Sharif Mowlabocus’s research while affiliated with Fordham University and other places

In this forum piece, I utilize Rahul Rao’s concept of “homocapitalism” (2020) as an analytical lens through which to evaluate the corporate support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights. Affinity groups, including those designed to support LGBTQ employees, have become a regular feature of most Fortune 500 companies. These groups seek to represent the interests of particular employee audiences, while also helping the company to advance its profit-driven goals. Drawing on interviews with queer professionals working for multinational technology companies, I signpost the promises and limitations of LGBTQ activism when it becomes (re)located within the context of a corporation.

Grindr, the popular social networking app aimed at men who are sexually interested in other men, launched its Kindr campaign in 2018, which was designed to foster a more inclusive and respectful environment for its users. This campaign followed years of criticism regarding the racism, transphobia, femmephobia, body shaming, and HIV-related stigmatism that littered profiles and permeated interactions on the platform. While the Kindr initiative was met with applause from some quarters of the gay press, it also drew criticism from those who felt that their “preferences” and desires were being policed and proscribed via new practices of censorship. Through a close reading of Kindr and an analysis of Grindr’s design features, I explore the central tension the platform sets up between its new discourse of “kindness” and the affordances of its software. Reflecting on these contradictions between discourse and code, and between discourse and action, I suggest that Grindr promotes an ethos of “polite incivility”, an ethos that provides a method for “managing” discrimination and difference, and which forgoes sexual citizenship in favor of sexual consumption.

Almost twenty years since Lisa Duggan coined the term ‘homonormativity’, this chapter provides a critical overview of this concept. In doing so, it also recontextualises the rise of homonormativity within a British context. This process involves identifying the relationship between British lesbian and gay politics and the broader political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter also points to some of the critical antecedents that Duggan drew inspiration from in her development of a theory of homonormativity.

This chapter considers the conditions upon which a specific model of male homosexual identity has come to be accepted in the British public sphere. Under what circumstances are gay men (more) accepted by British society today? What assumptions, notions and beliefs underpin this acceptance? And what happens when gay men do not meet these expectations? These questions occupy this chapter, and get answered via a specific case study involving the British news media’s coverage of PrEP, the anti-HIV treatment. The overall aim is to signpost the degree to which a neoliberal understanding of sexual difference—encapsulated in the term ‘homonormativity’– frames the acceptance of gay men in the UK today. This exploration reveals the way in which such a framing shapes public discussions of, and attitudes towards, gay male sexuality. It also reveals the consequences of this framing and exposes the terms and conditions upon which British society is willing to accept gay men; as privatised consumers, rather than as full sexual citizens.

Over the last ten years, chemsex has been framed as a major public health issue affecting gay male communities throughout the West. News reports and magazine articles paint a dark picture of addiction, sexual abuse and death, while linking this practice to the transmission of HIV and other STIs. This chapter moves beyond the sensational headlines and documents the experiences of ‘occasional’ chemsex participants in order to understand the rise of chemsex within this specific socio-political moment. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the chapter identifies how and why chemsex encounters create ‘other spaces’, in which gay men can congregate, experiment and connect. This reading of the chemsex event is then contrasted with the ways in which participants discuss their management of chemsex. This discussion reveals the ways in which the successful chemsex participant is framed as a neoliberal actor; one who demonstrates the capacity to push the boundaries of pleasure and experimentation, while also successfully enacting practices of self-regulation that allow them to ‘work hard and play hard’.

This chapter considers what happened when a major social networking platform sought to address issues of racism, transphobia, body-shaming and HIV stigma. Grindr, a popular hook-up app among gay and bisexual men and Trans women, has long been accused of failing to take action against the multifarious forms of discrimination that pervade its user profiles and user interactions. In 2018, the company sought to tackle this issue via the Kindr initiative. This chapter explores the limitations of this campaign and, in doing so, identifies the homonormative politics that underpin Grindr and, by extension, many other social media platforms. This political perspective seeks to encourage politeness and respectability while doing little to maintain civility or challenge the underlying structures that produce discrimination. The chapter identifies how the discursive practices of the Kindr campaign did little to address the technological affordances of Grindr; affordances that allow the company to profit from practices of segregation and filtering.

This final chapter reflects upon the findings in the previous chapters in order to identify a set of broader conclusions regarding homonormativity. Twenty years on from its first definition, homonormativity continues to exist, and the concept of homonormativity continues to be relevant in discussions of contemporary LGBTQ culture and politics, but especially gay male culture. At the same time, homonormativity does not reside in any one specific act or identity, but operates in a far more insidious fashion, infiltrating gay male culture and the relationship between gay men and mainstream society. Homonormativity is increasingly shaping public opinions and corporate attitudes towards gay men, constructing them as neoliberal actors that support, rather than challenge, the socio-political status quo. The chapter concludes by suggesting that homonormativity is invested in a political vanishing point, seeking as it does a form of assimilation and normalisation that is forever deferred. Indeed, homonormativity’s pursuit of convergence and assimilation might in fact be the reason why more and more identities and ways of being are coming to the fore today, demanding recognition. For while homonormativity supposedly brings queer folk ever closer to a state of assimilation, queerness always works to represent an ideological remainder; an irrecuperable, unassimilable, unresolvable other that cannot be assimilated by heteronormativity.

Pride parades in major towns and cities are increasingly reliant on funding from corporate sponsors who, in turn, use the parade and its associated events as an opportunity to publicise themselves, their products and their socially progressive credentials. There has been much written about the politics and economics of Pride in the twenty-first century, but little attention has been paid to those folk charged with organising the corporate contingents at these annual events. This chapter uses Pride as a starting point to develop a conversation regarding the relationship between LGBTQ employees and the companies they work for. Drawing upon interviews with queer folk who work for multinational companies based in California, the chapter examines the role that Pride plays in both representing and brokering this relationship. It identifies the central role that employee resource groups (ERGs) play in this relationship, and argues that these groups not only advocate on behalf of employees, but also provide a method for extracting additional human capital from workers on behalf of the company.

Same-sex marriage is routinely identified in discussions of homonormativity. This is not least because the organisations and individuals that Lisa Duggan originally signposted in her definition of this term championed marriage equality as one of the most important political battles for lesbian and gay activists. While there are good reasons for aligning same-sex marriage with the politics of homonormativity, it is imperative that we also interrogate the practice of same-sex marriage in order to fully understand the impact of marriage equality on the identities, politics and intimate lives of those who enter into such unions. This chapter focuses on the lived experiences of men who are married to men and explores to what extent the concept of homonormativity does (not) map on to the everyday experiences of gay men. The chapter examines the motivations behind such unions, the meanings of such unions, and life after such acts of union. In doing so, the chapter complicates claims that same-sex marriage is homonormative and identifies practices of both assimilation and resistance occurring in the everyday lives of married gay men.

One would not typically think of chemsex as a practice structured by the same political ideology that spawned ‘the new homonormativity’. For one thing, the gay press (a key mediator of homonormative thinking) has spilt much ink demonizing both the practice and practitioners of chemsex. Chemsex is framed in opposition to the ‘good gays’ that appear on same-sex wedding invitations or in advertisements for furniture stores or travel companies. Meanwhile, scholars have identified the ways in which chemsex embodies a response to both the political-economic landscape of neoliberalism, and the dominant model of homosexuality. From this perspective, chemsex appears antithetical to the political-economy of late capitalism, and to homonormativity. Building on critical discussions of this sexual practice, this article maps the complicated political terrain in which chemsex operates. Drawing on in-depth interviews with active and former practitioners, I suggest that chemsex occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the politics of homonormativity.