Category: My research

• February 14, 2020

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

  for the European Journal of Sociology
• December 18, 2019

  Article: Are gay bars closing? Some data.

  My undergraduate research assistants and I built a dataset to try to figure out if, where, and why gay bars are closing. The first piece is short, snappy, and open access on Socius. It’s less easy to click to, but the piece has a lengthy methodological appendix that contains the data table and lots of…
• 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…
• 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…
• June 10, 2017

  Learning from Pulse, Listening to Latinx Queers

  [This piece is an excerpt from the book I’m writing on changes in gay bars–written as it was for print media, it has a works cited rather than hyperlinks.] In 2016, two gay bars became national monuments, one in the early hours of June the 12th in Orlando, Florida. The way we learned of the…
• October 1, 2016

  Chapter: #aftermarriage Systemic violence and pulse; Lesbian Bars, Gay Places, Queer Futures?

  N.B. The panel presentation Systemic Violence: Reflections on the Pulse nightlife massacre became a chapter in After Marriage. Presented at the CLAGS After Marriage conference today in NYC on a panel about Pulse and about Lesbian Bars, Queer Futures. My slideshow is here.
• September 17, 2016

  Digital project: Mapping lost lesbian bars, 2006-2016

  I just finished the first draft of a map of all lesbian bars in the U.S. and Canada that closed from 2006 until now. It may not be the most depressing map of the 21st century, but it is seriously sobering: The  Map depicts 93 100 addresses (as of 9/27/2016) that no longer are lesbian…
• April 4, 2016

  Article: Parenting transgender children in PFLAG

  Published with Taylor L. Field in The Journal of GLBT Family Studies. Parents of transgender children (N=14) recounted four ways in which their parenting experiences were more difficult and isolating than those of other parents of a national GLBT support organization: the physical changes their children undergo, the lack of media representations of transgender lives,…
• December 25, 2015

  Chapter: Sociologies of (in)security

  This chapter was written with Lisa Stampnitzky for the edited volume by Philippe Bourbeau. Preprint available here. “In contrast to other disciplines, “security” has not traditionally been a central focus of sociological research. This is not to say that sociologists have not studied problems, sites, interactions, and discourses that are relevant to what has elsewhere…