Author: Greggor Mattson

• October 17, 2018

  Public essays on gay bars

  To learn more about my research project Who Needs Gay Bars?, I’ve written the following pieces of public scholarship which are available at the links below: 2018. with Tory Sparks OC’17. “‘We Have a Gay Bar Here.’ You Don’t Need a Coast to be Cosmopolitan,” in Red State Blues: Stories from Midwestern Life on the…
• August 2, 2018

  The poignant queer art of gentrification

  The piece I wrote for Belt Magazine about the loss of my favorite gay bar has now been used by two artists to explore gentrification in Cleveland’s Hingetown neighborhood. Danny Volk interviewed me for his piece called Cruising, which used smartphones’ geolocating technology to sonically take listeners back to earlier versions of the neighborhood. It’s…
• May 24, 2018

  Article: Gaydar and the fallacy of decontextualized measurement

  This freely available article, with Andrew Gelman and Daniel Simpson, came grew out of a blog post of mine that went viral when reposted by Scatterplot. “Recent media coverage of studies about “gaydar,” the supposed ability to detect another’s sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the…
• May 22, 2018

  Gay bar book interviews 2018

  (updated July 30th) This summer, my research assistant Jack Spector Bishop and I are completing the interviews for my book on gay bars. I just completed a road trip through New England, bringing my total to 106 interviewees in 33 states. If you or someone you love owns or manages a gay bar in WA,…
• April 6, 2018

  Article: “Weaponization”: The Metaphor That Rejects Politics

  N.B.: This post is now published at Metaphor and Symbol. The scandal about Cambridge Analytica’s theft of Facebook data for political marketing is often described as the “weaponization of social media.” On March 25, 2018, Meet the Press‘ Chuck Todd asked Senator Mark Warner if Steve Bannon’s company was designed “to weaponize something that we weren’t…
• February 23, 2018

  Article: Small City Gay Bars, Big City Urbanism

  N.B. This piece became a peer-reviewed journal article in 2020, available here); it was City & Community’s fourth most downloaded article of 2021. Just presented at the Eastern Sociological Society in the Small Cities miniconference. The slides for my presentation are here. They detail the 9 ways that small city gay bars are different from…
• January 5, 2018

  Interview: We Say Goodbye To Bounce Nightclub Hinge Lounge

  Interview with the irrepressible Ken Schneck for Cleveland Magazine
• January 1, 2018

  Gay bar book project update

  (updated Feb 17, 2018) Here’s what we think we know: Gay bars are disappearing and everybody already knows why. Gentrification is pushing them out of the neighborhoods they made hip, LGBT social acceptance has liberated their patrons to visit any venue they choose, and social media dating has eliminated their social function. Gay bars thus…
• December 20, 2017

  Gay bars in the Pacific Northwest

  Home for the holidays, time for a few more interviews. Some summary stats calculated from the Damron Guides (regular caveats apply): The Portland area has the same number bar in 2017 than it did in 1997, meaning the city has bucked the national trend of losing  24% of its gay bars (there was one more…
• November 16, 2017

  Teaching Weinstein, Spacey, Sexual Assault, and New Skirmishes in Old Sex Wars

  I’m teaching my sociology of sexuality class this semester. I often leave a gap in the syllabus for students to pick a topic that hasn’t been addressed. It helps me learn new things from them, respond to current events, and fill in the topical gaps for a class that students’ in which students are often…