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"Gay bars had been closing by the hundreds in recent decades, even before another global pandemic brought nightlife to its knees. The story goes that increasing mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ people, plus dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, have rendered these spaces obsolete. Beyond that, rampant gentrification in big cities has pushed gay bars out of the neighborhoods they helped make hip. Greggor Mattson's titular question Who Needs Gay Bars? plays on these narratives, accepting that the answer for some might be: maybe nobody. And yet... Inspired by the closing of his own favorite watering hole, Greggor Mattson embarked on a journey across and around the country to paint a much more complex picture of the cultural significance of these spaces. While they may no longer be the only places for LGBTQ patrons to openly socialize, he finds that their value has evolved--they are historical archives, safe spaces, community centers, and places of celebration, entertainment, and discovery. The question that frames this story is not asking whether these spaces are needed, but for whom, earnestly exploring the diversity of folks and purposes they serve today. Loosely informed by the Damron Guide, that Green Book of gay travel, Mattson logged 10,000 miles across 39 states, from the "big four" gay cities, to the flyover country where he lives, to all corners of the United States. Mattson finds one theme running through his journey: that of ambivalence. The story of gay bars is not unified or linear because they are as diverse as the country. Colorful characters, gripping experiences, and failing or thriving bars are featured in the chapters of these book and through them, the underlying spectrum of many different Americas is brought to life--POC, white, trans, cis, as well as past, present, and future"--

The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform traces case studies of four European Union countries to reveal the way anxieties over globalization translates into policies to recognize sex workers in some countries, punish prostitutes' clients in others, and protect victims of human trafficking in them all

The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform traces case studies of four European Union countries to reveal the way anxieties over globalization translates into policies to recognize sex workers in some countries, punish prostitutes' clients in others, and protect victims of human trafficking in them all.

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 classes may be described as "wobbly," responding to outside events and occasionally tipping over. Wobbly classes present an opportunity, however, to meet students where they are while achieving broader course and learning objectives. This teaching note presents a curricular innovation, Beyond the Book (BtB). BtB directs students to articulate a personal learning goal and groups students into collaborative teams to peer teach peer-reviewed scholarship on common themes in scaffolded sessions. This framework allows students to develop their personal learning goals in the context of shared course materials, fosters collaboration and trust, develops their research and presentation skills, and exposes learners to a broad range of research relevant to them.

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four "great cities." This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small–city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small–city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red–state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small–city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big–city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of "nation-state science" to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the "Lapps" (today's Sámi/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.

This essay assesses the legacy of urban ethnography's (UE) early engagement with the "saloon problem." Early sociologists (1880–1915) intervened in the national debate on alcohol on the basis of their long–term, in–depth understanding of the urban poor. Ethnographers highlighted the role of the saloon as a haven for maintaining social ties while socializing immigrants to American norms. Instead of prohibition or temperance, sociologists advocated replacing the saloon's positive functions with more democratic institutions, especially an egalitarian domestic sphere. This position was shared by both academic and settlement house sociologists whose saloon investigations offer a coherent sociological research paradigm that antedates the Chicago School. The activism of early sociologists exemplifies the characteristics of Michael Burawoy's recent call for public sociology. Yet the early sociologists failed to redeem the saloon amongst Progressives, who increasingly rallied around the National Anti–Saloon League and constitutional Prohibition. By only investigating alcohol in its public manifestations, sociologists failed to challenge the way the social problem was framed and may even have contributed to the stigmatization of the saloon. This voyeuristic opportunism has plagued the American tradition of urban ethnography, the ineffective legacy of which poses a challenge to a contemporary revival of public sociology.