterns within the functioning of capitalism, urbanisation and/or gentrification (Castells, 1983; Knopp, 1995; Rothenberg, 1995; Smith and Holt, 2005). The Castro district within San Francisco is probably the most famous example, where a concentration of gay voters facilitated Harvey Milk becoming the first openly gay elected official in America (played by Sean Penn in the Hollywood film Milk, which depicts his life and subsequent death). Ghaziani (2014) recently outlined that gayborhoods are characterised by four key features: a distinct geographical focal point, a unique culture, a concentration of gay and lesbian residences and a cluster of commercial spaces (e.g. comprising gay-owned and gay-friendly businesses, nonprofit organisations and community centres). He suggested that as such they offer gays and lesbians a space of freedom, and “enable social networking for a group of people who face unique challenges in not being physically identifiable to one another” (Ghaziani, 2014: 126). It should be noted, however, that not all studies of ‘gay’ life have focussed on urban settings, although there is a preponderance, as work has also sought to explore rural gay and lesbian geographies (e.g. see Bell and Valentine, 1995b; Browne, 2008), which will be returned to in further depth in Chapter 5.

Valentine (1994) has pointed to the extent to which ‘ghettos’ are often dominated by gay men. Explanations that lesbians had/have less economic power to own or run their own businesses in these (or other) areas may have some credence (Casey, 2007; Moran and Skeggs, 2001; Rothenberg, 1995). However, Castells’ (1983) suggestion that women have less ‘territorial aspirations’ than men has been robustly critiqued (Bell and Valentine, 1995a; Valentine, 2000). His argument that women are more concerned with personal relationships and social networks than seeking spatial ‘superiority’ or ‘domination’, for example, has been contradicted by a range of research demonstrating that there are areas of lesbian concentration. These have been defined as both lesbian ghettos and lesbian communities, albeit perhaps more ‘alternative’, ‘underground’ and/or less commercial than examples such as the Castro (Bell and Valentine, 1995a; Valentine, 2000, 2002; Browne and Ferreira, 2015). Examples include Adler and Brenner’s (1992) unknown US city, Peake’s (1993) study in Michigan, Rothenberg’s (1995) work in Brooklyn’s Park Slope (affectionately dubbed ‘dyke slope’ in Gieseking’s later (2013) work) and Valentine’s UK-based research (1993a, 1995). Whilst these locations may not visibly demonstrate their lesbian heritage as much as some of the more famous ‘gay’ districts around the world, their existence is known via word of mouth among women (Bell and Valentine, 1995a). Rothenberg (1995) has suggested that it is this social networking among lesbians that has successfully contributed to the growth of some of these areas. Geographical work focussing on lesbians, however, has also identified the place of private homes and/or temporary spaces within the concept of community (Johnston and Valentine, 1995; Valentine, 1993b, 1994). As Browne and Ferreira (2015: 15) summarise, “lesbian geographies contest traditional theories of urban space or ‘territories’ as continuous and visible areas. These spaces of lesbian conviviality are temporally specific spaces of resistance and can act as important reference points for the construction of lesbian identities”. Some of the early lesbian and gay communities literature, however, has been criticised for talking about lesbians and gay men as if they were a ‘pseudo-ethnic minority’ (Davis, 1995).

Although no studies exist of specific locales where only LGBT people live in the UK, there are studies of those who identify as LGBT within areas where there is a high concentration of LGBT people and businesses. Examples include recent large-scale research within Brighton (Browne and Bakshi, 2013), and older work focussing on the Canal Street area (the ‘Gay Village’) of Manchester (e.g. Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Whittle, 1994). Such studies will be discussed throughout this book.

Cultural Communities and Practices

A second tradition draws on cultural sociology and anthropology in its focus on a search for belonging and/or the cultural construction of identities. May (2013: 3) defined belonging as “the process of creating a sense of identification with, or connection to, cultures, people, places and material objects”. Delanty (2010) has noted that this tradition tends to focus on the self versus ‘other’, highlighting among others the work of Lash (1994, cited in Delanty, 2010: 154), who argued that “individuals are not placed into communities only by social forces … but they situate themselves in community”. Similarly, Cohen (1987) argued that the boundaries between members and non-members are crucial to the construction of communities, as “we-ness [is] asserted in opposition to them” (Jenkins, 2014: 140, original emphasis). This distinction between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, or ‘us’ and ‘them’, is a theme that runs throughout this book.

The shift in emphasis away from social interaction embedded within specific localities towards symbolic meanings and identities has been related to the role of shared rituals in particular (Cohen, 1985). This will be returned to in Chapter 7, where I examine Pride events. Within this school of thought, the meaning of community is seen to be constructed by social actors (Delanty, 2010). These communities may be called ‘elective communities’ (Maffesoli, 1996), ‘lifestyle communities’ (Day, 2006) or ‘interest communities’ (Willmott, 1986), and can coincide with spatial communities. Despite the complexity of defining such ‘communities of interest’, they have been operationalised within public policy (within the Welsh ‘Communities First’ programme), in a context where much regeneration work has tended to focus on spatial communities (i.e. clearly defined areas) (Day, 2006).

Sociologically informed work has emphasised the importance of a sense of belonging and communities of identity, particularly for marginalised or stigmatised groups (Walkerdine and Studdert, 2011; Weeks, 1996; Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan, 2001), though this is not to suggest that these are entirely or necessarily distinct from spatial understandings/concentrations. One of the key examples of the use of interest communities in relation to sexuality was Weeks’ (1996) article on the idea of a sexual community. The paper explored the concept of community and suggested that it could offer “a ‘vocabulary of values’ through which individuals construct their … sense of identity and belonging” (Weeks, 1996: 72). Weeks (1996) went on to argue that those groups whose existence is ‘threatened’ are most likely to construct a community of identity. Whilst pointing to the possible weakness of assuming similarity amongst lesbians and gay men due to differences, for example, of wealth, ethnicity, geography and political leanings, he also identified the potential for shared experiences of stigma, prejudice, inequality and oppression, giving rise to the need for a community of identity (Weeks, 1996). Such a community can then support activism and individual identity through shared ritual practices, such as Pride events, and a “sense of common purpose and solidarity represented by the term community” (Weeks, 1996: 76). According to Weeks (1996: 83), this “invented tradition” both “enables and empowers” by providing the context through which lesbian and gay lives are developed and social orders challenged. One might link the notion of ‘cultural’, and perhaps ‘political’, communities with broader social change, for instance the decriminalisation of sex between men, ‘gay liberation’ politics, activism and peer support in response to the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the campaign to repeal Section 28¹ (Kollman and Waites, 2011; Taylor, Kaminski and Dugan, 2002; Weeks, 2007). Indeed, ‘community-based’ responses to HIV/AIDS have been considered a form of social capital (Weeks, 1996). Political consciousness and collective action has been viewed as a basis for community (Delanty, 2010). Melluci (1996), for instance, identified community as being enacted through mobilisation processes involved in social movements, rather than being founded in any underlying ‘reality’. Earlier research by Willmott (1986) also identified the role of collective action in constituting what he called ‘co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Owning’ and Questioning LGBT Communities
• 3 Diversity, Inequality and Prejudice Amongst LGBT People
• 4 Lived Experience and ‘Doing’ Community
• 5 Relationships to, Within and Beyond Physical Spaces
• 6 The Pleasures and Pains of Scene Spaces
• 7 Pride Spaces, Rituals and Symbols
• 8 Imagined Communities and a Sense of Belonging
• 9 Consequences for Wellbeing
• 10 Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix: Research Methods and Participants
• Index