(Posted Sept. 13, updated Sept 16). This post tracked early responses to to Wang and Kosinski’s preprint paper that claimed their deep neural network’s ability to identify gay faces was evidence of the prenatal hormone theory of homosexuality, and exposed heretofore unknown threats to LGBTQ people in authoritarian regimes. My Sept. 9 blog post critiquing … More Tracking Wang and Kosinski’s AI Gayface Controversy

I’m giving this presentation at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference. It’s below. By the way, I don’t mean anything bad by the word provincial. I grew up provincial and I again live in the provinces, and I like it that way! The abstract is as follows: Our understandings of changes in gay bars are … More Centering Provincial Gay Bars

Guest post by Tory Sparks Stop Blaming Millennials for Killing Gay Bars: Generational Absolutism in the Gay Community I was born in 1994. If you’d like to stop reading now because of that, there’s nothing I can do about that except to ask you to consider: why do you want to stop reading? If you’re … More Guest post: Stop Blaming Millennials For Killing gay Bars

Northwest Arkansas contains all the contrasts and contradictions of other small city gay bars, isolated from gay neighborhoods but close to American landmarks. Fort Smith and Fayetteville are one hour apart, but their two gay clubs are entwined by more than their relative proximity in northwest Arkansas, home of Walmart’s international headquarters and the tiny, … More Road Notes 6: Our Arkansas in Three Gay Bars, by Tory and Greggor

  A short tally of what we accomplished so far this summer on the Who Needs Gay Bars Summer Tour: 5500 miles driven 53 gay bars visited, including: 31 formal interviews with bar owners or managers, 21 of whom ran outpost bars more than an hour from the next gay bar 17 ethnographic visits without … More Back home, for now

In my imagination, Texas has always been 100% Republican, 100% Christian, 100% cowboy. When I decided to come to Texas on this trip, I told myself: I can handle anything, as long as it’s for research. When I’m a researcher, I am detached—I’m not really there, I am an observer, and everything is interesting because … More Guest Post: Surpassing Tex-pectations by Tory Sparks

​My short piece on my favorite lost gay bars, A Man’s World / Tool Shed / Crossover, made The Cleveland Scene’s list of the best writing from and about Northeast Ohio from 2016.  The Editor, Vince Grzegorek, called it “An insightful and at times scathing look at the branding experiment turned neighborhood built, as the author … More I Made the List! “The Best Writing From and About Northeast Ohio From 2016”

Attending ILiADs this week to work on http://onprostitution.oberlincollegelibrary.org  with my Oberlin College colleagues Libby Murphy and Meghan Mitchell.