Summary of Chapter 4
In previous chapters of The Trouble with Normal, Warner has mentioned in passing “queer space.” This refers to real places in which people with non-normative sexualities might find each other. In American history after World War II, these spaces have often been special parts of urban areas. For gay men, for instance, some public parks in New York City and San Francisco were “cruising grounds,” in which it was an open secret that men could come together and search, or “cruise,” for sex with other men. Gay men also developed institutions like the gay bar and the bathhouse. Gay bars were a primary scene for gay social life throughout the 20th century; the Stonewall Riots of 1969, sometimes seen as a symbolic start of the gay rights movement, took place when the police raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Bathhouses are businesses in which gay men also come together to find sex with other men.
In this chapter, Warner discusses how these queer spaces have come under threat in recent years, and what that means for a sexual politics. Warner’s analysis focuses on New York City, and he has witnessed the closing of many of the queer spaces that were important catalysts for queer community in the past. The closing of the bathhouses began in the 1980s, in part in response to the AIDS epidemic and the ethics of abstinence that formed as a result, as discussed in chapter 2. More recently, other queer spaces have also been shut down, even if they were not explicitly about sex. Christopher Street, a space in which gay men could cruise but also socialize, is one example.
Warner blames New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani for much of the closing of queer space. In particular, Giuliani signed a series of “zoning” laws that divide the city into geographical districts or “zones,” each with their own permitted and prohibited kinds of businesses and buildings. Some zones are “residential,” for instance, and businesses are not allowed. Whatever the zone, Warner notes that these new regulations prohibit businesses and spaces related to sex and sexuality, such as adult video stories. Although these laws do not discriminate on the basis of sexuality—so that heterosexual and homosexual spaces are equally targeted—the effect has primarily been a decimation of queer space, because queers disproportionately relied on sexualized spaces in order to facilitate community. Straight people have an abundance of other institutions to facilitate community; they don’t need a “straight bar” in the way gay people need a gay bar.
The official reason provided for these zoning laws is usually real estate. Proponents argue that establishments related to sex and sexuality drive down the value of real estate. On the one hand, Warner says, this is a bit of red herring. The immediate effect of the laws is not a protection of real estate but a censoring of free speech. Images of sex and sexuality are banished, and the protection of private property is used as an excuse. On the other hand, Warner acknowledges that a market logic is at play here, and the problem is that we are siding with the market instead of with community. Queer people deserve to have spaces in which to have community; letting the market rule against them is using capitalism to defend segregation. The laws are first of all homophobic before they are anything else.
Unfortunately, many in the “official” gay and lesbian community have colluded with people like Giuliani in order to censor queer life. This is because of the idea, discussed in the previous chapter, that gay and lesbian people have “grown up.” In this view, gays and lesbians are already liberated and do not need to have spaces, like gay bars, in which to find community. In making this claim, these gays and lesbians have actually decided to segregate within the community. Their form of relationships are accepted as respectable, and any other kinds of queer life are unnecessary and properly shamed. People shouldn’t “cruise” any more, in other words. It’s time to settle down and get married.
Needless to say, this kind of discourse once against increases stigma rather than changing the society that creates stigma. Moreover, Warner argues that sexual autonomy requires more than the rights that gays and lesbians have asked for in fighting for gay marriage, for instance. Sexual autonomy also requires a sense that there exists a public—that is, a sense that there are other people like you with whom you could interact. That’s why it’s so vital for there to be queer spaces. It is in these spaces that people can not only have a community, but discover their own desires and preferences. Often, people don’t know what they like until they’ve tried it. We need to have safe spaces in which people can safely experiment with their sexualities, spaces in which people are not shamed, but discover what they like and that other people like it, too.
This turn to “safety” is particularly important, and Warner will touch on it in the next and final chapter as well. For now, the point Warner makes is that a public sex culture promotes safe sex. This is what AIDS activists learned in the 1980s. When queer people were allowed to come together, for instance in bathhouses, they were able to share knowledge about how to have sex safely in order to minimize the spread of HIV. Shutting down these spaces doesn’t stop people from having sex, but it does stop them from learning about how to have sex safely. We need public spaces in which this knowledge can be shared. Warner notes with particularly bitter irony that one of the effects of the zoning laws was actually a censorship of safe sex materials, because all the officials saw was the “sex” and not the safety. Advertisements for condoms, for instance, were banned. Instead, Warner calls for a sex public in which images and information about safe sex are widely shared.
Analysis of Chapter 4
In Chapter 2, Warner discussed how queer people do not have institutions like churches, schools, and families in order to facilitate the transmission of knowledge and memory from one generation to the next. This chapter, which is about queer space, builds on that insight because it is about the kinds of institutions that queer people do create. Examples include gay bars and cruising grounds, places that are not as permanent or stable as institutions like the church. This means that in order to keep the queer community alive, more work has to go into supporting and maintaining these spaces. They are more fragile because they don’t have an entire society contributing to them.
In an influential essay called “… 3, 2, 1, Contact,” the author and gay activist Samuel Delany has discussed the importance of space in creating and maintaining communities. Delany is particularly interested in chance encounters or “contact” in which strangers in a city meet each other in a public space and realize they have something in common. It is important to have public space, Delany argues, in order to make possible these kinds of chance encounters, whose positive consequences cannot be known in advance. People may go on to form relationships, communities, political programs, and movements. But the seeds of all of this are chance encounters. Warner would agree with this diagnosis. In queer space, we don’t know in advance what is going to happen. But part of its value is making possible a range of experiences and social formation.
In talking about space, Warner may at first seem to pivot to a different topic from the previous chapters. In those chapters, he focused on the inadequacy of any form of respectability politics or a sexual ethics that aims at being “normal.” The problem with those forms of politics is that they always re-create hierarchies of shame that stigmatize certain groups of people. People never get rid of shame, but they try to move it around. In this chapter, Warner focuses on queer space, which includes the kinds of places Warner wants in which people acknowledge their shame instead of trying to unload it on someone else. Although this seems a departure from discussions of, for instance, gay marriage, they are actually deeply connected.
For starters, one of Warner’s complaints about gay marriage, seen through the lens of this chapter, is that it, too, contributes to the destruction of queer space. Marriage is about the privatization of space. That means married people create their own domestic space through buying private property. Investing in private space is divesting from public space. Although straight people who get married still support schools and churches through taxes and donations, queer people who get married may not as reflexively support queer institutions like gay bars. Support for queer space isn’t automatic like support for straight space. If marriage moves queers out of public and into private, queer space will cease to exist.
This chapter also acts as a sort of bridge between the last chapter, which was on gay marriage, and the next chapter, which is on HIV prevention. The move Warner is performing is from thinking about rights to thinking about resources. The official gay rights movement focuses on rights, which belong to individuals, like the right to get married. By contrast, Warner calls for a queer politics that belongs to a public and is about making available resources for people to live their lives. Queer space is a resource because it provides information about sexual pleasure and safe sex, as well as opportunities to meet people in a safe community. For Warner, sexual politics should aim at maximizing resources, and public space is a primary concern.
