When gay sex becomes homophobic...

When I first moved to San Francisco two years ago and threw down all of my remaining money on a deposit for an apartment, I found myself broke and desperate for work.  After several failed attempts to get a restaurant or cafe job (most of my work experience in the past had been in the service industry), I quickly took the opportunity to work the counter service at one of the remaining all male strip theaters in the city.  Aside from putting on live nude strip shows, the establishment also catered to male public sex with its basement video porn arcade.  At first I thought this would be an interesting experience in working male public sex industry (and interesting it was indeed) because I had believed that male public sex spaces might serve as places of empowerment for validating gay sex.  What I found however was that the space sometimes functioned off of implicit principles of internalized homophobia.  Interestingly enough, I began to question the notions of solely ascribing a liberatory status to institutions that provided spaces for what appears to be non-heteronormative sexual experiences and instead began to understand the ways in which shame, anger and hatred were also inflected in the daily happenings of these establishments.  Allow me to give a few examples:

During each eight hour shift, my job primarily consisted of managing the strip performers, selling porn videos, sex toys or novelties at the front counter, or exchanging larger bills for smaller ones to be inserted into the video machines contained within private viewing booths downstairs.  All of these tasks I had preempted; however, the most time consuming aspect of the work was the 'video arcade check' that needed to be done every fifteen minutes which consisted of marching down the stairs and announcing to all the costumers that they needed to be in a booth and paying the machine.  Then after circling around the arcade several times, corralling customers, either solo or with a partner, into a booth and making sure they had inserted money (a green light would appear above each booth door at that point) I would tromp back up the stairs and put down my initials on the 'Arcade Check Sheet.'   

As most of the customers were utilizing the space to get off or engage in sexual experiences, some would comply with the regulation of constantly occupying a paid booth while others were indignant.  Our policy was to ask people to leave if they refused to pay a booth.  Way too many times, customers would get angry when asked to leave and would frequently utilize anti-gay epithets when the were kicked out.  I don't even know if I could count how many times these particular men called me faggot when I asked them to leave if they refused to pay a machine.  One customer who happened to be complying with the paid-booth rule even called me a faggot when I refused to come into a booth with him and let him give me a blow-job!

While being called a faggot hardly resonates any emotional response in me these days, I was curious about what the word meant to these men who were hurling them at me.  What a contradiction I thought.  Here were men who were entering a space primarily with the concern of engaging in sexual experiences with men, and here they were simultaneously exhibiting verbal homophobic aggression against anyone standing in their way of doing so!

There seems to be a propensity in academic writing to highlight and laud expressions of non-heteronormative sexual relations as emancipatory or liberating.  However, my experience working at the strip theater made me question these assumptions.  Instead of witnessing what I had previously thought would be an experience of affirming sexual interactions between men outside of the space of the home, I rather found myself entwined in a space homophobia ran high.  It made me consider the difference between specifically gay spaces that encourage and affirm sex between men and establishments that rather functioned as an outlet for libido that came with strings attached: a hypocritical devaluing of a gay identity.  

I'm glad that I worked at this particular theater/video arcade because I now hold a bunch a bizarre memories from the happenings there, however, I'm also glad to no longer become the target of men's ironically homophobic anger in not being to get what the want sexually.