Confusion of Public vs. Private Senses

I'm usually indifferent to politics but recently a news report caught my attention and I feel the burning need to say something about stroller-pushing moms complaining about sexually explicit displays along the strip on Castro. Tugged in the folds of hills in San Francisco, the Castro has once been the mecca of gay hedonism and celebration of the queer culture and its self-expression. This is a dip in the contour of the city where you walk up and down the street to meet people. The neighbor, which is known for its outrageous and bittersweet history, fosters a welcoming atmosphere with shops and restaurants packing four blocks of tight-knit community. Until families with kids move in and make the big deal out of the shops that display porn movie posters and toys.

Parents, both gay and straight complain about the overwhelming visual emphasis on the kinky and the phallic. One exasperated Lesbian counters that criticism with a deviant we-were-here-first attitude. This once again confirms the social (and legal) tradition that tends to protect sexual freedom by privatization. Through privatization it also reserves privacy protections for those whose sexuality is already normative. Media paints a picture that replaces one privacy with another, one public with another: it reduces a rich public culture, one that is signature of the gay community, to inarticulate deviants, consolidating instead a normal, or dominant (namely, heterosexual) public in which it can be taken for granted that "one" has children and goes to "public places" in order to shop.

Intermingling of the sense of public and private sexual culture is the core of the matter. Sexual cultures of the gays are in a way cultures that are forgotten. Norms of the dominant culture will always quash the scene the gays are participating in. Therefore, the gay sexual culture is best understood as a counterpublic. The openness, accessibility, volatility and unpredictability of this counterpublic are all marks of its publicness. As you see, it's not a matter of who is where first, but a conflict between the dominant public (in the strolling moms) and a counterpublic that is hierarchized by shame and silence.

It's the responsibility of the dominant culture to be savvy of a public sexual culture that is free from the politics of sexual shame. And instead of battling to the mainstreaming of homosexuality, the counterpublic needs to stand up to public elaboration to break the social alienations.