Mutating the Bear Meme Part Two: Sex, Behaviour and Realness – Why Being a Bear is a Real Drag

Male Drag/Female Drag: A Difference

It is important to establish the difference between a gay man dragging up as a female on the mainstream gay scene and gay men exhibiting what may be termed ‘male drag’ on the bear scene. Female drag, whether it forms part of a staged performance or is simply an outfit for a night on the town, is primarily about being noticed, about standing out. There may be, as some feminist thinkers claim, a secondary purpose to supplant or surpass ‘real’ women but the main point of dragging up with a wig, heels and makeup is to get attention and to show difference.

On the bear scene, the opposite it true. Male drag often refers to dressing in a way that is redolent of the traditional look of the working class male: denim, leather, boots, combat trousers, baseball caps and other clothes associated with labourers, cowboys or bikers. Male drag can also include unifroms and props such as cigars, although these items branch off into wider fetishism. Unlike female drag, male drag is about fitting in, about articulating an idealised image of masculinity which is shared by your brethren. In a nutshell, it’s all about blending in. If a particular bear gets a special amount of attention - an 'A-Bear’ or ‘Bear God’ - it is because he is deemed by his bear brethren to be an apotheosis of bear masculinity. He is an embodiment of the bear identity shared by all and so becomes a locus for bear desire. He also frequently becomes the site on which bear desire is articulated. Unlike the drag queen, whose goal is to show difference by standing out, the A-Bear gets attention because he ‘fits’ more perfectly, more snugly into the bear ideal than those around him.

Purposes of Bear Desire, Expressions of Bear Desire

Desire and articulations of desire in bear culture are used to police bear identity, to delimit bear identity and keep it ‘safe’, untainted by campness or femininity. Expressions of sexual desire in bear culture serve to strengthen bonds between brethren, to reinforce ties between friends. In this, there is a parallel between the daddies (and very occasionally mummies) and the cubs in bear culture, and the drag houses with their house mothers we see in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning. Although the drag queens in that documentary did not view each other as sexual objects, like bears they used the bonds of their ersatz families to reinforce and police a shared identity, to pass it on, recreate it, its rules, codes and behaviours.

Sex is a huge deal on the bear scene. No matter how much bears may like to paint themselves as ‘ordinary guys’ who like to hang out with other men, drinking and discussing cars and sport, most of the time this is an affectation, the primary purpose of which is to help a bear get laid.

So let’s take a look at what sex means on the bear scene. Obviously, when a bear has sex with another bear, he is primarily having sex with a hot bear. Beyond that, however, he is also experiencing himself as a bear, an object of desire which also articulates the same desire. This strengthens, normalises, and serves to police the boundaries of the bear identity with astonishing rigor. Group sex is a prevalent activity in bear culture. Many bears form lasting couples, unlike on the mainstream gay scene, but few of these couples are sexually monogamous. Those that do chose a path of sexual monogamy swiftly disappear from the scene. Many couples will engage in sexual activity with bears and men outside the relationship, sometimes separately from each other but frequently together.

Often these couples can be seen cruising separately when out on the scene. Once one has located and made a connection with a potential sexual partner, he will then bring his catch to the attention of his partner. In this way, even before sexual activity has occurred, the bear fraternity has served to strengthen itself, reinforcing bonds which also serve to strengthen the bear meme. Thanks to the internet, something which (as discussed in part one) bears have been swift to adopt and make use of, bear couples can now cruise and arrange liaisons from the comfort of home. Sites like Eurowoof.com and Bearwww.com have also helped to widen the choice of potential sexual partners bears can choose from, which in turn increases the homogenisation of the bear identity.

Many bears do not ‘believe’ in monogamy. A common opinion is that it isn’t ‘natural’ for men to form and remain in sexually monogamous relationships. In a sense this is fair enough, since it certainly makes little sense within bear culture for bears to express sexual fidelity. To do so would quite possibly mean the death of the bear meme. Monogamy does not have the vital function that it has in wider, heterosexual society. There, straight couples form lasting bonds, using sexual fidelity as a way to delimit the boundaries of their relationships. This makes sense, since they will pass on the meme of the family unit through physical propagation. The bear couple, usually, does not have this option. So the bear meme has evolved an ingenious way to pass itself on from generation to generation, from city to city, country to country, from scene to scene. It uses sex, reinforced with a prevalence of heavily fetishised and valourised imagery of idealised masculinity. Quite literally, bears use their masculine bodies, their sex, their sexuality as a way to create more bears.

Queerness Deferred

In one sense, this sums up the radical queer possibilities of bear culture and the bear identity. Bears use their masculinity, the very same rigorously defeminised masculinity seen in traditional patriarchy, as a means to create, to nurture. Older bears - daddies - will often take on a role towards a younger bear or cub which is far more maternal than paternal. A man who uses his masculine identity, complete with all the accoutrements of extreme masculinity – the boots, the leather, the chest hair, the full beard, the buzz cut – in the service of nurturing another person, helping him find his place, listening to him, caring for him, loving him… This man possesses powerful potential to alter traditional homosocial bonding.

And yet he doesn’t and will not. Why? Because as much as bears can delimit the boundaries of their shared identity, as much as they can propagate that identity, they cannot for a second break free of that identity. The very desire they put to service as a means of spreading the bear meme is also the desire they must serve. To break free, to articulate a consciousness other than bear consciousness when around other bears, to admit to adopting and refining bear behaviour (and to encouraging others to do so) would mean a queering of the bear identity which would only weaken it. Just as women are encouraged to shave, scent and pluck their bodies in order to be intelligibly ‘female’, so the bear must manage his weight, his body and facial hair, his behaviour and his articulations of desire so that they make him intelligible as a bear to other bears, all the while never letting on that he has put work into these aspects. Fail to do so and he risks ostracisation and perhaps even mockery. If he succeeds, he wins the approval of his peers, usually expressed in a sexual manner – a prize as great as any trophy for ‘realness’ won by a drag ball contestant.

This is why bear nights are always ‘men only’ (although I have never -not once - been to a supposedly 'men only' bear event or venue and not found at least one woman there). Bears are warrior men (or perhaps naughty boys) who have escaped the ‘force field’ of female influence and shaken loose the taint of femininity which mortally weakened gay men historically – the implications of HIV/Aids transference via penetrative sex, where the passive partner was identified as most at risk and hence the ‘carrier’, the images of the slender, frail bodies of AIDS sufferers; back to the centuries-old symbolic castration of male rigor wrought by abject femininity, a castration felt all the more keenly by gay-identified men since the late 19th century when they were seen to have the sickness of femininity within them, causing a perversity which must be purged. Bears are, ultimately, this reactionary body politic and its resulting crisis of identity writ large.

So, assuming we want to, how do we change this?

Richard Morris

Harry Potter is a Bummer: Homoeroticism in the Harry Potter novels and films

Draco Malfoy would totes get it. I don't care what insults and accusations that assertion earns me, I'm not ashamed to admit it. He's hot. And whilst his sneering and pouting in his school uniform is enough to fuel the masturbatory fantasies of slashers the world over, for many it's even more appealing to imagine Draco getting hot and heavy with his heroic archenemy, Harry Potter.

Some might call me sick, others might rationalise it with the argument that for the millions of predominantly female slash fiction writers, making teenage boys gay it off to satisfy your own twisted desires is simply a way of subverting the age-old straight male role of fantasising about lesbian teenage schoolgirls. And there's an element of power and control to it too; being a sexual puppeteer can be intoxicating, especially when it's only on the page or computer screen, because it's a safe format without any of the real-life mental or physical consequence (with the possible exception of chafing) of dabbling in all sorts of perversions and sexual taboos. Especially when you're taking control of canonised characters, since you're reasserting your authority as a reader over the characters you've come to know, and vocalising a facet of their personality, their libido, which their creator and author has likely ignored. And let's not ignore the appeal of virginal innocence and its inevitable sexual corruption.

But whilst these theories might all be true to an extent, there's also an argument that the simple explanation for so many thousands of hitherto unconnected slashers coming (pun intended) to the same conclusion about Harry and Draco is that it just seems to make sense. First of all, let's consider the context. British boarding schools are hotbeds for homoeroticism and sexual tension. This might sound trite, but please don't scoff just yet. Whilst we didn't board there, I did go to an all-girls' school, and can testify from experience there was indeed same-sex curiosity and experimentation in the changing rooms and at sleepovers. Call me clichéd if you must, dismiss my claims as stereotypical wankfodder for adolescent boys with throbbing, tumescent erections and fevered yet unoriginal imaginations, but these things do happen.

From Enid Blyton's Malory Towers and St. Clare's series to St. Trinian's, Billy Bunter and even The Worst Witch, whether conscious or not, fiction set in schools usually has some kind of homoerotic subtext. And really, what else would you expect from any novel in which hundreds of hormonally-insane teenagers are cooped up together with only their biological urges and each other for entertainment?

And therein lies the beauty of the traditional boarding school stories, described by the marvellous Michael Baywater in his directory Lost Words, as "staples of childhood pulp literature throughout the twentieth century." Adored and devoured by far more readers than could have experienced first-hand the reality of being at boarding school, the stories were essentially fantasies, in which children could escape from authoritative overlords, their parents, whilst still having the routine and authority figures required to prevent all-out anarchy being unleashed. "Gothic public schools with arcane rituals; midnight feasts, crushes, pashes, hero-worship, bullying, snobbery, and above all, no parents in sight. This was the diet, and it nourished children from all backgrounds, whether they attended Gothic public schools or the local Bash Street comprehensive. And then suddenly, the tap was turned off."

School stories fell out of fashion, interest waned from authors and readers alike and the 'young adult' genre blossomed to become essential teenage reading, with its blend of romanticism and realism, and graphic renditions of adolescent sexual inadequacies and insecurities. "But," says Michael Baywater, "the hunger grew until someone, finally, found a magical way round the unspoken ban...For what is Harry Potter but another schoolboy in another school story; perhaps at a school more explicitly magical than most, but still a school nevertheless. And now we are back where we always wanted to be: in a Manichean world, free from invasive parents, where good and evil are clear, where loyalties are pre-defined and the outside world is held at bay... at least for the time being."

Although it's only been hinted at in the previous books and films, in the most recent instalment of the HP blockbusters, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, director David Yates effectively "captured the sexual tension that must throb through any co-ed castle." (According to Gawker, at least). Wizards smooched witches around every corridor corner, the classrooms were bursting at the seams with blustering macho bravado, awkward glances, and swooning, giggling girls, and there were jealous rivalries erupting everywhere at the tip of a conical hat.

You can practically smell the pheromones, not to mention that distinct stink of sweat, lust and fear. They might not have access to the traditional joys and distresses of underage boozing, amphetamines and sticky fumbles in grotty nightclubs frequented predominantly by school kids, pillheads and sex pests, but like adolescents all over the world, the HP characters are still doing their best to get in each other knickers.

Except. Every last one of the hetero relationships in the latest film are cringe-inducingly awkward, with no chemistry whatsoever. In comparison, the scenes between Harry/Ron or Harry/Draco in both the books and the films have much more authenticity to them. Whilst the opposite sex might remain a mystery, whether it's an obsessive crush on your best friend or your worst enemy, you know what you're getting with your own gender. Even if you have to keep these thoughts repressed, with your only outlet furtive looks across a crowded classroom and secret midnight dormitory wankathons.

(As a slightly tenuous aside, I'm not giving credence to JKR's announcement about Albus Dumbledore's supposed homosexuality; a pathetic, tokenistic claim made with the clumsy and manipulative intention of side-stepping the accusations of homophobia levied at Lady JK when she reacted rather sniffily to the proliferation of slash fiction based on the HP canon. If she'd always known Dumbledore was queer, why wait until so late in the series to make it common knowledge? Until that announcement, fans had speculated about every other possible coupling, but not once in all their fevered fantasies about freaky werewolf sex between Remus and Sirius, or Fred and George-themed twincest, had Dumbledore's latent – and according to JKR, blatantly obvious - homosexuality ever been mentioned. And if the slashers (who will read throbbing homoeroticism into almost any scene with only the subtlest hints and cryptic codes to nudge them in that direction) didn't see it, then I'd speculate that this is frantic back-pedalling from a publishing franchise who've only just recognised the importance of keeping that audience happy.)

The Harry Potter series has sold more copies, and been translated into more languages than any other book, with the sole exception of the Bible. And the Harry/Dracco shippers of the HP slash fiction community make up one of the internet's most popular fandoms. As an example, the epic, novel-length opus, Starts with a Spin, by Maxine Chan, has almost 130,000 words, has been read online more than 80,000 times, and has even been painstakingly translated by fans into a handful of other languages.

Harry and Draco hate each other's guts, so much so that they're obsessed by each other. The hatefuck has a lot to answer for in contemporary culture. And with so much of the online Harry/Draco slash fiction, that's where it starts. Violence and sex is a difficult and damaging combination (both physically and mentally), but it also has its attractions, because it has the handy advantage of absolving the submissive participant of any responsibility and the accompanying guilt.

Harry and Draco are playing the same role, just from separate sides of the battlefield. With the pressure on both of them mounting in the latest cinematic instalment, the pair are bottling up some intense resentment and other powerful emotions. Maybe a mutual fuck-fest would let them unleash some of that pent-up aggression and frustration without (as long as copious amounts of lubricant were used) causing any permanent damage. And through so doing, if the two of them were to find that they could each by other's answer to those needs, couldn't that then lead to an eventual acceptance, intimacy and even affection for each other? Enter millions of slashers all over the world who certainly think so. Faced with that kind of erotic evidence, I'm not one to disagree.

http://gawker.com/5317280/the-homosexual-undertones-of-the-half+blood-prince
http://archive.skyehawke.com/story.php?no=5601
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Harry_Potter

Jane Bradley

Mutating the Bear Meme - Part One

“The rich diversity of the bear community has become telescoped into a narrow range of images, which nowadays is defining us. But it is misleading to mistake the beautiful icons for the rich diversity of our reality. As gay youth encounter an increasingly stratified and commercialized gay social hierarchy, more nowadays are coming out as bear. They still seek a home community where they can be themselves whoever, however they are.

"As we continue to mature as a community, and a global one at that, maybe it's time to give more thought to how we might create bear culture broadly, and revisit our roots of "inclusively".

It's just a thought.” – Les Wright, author, founder of the Bear History Project

It’s May 2009. I’m logged onto YouTube watching the latest ‘talent’ to be unearthed on that bastion of telly despair, Britain’s Got Talent. The three bearded, chubby men gyrate on stage, guts over spilling from their too tight briefs. They are called the Dream Bears. A glum-looking Simon Cowell isn’t too keen on them but the other two panelists and crucially, the audience is with them so they make it through to the next round. The three bears look relieved and relaxed in their post-performance interview with Ant ‘n’ Dec. All in all, there’s no great difference between this and any other clip from this ludicrously and bizarrely successful show. But for a not-inconsiderable number of hairy, often overweight gay men in the UK – and, of course, their admirers – this was undeniably a big moment. Because, whether we realise it or not, whether we want it or not, this otherwise ordinary Saturday was the moment bear culture hit the mainstream.

But how did we get here like this? How did a culture which once prided itself on being a homosexual reclaiming of the profoundly homosocial pursuits of beer-drinking, bonding and bromancing - a sub-scene populated by those proud of being too fat, too hairy, too ugly to fit into the gay mainstream – how did this scene spawn three men proud to wiggle their rotund posteriors to disco music to get a place in a God-damned talent contest judged by Simon sodding Cowell?

In this article I will be writing about the UK bear scene and UK bear culture. Although there will be links and references to bear culture worldwide, it is important to understand that unless otherwise stated, I am writing about bear culture in the UK. The most important distinction I want to make is from US bear culture, which I understand as being closely linked to the idealised image of masculinity in American folklore – the cowboy, the ranch hand, the trucker – and the American concept of manifest destiny. The significance of this will become clear in the course of the article.

For the past twenty years or so bear culture has been growing steady and surely in the UK, as it has worldwide. In part this is obviously because the internet has provided easy access to bear porn and bear culture for teenage boys who fifteen years ago would have spent years fretting that they were the only ones to nurse a secret crush on Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Phil Mitchell in Eastenders.

When one considers the fact that the bear scene unquestionably harbours a significant amount of IT savvy men – throw a stone at a bear event and you are 90 per cent certain to hit an IT consultant called Dave – it’s really no surprise bear culture has colonised cyberspace so robustly.

But bear culture has also greedily claimed significant space on the gay scene. Since gaining a toehold in a few less-than-fashionable UK bars in the late 1970s and early 1980s – most significantly the Rembrandt on Manchester’s Canal Street and the Kings Arms in Soho, London – the bear culture has proven itself extraordinarily adept at co-opting and swallowing other gay sub-scenes. First and most obviously, it ate the leather/clone scene so popular in the 1980s before the HIV/AIDS crisis. To a great extent, this scene spawned the nascent bear scene before being all but devoured by its cuddlier, plaid-clad brethren, who had by that point also absorbed the chubby or Girth and Mirth scene. Other scenes followed: the gay S&M club scene, the skinhead scene, the scally scene – all still exist in their own right but go to a night or check out a site and you won’t have to look far to find a beary body or some bear-related content.

The successful spread of bear culture is attributable to what we can term the Bear Meme – the ideas, symbols and practices that form the backbone of bear culture, as well as the speech, gestures, rituals which constitute interactions on the bear scene. This meme has something in common with all the most successful memes – religion, marriage, the family unit – in that it can mutate, distort, adapt and co-opt, and it can do this with an elasticity which does not compromise its integrity and essence.

There are two ways of looking at the success of the Bear Meme. The first is that the meme has gained ground because it represents the absolute opposite of the gay mainstream. Bears themselves are the very embodiment of everything the mainstream has disavowed – overweight, hairy, often of mature years, often uncompromisingly masculine. For gay men who feel disenfranchised and alienated from the mainstream gay scene because of their body type, fashion scene, music taste, or because they cannot ‘shade’ (bitch) expertly enough to facilitate shallow interactions with scene queens, the bear scene can seem like some utopian Freedonia where body fascism and hysterical queening has been righteously banished.

It should be no surprise that the bear meme is proving attractive to so many young gay guys, because the second reason for the meme’s success is that following its early, somewhat queer origins, it very quickly came to align itself with a very heterosexist and rigid form of masculinity.

It’s easy to understand why bear culture took this turn. In the US and UK, a combination of the horrors of AIDS and hard-right Raganite/Thatcherite politics saw gay men routinely vilified in 1980s as the very worst humanity had to offer. In a nascent gay subculture which valorised the untweaked, uncensored masculine form, it was just a short amble to valorising all the signifiers and totems of masculine primacy and power: work-boots, cigars, overalls – anything untainted by the wretched, disempowering whiff of effeminacy; the new converts of the bear meme took them and made sexual idols of them.

In America during the unrelentingly materialistic 1980s the impulse to retreat to legends of cowboys and In’juns, lone rangers and sharp shooters was irresistible. These were the mythologies on which America was founded and in them the bear meme found the bedrock, the common psychological root, the origin myth, which had hitherto been denied unmanly gay men.

At a time when they were being attacked from without and within, gay men turned inwards and recreated a world where men were real men who made their own law and relied only unbreakable brotherly bonds. A world mercifully absent of women. They abased themselves before their new sexual godheads and forgot all about what it meant to be here, queer and in the world’s face. The revolutionary potential of masculine gays unafraid to show physical love for each other was quietly brushed under the carpet and bears settled for being able to ‘pass’ as normal hetero types and thus kept their precious male privilege.

And so bear culture remained, always encroaching, always colonising, yet somehow always frozen; never challenging the primacy of constipated machismo. But then came signs of change – in the UK and Europe at least. Groups like cabaret act Bearlesque and ‘bear band’ Bear Force 1 emerged in 2007 and showed a different side of beardom – fun loving, music loving, self-deprecating and (busting the ultimate bear taboo) camp.

Richard Morris

HOW TO SPOT A HOMO

Playground Shock

The newspaper rustled as I struggled to stop my hands shaking. It was late 1962, I was 13. I had opened it in the boys’ playground, expecting to turn to the cartoons. Instead, the headline screamed out at me “How to Spot a Homo”. My God, now everybody will know. If they read the article it’ll be total public humiliation and prison for the rest of my life.

I was torn between reading the article and throwing away the paper before anyone else saw the headline. If I read it I could find out what the giveaway signs were and – well, not give them away! And avoid the humiliation. But what if the other boys saw me reading it? They’d be bound to see straight away that I was interested in it and immediately understand why. I could hear “puff”, “queer” and “homo” ringing in my ears even before they shouted the words.

A Man in His Underpants

A few days earlier, I had been sitting in the living room with my mum, daydreaming as usual. The TV news was on. Suddenly the screen expanded to 1,000 times its usual size as a picture of a man in his underpants lying on a bed appeared. This was shocking stuff for 1962 television. Although slightly repulsed by the sight of a man in his underpants and extremely embarrassed to be looking at the picture alongside my mum, I could do nothing other than look and listen to this news item.
The man was John Vassall.

The story went as follows. Queer John worked as naval attaché in British Embassy, Moscow. Picked up by KGB pretending to be Russian queers. Plied with drink till drunk. Photos taken of him with other men. All queer activity illegal at that time. Blackmailed into spying for Russia. By 1962 had become Private Secretary to admiralty minister – still spying for Russia. Discovered.

The Pain of Understanding

So that explained a lot. Some grown men had the same sexual attraction and feelings for other men that I had for other boys. How revolting. My God, did that mean I would grow up to be one? Plus, they were the sort of people who were traitors! Either that or limp-wristed effetes like Kevin Williams. More my God! I had to think fast.

I decided: 1. I would not grow up like that; instead, I would carry on feeling like this for a short time and then turn normal. 2. I would stop masturbating. 3. I would redouble my efforts to hide my feelings and inclinations, which I had hidden since I first fell in love with another boy at age 11 – even though I didn’t realise what had happened to me and would never have used the word “love” to describe it: I know better now.

Death in obscurity

John Vassall was sentenced to 18 years in prison but served only 10. I was sentenced to a very long spell in the closet and am still petitioning for release from guilt and hatred. John changed his name on release and died as John Phillips in November, 1996. He merited two column inches in The Guardian.

Homosexual acts were legalised in 1967? I should coco! It was called the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, not the 1967 Sexual Liberation Act. Yes, men could have sex with each other but only on certain conditions. They had to be over 21 (did you wait that long?) and not in the army, navy, or air force. It had to be in private. Even in the 1980s the police were breaking down bedroom doors, dragging men out of bed and in front of the magistrate, who agreed with the police that as the men were at a party they were in a public, not private place, and they were Guilty as Hell.

I meet those same playground boys today, forty years later. They still throw around words like “bender” and “shirt-lifter” before realising what they are saying and half apologising to me. They refuse to meet my boyfriend and accuse me of choosing a lifestyle. They complain that gay men are promiscuous and get away with murder because it’s PC not to prosecute gay men having sex in gay bar toilets. They never read of straight men getting away with gay murder. They think men like me who have in the past had sex with women have spread Aids from where it belongs, in gay men, to their straight world.

Fingers and Breasts

The bit of the article I dared to read told me that homos will spread out their fingers like a fan when asked to inspect their nails and that they prefer to hang around with women with large breasts to put others off the scent. Forty years later Gay Times ran an article on that headline. Apparently it read “How to Spot a Possible Homo”. So the Mirror was liberal after all, even in 1962.

Geoffrey Shoesmith

Coming Soon...

In all good places.

An offer you can't refuse...

Bubble

Brighton is in a bubble. LIVING IN BRIGHTON IS LIKE LIVING IN A BUBBLE. A lovely morphine bliss, candy floss coated bubble. It is a place where LGBT, “alternative” people and environmentalists can live in an location where there are other like-minded people, where they are not going to get deeply questioned in a negative way about their life “choices” – an environment where they are positively encouraged.

Living in a bubble does not involve living in the real world. Brighton has such a big identity of its own that I feel the identity of the individual can become crushed underneath. If you take on a city’s identity your own identity cannot grow as a person. Brighton has such a big identity that people can get enwrapped in that and take on the city’s identity as their own. If negative things like excessive drug taking are occurring in a bubble, there is no one to put you back in check. In Leeds, there are walking gay sterotypes, but in Brighton these are even more numerous and pronounced – people don’t suddenly decide they want faux hawks, society conditions them into thinking “I am gay so that is what I should do”.

Plus Brighton is not bullet proof. Sometimes for unthinkable reasons leaving the BN postcode is required. For example, I used to work in Goring-by-Sea (13 miles from Brighton city centre) and even there I got heterosexist assumptions placed upon me. I would be talking about my girlfriend and then in a later conversation someone would ask me about my boyfriend. Brighton is also a tourist town, so ignorant pigs get in this way and make homophobic remarks and derogatory comments about women. Brighton is also a tourist town so there industry is to entertain. To live there is to be part of the tourist attraction. To live there is to be part of the tourist attraction.

Living in a gay ghetto (note the ironic name of the club) does not lend itself to socio-cultural action through forcing people to note the existence of gay and trans people through their very presence in locations where phobia exists. Mixing in society allows the challenging of narrow minded beliefs and stereotypes through general conversations and the gradual acknowledgement that “these people are just like you and me darling, and don’t have two heads”. Being out and proud may seem like part of daily life to many, but congratulations to all of you. Just this behaviour and expressing your own gender expression in public challenge’s people’s assumptions about gay and trans people and gives them a truer picture, opposed to just leaving them with the one that the media and their peers have left them with. And being in an inclusive location like Brighton is not helping to do this to anywhere near the same extent as living in the majority of the remaining millions of square metres in the UK. I’m not saying we should all purposefully go out of our way to live in Belfast (1. “recently ranked the homophobic capital of the UK” 04/08/08 The Irish News), but my opinion is that homophobia and transphobia are parts of society and I will not ignore them or hide from it.

1) http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:4-Gb_jVujnAJ:www.irishnews.com/articles/540/5860/2008/8/4/594333_353231713890GayPride.html+%22homophobic+capital+of+the+UK%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

Kate Benny