Unpacking Providence's Queer Underbelly

 If there’s anything my experience in the queer underbelly of Providence revealed to me this semester, it’s that the sites of conflict embedded in the human experience become stark and in-your-face when boys, girls, and erotic desire are thrown into a hot space with thumping bass and strobe lights.  Understanding the way queers operate after dark in a smallish city like Providence sheds light on the social schisms that happen elsewhere in our nasty world.  

Which is why, even in the little capital city of the littlest state, there are quite a few places to be “queer” when the sun goes down.  Doing my project on the “queer” scene here in Providence was, admittedly, an oversized undertaking.  Not all queers are created equal.  The fact is, twinky gay boys and clunky leather barons don’t always wanna rub shoulders.  The girlz need their spots too.  So my attempt to hit up these identity hubs was certainly a challenge, but I’ll do my best to document some findings.

I entered these clubs as a participant, determined to document the way clubs operated and understand my own role as a white, twinky male in spaces that are racialized, gendered, and constructed around ideals of body image.  I came out of this project with an amplified knowledge of aspects of club culture I have suspected, plus a few surprises.  My experiences at Mirabar and other gay clubs in years past have equipped me with some understanding of the aesthetic that is celebrated in those spaces.  But I have never really thought about the music that undercuts clubbing, the variety of queer spaces available in a given city, and the spatial fragmentation that occurs within clubs along lines of race, class, age, gender and body type.   These are findings that became clear to me as I navigated three very distinct queer spaces over the semester.  I also feel that as a gay male, my understanding of Mirabar as a space and my comfort entering it led me to document it more thoroughly and with less hesitation.  My unfamiliarity with the bear scene and with fetish subcultures was in itself a site of knowledge; I can now say that I have cruised at a bear club (minimally), and hit up a fetish party.  Beyond that however, I have not developed the layers of understanding that come across as I analyze the dynamics at play at Mirabar; I feel that this imbalance, while inevitable considering my subject position, shines through in this ethnography post. 

In cities big enough to handle variety -- and Providence is one -- queerness is a fragmented ordeal whose boundaries correspond loosely with the clubs and bars available in the city.  I took on three very different models of the “queer” club space.  I frequented Mirabar over the last few months to document a boy-heavy dancefloor, rocked Fetish Night at Club Hell on a recent Wednesday, and spent a few minutes cruising around the Eagle with some big badd bearz.  

DISCLAIMER--->In this post, I’m using “queer” to describe any sexual identity that doesn’t fit squarely in the framework of normative sexualities.  I’m a fan of UrbanDictionary’s definition #5 (scroll down a little after the jump), which doesn’t place “queer” as the opposite of “straight” like UrbanDictionary’s definition #4.  Clubs in which non-normative sexual behavior like BDSM (Club Hell’s forte on Wednesday nights) is visibly performed and advertised are “queer” in the context of this essay, even if their participants may sometimes identify with a “straight” label as well.

Queer Identity and the Regulation of Sexual Desire

My first time ever stepping foot in Mirabar, a tight-muscled tight-jeaned alpha-twink greeted me with shotglasses filled with scarlet liquid I’m too young to drink.  “Welcome,” said his seven-and-a-half abdominal muscles, while the bulge in his boxer briefs whispered a salacious “Have fun tonight.”  

This guy looks like a Mirabar shotboy
n.d., n.a., <http://www.helloken.net/other/Cel/twink/twink%20(21).jpg>

The barboys who are hired at Mirabar symbolize the regulation of aesthetic desirability promoted at the club.  In Mirabar’s case, the muscular-blonde-twink aesthetic is celebrated both on and off the dancefloor, and this is the inglorious irony of queer nightlife.  Damien Ridge writes that, in the case of gay men, “they are not necessarily excluded from...the rituals around performing masculinity and displaying muscularly developed and fat reduced bodies are prized” (Ridge 2006: 507).  Social spaces dedicated to homosexual pursuits (among men and women alike) have long been in existence since at least the 1890’s, when saloons and dancehalls catered to otherwise invisible queer peoples (Mumford 1996:399); these spaces existed because more “mainstream” spaces were not inviting to homosexual lifestyles, and this trend has evolved into a modern-day queer scene that exists for many of the same reasons.  Yet despite the ethos of inclusion that drives the existence of these clubs, they are both socially and physically constructed to uphold aesthetic values.

Here’s a rough sketch of Mirabar’s geography with regards to race, body type, other characteristics.

 This is an especially daunting reality in smallish cities like Providence (pop <180,000), where those that identify squarely with a coherent queer demographic have access to one or two clubs each (skinny boyz flocking to Mirabar, thick boyz to the Eagle, girls to the Alleycat or Friday night at Club X and BDSM-junkies to Hell).  In Richard Parker’s ethnography of queer nightlife in Brazil, he notes that queer subcultures exist “to provide an alternative to traditional or dominant sexual cultures...because the provide a source of sexual freedom [and] suggest alternatives in a world that has been so powerfully structured around social distinction” (Parker 1999: 118).  But when new axes of desire, such as models of masculinity that favor bigger muscles at Mirabar or the privileging of what my Chicana-queer-womyn friend describes as “the white femme butch” at a lesbian nightspot in her native L.A., are inscribed into these subcultures, new “social distinctions” are produced, creating methods of exclusion from the fantasy-world that is the queer nightspot.

My conversation with Ash reveals a good amount of racialization that goes down in Clubland.    Providence’s positioning as a hub of the nation’s 37th largest metropolitan region  brings faces from a wide cross-section of cultural communities across Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts.  My time at Mirabar and Hell brought me in contact with a wide variety of people from distinct cultural backgrounds and locales.  So the use of white, muscular shotboys as ambassadors of a central gay aesthetic is a skewed representation of the folks who actively inhabit these spaces.  Understanding the role of race in a club reminds me of Maira's comparison of Desi club dynamics to a "caste system" that privileges slender light-skinned Desi women over darker skinned clubgoers.  I was reminded of this system of racialization in observing male structures of desirability at Mirabar (Maira 1999:39).

For example, Ash’s assertion that at Mirabar black men can often be rendered invisible is one I observed as a participant; apart from the corner of the club where most of the black and Latino men were clustered, I found that sexual activity, and the physical elevation of individuals on the elevated dancefloor, privileged men with bodies similar to the shotboys.  The performance of masculinity and the celebration of certain body types over others is an issue I’ve been stressing in my blog, and race is a very critical physical characteristic that helps construct the idea of “body type.”  Ash’s assertion that the wide variety of clubs in his native New York allows queers of color more opportunities to observe the celebration and acknowledgement of less whitewashed forms of desire highlights a broader concern: how can queer identity, or even gay identity, be packaged into an exemplary space?  In Providence, factors of population size and economics limit the capacity for queer nightlife.  So at the token institutions where queerness can be on display, there are evident divisions and conflicts in whose queerness deserves the spotlight.  When a club owner chooses to hire a shotboy as an ambassador to a queer aesthetic, and he pick a white male body to fill this role, this has a profound impact on both the club’s identity and the images associated with “queer” identity in a community.

For what it’s worth, my experience at Hell seemed like a less racially fragmented and weightest space.  Underlying the “fetish night” theme I observed was a certain affiliation with leather-bound and sex-toy-heavy aesthetics, but the race and heft of its participants seemed less divisive than that of Mirabar.  I attribute this quality to the way Hell sells the experience it offers: while the Eagle is unabashedly a haven for thick hairy men, and Mirabar openly places its shotboys on its [Facebook page] to bring the boyz downtown, Hell is organized less explicitly around gender and body type, and rather sells its queer experience based on fetish and kink to anyone who wants to celebrate their wildest desires.  For this reason, I did not encounter the same spatial segregation within the club, nor did I notice any quintessential body type chosen to represent the club.  

All of that said, the fashion and outrageousness of one’s presentation is extremely critical to how Hell separates itself from the gay venues I observed; there was a very clear privileging of leather wear and the vibe recalled the goth aesthetic that marked certain sections of my high school’s cafeteria.  Racially, the clubgoers were largely white, but there seemed to be much more integration between clubgoers of different racial backgrounds.

What Does This Have to Do With Music Yo

My experiences at Hell, Mirabar, and cruising outside the Eagle were sonically wildly different.  The moods conveyed in these spaces are simply not the same, and therefore they require distinct soundtracks.  

For example, bears that flock to the Eagle tend to follow what Hennen dubs a “back-to nature masculinity...and escape from the perceived feminizing forces of civilization” (Hennen 29) that manifests itself in a much less dance-focused atmosphere than Mirabar or Hell.  The Eagle is a man cave.  It’s a watering hole, with TV screens playing football games and men cruising outside.  There are no strobe lights and absolutely no disco blasting out of the speakers.  I never got a chance to enter the bar, but I definitely heard Brad Paisley’s song “Alcohol” from the alleyway outside the club door.  Eagle’s music is a soundtrack to drinking and manliness, and the soundtrack of spots like the Eagle seem to construct lifestyles of hypermasculinity and male camaraderie that, within these spaces, can swiftly turn into erotic encounters (Hennen 43).

In contrast, Mirabar is a dance club.  It is built to sustain dancing on the ground floor, with a panopticon-bar on the second floor in which clubgoers can observe the scene that unfolds below them.  The entire experience is constructed around dancing, and the remixed and disco-fied sounds of Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and other Top 40 bigshots predominate on the speaker.  Alice Echols writes that a “gay glitterball culture” emerged in the mid-70’s as the popularity of disco covers by Donna Summers, Diana Ross, and other R&B legends coincided with the visibility of gay men in New York City and Los Angeles nightlife (Echols 128, 134).  The “danceability” of music is necessary for any dance-based venue, but at gay clubs like Mirabar the historic association of certain sonic qualities -- fast-paced thumping bass, female lead vocalists, lyrical constructions of sexual fantasy and illicit love -- with gay male lifestyles are all the more relevant to these clubs’ existence.  In my three visits to Mirabar this year I have heard at least three versions of Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World” and Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” but DJ’s also tend to spin old-school dance club faves like Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”.

The scene at Club Hell was soundtracked to a lot of thumping house music and less widely recognizable remixes than was the case at Mirabar.  Less of the clubgoers seemed to flock to Hell to dance (many were there to perform a black-clad, leather-bound aesthetic but didn’t come to shake their bodies).  That said, the bumping bass and fast-paced beats that reverberate there are certainly conducive to the casual dance atmosphere on display on the fetish-party interwebz.  

The Point

My first gay club adventure was at age 18, in Ferndale, Michigan.  It was there that I discovered the glory of basking in a sea of testosterone and dancing my heart away amidst the almost caricatured ambassadors of “male beauty” that had surrounded me throughout my coming-out stage. 

But only through fieldwork, blog posts, interviews, and most importantly conversations with queer friends and colleagues throughout my time at Brown that I have been able to think critically about how my own perceptions of beauty have been shaped by the spaces I enter and the imagery those spaces celebrate.  In keeping focus with the theme of my project, I’ll end on a strictly local and strictly resigned note: The queer scene in Providence is a microcosm of the fragmented state of our world, where divisions, -isms, and axes of exclusion turn safe spaces into dangerous ones.

Word Count: 2,222.

Works Cited

Echols, Alice.  Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture.  New York: W.W. Norton and 

         Company, 2010.

Hennen, Peter.  "Bear Bodies, Bear Masculinities: Recuperation, Resistance, or Retreat?"  Gender and Society (19.1), February 2005.

Maira, Sunaina.  "Identity Dub: The Paradoxes of an Indian American Youth."  Cultural Anthropology (14.1), 1999.

Mumford, Kevin.  "Homosex Changes: Race, Geography and the Emergence of the Gay." American Quarterly (48.3), 1996.

Parker, Richard.  Beneath the Equator.  New York: Routledge, 1999.

Ridge, Damien.  "Remaking the Masculine Self and Coping in the World of the 'Gay Scene.'"  Culture, Health & Sexuality (8.6), November-December 2006.