Chapter 2: Creating Spaces, Maintaining Places for Male-on-Male Kink

This chapter looks at male-on-male sexual activity in the subaltern world of male sexual spaces. It examines the importance of such spaces regarding etiquette, negotiation, opportunities, safety, safer sex practices, status, and navigation of sexual expression including experimentation, exploration, and risk-taking through sexual activity. It also explores how these time-limited communal engagements for sexual pleasure and affirmation contrast normative societal expectations. Through hard-copy and online content analysis as well as ethnographic immersion and observations in the subaltern world of gay male sexual spaces such as bathhouses, circuit clubs, dark rooms, fetish balls, porn theaters, sex clubs, and sex shops, a self-monitored subculture that creates its own tribal rituals at various odds with both mainstream societal and LGBTQ movement norms is examined. By deviating from and resisting such norms, this tribe demonstrates how it maintains a core drive of liberated sexuality outside of mainstreamed sexual governance. Premised on spatial theory, in which space, place, and spatial practices are deconstructed with regard to the creation and preservation of male-on-male fetish activities, a link is made to queer liberation theory that supports self-defined sexual expression, including that of kink.