Small City Gay Bars: Places of Micropolitan Cosmopolitanism

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Sexuality and Space

Abstract

Small city gay bars highlight how implicitly metropolitan conceptions of places can blind us to their micro-politan diversity. This paper considers the gay bar as a place, and how bars outside gay neighborhoods challenge scholarly conceptions of urban or cosmopolitan places. Micropolitan areas, created by the OMB in part to analyze the proliferation of geographic bid data, have been largely ignored by sociologists. Data here are drawn from 78 interviews with gay bar owners or managers, and site visits to 40 bars that are more than an hour’s drive from another, such as Pasco WA, McAlester OK, Erie PA, Dothan AL, or Kenosha WI. There are 147 such cities with only one gay bar—as many as in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles combined—and there are gay neighborhoods in Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, and Seattle.

Bar professionals understand their businesses as contributing to local and regional economies, and their bar patronage is remarkably integrated by gender, race, orientation, and gender identity. These bars are embedded in municipal networks of other institutions that scholars often unwittingly characterize as urban or cosmopolitan: yoga studios; art galleries and boutiques; NPR stations; and craft brewers of kombucha, beer, and coffee. Some have participated in citywide CowParade-styled public art installations, lobbied successfully for bike lanes, or formed business-improvement districts or social service nonprofits. That these are happening in stagnant inland small cities, large shrinking Rust Belt regions, or booming micropolises challenges what we know about the relationship between amenities and urban growth, between consumption and gentrification, or the social movement possibilities of small-business capitalism. The micropolitan is a necessary counterweight when theorizing metropolitan places.

Author

• Greggor Mattson, Oberlin College