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This book examines the roles of the market and the media, notably cinema and the Internet, in the recent transformations of Bangkok's queer communities. It considers the ambiguous consequences that the growing commodification and mediatization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender/transsexual (LGBT) lives have had for queer rights in Thailand. The chapter also considers Bangkok queer cultures until mid-2008, just before the onset of the global financial crisis in the second half of that year and before the intensification of political conflicts between supporters and opponents of the September 2006 military coup that toppled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

This chapter compares the boom in Bangkok queer cultures over the past decade with the sense of decline in some Western lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) scenes. It also examines the political, cultural, technological, and transnational forces that likewise contributed to the rapid expansion of queer markets in early twenty-first-century Bangkok.

This book has explored the enduring yet evolving relationship between sexuality and the city, the causes and consequences of urban change, the diverse and dynamic cultures of a place, the experiences of a marginalized community on the doorstep of equality, and the protean meanings and material expressions of the gayborhood in America. Gayborhoods are artifacts of urban planning, but in the coming out era, they also embodied distinct queer cultures and communities. Today, however, they are straightening and becoming mainstream. The book concludes by suggesting that the queer spirit has become more plastic and portable in a post-gay era, which helps gayborhoods to evolve in exciting ways as many different gender and sexual minorities reinvent their relationship with them, and thus the city itself, in profound ways.

This chapter examines Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts. It suggests that this opera was a landmark collaborative creation of U.S. modernist artists engaged in early-twentieth-century efforts to establish a distinctly and genuinely American voice in transatlantic high culture. It also highlights the queer expressive potential of artistic abstraction within the homophobic context of twentieth-century U.S. culture, and the crucial confluence of queer lives and culture with artistic activity and culture.

The chapter establishes the connections between LGBTQ filmmaking and the everyday experience of its audiences in Spain over the past 25 years. It links a discussion of the term ‘queer’, relating both to film and Spain, to the phenomenon of liberalization represented by changes to the Spanish Civil Code in July 2005 on same-sex married couples. It traces the developments of a queer Spanish film culture and of post-identity politics through documentaries, feature films and shorts.

This introductory chapter discusses the general disregard for America’s queer culture that has been observed since the onslaught of AIDS among homosexuals during the early 1980s. Gay culture, among all kinds of queer culture, was targeted not because of the AIDS epidemic but because of the AIDS epidemic becoming an avenue for cultural forces, which include straight men and women, as well as the gay neoconservatives. For instances during the post-AIDS onslaught, the issue of “gay marriage” has risen to the forefront of public consciousness as an in-demand debatable topic, an abandonment of “gay ghettos,” and the hampering of the entry of the rhetoric of sexual liberation to the popular media.

Chapter 4, “ ‘Fuck Aneta Briant’ and the Queer Politics of Being Political,” builds on the preceding chapters’ arguments on US country music and on gender in the white working class to examine contemporary representations of homophobia, past and present. This final chapter engages histories of class-specific gender and sexual cultures and reads these in conjunction with the concrete anti-homophobic instance of David Allan Coe's “Fuck Aneta Briant,” in order to trace working-class cultural logics unfathomed in many contemporary discussions of (perceived) redneck bigotry. Ultimately, my conclusions indict not the middle-classing of the queer but the cultural logic whereby the associations now forged between the queer and the middle class necessitate demonizing the white working class as homophobic and erasing and depoliticizing their deep historical relations to queer culture.

This chapter discusses the production of public queer cultures as sites of media consumption. The recent development of a global media hub in Singapore has enabled the emergence of a queer public culture despite the illegality of homosexuality. State-funded gay films, subsidized theater plays, Internet portals, and nightclubs are part of the new spaces and practices that have been direct beneficiaries of this policy initiative. In a city-state such as Singapore, cultural citizenship is contested through the way sexuality functions as a technology for the creative economy. While the government has mobilized sexuality as a policy tool to promote cultural liberalization, gays and lesbians have also seized on these practices to claim their right to produce and participate in public culture. The chapter thus evaluates how lesbians “do” citizenship and fashion modes of expression through their media consumption that allow them to fit in, use, and twist the governmental framing of media environments.

This book examines the confluence of race, sexuality, gender, and nation in the intimate relationships of Yone Noguchi. From his expression of impassioned love to Charles Warren Stoddard to his affairs with Léonie Gilmour and Ethel Armes, the book shows how Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences and managed to exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. Noguchi's intimacies illuminate how Japanese immigrants negotiated America's literary and arts community and achieved romantic fulfillment at the turn of the century—a period characterized by historians as a moment of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Building on biographies of Yone Noguchi and studies of sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and late Meiji Japan, combined with debates about queer cultures and Western imperialism, this book reveals how Noguchi was able to articulate same-sex love and interracial marriage even in the face of racism.

In 1951 the filmmaker and poet James Broughton moved to London from San Francisco. At that time he was beginning to garner a reputation for his short, whimsical, films, which often made use of outmoded costumes and decaying public spaces. One important reason he gave for moving was the idea that Britain had a more open-minded society for queer artists like himself to work within, in contrast to the McCarthy-era USA. With the help of a number of figures from the British film establishment he managed to make a half-hour-long film The Pleasure Garden in London. The film is for the most part set among the ruins of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the surrounding park. Broughton’s film is an allegory of Britain as he found it in the summer of 1951, asserting its own vision of a post-war national identity in the Festival of Britain. This chapter examines the way in which the Festival of Britain revived certain ideas of national identity from the past, yet neglected others – and the way in which these ideas were doubled and questioned in Broughton’s film.

The hybrid nature of Moodeijt Yorgas, which blends talking heads with oral histories presented through dance, music and optically printed effects, effects an imbrication of documentary and experiments through a specifically non-white, queer feminist authorship. The author thus argues that Moffatt’s film presents a challenge to traditional conceptions of the author/auteur, embedded in Euro-Western exceptionalist individualism. “The stakes for the Moodeitj Yorgas project were therefore high: contesting historical erasure, contemporary misrepresentation by settler culture, and … way in in which settler patriarchy had been internalised within Aboriginal communities to devalue women’s law.”

This chapter examines the multiple roles that gender plays in Yiddish, beginning with its grammar. Yiddish has often been conceptualized as a gendered language, whether in its instrumental use or in its symbolic value, given that Yiddish is always used in relation to other languages. In particular, women have figured strategically in the development of Yiddish literature, both in the early modern period and during the Haskalah. In the modern period, Yiddish has sometimes been characterized as essentially “feminine” in contrast with Hebrew as “masculine.” Yiddish has also been used to disrupt a heteronormative gender binary, whether articulating a third gender in traditional Jewish literacy or the recent phenomenon of Queer Yiddishkeit.