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Negotiating Gender & Sexuality in a Country-Western
Gay Bar
Gay bars, specifically designed to wall out straights, remain a central
social institution and leisure context for a number of gay men. Informed
by feminist theory and critiques of masculinity, this ethnographic study
conducted by Dr. Corey Johnson of California State University, Long Beach
focuses on how gay men come to understand and negotiate the meaning of
masculinity in a country-western gay bar and is driven by the following
questions: 1) How does this gay bar serve as a leisure context for its
gay male patrons? 2) How do gay men in this bar negotiate hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic gendered practices? 3) What structures exist to facilitate
and/or prohibit gendered practices in this gay bar? Using participant
observation as his primary method of data collection, supplemented with
semi-structured interviews and archival analysis, Dr. Johnson continues
to document the bar’s relationship to the community and the social
practices that reveal how gay men negotiate their gender and sexuality
in a country-western gay bar.
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