When the Roost closed its doors at the end of 2007, no one bar in town took its place. A handful of existing and new bars instead began catering to specific groups of gay people—Boots has become mostly for older guys and bears, Buddys for twinks, Prism for ladies and Play has specific nights for various groups (jocks, fetish, etc).
Around the same time I noticed this bar situation I came across the term “reification” in my comparative literature course, and it seemed to resonate with what has gone on in gay culture generally and helps to explain why gay bars in the city are now catering to specific lifestyles rather than to gay people in general.
Reification, according to theorist Fredric Jamerson, is “the way in which under capitalism, older traditional forms of human activity are reorganized and analytically fragmented and reconstructed according to models of efficiency.” The Marxist thinker Ernest Mandel points to detective novels as an example of how a human activity, in this case death, has been reframed to no longer be something that just happens but something that needs to be solved, and along the way commodified.
In the class I couldn’t help but think that in the last 40 years—with gay bars as just one example—homosexuality has become reified. No longer does “gay” refer only to forms of human activity (homosexual sex), it has been reorganized and constructed to describe a type of lifestyle. When we say it is a gay magazine or a gay TV show, it is not because the magazine or TV show depict same-sex sex, but rather because it showcases a lifestyle designed to be desirable to gay people. A good example of this is the fact that for the most part many people still don’t know what lesbians do in bed, but ask a random sampling of individuals to describe what a lesbian looks like or what a lesbian’s hobbies might be and you likely hear descriptions that sound like they came from The L Word’s central casting office.
In many ways the advertising of a gay lifestyle has been great. For some people it has been a lifesaver to see gays on TV, letting them know that gay people do exist. But this reconfiguring way to look at homosexuality has also meant that gay people have shifted from being a minority group to being a marketing demographic.
Instead of being seen as a group working towards equality, gays are seen as being good for business. We see this manifested in urbanist Richard Florida’s idea that gays are good (read: profitable) for cities, and in the efforts of advertisers to woo the “pink dollar,” a term that refers to the buying power of gay people. (Mirroring mainstream culture, the majority of the gay buying power is in the hands of men—how else do explain Cher’s once-never-ending farewell tour and the fact that it was Will and Grace not Jill and Glenn.)
The move towards focusing on gay as a buyable lifestyle has, of course, intertwined sexual orientation and class. If gay is understood as a lifestyle rather than an orientation then it becomes hard to imagine someone as a sexual minority if they don’t fit into the marketplace’s definition of being gay. And it’s even more difficult to imagine that someone is a victim of homophobia if you don’t recognize them as gay. This is why it may be easy to support your gay male neighbour as they tell you about their homonegative boss but it’s more difficult to imagine that it is systemic homophobia that has lead to a homeless bisexual youth asking you for money.
In the end, in order to gain legitimacy in western culture—and along with it all the rights and freedoms enjoyed by the majority—you must be part of the marketplace. As the marketplace becomes more competitive you must diversify. In the wake of the Roost’s final night it was no longer commercially viable just to serve beer to gays, you had to serve beer to specific kinds of gays.
Ernest Mandel’s major criticism of reification is the lack of room it makes for complexity. Just think of the detective novel again: everything in the end has to be black and white. Every who-done-it must eventually be seen as an open-and-shut case. But everyone knows that gay is a rainbow, or as filmmaker Derek Jarman said, “Sexuality is as wide as the sea.”
So why would we want to go to bars where we’re all the same? It makes no sense to me, but maybe I just miss the Roost. Or maybe I just don’t understand reification.
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