Boundaries of Desire: Becoming Sexual Through the Spaces of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games

Abstract

What are the consequences of unbounded gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (GLQBTI) spaces that are positioned as inclusive through welcoming everyone? Two festival spaces of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games, the City Hub and Oxford Street, illustrate inclusivity within nonheterosexualized space. Adopting a poststructuralist feminist approach, I examine experiences of male desires. The spatial metaphor of a “GLQBTI borderland” provides a conceptual lens through which to rethink the relationship among desire, boundaries, imagined space, and sexualities. The uncertainties of GLQBTI borderlands indicate it might be possible to revisit the queer political agenda by acknowledging that sexual identities are actively and spatially produced through processes that simultaneously draw from and defy social borders.

Key Words:

• Australia
• boundaries
• Gay Games
• same-sex desire
• Sydney

In November 2002, Sydney hosted the Gay Games, a seven-day international sports festival. Since 1982, the Gay Games has been held every four years. Previous host cities include San Francisco (the first two Games), Vancouver, New York, and Amsterdam. From 1982 to 2002, participation in the Games increased from around 1,300 to around 11,000 sportspeople. Since its inception by Tom Waddell, a decathlete competitor in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the Gay Games professes to be synonymous with inclusion. Waddell emphasized dismantling the elitism, sexism, racism, and nationalism erected by competitive sports events through an emphasis on “inclusion,” “participation,” and “the achievement of one's personal best.” Loyal to Tom Waddell's ideals, the Federation of Gay Games (FGG), the institution responsible for selecting the host city since 1989 and composed of twenty-five directors from four continents, promotes the event as inclusive, welcoming all people “without regard to their sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, political belief, physical ability, athletic/artistic ability, or HIV status” (FGG 2001, 1). The Gay Games therefore coalesces around the somewhat utopian idea of creating an inclusive space that invites participation from all people (Krane and Waldron 2000).

While valuing how the Gay Games celebrates the homoeroticism in sports, I have raised concerns about how this ostensibly inclusive festival operates to exclude along the lines of gender, ethnicity, and class (Waitt 2003). Despite the best intentions, the social diversity of every iteration of the Gay Games has been restricted. The implied invitation is always to “come out” and celebrate being part of a remarkably white, gay, metropolitan community that operates across cultural distinctions. The universalizing impulse is only underscored by an emphasis on predominantly Western sports. Drawing teams primarily from cities where there are organized lesbian and gay sports associations, the Games appear to privilege the interests of white, Anglo, urban, middle-class men who have the leisure time and financial resources to cover costs associated with travel and registration.

The Sydney Gay Games VI Board (SGGB), the temporary authority responsible for hosting the 2002 festival, embraced inclusion as a central organizing code. Responding to how sexuality intersects with racism, class, and gender, the SGGB implemented the Outreach Program and the Hosted Housing Program—House a Homo, Bed a Dyke—as well as the Asian Working Group, the Australian Indigenous Working Group, the Women's Advisory Group, and Moana Pacifika (SGGB 2002b). The event organizers demonstrated an awareness that although the dismantling of the White Australia Policy began more than four decades ago, in the lives of gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, transgender, intersex (GLQBTI)-identified Asian-Australians and Aboriginal Australians, many are only too familiar with the racist practices of the “scene.” Yet, the unconscious welcome to celebrate being part of a white, metropolitan, lesbian and gay community was clearly illustrated through marketing for the Sydney 2002 Gay Games (Waitt 2003). Indeed, the impression from the opening ceremony was that the Sydney 2002 Gay Games was attended by predominantly not-so-young professionals, particularly same-sex-attracted males from metropolitan centers in Australia, North America, and Europe. The notable absence of African-Americans, in comparison to their participation in, say, the Olympic Games, is testimony to Gray (2004) and Sinfield's (2000) arguments that African-Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with metropolitan constructs of gayness and are indifferent to Stonewall and Pride events. ¹ The imagined community of gay pride blazoned by the Gay Games sits uneasily with lived experiences of the “scene” that often repeat racist assumptions and stereotypes of both United States and Australian society generally. Despite good intentions to be socially inclusive, the nonegalitarian outcomes reflect how the power hierarchies of sexuality in each nation intersect with gender, race, and class.

GLQBTI Borderlands

My aim is to explore how the politics of inclusion operates through corporeal experiences of male sexual desires in the festival spaces of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games by Sydneysiders who attended this event either as spectators or athletes. Do their festival experiences work toward a politics of GLQBTI inclusion? What are the outcomes of utopian “queer” politics that promote an inclusive society through ambiguity?

Claims of utopian, inclusive GLQBTI places by the emerging lesbian and gay tourism industry and some city marketing authorities have encouraged geographers to examine critically the social processes of exclusion operating within nonheterosexed space. Adopting this standpoint, the gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed exclusions have been carefully recorded for commercial leisure activities (see Binnie 1995, 2004; Bell 2001; Nast 2002; Visser 2003). A queer politics of inclusion that rejects category labels has seemingly not materialized into utopian places comprised of a borderless, fluid world that still contains inadequate treatment of differences within and between GLQBTI people (including Hodge 2000; Elder 2002; Hemmings 2002; Puar 2002; Cieri 2003; Knopp and Brown 2003; Sugg 2003; and Sothern 2004).

Three concepts help clarify how respondents become sexual through the spaces of the Sydney 2002 Gay Games: social borders, boundaries, and GLQBTI borderlands. Social borders acknowledge the worth of, or even the need for, the categories of the subject (i.e., categories of sexual, ethnic, and gender identities), while simultaneously questioning their foundational status as preexisting or purely natural subject categories. Boundaries are both material and symbolic markers that help territorialize social borders and in doing so may help to sustain the seemingly foundational status of the category of the subject. GLQBTI borderlands are places where sexual minorities are brought together and become visible. Moreover, GLQBTI borderlands, while acknowledging the need for categories of the subject, emphasize the possibilities of subjectivities being open to transformation through the potential offered by working across social borders. Employing these concepts, this article explores how forty-four nonheteronormative male Sydneysiders became sexual by comparing reflexive discussions of their festival experiences at two festival spaces or GLQBTI borderlands: the City Hub in Hyde Park and Oxford Street in Darlinghurst (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Location map for the Sydney 2002 Gay Games: Hyde Park and Oxford Street.

Source: author.

The City Hub, located in Hyde Park, smack in the middle of Sydney's central business district (CBD), was officially designated by the SGGB as a main focal point for queer social interaction during the Games. Here, temporary entertainment, information, and medical facilities were organized. In comparison, Oxford Street, located 1 km from the CBD, carried no official Games endorsement. Instead, the permanent GLQBTI-friendly bars, cafes, clubs, and sex-on-premises venues facilitated social interactions. For more than a century, Oxford Street has been a borderland, a place where ethnic and sexual differences have come together (Faro and Wotherspoon 2000). The Games superimposed another borderland on this street, one fundamentally constitutive of a transnational sporting pride founded in the American gay rights lobby. The thousands of participants and spectators from across the globe who ventured to Oxford Street helped to establish this temporary festival borderland. Are these borderlands temporary sites of GLQBTI inclusivity or expressions of gay male hegemony?

To explore this question my analysis of the City Hub and Oxford Street focuses on respondents' corporeal realities. I explore whether the sexual and nonsexual social relationships that occurred within the bars, restaurants, and clubs of these material spaces provided opportunities to expand respondents' capacity to know human sexuality. My concern with respondents' experiences enables me to shed light on how male sexual desires played out through these borderlands. I pay particular attention to how experiences of these two borderlands differ in regard to sexual desire.

The City Hub became the “dead center” of the Games, not the vibrant, inclusive space envisaged by the organizers, while Oxford Street became the social hub for many men. For most respondents, the Hub did not operate as a GLQBTI borderland because the lack of boundaries failed to challenge the territorialized norms of heterosexuality. In contrast, the commercial character and imagined geographies were reconfigured by the games to become a gay borderland that attracted a largely white, not-so-young, affluent gay male crowd who brought about the territorialization of the street as gay. These Australian men found greater opportunities to perform and reconfirm gay male sexuality through seeking conversations or casual sex, particularly with non-Australian partners. Yet, rather than expanding the capacity to imagine human sexualities, these respondents often articulated unitary understandings of gayness. But younger, and especially nonwhite, Sydneysiders felt excluded by the rebordering of Oxford Street according to the unitary category of the gay male prescribed by the conspicuous consumption practices of the “global gay.” Rather than a celebration of difference, the Games represented an annihilation of difference on Oxford Street that provoked serious anxieties, a sense of placelessness, and a need to solidify social borders.

Methodology

Resisting any temptation to invest in a prescriptive single sexual subject, I designed a methodology to understand how male desires were experienced in Sydney both before and during the Games. I used several tools, including participant observation, semistructured interviews, and content analysis. Participation in the event as a competitor, spectator, and party reveler permitted me to observe the social dynamics in the City Hub and Oxford Street. Between July 2002 and December 2002, two research assistants and I conducted eighty-eight semistructured interviews with forty-four participants. Two interviews were conducted with each informant, one in July 2002, four months before the Games, and one in December 2002, immediately after the Games. Approximately half of the sample was derived from an advertisement placed on Team Sydney's homepage. The remaining half was derived from a “snowballing” sample among gay and lesbian organizations and through personal contacts of the interviewers.

Overall, a project positioned as examining the social impacts of the Games among same-sex-attracted men in Sydney was enthusiastically received. We continued interviewing until our sample was socially and geographically diverse. Involving respondents from different social locations was essential, given that sexual subject formation cannot be separated from age, ethnicity, affluence, body shape, or the social spaces of residence, work, and play (McDowell 1999). The sample was not simply attuned to the dominant same-sex desires of affluent, white gay males living in the inner-city. Semistructured interviews were conducted with each informant at a time and location convenient for the informant. The character of the researcher-informant relationship was always conditional on the positionality of the three researchers; however, because of our shared residence in Sydney, sexual desires, gender, and western cultural backgrounds, everyone with whom we spoke shared certain common social ground. Conducting the interviews, each of us therefore assumed a position of “inbetweeness” rather than “outsider” or “insider” (Nast 1994).

Each interview lasted approximately one hour. The part of the first interview most relevant to this article was the section that encouraged informants to reflect on how their sexual desires took shape in the contexts of particular events, suburbs, bars, venues, and other material spaces. Questions in the follow-up interview were written to help respondents provide a narrative of their sexual desires in the context of where they went during the week of the Games. Participants were asked to reflect on their actions, social encounters, and experiences, especially their experiences of social borders, in each location they visited. Informants were constantly caught up in a complex process of discussing practices that established, maintained, or challenged social borders in terms of resolving complex relationships between various material places, their layers of symbolic meanings and the experiences from practices in those places.

The semistructured interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed professionally in full. After transcription, content analysis was used to interpret how participants either expanded or did not expand their capacity to imagine human sexuality through their experience of the Hub and Oxford Street. While not adhering to a particular formal procedure, a number of strategies were implemented to assist the analysis, including a process of suspending preexisting categories, familiarization, and coding (see Rose 2001). A number of emergent themes were identified for each location, including “resistance,” “social borders,” and “cruising.” These were interpreted using the conceptual frame of inclusion and exclusion. The quotations used in the text are verbatim. Participants' names have been changed to ensure anonymity and confidentiality.

Festival Spaces of Sydney's 2002 Gay Games as GLQBTI Borderlands

My conceptualization of the festival spaces of the Games as GLQBTI borderlands draws together post-structuralist feminist and/or queer epistemologies. Anzaldúa (1987), Haraway (1991), Probyn (1993), Braidotti (1994), Grosz (1995), and Butler (1997) have presented new challenges for conceptualizing the articulations of sexuality and space through their understanding of the subject in process. They challenge orthodox views of a single subject of inquiry and predetermined hierarchical difference. No longer can social borders be conceptualized as delimiting fixed personal identities; however, rather than dismissing sexual subject categories altogether, I pay particular attention to examining how these and other subjectivities are established, maintained, or challenged. Understandings of people becoming sexual, rather than being a priori sexed subjects, challenge ideas of mapping a sexual border where one prescribed sexuality adjoins another.

Thinking spatially, no longer are individuals conceptualized as crossing an imagined social border to play out essential meanings of a particular fully-formed sexual identity. Rather, sexuality is progressively formed through actions, encounters, and experience in spaces where sexual desires are expressed. Sexual borders are no longer closed but are open, porous, and uncertain. Categories of sexuality are released from their prescriptive map and left unfinished. Applying this understanding to festival spaces, it can be argued that fixed borders of sexuality foreclose the complexities of subject formation and maintenance by cordoning off areas, constituting them as discrete zones attended by participants with preconfigured subjectivities. In contrast to this conceptualization, I propose that subjectivities of participants, thought of as always being in the mode of becoming, demand a rethinking of social borders that acknowledges both ambiguities and fixity. The social borders of festivals offer, paradoxically, both reworking of and conformity to subject norms.

Questioning the foundational status and bounded cartography of the category of the subject is not the same as doing away with either categories or boundaries altogether. Public visibility of nonheteronormative identities and the concentration of services must be understood as fostering GLQBTI movements through aiding the survival of marginalized (homo)sexualized people in a relatively safe space (Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter 1997). Furthermore, the important use of symbolic markers, including rainbow banners and pink triangles, potentially assists in claiming space as nonheterosexed territory. Territorialization also operates through imagined geographies. Places central to the struggle of sexual minorities, such as Oxford Street, Sydney, have often become imagined as places of belonging. GLQBTI boundaries therefore help to designate places both physically and symbolically as nonheteronormative.

Unquestionably, the bounded cartography of desires has helped to insert geographies of sexuality onto the once heterosexual map of geography (Valentine 1993). Yet, post-structuralist feminist and/or queer epistemologies suggest that the very nature of social borders, the mapping of sexual boundaries, and their function in the formation of sexual subjectivities deserve reexamination (Binnie 1997). This is not to suggest that feminist/queer perspectives are antigay, but to encourage thinking that questions established “truths” about sexuality, and about how certain subjectivities work: what people do, what people experience, and what sexual and nonsexual social relationships they form.

My analysis of GLQBTI borderlands suggests how subjectivities are actively and spatially constituted in places where GLQBTI people are brought together and given a spatial expression either ephemerally, as in the case of festivals, or on a more permanent basis, including certain suburbs. Given the social diversity of such borderlands, the capacity always exists for people to work across social borders, but this requires a willingness or openness to do so. A GLQBTI borderland, by bringing together sexual diversity in one place, creates the potential for a more inclusive GLQBTI movement if people are open to expanding their capacity to imagine human sexuality. The diversity of GLQBTI borderlands theoretically holds the potential for new ways of seeing other people and self.

This capacity to work across social borders toward a more inclusive queer collective requires attention to the corporeal experience of sexual desire rather than sexual subjectivities. As Hemmings (1997) points out, sexual desire and sexual identity are not the same thing. Yet sexual desire underlies identity. Same-sex desire is often a justification for claiming a nonheterosexual identity or for rejecting all identity labels. Equally, desire for someone with a different sexual subjectivity may also result in a personal reexamination of the meaning of sexuality.

Becoming Sexual Through the City Hub

SEE YOU AT THE CITY HUB. Come along to the City Hub during Gay Games VI. With open stage performances, gourmet food fair and a Hub Pub, you can enjoy a cool refreshing beer, plus lots more. With entertainment each day—the City Hub will be alive with thousands of participants and visitors. It's the place to be during the Games!

—SGGB 2002c, 33

The SGGB positioned the City Hub as the temporary, utopian focal point of the Games. An official invitation was extended to more than 11,000 participants (SGGB 2002a). The focus was always on inclusion. No attempts were made to patrol the boundaries of sexual desire (either physically through barricades or ID checks) nor to territorialize the park symbolically through paraphernalia such as rainbow banners.

A spatial focus in Hyde Park was deemed necessary by the SGGB, given that the thirty-one sports events were distributed unevenly across metropolitan Sydney (Figure 1). The City Hub was publicized as an “important place to get information, meet up with friends, be entertained and much, much more” (SGGB 2002a, 7). Public social gatherings are not uncommon here. Everyday the grounds are used principally by office workers to rendezvous with friends and or to relax. Throughout the year, various organizations use the location to host festivals. Its central, accessible location and wide formal boulevards are conducive to attracting and hosting large crowds of domestic and overseas tourists (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The City Hub, Hyde Park.

Source: author.

This parkscape was the outcome of very explicit state powers exercised during the early 1900s when, during the construction of an underground railway, Hyde Park was refashioned to naturalize and legitimize the notion of statehood. This ideological operation was manifested in the persuasive symbolism of monuments including the Anzac War Memorial to honor Australians who died in World War I, the Archibald Fountain to commemorate the Australian French Alliance of 1914–1918, and the Sandringham Memorial Gardens for George V and George VI. Clearly, the symbolism deployed invokes heterosexual nationhood and citizenship. Yet this refashioning did not initially erase the park's nonheteronormative value. Historical records suggest that since the 1820s the park had operated as a beat. This use continued until the 1950s. Indeed, the Archibald Fountain erected in the 1930s acted as a focal point of cruising activities (McKay n.d.). Furthermore, the public toilets built for the underground railway provided new opportunities for men to fulfill same-sex desires; however, silences and invisibility surround these activities as well as physical acts of homophobic vilification because male homosexual acts were not decriminalized in New South Wales until 1983. Furthermore, since the 1960s the general movement of same-sex activities had shifted away from Hyde Park, initially to Kings Cross, then Darlinghurst (Wotherspoon 1991). From 2001 to 2005, Hyde Park was designated as the annual launch site for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG). Overall, the park today is left with little symbolic capital for most GLQBTI Sydneysiders.

At the City Hub, the SGGB made every effort to provide a queer political perspective on space by promoting inclusion. Welcoming thousands of GLQBTI people to gather in the park brought the potential of opening a borderland. Possibilities arose through encounters with social difference of challenging certainties about both Hyde Park as fundamentally constitutive of the heterosexual order and about the sexual self. Yet only two respondents spoke about transformative qualities of the Hub and these were in terms of working toward a more inclusive understanding of sexuality in Sydney. Blair's openness to another way of living in Sydney was an outcome of a chance encounter. In the Hub, after work, he accidentally saw the performance of a Polynesian transgender comedian whose act was part of the festival. Blair's pleasure arose from experiencing the possibilities to implode Sydney's heterosexual norms.

It was amazing. There was this whole group of people hanging about. Some obviously from the Games community … others were just people going home from work. It was really a nice feeling. Oh, I am in my city and this is happening. It was inspiring. … There were definitely gay couples that were holding each other and doing that sort of stuff which was interesting given that Hyde Park is also a place where poofters and Dykes have been bashed. I was making those connections. So, that was great.

—(Blair, 44 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, public servant, Gay Games spectator)

For Blair, as a consequence of his opportunistic encounter, the border between straight/gay demanded rethinking. Operating as a borderland, the Hub undermined the certainties of dualistic thinking that tend to confine physical expression of gayness to Sydney's safer spaces. The Hub park became a source of inspiration within the context of the struggle of resistance against heteronormativity. This disassociation of Hyde Park from heteronormativity helped validate his own sexuality by bringing about opportunities for public expressions of same-sex desire in the CBD.

Similarly, Carl's experience of pleasure exemplifies how the Hub helped to challenge the (hetero)sexual cartography of Sydney. Sydney was regarded as a more inclusive city as a consequence of his experience of the rupturing of spatial signifying chains that bounds suburbs through the straight/gay dichotomy. He had planned a visit to the Hub with his boyfriend to socialize with friends over dinner and drinks after work. Carl experienced the dissolution of straight/gay borders with great joy:

I did find it fantastic that The Hub was in Hyde Park. … It felt like Sydney was gay for a week. It was nice to know that you felt comfortable, at home in your own city and you didn't have to worry about being gay … holding your boyfriend's hand or whatever. I wouldn't normally do that, not there [Hyde Park] anyway. … I didn't realise how all pervasive it would be. I remember walking through Sydney and seeing lots of gay couples and lesbians holding hands, and it was fantastic to see that.

—(Carl, 25 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, financial consultant, Gay Games spectator)

Carl reflected on how the activities he participated in at the Hub temporally disrupted the heteronormativity he usually felt in the CBD. As a GLQBTI borderland, the Hub provided possibilities to express his same-sex desires. Holding his boyfriend's hand no longer seemed inappropriate. Such performative acts reaffirmed his sexual identity through helping him to position Sydney as “home,” a safe place for gay men. His remarks disrupted the hierarchical dualism of straight/gay that often constitute imagined boundaries around particular city suburbs as either straight or gay. During the Games, for Carl, accessing the safer places for a gay identity did not require crossing into the spatially bounded “gay ghetto.”

Yet, most respondents' experience of the Hub was disappointment. Rather than operating as a borderland through GLQBTI diversity that brought certainties about sexuality into question, the Hub was understood as an everyday, heterosexed space. Designed to be inclusive, physical and symbolic boundary markers were absent. Displeasure arose primarily for the lack of clearly marked GLQBTI bodies and symbols. As Greg pointed out:

There were people lounging around, lazing around … you would think that it was a normal day in Hyde Park. If you go through there on a lunch day there are normally people lounging around, enjoying the grass, the sunshine. You would probably think it was another stall day. It is just another merchandise day. … There was a couple of HIV/AIDS banners, gay flags but nothing that really stuck out.

—(Greg, 31 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, accountant, Gay Games participant)

Without boundaries, those GLQBTI bodies present in the City Hub were not clearly marked as visible or different from non-GLQBTI bodies. Encounters with GLQBTI borders were further minimized because the Hub failed to maintain its same-sex clientele. Instead of the energy derived from challenging heteronormativity, the Hub was described as deserted, secret, and dull. For example, Dennis (47 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, manager, Gay Games participant) reflected on his surprise at the small numbers of people: “I was astounded how deserted The Hub was. You would have been lucky if there were eighty people watching the events on the stage.”

Edgar (55 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, company director, Gay Games participant) spoke of the lack of visibility, describing the Hub as: “almost secret in spots … it wasn't buzzy.” The lack of visibility, people, and the challenging of social borders and boundaries meant it was often experienced as dull. Frank (22 years old, Filipino-Australian, inner-city Sydney, technician, Gay Games participant) lamented, for example, that “it wasn't exciting.” The majority of respondents did not experience the Hub as transgressive. The City Hub lost its distinctiveness.

Without clearly marked social borders and boundaries, the Hub was experienced as integrated into Sydney's heteronormative urban fabric. Without the experience of living on the border, the creative potential of borderlands was lost. The City Hub, pitched as inclusive, was dismissed for its sameness.

In part, its failure derived apparently from respondents' inabilities to express their sexual desires in the context of the Hub. Expressions of sexual desires were deemed inappropriate or impossible due to the people, signs, and activities they encountered. When directly asked about searching for sexual encounters, nobody volunteered information about cruising for sex in Hyde Park. Instead, Edgar reflected, “There was never a large enough presence of people in that vicinity [Hyde Park] to make it feel different.” Most respondents experienced complete dissociation from The Hub: “I just found The Hub irrelevant to me. I just ran through it. I didn't stop” (Greg). And,

I didn't get it. I didn't understand it. It wasn't a Hub. It was some tents in Hyde Park. So, it was pretending to be the centre of activities when it really wasn't the centre. It felt forced, and a bit trite. The whole thing didn't have an epicentre or focus.

—(Henry, 42 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, suburban Sydney, architect, Gay Games participant)

I didn't think it was transformed at all. I thought it looked like a bunch of tents that wasn't doing anything … it didn't look exciting. A waste of time I thought. … I think if you had put two tents up in Taylors Square [Oxford Street] you would have had a far better Hub than down there in Hyde Park.

—(Jack, 55 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, suburban Sydney, mechanic, Gay Games participant)

Most respondents experienced the City Hub as indistinct from heteronormative city spaces and therefore remote and irrelevant. Clearly, the borderless City Hub did not meet these informants' expectations. Resistance to spending time socializing and playing there was apparent among interviewees. Without clearly marked social borders or territorialized boundaries, the irrelevance of this site for many was in part derived from respondents' inability to sexualize their bodies through the Hub. Consequently, during the Games, the City Hub operated primarily for these men as an information kiosk and the collection point for participation medals, rather than as the envisaged social focus. Instead, without any formal invitation, “the place to be” for many participants during the Games was apparently Oxford Street: “[The] Gay Games, I feel was only around Oxford Street … everywhere else in Sydney it was just as normal (Ken, 21 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, steward, Gay Games participant).

Oxford Street as a GLQBTI Borderland

Oxford Street has been a borderland for more than a century, a place where sexual differences have come together. Since the 1970s, the political and commercial activities have been principally responsible for this designation (Murphy and Watson 1997). During the late 1970s, Oxford Street became firmly linked to particularly Australian lesbian and gay identities through the increasing visibility of a localized commercial world, often shaped by American influences, replete with bars, discos, and bookshops (Willett 2000a). Health and social services soon followed, providing a suburb in which lesbian and gay people could live openly outside the rules of compulsory heterosexuality. As the route of the annual SGLMG parade, Oxford Street's link to nonheteronormative identities is underscored. First established in 1978 to recognize the Stonewall Riots in New York, the parade has become an important political vehicle for consciousness-raising about heterosexism and community building (Carbery 1995; Willett 2000b). Annual gay pride parades sustain borderlands in each of Australia's capital cities. As a site of the first public demonstrations that drew public attention to the oppressions experienced by sexual minorities in Australia, the SGLM parade continues to play a central role in the mobilization of gay communities nationally (Gorman-Murray 2004). The visibility offered by the parade has been critical to making heteronormativity less oppressive in Sydney and Australia. The specific social context of Oxford Street as a GLQBTI borderland has resulted in this thoroughfare being marketed to gay and lesbian tourists as a homeland (Markwell 2002) shaped by both globalization and multiculturalism (Altman 2000). The continuation of heteronormativity assures the maintenance of Oxford Street imagined as a place of origin. Oxford Street as a GLQBTI borderland remains a site of collective affirmation through rupturing assumptions of heteronormativity in Sydney and Australia.

Yet, as in all communities that invent their identities, the collective nonheteronormative social identity attributed to Oxford Street has constantly been reworked. Since being territorialized as “lesbian and gay” space, at least three major shifts have occurred in the remaking of its social identity. Since the 1970s, exclusions have operated through the housing market. Predominantly white, gay males have undertaken the gentrification of the surrounding suburb of Darlinghurst. In 1992, the Lesbian Space Project responded to this exclusion by gay patriarchy through an attempt to secure property in Newtown for the sole use of lesbians (Taylor 1998). More recently, exclusions operate between same-sex-attracted men through body shape and racism. The presence of a commercial scene catering primarily to white gay males has meant that Oxford Street has become a focal point to express what has been termed the “global gay” (Altman 2001, 20). He is portrayed in terms of a North American reconstitution of gayness, one defined by the hypermasculine “cult of masculinity”: young, upwardly mobile, sexually adventurous, and gym-pumped. Colloquially often dubbed the “Scene Queen,” a sexual preference for white, masculine, muscled men and the consumption of branded dance music, drugs, clothes, and cosmetics is central to the identity of the global gay (McInnes 2001). Signorile (1997) explains the emergence of this “macho” gay identity as both a response to the crisis of masculinity in western society generally and to the HIV/AIDS pandemic specifically. Gay tourism and its cultural transmissions have further facilitated this reidentification. Dance parties of the SGLMG have been incorporated into an international circuit of this muscle culture (McNeil 1994). The progressive remaking of Oxford Street through this emerging “global” constitution of gayness from the United States has operated to exclude, not only because of an emphasis on masculinity and access to capital but also in terms of body shape and ethnicity. Along with height, weight, masculinity, and fitness level, the cult of masculinity has underscored the importance of whiteness in same-sex dating or casual sexual contacts. The iterative performances of muscled gay whiteness informs preferences for same-sex desires and fantasies involving white-on-white encounters. Consequently, many GLQBTI Aboriginal Australians and Asian Australians experience blatant and subtle forms of racial discrimination (see Mills 2003; Farrar 2004).

Concurrent with this reidentification, Oxford Street has also become increasingly “de-gayed” through a number of mechanisms: the closure of several lesbian and gay commercial venues and the steadily increasing appearance of straight women and men in GLQBTI venues, sometimes incorporated into gay culture as “fag hags” and “stags,” respectively. The ways in which the social identity of Oxford Street has been continually redefined have created considerable tension among GLQBTI Sydneysiders (Knopp 1998; Haire 2001). This anxiety in part has fueled a remapping of GLQBTI space in Sydney. Since the late 1990s, King Street, Newtown, has for many people materialized as the preferred GLQBTI rendezvous. In part this was achieved materially, through lower rental accommodations and housing prices. Equally important were the imagined geographies of Newtown, a suburb positioned as both multicultural and alternative, on a cluster of Asian, African, and European restaurants, and an association with a range of counterculture movements including goths, grunge, and ferals.

GLQBTI Unity on Oxford Street Operating as a Borderland of the Gay Games

Everything changed during the week of the Games. Unintentionally, the Games superimposed another borderland over Oxford Street. Four emergent themes can be identified among respondents who understood Oxford Street operating as a borderland working toward GLQBTI unity: resistance, social borders, cruising, and re-territorializing. GLQBTI unity is suggested by two subthemes of resistance to heteronormativity: fetish and drag. Ken told of how men dressed in leathers challenged both the hetero- and homonormative: “It was good that on Oxford Street everyone just felt comfortable enough to do what they wanted, you know, wear their fetish clothes or whatever, which you do not normally see. So that atmosphere was great.”

The value for Ken for bringing leather fetish into public view was how it expanded thinking about human sexuality, given the tendency for crossover between gay, straight, and bisexual identities in the bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism (BDSM) communities.

Also challenging heteronormative scripts of acceptable gender displays was the visibility of drag queens and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (an irreverent order of male nuns). Mark (20 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, student, Gay Games participant), for example, understood the bodies of drag queens as sites of sexual subversion: “There was this guy, like a marcher guy, I've never seen him before, he was marching up and down the street with his little shorts and fishnets, definitely marching to his own beat!”

Mark was not alone in finding the most memorable bodies were those that troubled the dichotomy between male/female and straight/gay. Through the openness of some respondents to the various sexed and gendered borders, Oxford Street became understood as the center of a highly politicized performance that was working toward a more inclusive GLQBTI movement. Those respondents who embraced these possibilities of the borderland described Oxford Street as having “an amazing energy” (Lawrence, 33 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, manager, Gay Games participant) and being “buzzy” (Carl). Ken expressed his experience of the opportunities presented by the carnival atmosphere sustained through sexual diversity by making comparisons with the SGLMG: “Just generally quite different from a normal Oxford Street night—it was more like a Mardi Gras night in terms of the wide variety of people walking up and down.”

Scott (21 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, student, inner-city) also explained how he enjoyed witnessing alternative resistances to heteronormativity: “a little more exciting and a little more wild, you saw people walking down the street naked sort of thing, which you don't normally see on Oxford Street.” Operating as a borderland, for the respondents Oxford Street apparently helped to contest the hierarchical dualism of straight/gay by acknowledging a multiplicity of human sexualities.

At another level, inclusion was apparent through the emergent theme of “social borders,” which suggests opportunities were presented for some respondents to rupture the links between Oxford Street and the global gay identity, particularly for not-so-young, Anglo-Celtic males whose anxieties about not conforming to the prescriptive sexualities usually performed on Oxford Street seemingly dissipated. For example, Thomas commented on how the social diversity he experienced helped constitute an alternative, more inclusive understanding of gayness:

The breaking down of barriers, the different ages, the different ethnicities, the internationality of it, the inclusive participation … between people who were just people. … As opposed to what for some people is the most recognisable and identifiable participation in the gay community, which is bars, nightclubs, discos; where people go along to sort themselves out with their peers, work out where their acceptance or acceptability lies in terms of body type, dress, sense, behaviour. [During the Gay Games,] the barriers are reduced, somewhat, and there is a great opportunity to go and meet people under those circumstances.

—(Thomas, 40 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city Sydney, manager, Gay Games participant)

Thomas understood the social diversity as operating to suspend the unitary subject of the global gay. He confirmed the possibilities of the Games operating as a borderland to sustain affirming experience by generating an opportunity to expand participants' capacity to imagine human sexuality.

Thomas was not alone in acknowledging how the Games brought into question the certainty of Oxford Street as a place exclusive to the homonormativity of the global gay. Many white, not-so-young, professional, gay-identifying male Sydneysiders embraced what they understood as the more inclusive possibilities sustained by the Games. As noted by Dennis: “Like a lot of people who don't normally go out, and I don't normally go out there [Oxford Street], [I] ran into people that I knew … and spoke to people that I hadn't seen in years.” Dennis enjoyed how Oxford Street, operating as a borderland, created the potential for expressing same-sex desires that no longer followed a prescribed script. Similarly, Henry articulated the pleasure he experienced by this displacement: “I totally noticed how Sydney gay men spend all their time ignoring one another, even though you've being going out to the same bars with the same people for twenty years, you still ignore each other. Yet, everyone was talking. … It was positive, social fun. Shared. It was somehow cohesive.” Equally, Ken expressed his delight from experiencing the reworking of social rules of sexual and nonsexual engagement: “People were very open and happy to chat to people that they vaguely recognized, which is a bit different from normal. It was a so relaxed and not so drug related party as normal.” Joy in the apparent friendliness, openness, and inclusiveness among gay men was a shared theme among respondents who embraced these uncertainties. Particularly for older, white gay males, the increased presence of not-so-young, affluent, white gay men demanded a rethinking of who belonged on Oxford Street by unsettling the scripted performances of particularly the global gay. Clearly, during the temporal limits of the Games, this event broke the links between identity and place that generally operates to exclude the not-so-young, white, affluent, male, gay-identifying Sydneysiders.

A third theme of apparent inclusiveness amongst these respondents was the strong possibility to express same-sex desires through cruising. The novelty sustained in the gay borderland offered great potential for particularly these respondents to fulfill their same-sex desires. For example, Thomas told of the male gaze that reclaimed the street as specifically gay:“ Make no mistake, the boys in the bars were definitely in the mode to hunt. They were on the prowl … probably more so than usual.” Jack (55 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, suburban Sydney, mechanic, Gay Games participant) also spoke of the predominance of the male gay gaze, reactivated by new male bodies: “there was a lot of cruising going on along Oxford Street … everyone was in a place with a whole load of new people. So, you look.” Frank detailed how he cruised for sex on Oxford Street: “You go into the bars, meet and greet and exchange numbers and arrange to play later on. You play. You watch.”

Undoubtedly, the cruising opportunities afforded through the male social diversity of the Games was important in maintaining these men's sexuality. Priority was seemingly given to meeting new people from overseas. As Greg explained: “There are these new bodies in town, new people to look at … when it moves into that night out, it is very much around sex, … How many men can I have sex with, hopefully all from different countries.”

The streetscape became highly saturated by a male gay gaze actively seeking casual sex. Territorially based social borders of the nation state remained important for cruising. These proliferated as microboundaries on bodies: temporary tattooed flags, track-suits, T-shirts, and caps. These microboundaries were localized performances of nationalism that simultaneously drew upon and defied the social border by unsettling the heteronormative narrative of the nation-state. Interestingly, Anglo-Celtic respondents who spoke of casual sex told only of encounters with white Europeans, Americans, Canadians, South Africans, and New Zealanders. Anglo-Celtic respondents seemingly privileged white-on-white male sexual desires. Imagined national differences remained essential amongst these respondents, prioritizing cruising for sex with Swedish, French, or Dutch men.

Furthermore, cruising often became understood through the emergent theme of “reterritorializing.” Blair's explanation illustrates how he defined the performativity of cruising as a process of rebordering Oxford Street as gay:

The week before the Games … we thought Oxford Street was losing it. It was a Saturday night and it seemed to be an unpleasant place to be. Almost as though it had become a heterosexual strip with the odd gay bar that hadn't closed.

… During the Games [there were] … people sitting at the coffee shops watching the trade go by, and back and forward. The promenade. All that stuff that makes it definitely a gay space. It was good and exciting. Why can't it be like this all the rest of the time?

—(Blair)

Blair read the cruising bodies as operating to generate counter-public spaces. Their actions helped to reverse a process where he increasingly felt Othered by the presence of heterosexual bodies. The capacity to acknowledge same-sex desires through opportunities that transpired throughout the Games ruptured the link that was forming between heterosexuality and Oxford Street.

The themes of resistance, social borders, cruising, and reterritorializing were apparent for men who spoke positively of how Oxford Street operated as a gay borderland during the Games. The re-stitching of the links between Oxford Street and nonheteronormative identities was understood as progressive. Redrawing the borderlines on the imagined city map, however, was a process dominated by white, affluent, professional, not-so-young men who shared the necessary cultural and financial capital to access the commercial venues. For others, the uncertainty generated through the social borders present on Oxford Street resulted in experiences of exclusion.

Exclusions from Oxford Street Operating as a Gay Borderland of the Gay Games

Oxford Street operating as a gay borderland of the Games was not read universally in utopian terms. Two analytical themes derived from content analysis suggest an opposing process was concurrently operating: a heightened sense of placelessness and white gay patriarchy. Ricky (22 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city, student, Gay Games spectator) expressed the first theme by how he viewed people attending the Games as tainting “his” Australian lesbian and gay homeland. In responding to how he felt visiting Oxford Street, he told of his alienation: “Hey, get out of our backyard, these are our clubs, you're taking over our space!” Ricky defined Games participants as invaders. In part, his sense of alienation stemmed from his emotional investment in Oxford Street and his pre-Games rupture of global gay ethics. Ricky understood Oxford Street as “owned” symbolically by lesbians and gay men. Prior to the event, he positioned the Gay Games as contra to the inclusiveness he believed underpinned the SGLMG. His uncertainties resulted from his perceived loss of a peculiarly inclusive Australian GLQBTI space. He understood the rebordering of Oxford Street by primarily American, not-so-young, white men as acting to narrow the capacity to imagine sexuality. In doing so, he felt excluded from a wider lesbian and gay community:

I didn't feel the solidarity. I didn't feel the community. I felt violated a lot of the time. Because these, I think it was mainly American men … they were just so much more obnoxious and open about their sleazing. So, they were on the street, checking you out, and they would just leave their eyes on you as you walked past. … People would just stare at you as you walked past. And, that felt yuk. I felt like a piece of meat. And, that most people from overseas were just here to get some arse.

—(Ricky)

Cruising, as performative of same-sex male desires, is not exalted as a mechanism to territorialize space and stabilize a (homo)sexual identity in an uncertain heterosexual world. Instead, Ricky's response to social difference, expressed through an American performative of cruising, was becoming raw flesh, tissue devoid of any human identity. His becoming “meat” was derived from the differences he perceived between cruising as a performance of same-sex desires between American and Australian men. As meat, he was unable to express his sexual desires, he experienced alienation from Oxford Street, and he expressed hostility toward American visitors. Ricky refused to enter into a performativity that he understood as narrowing not only the capacity to imagine sexuality but being human. For Ricky, the explosion of microboundaries of nations on Oxford Street, expressed by the attitudes, voices, and clothes of participants, signaled a new borderline between “them” and “us.” Rather than working toward a more progressive GLQBTI movement, the unitary American gay male subject was regarded by Ricky as potentially substituting for a seemingly Australian GLQBTI capacity to work in coalitions across gender differences.

How the presence of predominantly white, not-so-young, gay males on Oxford Street during the week of the Games operated to exclude women was commented on by several other respondents: “There seemed to be an imbalance between lesbians and gay men” (Neil); and “I didn't see that many of the lesbians out at the bars” (Walter, 23 years old, Anglo-Celtic Australian, inner-city, athlete, Gay Games participant). Women were always in a minority. Every evening the commercial venues were catering primarily to gay males. The impression given by respondents was that lesbians became almost invisible on Oxford Street.

The theme of “white gay patriarchy” also indicates how Oxford Street, operating as a borderland of the Games, excluded nonwhite males by solidifying existing racialized boundaries. The nonwhite respondents did not perceive the Games as a mechanism whereby people come together to work across social borders. Instead, through the predominance of white, affluent, often pumped, not-so-young gay males on Oxford Street, the borderlands of Games were understood as a materialization of white gay patriarchy. For many non-Anglo-Celtic respondents this generated feelings of frustration. For example, Albert commented on his concerns of this Western-styled gayness:

I think why I was disappointed … for us to see this globalized gay village, it was really highly Westernized and it reaffirmed my original concerns of the Games being somewhat of a Western concept. … Walking down Oxford Street I really felt like it was something that was quite pungent … I still felt that there was that separation that occurred in terms of race … the certain places where rice queens could pick-up were Asian places and I thought that was quite sad quite frankly.

—(Albert, 22 years old, Filipino-Australian, inner-city Sydney, student)

Albert's remarks highlight how his anxiety arose from this festival space being concurrently inhabited and sustained by predominantly white gay men. The sociospatial dynamics of cruising in the borderlands of Oxford Street materialized how sexualized encounters between strangers were apparently negotiated within the racialized iterative performative of the “global gay” that prioritized white-on-white bodies. The borderland seemingly reinscribed rather than removed social borders that operate to segregate commercial venues on Oxford Street spatially along racial lines. Albert suggests that non-Asian men only eroticized Asian-Australian men when entering venues known to fulfill the sexual desires of white-rice queens. This segregation highlights the highly inequitable networks of power that operated before and during the Games to maintain white gay supremacy. Albert therefore understood the social dynamics of the Games on Oxford Street as neither “radical” nor as an energizing site of “liberation.” Instead, he felt depressed. In his view, the borderland of the Games only reaffirmed the capacity to imagine sexuality in terms of whiteness through maintaining its links to the global gay sexuality. This borderland only reconfirmed his nonidentification with the universalization of sexualities along Western lines, a construction of gayness commonly experienced and performed in commercial venues along Oxford Street.

Conclusion: Boundaries of Desire

The Sydney 2002 Gay Games brought more than 11,000 people together for a seven-day sports festival, layering temporary borderlands across the city. Forty-four male Sydneysider participants were interviewed to explore the claims of this festival as an event working toward a more inclusive GLQBTI movement. To work against fixity and stability, a methodology was implemented that unhinged the prescriptive links between a stable, unitary sexual identity and a given, unchanging place. Festival spaces conceptualized as borderlands demanded rethinking social borders as defined by unitary sexual categories that could be drawn as boundaries on maps. Reconceptualizing social borders in performative or processual terms emphasized uncertainties over givens. This approach does not reject subject categories altogether but questions their foundational status. It therefore does not deny that possibilities exist to spatially manifest social borders as imagined or material boundaries that reestablish a link between place and a particular identity through the process of territorialization. As illustrated by the white, not-so-young respondents, imagined old lines of demarcation between unitary subject of “us” and “them” can potentially be redrawn on the map. Yet, as Blair demonstrated by his response to festival performances at the Hub, creative possibilities are also conceptualized as presented where openness exists to work across differences. Through rupturing the links between place and identity, opportunities exist to defy, modify, and challenge the old boundaries. Given that boundaries are thought of as always processual, socially constructed, and highly performative, they can be confronted through the introduction of alternative meanings and performances.

Rethinking spaces of the Sydney Gay Games as borderlands illustrates how they primarily worked among many male respondents moving toward a more inclusive understanding of the GLQBTI movement. Despite welcoming everyone to the party and creating an unbounded GLQBTI space, the City Hub failed to attract or maintain a GLQBTI clientele. Opportunities to work across differences in the Hub never occurred because of the invisibility of boundaries in a place that was primarily understood by respondents as heterosexual. Respondents suggested that one reason for the apparent “failure” of the City Hub to attract and secure a large crowd was that the lack of boundaries resulted in an inability to become sexual. Consequently, for the majority of respondents the Hub never operated as a borderland. Without experiences of social borders, respondents were never challenged to question their own sexuality or to imagine other ways of being sexual.

In contrast, Oxford Street operated as a gay borderland through the experience of social borders and spatial boundaries. Unquestionably, as a gay borderland, Oxford Street was celebrated by the majority of not-so-young Anglo-Celtic respondents as defiant of both heteronormative and nonheteronormative ideas of who belonged. In the view of particularly affluent, not-so-young, gay males, the Games ruptured the link between Oxford Street and the restricted performativity of gayness constituted by the cult of masculinity. Apparently, for these men, Oxford Street was experienced as more inclusive through changing the cult of masculinity's performativity of gayness. These respondents claimed that through the cruising performativities of same-sex male desires the street was rebordered as a more inclusive “gay space.” During the Games this often relied on a range of microboundaries that helped identify nationality including T-shirts, caps, flags, pins, and temporary tattoos. The intensity of respondents' reaction to this rebordering of Oxford Street as gay was clearly apparent in their eagerness to repeatedly join thousands of same-sex-attracted men in the street-party. Social borders and spatial boundaries remain durable through their function in establishing, maintaining, or reestablishing “gay” as a central focus to plural identities. However, the coalitions made across social borders that were experienced as defining a more inclusive gay male collective were also experienced by some younger and particularly non–Anglo-Celtic respondents as narrowing ways of knowing sexuality around the unitary category of gay.

Those who interpreted this rebordering of Oxford Street as a not-so-young, affluent, white gay male space spoke of exclusion. Often, younger Anglo-Celtic men experienced their alienation in terms of class, the performativity of cruising, or the lack of gender or age diversity. Equally, non-Anglo-Celtic respondents articulated how the performativity of Western understandings of gayness continued to exclude on Oxford Street by constraining the capacity of white sexual desires to operate across existing racialized differences.

These results have important implications in working toward more inclusive festival spaces and a progressive GLQBTI movement. They suggest that policing borders continues to play an important role in solidifying GLQBTI identities. These results appear to challenge a queer politics based solely on “fucking with boundaries” to produce a borderless, queer utopia. Policing and erecting spatial boundaries appears remarkably unqueer. Yet, as evident from the City Hub, a sexual politics based solely on suspending boundaries, as advocated by Phelan (2001), may only dissolve the stiches holding together components of the GLQBTI plural self. Instead, experiences of living on social borders, spatially expressed as material or imagined boundaries, remain seemingly essential to progressive GLQBTI politics through allowing people opportunities to expand their way of knowing sexuality. Festival spaces operating as GLQBTI borderlands are potential-laden spaces where (hetero)sexed, and racialized assumptions can be challenged and made less oppressive through participants' capacity to question certainties about human sexuality and race. The inclusions and exclusions experienced on Oxford Street during the Games underscores how the lack of social diversity often narrows understandings of sexuality rather than working toward GLQBTI unity.

Acknowledgments

A University of Wollongong Start Up Project grant provided funding for this project. Gratitude must be given to everyone who enthusiastically participated in this project. Thanks must also be given to the constructive comments of Georgine Clarsen, Guy Davidson, Nicholas Gill, Stephen Hodge, Andrew Gorman-Murray, and three anonymous referees.

Notes

1. The Stonewall Riot occurred on 27 June 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village. On that day, rather than accepting the police raid on a gay bar, an event that had occurred many times before across the United States, those gathered in the Stonewall Inn resisted arrest. Pride events celebrate this stance against oppression and the collective identity the rebellion established among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.