The Queer Clubhouse? Bar culture, sports media, and LGBTQ+ communities

In the following article I analyze sports bars for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) communities via a combination of semi-structured interviews, field studies, and archival research. In particular, I examine how sports and non-normative sexual and gender identities influence, and are influenced by, media “in situ.” I also seek to better understand how LGBTQ+ sports cultures are constructed by the owners of these bars, by media technologies and rhythms, and by the patrons themselves. Within this approach I address how media and space overlap and inform one another, especially in relation to social and cultural imperatives, and I unpack how these interactions shape particular LGBTQ+ sports spaces. Guided by queer methodological and analytical approaches, I demonstrate how LGBTQ+ sports bars vary in material, contextual, and historical ways and how they are often influenced by competing concerns related to queer(ed) community and normative sports (media). Ultimately, I contend that to understand these spaces as built environments transformed by, and transforming of, LGBTQ+ communities, we must see them, as with most places of LGBTQ+ commerciality, as arenas of both queer potentiality and normalized inequality.