Category: My research

January 28, 2023

Gay bar writings

Since 2015 I have been researching and writing on the role of gay bars in urban processes including gentrification, LGBTQ+ community development, and social inequality. This forms the basis of my forthcoming book with Redwood Press, Who Needs Gay Bars? It is based on interviews with more than 130 gay bar owners and managers, site…
November 27, 2022

Club Q

From a piece I wrote for Contexts in the wake of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs: The public only takes note of gay bars when something bad happens. It makes being a gay bar expert utterly depressing. I feel an obligation to share my knowledge, but I also feel like a…
June 1, 2022

The impact of lesbian bar ownership on USA lesbian bar geographies: all-gender/straight-integrated LGBTQ places by design

One longstanding explanation for the scarcity of lesbian bars in the United States is the lack of women’s ownership of durable spaces. This study interviewed 15 women owners of lesbian and LGBTQ bars to understand how they conceptualize the queer social spaces they control. Whether they owned a lesbian bar in a big city with…
April 29, 2022

New data: gay bars and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

This report is currently undergoing peer review but the preprint with data table is freely available at SocArxiv. Abstract: “What was the impact on gay bars of COVID-19 public closure orders? Gay bars were already quite vulnerable, retaining only 63.4% of their business listings from 2007 to 2019. Historic data from printed business guides were…
April 13, 2022

Chapter: The changing role of gay bars in American LGBTQ+ life

In Introducing the New Sexuality Studies 4th Edition, released June 2022. “Gay bars are iconic in part because they are the most common and accessible LGBTQ+ places, but they are in decline. About one third of gay bars closed in the 2010s, but new ones continued to open to serve their communities as one of…
July 13, 2021

Article: Anticipated Stigma and Self-Racialization: From Alcohol Flush Reaction to Panethnic Asian Glow.

Published with Alexandra Hamada OC ‘13, Karl Orozco OC ‘13, and Han Guel Jung OC ‘14 in Deviant Behavior. These former students formulated the research question and executed the research while taking my SOCI 428: Alcohol and Culture seminar; I gave an assist in the framing and writeup. Although the biomedical processes of the alcohol…
March 15, 2021

Chapter: Update to “Style and the Value of Gay Nightlife: Homonormative Placemaking in San Francisco”

I updated my 2015 piece in Urban Studies for Christopher T. Connor and Daniel Okamura’s edited volume, The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle. “Reductionist conceptions of gay nightlife and the neighbourhoods they anchor have obscured their diversity amid claims of gentrification or displacement. The divergent trajectories of San Francisco’s three gay bar districts…
February 23, 2021

Article: Responding to Wobbly Classrooms through Scaffolded, Peer-Led, Small-Group Presentations of Personal Learning Goals: The Beyond the Book Tool

This article in Teaching Sociology discusses a pedagogical technique I developed while teaching my SOCI/GSFS 203: Sociology of Sexuality. Teaching topics that implicate student identities, traumas, and/or activism is challenging because students often come with very personal attachments to curricular and extracurricular topics, such as in courses on sexualities, race, gender, and/or social movements. These…
February 19, 2020

Book review of The Gay Marriage Generation by Peter Hart-Brinson

for Contemporary Sociology
February 14, 2020

Book review of How Places Make Us by Japonica Brown-Saracino

for the European Journal of Sociology