A Social Geography of Sex PDF

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A Social Geography of Sex

a
Robert C. Philen PhD
a
Anthropology , University of West Florida , USA
Published online: 05 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Robert C. Philen PhD (2006) A Social Geography of Sex, Journal of Homosexuality,
50:4, 31-48, DOI: 10.1300/J082v50n04_02
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A Social Geography of Sex:
Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSMs)
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 08:26 22 December 2014
and Gay Bars on the U.S./Mexican Border

Robert C. Philen, PhD
University of West Florida
ABSTRACT. In discussions of male homosexuality in Hispanic/Latin

American and Anglo/North American contexts, ethnicity is often af-
forded a key role in structuring sexual identity, with a distinction being
made between sexual role patterning (Hispanic, Latin American) and
sexual object choice patterning (Anglo, North American). I argue in-
stead that the key factor in shaping distinct patterns of sexual identity
among Men who have Sex with Men (MSMs), within the broad though
still circumscribed comparative context of Latin American and North
America, is the role of particular sites, especially gay bars, in producing
gay identity and community. [Article copies available for a fee from The
Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:
<docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>
© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Gay bars, gay identity, machismo, ethnicity, U.S.-

Mexican Border, El Paso, Juarez, sex work, sex cruise scenes
Robert C. Philen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University

of West Florida. Correspondence may be addressed: Department of Anthropology,
University of West Florida, 11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL 32514.
The author would like to acknowledge the Mario Einaudi Center for International
Studies and the Program for Gender and Global Change at Cornell University for their
role in funding his research.
Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 50(4) 2006
Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JH
© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J082v50n04_02 31
32 JOURNAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY
From the summer of 1998 to the summer of 1999, I conducted

ethnographic field research along the U.S./Mexican border in the urban
area of El Paso/Juarez, as well as in nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico,
examining HIV prevention efforts, especially those directed toward Men
who have Sex with Men (MSMs). In my research, I found two broadly
defined patterns of sexual identity amongst MSMs, one primarily object
choice defined, typically framed as gay identity, in which sexual identity
was defined in terms of gender of sexual partners, and the other primarily
sexual role defined, with males who played, or at least claimed to play,
the “active” inserting sexual role generally not gay identified, and males
who played, or again claimed to always play, the “passive” inserted
sexual role identifying variously as gay, feminine, and/or transgender.
These two patterns are typically presented in the ethnographic and
HIV prevention literature as Anglo/North American (the object choice
pattern) or as Latino/Latin American (the sexual role pattern) (see
Almaguer, 1991; Alonso and Koreck, 1999; Carrier, 1980, 1985, 1995;
Carrier and Magaña,1992; García, et al., 1991; Hernandez, et al., 1992;
Kilmartin, 2000; Lancaster, 1988, 1992; Leiner, 1994; Lumsden, 1991;
Magaña and Carrier, 1991; Van Druten, Van Griensven, and Hendriks,
1992; Wiley and Kerschkorn, 1989). The HIV prevention practitioners I
worked closely with in El Paso did recognize the presence of both Anglo
and Hispanic gay-identified men, but with non-gay-identified MSMs, a
distinction was commonly made on the basis of ethnicity, where Hispanic
men were conceptualized as not gay identifying because of their ethnicity
and a sexual role pattern and Anglo men were conceptualized as closeted
gay men, i.e., as men whose sexual orientation was defined by object
choice but who could not come to terms with their sexuality.
In my field research, however, what I found was not a pattern mapped
onto ethnicity, but instead patterns of sexual identity linked primarily to
particular types of sites associated with MSMs, such as gay bars, sex
cruise scenes, or sex work scenes, alongside additional factors such as
socioeconomic class (which played some role, though not a determining
one, in shaping which men were regularly at which types of sites) and
broad patterns of urban and economic development (which underlay the
distribution of particular types of sites, especially gay bars).
MACHISMO, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY
In the anthropological literature, machismo plays a key role in the

discussion of Latin American constructions of sexuality. The qualities
Robert C. Philen 33
associated with machismo, such as dominance, assertiveness, or ag-

gression are mapped onto sexuality, such that the penetrating sexual
role is constructed as dominating and masculine, and the penetrated
sexual role is constructed as subordinated and feminine. This yields a
difference in constructions of sexuality between Latin America and

North America, Hispanic and Anglo, with a Hispanic/Latin American
pattern based on sexual role, where only the penetrated, “feminine”
partner is potentially stigmatized as homosexual and the “masculine”
partner is not considered homosexual at all, and an Anglo/North Ameri-
can pattern based on sexual object choice, where MSMs, regardless of
sexual role, are equally considered homosexual and potentially stigma-
tized as such (see especially Almaguer, 1991; Carrier, 1995; Carrier and
Magaña, 1992; Lancaster, 1988, 1992; Magaña and Carrier, 1991).
While in broad strokes, largely having here to do, I think, with socio-
economic development and urbanization, it may be true that sexual
object choice is generally the more important factor constructing sexu-
ality in North America and sexual role the more important in Latin
America, I have long been somewhat skeptical of the distinctiveness
of the patterns as drawn in the literature. Growing up in a semi-rural,
working-class context in the U.S. Southeast, though sexual object
choice was clearly the more important factor in defining sexuality,
I also encountered MSMs who did not identify as gay, not because of
being closeted in the normal sense of being incapable of coming to
terms with being gay, but because of the sexual role they claimed to
play. Upon first coming out to friends while in my teens, I also fre-
quently encountered as much or more concern over what sexual role
I played than with my being gay, with questions such as, “You don’t take
it up the ass, do you?” In short, the supposed Latin American pattern co-
mes as close as, though no closer than, the supposed North American
pattern to describing my experience of how sexuality is constructed. It
is important that where I encountered this growing up, and have sub-
sequently encountered it in other parts of the U.S., it was related to,
though not to say determined by, the urban and socioeconomic con-
texts: that is, it was a semi-rural, southeastern, working-class context.
As I discuss later in the article, gay bars in particular are sites of pro-
duction of gay identity and community, and given the historical under-
development of the U.S. Southeast, the specifically working-class
context, the relevance of which to gay identity will be elaborated below,
and the semi-rural setting, these sites were not immediately available
in the environs in which I grew up.
There are other things which make me question the status of these
patterns as distinct, that is, as two distinct patterns rather than as a matter
of emphasis between two important factors within a broader pattern.
First, though secondary, sexual role is clearly very important in defining
gay identity throughout North America, seen with the importance of cate-
gories like “top” and “bottom” in classifying gay-identified men amongst
themselves. Second, if again secondarily, sexual object choice is clearly
important in Latin America. There is a burgeoning gay community in
Mexico’s larger cities, such as Guadalajara and Mexico City (see Carrier,
1995). Further, with non-gay identifying MSMs who play “masculine”
sexual roles, a number of sources mention the non-stigmatization of their
homosexual behavior alongside sex with women, but nowhere in the lit-
erature have I encountered an explicit statement that a pure male sexual
object choice would still be regarded as normal and unstigmatized,
though that should be the case if only sexual role matters. Though not
writing of a Latin American context, Vincent Crapanzano does indicate
that in Morocco, males who play the active role, but do not also have in-
tercourse with women, are looked down upon (Crapanzano, 1980: 110).
As I examined the constitution of male homosexual behavior and
identities at my field site, a primary question had to do with the exis-
tence of different patterns of sexuality, and just as importantly, with the
extent to which such differences corresponded not only to ethnicity but
also to particular factors such as socioeconomic class, distribution of
wealth and urban size, as well as with the combined relevance of these
factors in determining the presence, absence, and relative importance
of gay bars and other types of MSM sites.
PLACES AND PATTERNS OF SEXUALITY, IDENTITY,

AND HIV PREVENTION KNOWLEDGE
There were three main, sometimes overlapping, types of MSM

settings which I regularly encountered during my field research work-
ing alongside HIV prevention practitioners: bars, sex cruise scenes, and
sex work scenes. I also encountered gay-oriented social and/or support
groups, but they are not discussed here, both because they involved a
relatively small number of MSMs and because they self-selected for
already gay-identified men, and hence say little about the relationship
between certain types of sites and the production of sexual identity. As
stated above, both sexual object choice and sexual role patterns of MSM
sexual identity were present, but they were differentially associated
Robert C. Philen 35
with particular MSM sites: sexual object choice patterning (especially

in the form of gay identity) in association with four bars identified
locally as gay bars; and sexual role patterning more associated with sex
cruise scenes and sex work scenes.
THE GAY BARS
There were six bars in El Paso which were associated with MSMs.
Four of these were locally identified as gay bars: the Office, the Shaft,
Numbers, and the UKnowIt. (These names, as with all proper names in
this essay, are pseudonyms.) The clientele of these bars were primarily
gay-identified men and lesbian or gay-identified women. Two other
bars to be discussed in the section below, the Tiki and the Cabana, were
associated with a transgender sex work scene. To my knowledge none
of the regular clientele of these bars, sex workers or sex workers’ cus-
tomers, was gay identified.
The Office was a large, two-story dance club, while the other bars,
including the Tiki and Cabana, were much smaller, and not as primarily
dance-oriented in social activity. In fact, only at the Shaft was dancing a
regular and important bar activity. The Shaft, though much smaller than
the Office, was the most similar to the Office in terms of music–primarily
English-language dance music–and overlap of regular customers, while
Numbers and the UKnowIt offered very different music, classic rock at
Numbers and primarily Spanish-language Tejano at the UKnowIt, and
had a much less overlapping clientele base with the Office.
At the Office, the Shaft, and Numbers, the clientele was mixed in
terms of ethnicity, though a majority of customers were always His-
panic. In my experience at least, this also roughly mirrored the popula-
tion of El Paso–approximately 3/4 Hispanic, roughly 1/4 Anglo, plus
a few African-American or Asian-American customers. In contrast,
with one exception, any time I was ever at the UKnowIt, I was always
the only Anglo at that bar.1 Further, on occasion I heard the UKnowIt
referred to in a derogatory fashion as a “Mexican” bar. That said, the
primary differences between the UKnowIt and the other gay bars didn’t
have anything to do with sexual identity per se, but with the ethnicity of
clientele, the music played at the bar, and the greater use of Spanish for
conversation at the UKnowIt, which is to say that sexual identity and
ethnicity and factors associated with it were independent variables.
With all the MSM bars, the busiest nights were Thursday through
Sunday, which were the only nights that the Office was open. Within
this, Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest nights of all. Other
evenings, there would usually only be a handful of people at any given
bar at any given point in the evening. On Fridays and Saturdays, the
Shaft, Numbers, and UKnowIt would be very crowded and busy rela-
tively early, around 9 or 10 p.m., whereas the Office would not begin to
get busy until at least 11 p.m., and wouldn’t reach peak levels of busy-
ness until around midnight, full of people dancing well into the morn-
ing, even after last call at 2 a.m. Corresponding to the Office beginning
to get crowded around 11 p.m., the other three gay bars would gradually
get less busy as customers at these bars gradually filtered over to the
Office. This was especially the case with the Shaft, which was often vir-
tually deserted after midnight, whereas the UKnowIt and Numbers
would simply become a little less busy. Again, these two bars were
much less similar to the Office in terms of things like music being
played, or prominence of dancing as a main bar activity, so there were
plenty of people who liked one of these bars who didn’t care for the Of-
fice, or simply preferred one of these two. Of course, not everyone at the
Office late on Fridays and Saturdays came over from one of the other
three gay bars. Many people only went to the Office, and the Office also
attracted many heterosexually identified men and women who went
there because it was one of the best dance clubs in town and was gener-
ally open later than other clubs. The Tiki and the Cabana, attracting a
quite different clientele from the gay clubs, as will be discussed mo-
mentarily, were largely unaffected by the cycles of movement between
different clubs and were simply much more busy on Fridays and
Saturdays than on other nights of the week.
In addition to being of interest in terms of clientele and their identities,
the bars are also of interest in terms of social function. While HIV
prevention workers characterized all six as being frequented by MSMs,
there is at first glance an obvious distinction between the bars in the
social functioning of the bars. As discussed above, the Tiki and Cabana
were not often frequented by gay-identified MSMs, whereas the other
four were frequented primarily by gay-identified men and gay and/or
lesbian-identified women. The Tiki and Cabana functioned primarily as
a transgender sex work scene, and this will be discussed below with
other MSM sex work and sex cruise scenes, while the four gay bars
served several different social functions.
A number of activities were important in the social milieu of the gay
bars, that is, the Office, Numbers, the UKnowIt, and the Shaft, includ-
ing cruising, that is, searching for sexual partners; dancing; chatting and
joking; and drinking; with these activities also done in any possible
Robert C. Philen 37
combination with one another. Cruising, while an important element of

the social milieu, was not the predominant activity in bars in El Paso. As
Kenneth Read (1980) has pointed out, there are different types of gay bars
when it comes to dominant activity, with the extremes referred to by him
as “cruise bars” and “home territories.” With cruise bars, the primary ac-
tivity is, appropriately enough, cruising, where the closest equivalent in
El Paso were not bars, but the sex cruise scenes discussed below. With
home territories, the main activity is conversation and relaxation with
friends, and cruising is often looked down upon. Read goes on to say that
most gay bars lie somewhere in between these two extremes, with some
of the people present cruising at any point, but on any given night, most
people present not doing so. I would add that it is mostly with larger cities
that the full range of gay bars can be seen, and all four of El Paso’s gay
bars were somewhere in between. Though cruising may not have been the
predominant activity at any time, it was one important activity, especially
on weekend evenings, and sex was an important part of the milieu in the
form of sexual innuendo and joking in conversation. Sexual innuendo
and joking were also very much a part of the social atmosphere at the
Southwest AIDS Committee (SWAC), an important local AIDS service
organization, and something which helped produce a sense of connection
of that facility with the gay community, and in the production of SWAC
as gay space, if not just gay space. While this could work hand in hand
with flirtation and/or cruising, it was also part of normal conversation, as
joking amongst friends, as gossip about friends or acquaintances, or sim-
ply as conversation filler in the way that people on the street might talk
about the weather, though conversational style and topic changed through
the week as well, as discussed below.
The relative importance of these different activities changed through
the week, as did the bar population, where one pattern could be discer-
ned for weekends, specifically Friday and Saturday nights, and a second
pattern for Monday through Wednesday, with Thursday and Sunday
serving as transitional periods. On weekends, again, there were far more
people in the bars, with several hundred people at the Office during
peak business hours, and generally around 75 or 100 people during peak
weekend hours for each of the three smaller gay bars.
Cruising was a more prevalent activity during weekends than during
the week, both absolutely, because of the greater number of people, and
proportionally, i.e., cruising was more a weekend activity, which is not
to say it couldn’t or didn’t happen during the week. It is hard to say be-
yond definitely encountering more cruising activity in the bars during
the weekend evenings just how much cruising was going on relative to
other activities, both because people didn’t cruise all the time, e.g.,
people who came to cruise didn’t cruise the whole time, and those who
didn’t come to the bar intending to cruise might do so anyway. Further,
cruising can be hard to pick out from a crowd, taking multiple forms–a
stare or glance, a conversation turned flirtatious, an offer of a drink–and

happening in conjunction with other bar activities, such as dancing,
chatting, and drinking. It might be more precise to say that during the
weekend, other bar activities more often added a cruising dimension.
Conversation in the bars during weekend evenings varied consider-
ably depending upon whether it was between friends and acquaintances
or between strangers. Conversations between friends and acquaintances
were not particularly special just because it was taking place in a bar,
but were rather much as they would have been elsewhere. For example,
in my conversations with various gay men who worked at SWAC which
occurred in bars, at SWAC, and in a variety of other settings such as
restaurants, parties, or homes, the conversations were shaped by setting
mostly insofar as occurrences in the setting could easily become part
of the conversation, and there did not seem to be a special type of bar
conversation amongst acquaintances. For example, one particularly
common conversation, the size of some guy’s “package,” was shaped
mainly by whether the package in question was that of a guy in a bar, the
waiter at a restaurant, or someone who had dropped in at SWAC. The
conversation could entail a high degree of sexual repartee, but this was
just as true, for example, of conversations at SWAC, and has also been
true of my conversations with groups of gay men elsewhere, though the
conversation could also just as well be about popular music or politics.
Conversations amongst strangers, usually involving flirtation or cruis-
ing, as that was the main reason to talk to a stranger, were different,
though, primarily in not being substantive conversations about some-
thing, but instead being conversations that usually didn’t reveal much
of anything in the way of personal detail about the speakers, except to
express interest in each other, and in these types of conversations in
particular can be seen the mirroring and masking discussed by Read.
It is notable also that regular drag performances occurred only on
weekend evenings. Drag offers a useful metaphor for much, though not
all, of the social activity at the gay bars during the weekend, when peo-
ple step away from the work-a-day world and most just want to have
fun, both in terms of conversation amongst strangers and in terms of
people’s dress. Where Judith Butler (1993) would use drag as a meta-
phor for gender performativity as impersonation, I would here restrict
the metaphor to instances of intentional enactment of some stylized
Robert C. Philen 39
mode of conversation, role, or dress as performance. So, with the above

conversations amongst strangers, usually associated with cruising,
I find it hard to describe the conversations themselves or to discern
some definite pattern, for they could start about anything, or an individ-
ual might have his own typical “line” or conversation starter. Further, it
is not the conversations themselves which are important, but that a con-
versation is being performed, which is to say the conversation is impor-
tant primarily as stylized mode of interaction, where what is significant,
generally speaking, is whether or how long the conversation continues,
where the real substance of most such conversations is testing another
person’s interest in sex. If one or another party is not interested, the con-
versation usually doesn’t last long, or perhaps worst of all for someone
seriously cruising, may turn into a real substantive conversation with
someone who isn’t cruising. In dress as well, on the weekend, people
“dress up”: some in drag; some in the black leather jacket, pants, or
chaps of leathermen; some in club gear not often worn at other times,
such as shiny, metallic shirts; some in ranchero hats and shirts, similar
to cowboy hats and western shirts, with this last primarily at the
UKnowIt. More importantly, gone are the signs of social class or of the
individual, replaced with stylized gay personae, with this playing a part
in enabling the illusion of gay community. Here the illusion is powerful
in creating a sense of shared collectivity with which people identify and
which shapes self-consciousness. As with any such illusions and identi-
ties, there is tension in that many, at least, do recognize that not all in the
gay community are alike, which can also be seen reflected in the occa-
sional cynical reference to someone who performs a gay persona too
well, which is to say too generically, as a “gay clone.” There are also
plentiful exceptions to stylized personae engaging in stylized modes of
interaction, for example, with conversations amongst friends, or the ac-
tivities of the bars during the week, which I will turn to momentarily,
but in both of these cases, these are instances where a sense of connection
or community is produced or reproduced in other ways.
At Numbers, the UKnowIt, and the Shaft during the week, when the
Office was closed, social activity was quite different than on weekends.
The number of people in the bars was considerably lower. Often there
were as few as 5 to 10 people in a given bar, and 20 or more people was a
crowd. Proportions of bar patrons by age also differed considerably.
During the weekend, the vast majority of people were in their late teens,
20s, or 30s, a small number, proportionally speaking, in their 40s, and
only a few people older than that. During the week, patrons were gener-
ally more evenly distributed over this age range, though given the small
crowds, this could vary considerably from night to night. With dress,
the gay personae were gone, and people were much more likely to be
dressed in jeans and T-shirt or other generally nondescript clothing.
I suspect, though I don’t know for sure because I never saw it happen,
that to show up in drag or in full leatherman regalia on a Monday eve-

ning would have been seen as a bit garish-and at the least, the fact that
I never encountered this, despite the fact that I was in the bars during the
week at least once or twice a week for 11 months, indicates that this was
something which didn’t regularly occur.
Conversation and social interaction was different as well, and on
these evenings these bars became closer to what Read terms “home ter-
ritories,” in that cruising, while it occasionally occurred, was much less
a part of the bars during the week, which should not be surprising given
the inconveniences of a one-night stand when one has to be at work the
next morning, as was the case with most patrons of the bars. Further,
there was less of a distinction between conversations among friends
and acquaintances and those among strangers. While small groups of
friends were generally left alone to have their conversations wherever
they were in the bar, lone individuals would generally be dragged into
conversation so that a conversation between strangers would become
one between acquaintances, with the conversations often substantive
ones about any number of topics. It was not that uncommon to walk into
one of the bars and be told by someone something like, “Hey, we were
just talking about X,” and immediately become a part of the conversa-
tion, and while I accompanied John (an HIV prevention worker with an
AIDS service organization in El Paso at the time) on prevention out-
reach, there were several instances in which the whole bar, albeit only
5 or 10 people, would quickly be talking about HIV prevention issues.
During these conversations, also, it was possible to get to know people
on a personal level in a way which never happened in conversation with
strangers over the weekend.
The production of gay community can also be seen in the intimacy of
the bars during the week, and in a very different way from the weekend,
in this case through the building of connections between individuals
rather than a sharing in stylized, non-individual community. It would be
easy to view the one instance as real and the other as fake or artificial, but
I think it is better to view these as two different ways in which individuals
from quite varied and diverse backgrounds come to see themselves as
part of a collectivity or community, through the building of connections
through individuals. This is something, though, which only happens in
small groups, or through partaking in the illusion of unity, even when
Robert C. Philen 41
there may be very little in the way of common experience, outside of the
stylized enactment of personae in the bars in any case, to provide this
unity. There is a danger in this illusion to be sure, especially insofar as all
too often middle-class white gay men stand in as the token of gay-ness
and gay identity, but there is potential power as well, in both the identity
and in the building of intimate links between individuals, for political mo-
bilization for gay rights or to fight homophobia, as well as for the encour-
agement of AIDS awareness and a positive valuation of HIV prevention.
SEX CRUISE SCENES AND SEX WORK SCENES
Though sex cruise scenes and sex work scenes are not the same thing,
I discuss them together here because they can and sometimes do overlap
physically and function simultaneously. There were three such locations
which figured into my research, two in El Paso, one a sex work and cruise
scene and the other simply a sex work scene, and one site in Las Cruces,
a cruise scene–technically one cruise scene located at two physical sites
in close proximity.
The cruising in Las Cruces took place both at the parking lot of a local
park and at a large open area nearby fringed on two sides by ware-
houses. Within the open area, several short dead end streets branched
off one main street, as though someone had started to develop an indus-
trial park and had stopped before getting around to putting up the build-
ings. Cruising activity took place primarily at night, with cruising going
on at any given time primarily at one or the other of the two sites, though
sometimes there was activity at both simultaneously. For the most part,
cruising activity was relatively simple. Men would drive their cars
through the site, stopping beside another if interested in a sexual liaison
with the driver of the other car. If that person also stopped, they would
chat and, if interested, negotiate to go somewhere to have sex. Activity
was not necessarily restricted solely to finding someone to have sex
with though. Las Cruces does not have a gay bar. At about 35 miles
away, El Paso’s gay bars are not that far away, but they are not that close
either. A lot of men went to the cruise scenes as much simply to social-
ize as for sex, or for both. So, often men cruising would simply chat with
someone that they knew. This was especially the case at the park, where
in addition to men cruising from cars, many men would park at a picnic
area and hang out with other men.
The cruise/sex work scene in El Paso was located in the area around
an adult bookstore called Johnz. This particular adult bookstore catered
more to the gay community than others in the area. It had a larger selec-
tion of gay pornography than other area adult bookstores, and two
nights a week, gay pornographic videos were shown in their small the-
ater. The cruise scene circled through this part of town, a few blocks on
a side. The cruising worked much the same as in Las Cruces, with men
driving slowly through the area, looking for other men they might want
to have sex with. The socializing element amongst men cruising was
largely missing here though, which makes sense, given that those
MSMs who wanted to socialize with other MSMs had several bars to
choose from for that.
Another difference between this location and the Las Cruces cruise
was that here, cruising overlapped with sex work. Johnz was a regular
place to hang out for a group of young MSMs in their late teens and
early twenties who lived nearby. Some engaged in sex work, selling
sexual favors to cruising men, though some did not. For several, sex
work was something they engaged in opportunistically–where if some-
one offered to pay for sex, which was fairly often, they might accept the
offer–while others more systematically worked as sex workers there.
While socializing was largely absent at this location amongst MSMs
who were cruising, it was very much part of the scene for these younger,
sometimes sex worker MSMs. For many of them, this had been a place
to hang out before they were old enough to get into the gay bars, though
all of them that I knew were over 18 during the time I was there. In addi-
tion, most did not have ready access to cars, and the bars were a long
way to walk at night, nor did they offer the same opportunity to engage in
opportunistic sex work. With these younger MSMs, some of whom
were sex workers, some identified as gay and some as transgender.
Even with those who identified as gay, however, there was at this site a
production of a different sort of “gayness” from that produced at the gay
bars, with all of these MSMs conceiving of their gayness or other sexual
identity in terms of femininity and playing a specifically “feminine”
sexual role. There were some gay-identified men among the men cruis-
ing and/or paying for sex at this site, but there was not the production of
gay identity and community among cruising MSMs at this site as there
was with El Paso’s gay bars, as the sorts of social activities present at the
bars were missing amongst these men.
The sex work scene at the Tiki and the Cabana worked differently
from sex work at Johnz, though there are some similarities as well.
There was no cruising, and therefore no chance to opportunistically en-
gage in sex work with men otherwise cruising other men. Many of the
sex workers made it clear to me that they were there specifically to
Robert C. Philen 43
work, and that customers came specifically to solicit sex from them. Sex
workers waited for those potential customers either inside the bars or
immediately outside, though sexual activity, so far as I ever saw, did not
take place on the premises. Instead, sex workers would ride away with
customers to some other locale, usually to be dropped off again at the

bars a short time later.
While this was an MSM sex work scene, it was not a gay sex work
scene, for as discussed above, with rare exception, no one involved
in sex work there, workers or customers, was gay identified. The sex
workers were all male-to-female transgendered, and identified as
women. Most had breast augmentation through hormone usage, and all
dressed not so much in stereotypically feminine clothing as in clothing
stereotypical of female sex workers, such as short, tight mini-skirts and
extremely high spike heels.
The male customers are more difficult to discuss since I had limited
direct conversation with them. Most, though certainly not all, appeared,
from their dress and vehicles, to be working-class Mexican or Mexican-
American men, along with some Anglo men, though obviously that says
nothing about their gender or sexual identity or behavior. According to
some of the sex workers, these men were mostly straight identified,
though there are obviously limitations to what can be made of such
assertions except as they pertain to sex workers’ constructions of the
scene.
One thing does, however, convince me, not so much that the male
customers were necessarily heterosexually identified, but that at least
most of them were not gay identified, and that was the utter absence of
any sort of cruising amongst themselves that I ever witnessed or heard
about. Sexual interaction, or even other social interaction on a regular
basis, did not occur at this scene between male-identified men of similar
age and social status. This made this scene unlike the overlapping sex
cruise/sex work scene at Johnz–where there was a lack of production of
gay identity amongst cruising men, but where some gay-identified men
were present, the cruise in Las Cruces–where there was a limited degree
of production of gay community and identity, or the gay bars– where
there was active production of gay identity and community.
MSM SITES AND PRODUCTION OF IDENTITY
One key point about these various MSM sites was that the construction
of sexual identities and behaviors did not match up to differences in
ethnic identification. That is, there were not distinct Hispanic and Anglo
patterns of MSM sexuality. Instead, a substantial number of Hispanic
men, who constituted the vast majority of the local gay community, were
gay identified, with sexual identification constituted primarily on the
lines of sexual object choice. Further, though there were three MSM bars
which were often discursively marked and stigmatized as “Mexican,”
the UKnowIt, the Tiki, and the Cabana, the UKnowIt was a gay bar
whose clients were very nearly exclusively Hispanic and predominantly
gay identified. At the Tiki and the Cabana, on the other hand, I never en-
countered any MSMs who identified as gay. Instead, the MSMs there
were either transgender sex workers or non-gay-identified men whose
sexual orientation was configured more by sexual role, that is, by the
supposed Latin American or Hispanic pattern. Further, though the ma-
jority of the sex workers’ clients were Hispanic, a substantial minority
of them were Anglo. I also encountered Anglo men at El Paso’s sex
cruise site who claimed not to identify as gay because of their sexual
role identity, for example, one man who said that he wasn’t gay himself,
but that he liked “to fuck boys.”2
In El Paso at least, the primary factor shaping the presence or absence
of gay identity was the role of certain types of MSM sites in producing
gay identity and community. Gay bars in particular played this role,
especially as places where people regularly discussed issues like homo-
phobia, HIV, or what it means to be gay, though gay-oriented social and
support groups played this role to a lesser extent as well. The biggest
difference seen in my research in the production of MSM identities and
behaviors was not between Hispanic and Anglo then, but between El
Paso and the much smaller Las Cruces. In Las Cruces there were no gay
bars, and although gay social groups took on more relative importance
than in El Paso, and though there was a limited amount of production of
gay community at the sex cruise site in Las Cruces that was not present in
El Paso, gay-identified MSMs in Las Cruces were not only numerically
less common, because there were less MSMs overall in Las Cruces than
in El Paso, but also proportionally less common amongst MSMs, be-
cause there was less space for the production of gay community and
identity in Las Cruces.
Though it was the sites and the social activity at these sites which
were most productive of identity, especially gay identity, socioeco-
nomic class played a role in structuring who was at which sites, though
it is important not to overplay its role. Individuals at the gay bars repre-
sented a cross-section of socioeconomic class in the community, such
that anyone inhabiting the bars could contribute to the production of
Robert C. Philen 45
community, though the price for participating in the illusion of unity

could be the occlusion of other aspects of self, or stigmatization when
those aspects were expressed, as seen with the occasional stigmatization
of the UKnowIt as “Mexican.” This was not the case with the sex work
or cruise scenes, though. That is, there was not a cross-section of socio-
economic class at these sites. Instead they were populated primarily,
though not exclusively, by working-class or poor MSMs, so that the
more important difference in practice between the UKnowIt and the
Tiki/Cabana was not the ethnicity of the sex workers’ clients, but their
working-class status, seen, for example, in the higher presence of Span-
ish monolingualism at the Tiki/Cabana, even alongside the presence of
Anglos. As discussed in detail in another work (Philen, 2001), language
use and especially Spanish monolingualism in El Paso can be a marker
of socioeconomic class, and, further, the stigmatization of all three bars
as “Mexican” by some Hispanic gay informants, and most often by mid-
dle-class Hispanic gay informants, is related to a devaluation of things
Mexican and Spanish by many, though definitely not all, middle-class
individuals in El Paso.
Socioeconomic class, and specifically working-class or impoverished
status, does not determine sexual identity, for gay identity was seen fre-
quently across class lines, but can present barriers to the development of
gay identity.3 First, the style and sometimes more aggressive expres-
sions of machismo and homophobia often found in poor or work-
ing-class settings (see Philen, 2001) can make it more difficult, or even
more dangerous, for some of these men to develop gay identity. Further,
men in such contexts are more likely to be linked to or dependent on fa-
milial or community support networks than are middle-class men (see
Murray, 1987), and less likely to have had extended periods somewhat
removed from these contexts, such as with the college experiences of
most middle-class youth which can provide a space away from family
and home community where gay identity can flourish.
If we compare Latin America with North America or Mexico with
the U.S., there are broad associations of Latin America and Mexico with
sexual role patterning and of North America and the U.S. with sexual
object choice patterning. Looked at another level, though, it seems that
particular types of sites, particularly gay bars, can be productive of gay
identity and produce this difference of patterning. Here, what is impor-
tant are broad patterns of urban and economic development (with
economic development considered especially in terms of distributions
of wealth and not just in terms of influxes of capital) in shaping the
presence or absence of sites like gay bars, and it is this which enables
us to make sense of differences within regions and areas, e.g., in the

differences between El Paso and Las Cruces stemming from the larger
size of El Paso and its ability to support gay bars; in the growing impor-
tance of gay identity and object choice patterning in Mexico’s largest
cities, such as Mexico City and Guadalajara (Carrier, 1995); or in my

experiences of greater importance of sexual role in working-class
Southern settings in the U.S. compared to the Northeastern U.S.
Beyond academic considerations, there are important ramifications for
HIV prevention work. Though the recognition that different ethnic and
cultural contexts can produce different constructions of sexuality with
importance for HIV prevention is important (see Carrier and Magaña,
1992; Magaña and Carrier, 1991; Parker, 1989, 1992, 1999; Parker,
Herdt and Carballo, 1999), especially in the case, I would argue, of im-
migrants who bring with them different conceptions and practices of
sexuality, it is also important not to reify or overdetermine ethnicity in
relation to sexuality. In the case of Hispanic or Anglo men, both sexual
role and sexual object choice are important in shaping their sexual
identities and practices, with the differential emphasis of one factor over
the other being more a matter of particular individuals interacting in
particular communities at particular sites than of absolute distinctions
between Hispanic and Anglo sexualities.
NOTES
1. Or, if I was there with John, a local HIV prevention worker, something which was
often the case, the two of us were the only two Anglos in the bar.
2. By “boys,” he indicated young adult males, such as the MSM sex workers at this
scene.
3. I do not mean here to suggest that all non-gay-identified MSMs are somehow
proto-gays or closeted gays. Non-gay-identified MSMs, as discussed elsewhere, have
their own sexual identities. Nor do I want to suggest that the most useful HIV preven-
tion strategy is to encourage the development of gay identity on the part of all these
men (for contrasting discussions, see Deverell and Prout, 1999; Watney, 1987, 1993,
1999). As I argue elsewhere, for pragmatic reasons if nothing else, these men should be
approached on the terms of their own identity and consciousness. Finally, I do not
mean to suggest gay bars as magical places where a single visit transforms a person’s
identity. Rather, identity and community are produced through habitual practice and
discourse, much though not all of which happens to happen at gay bars.
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A Social Geography of Sex

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and Gay Bars on the U.S./Mexican Border

ABSTRACT. In discussions of male homosexuality in Hispanic/Latin

KEYWORDS. Gay bars, gay identity, machismo, ethnicity, U.S.-

Robert C. Philen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University

From the summer of 1998 to the summer of 1999, I conducted

MACHISMO, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

In the anthropological literature, machismo plays a key role in the

associated with machismo, such as dominance, assertiveness, or ag-

difference in constructions of sexuality between Latin America and

PLACES AND PATTERNS OF SEXUALITY, IDENTITY,

There were three main, sometimes overlapping, types of MSM

with particular MSM sites: sexual object choice patterning (especially

THE GAY BARS

combination with one another. Cruising, while an important element of

stare or glance, a conversation turned flirtatious, an offer of a drink–and

mode of conversation, role, or dress as performance. So, with the above

that to show up in drag or in full leatherman regalia on a Monday eve-

SEX CRUISE SCENES AND SEX WORK SCENES

customers to some other locale, usually to be dropped off again at the

MSM SITES AND PRODUCTION OF IDENTITY

community, though the price for participating in the illusion of unity

us to make sense of differences within regions and areas, e.g., in the

cities, such as Mexico City and Guadalajara (Carrier, 1995); or in my

A Reader. London: UCL Press.

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