Get involved

Do you live in one of the countries I’ll be visiting? Drop me a line - I’d love to meet up!

Have a story you want to share? The world deserves to know! Feel free to post your stories here, or send them to me.



• What is your neighborhood like? How does life there compare to the places you go to 'be gay'? Where do the two intersect, and what does it mean to your life?


• What did it 'mean' to you when you first considered the idea that you were gay? What does it mean to you now?


• To what extent are mainstream images of gay people appropriate to your life? In what ways are they not? What people/communities have you known that have come to define themselves in different ways?

The Project

A (Scandalously Brief) Primer...

Basically, what it boils down to is this - the idea that the world is split up into two distinct and alien races of heterosexuals and homosexuals is rather unfounded. Ever since the beginning of sex demography we’ve known that people’s sexual experiences are varied and dynamic, and that physical intimacy factors into people’s lives in complex ways. The very words ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ as well as their associated concepts are less than 140 years old, making them relatively new way of thinking about a subject that’s as old as humanity.

While discussion of a homo/hetero binary has steadily lost currency in academic circles it appears to be on the rise, in many ways, in popular culture and people’s everyday life as a (seemingly useful) social category. The way we view and interpret people across space and time becomes colored along these lines, and people start to talk about the ‘gays’ of Ancient Greece, and the ‘global gay community’ as if perhaps anywhere that you don’t see gays holding picket signs or rollerblading in short shorts and eye-shadow they must simply be repressed.

At the other extreme is the tendency, born from the noble days of early postmodern anthropology, to say that everyone’s sexual experience is inherently unique and dependent upon their specific regional context. At worst, this can lead to outright exoticism, and at best to a vested, nostalgic or inaccurate portrayal.

The truth encompasses parts of each of these images - we live now in a global, predominantly urban planet, where people have to be able to juggle a number of different identities and realities, and where they may not ascribe completely to any of them.

The angle I’m taking on all of this is a ‘social-constructionist’ account of a queer ‘ethnogeography’. Useful terms, no?

Implicit in this is the idea that some kind of idealized gay identity doesn’t truly exist for anyone in practice but that they take on elements of it at various points in their life and ascribe to the name when it’s convenient for them to do so (what theorists refer to as ‘strategic essentialism’). However, while I may see my role as a ‘gay’ person now as a socially-structured artifice that I can employ as needed to legitimize non-conforming activities and performances (rather than as some deterministic script for my behavior), I’m still left in the position of having to find a date...

Regardless of how much we may choose to ascribe to, contain, or dismiss identity politics, there remains a very practical need to access and participate in social ‘markets’ of people who are seeking the same things. Every person with same-sex desires or histories, from gay rights activists to ‘discrete’ MSM must learn to reconcile their sense of self with this ‘third party’. It is therefore much easier and more efficient to study these places than all of the myriad people whose lives intersect with them. These places, physical, digital, and imagined, come to represent the notion of a quintessential gay lifestyle with which we may choose to adopt some likeness. These locations are both global (embedded in a Western notion of the ‘gay bar’) as well as local (utilized as tools and intersection points for a number of different ends by different people), though they are by no means the exclusive domains of an area’s same-sex eroticism.

It is through documenting life in the domain of same-sex activity that I hope to shed light on how these identities are coming to be defined on the local scale, something that - as discourse on such topics becomes increasingly acceptable around the world - can influence the way an entire region comes to think about sex and sexuality.

My (Big Gay) Story

I grew up in a small shrimping town on the coast of South Texas by the name of Port Isabel.



Now, as far as small-town Texas goes, things really don’t get much quainter or sleepier. Nonetheless, despite sixteen years of hunting, fishing, and high-school football, I was slowly dragged, more or less kicking and screaming, toward my homosexual destiny in an area where such a thing is a little less than kosher.

When, while living in Arizona, I'd finally conceded to the idea that I was gay, the transition was rough. Curiously though, the sleeping with men part seemed a rather trivial element. It was more the idea that in some way didn’t get to decide who I was anymore, that my life and destiny were in part to be scripted for me. The “truth” was that I was this other thing, this other person who belonged in a faraway city, superficial and vain, who I didn’t know and who had little or nothing to do with who I was.

Nonetheless, after a few months of reflection (as well as engagement in the sufficiently manly work of construction and carpentry) I was ready to go and seek out my people. I moved to LA in search of a ‘gay culture’ that would help make sense of my life only to find that... it didn’t exist. Nobody’s grown up acculturated to a universal gay society; they’re all just people, from different walks of life. And so, they give a little and take a little, and through this interaction create a new, shared understanding of what it ‘means’ to be who they are. Still, the factors that shape gay identity in the US are many, and the role of mass media is strong - displaying only a very narrow range of people, lifestyles, and ethnicities, and holding them to be representative of the whole of American society.

Feeling satisfied with my personal growth and dissatisfied with a world I increasingly felt to be co-opted by commercialism and niche-marketing schemes, I decided to put my love life on the back burner in favor of focusing on my studies. And so, I moved out to a little college in the mountains where I could study biology, go camping, and be myself...sort of.

It wasn’t until I became exposed to gay networks back home on the Texas-Mexican border, visiting my family in Chile, or studying abroad in Costa Rica that I saw firsthand how gay identities and communities can and are being formed in many ways outside of the mainstream social movement. Queer people all over the world are learning to not only reconcile their identities and values with that of national and international images and social movements, but learning to relate to each others' lives and struggles not simply in terms of a universal theme of escaping from their homeland to a rich, white, urban gay culture on the other side of the country (or the world), but through sharing what love, friendships, and family turmoil is like in their own context within their own communities.

Since then, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time involved in review of the literature on sexuality, identity formation, and social movements. This process, in addition to profoundly challenging the way I explore the underlying struggles of my life, has been a source of fascination and inquiry for me in it’s own right. Due, however, to a number of factors ranging from a lack of funding to the rapid and immediate nature of globalization, the literature exhibits a startling bias toward the experiences of the US and Western Europe (with a few notable exceptions), leaving much of the world’s modern sexual communities the subject of speculative discourse and generalizations.

It was in the interest of helping to bridge this gap (at least in the public eye) that I set out to develop this project.

About this Blog

In a rather dumbfounding event of (perhaps unjust) fortune, this last spring I became the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to engage in a study of the factors shaping sexual identity across the globe. The premise of my project is as follows:

Massive rural-urban migration in recent years has borne a wealth of new urban landscapes where local values meet a global way of life. As it becomes easier for same-sex persons to meet for sex and relationships, new queer communities are forming, influenced by their cultural background, individual histories, and an increasingly global gay community. In my Watson year I will investigate what it means to be a gay man in six major cities, what local and global factors have shaped this identity, and how these individuals have integrated it into their life stories. Through my research I hope to shed light on who these communities are, how they’re faring, and where they’d like to go. In a way, each of our individual histories only take on meaning through the lens of our greater story. By stimulating a dialogue between their experience and that of the west I hope to draw a more universal gay narrative, one that is inherently also my own.

Over the course of the next year, I’ll be traveling to South Korea, Vietnam, India, Turkey, South Africa, and Brazil to provide a face and a name to a few of these people and communities - to allow them to define themselves on their own terms, not merely as extensions of western stereotypes or human rights victims.

While I won't be publishing my research here, I created this blog to bring the topic of a gay and queer identities under scrutiny in the public eye, as well as to share my experiences, impressions and thoughts as I have them - because really, in addition to offering fascinating parcels of anthropological insight, life in and out of the gayborhood for a twenty-something foreigner is often funny, embarrassing, emotional, and entertaining.