Gay Bars, Covid, and Informal Information Seeking (Major Paper)
Information Studies 246, Spring 2021
Professor: Leah Lievrouw, PhD
Introduction and Literature Review
The following sections demonstrate key skills through a major paper component, a lesson plan for a course developed in my field of specialization, academic librarianship, and a paper from the core MLIS curriculum.
Major Paper: Gay Bars, Covid, and Informal Information Seeking
Introduction and Literature Review
In March of 2020 the rapid spread of the Covid-19 Coronavirus led to the shutdown of numerous public gathering places. Throughout this course we have explored methods of information seeking with a particular focus on the impact of crises on those behaviors. As part of of our survey of the the literature on this topic we encountered Reijo Savolainen’s model of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) which I found to be particularly interesting, and ultimately lead me to begin thinking about the myriad of ways of in which individuals seek information in regular environments they frequent outside of formal knowledge/information institutions like libraries. During the Covid shutdown numerous LGBTQ bars have faced temporary or permanent shutdowns which piqued my interest in the context of information seeking (Chuba, 2022). What kinds of information seeking behavior was not occurring as a result of these shutdowns? What informal information sharing was stopped? This paper will explore the historical and contemporary role that gay bars have played and continue to play in information sharing and seeking, what kinds of knowledge is being lost as a result of the closure of these spaces and how we can imagine the kinds of information seeking that will not be possible without the physicality of spaces like the local gay bar. I will begin with a brief literature review, discuss the two interviews I conducted, and then draw conclusions based on findings from those sources.
At the core of my questions is the idea of ELIS. Savolainen articulates ELIS as, “the ways in which people use various information sources to meet information needs in areas such as health, consumption, and leisure” (1995). Each of these three facets, health, consumption and leisure, are central to the experience of gay bars. Savolainen incorporates research into online ELIS behaviors in studies in the late 1990’s (Salvoleinen, 1999), which Fox and Rolston take up in the context of Queer identity formation (Fox and Rolston, 2016) as an information seeking behavior. Fox and Rolston’s study identifies the ways in which queer folks seek out information about their identity from others in the community, that they seek to learn about themselves through online community spaces, and often seek to do so in an anonymous way for fear of social stigma in their families of birth and communities of origin (p.638). Mehra and Braquet take up the specific issue of coming out as a motivating factor for information seeking behaviors in queer young people, where they sought to map specific behaviors over time during the coming out process and identity formation, drawing on differences in experience within queer youth, for example, looking at how geography might impact certain information seeking behaviors (2007). While these topics are clearly important to understanding the experiences of queer people as information seekers, I think the search behaviors in online environments speak to only one piece of the puzzle. I think it is equally important to understand the ways in which these behaviors become internalized, actualized, and enacted in real world environments. That is to say, I think the ways in which queer folks use public gathering spaces is likely informed by online behavior, particularly in the age of location based phone applications, but also does not capture the whole scope of experiences through which queer folks seek.
We should pay particular attention when ‘definitive works’ on a subject omit an entire class of behavior, as is the case with Looking for Information 4th Ed. by Case and Given, a quick search of the subject index will show that “gay” appears with no page notations, and a See Also reference to a subject (LGBTQI) that is not listed (2016, p.500, 502). While this work lists four occasions for researching AIDS, at least according to the subject index, it never deals with queer information seeking behavior in any other context (2016, p.497). Thinking about the omission of LGBTQI and the inclusion of AIDS by Case and Given Foucault might call the move towards medicalization. Foucault addresses the ways in which this power dynamic (medicalization) is perverse and often baffling, “this produced a twofold effect: an impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further”(Foucault, 1978, p.44) In the Foucauldian framing, this turn can be seen as a self reinforcing cycle of biopower, the policing of the body through social mores that become internalized and then enacted by individuals (Foucault, p. 42). It is with this in mind that I think it is particularly important to address information seeking behavior among queer folks in other contexts, in the very least, alongside medical/health information.
In addition to the ELIS model proposed by Salvoleinan, it is also relevant to consider the theory of sense-making as presented by Brenda Dervin. While Dervin rejects the idea that the hyper contextual is relevant to understanding information seeking behavior and can lead to a reductio ad absurdum, she is also very much concerned with the user experience in terms of methods and systems of information seeking (Dervin et al., 2009, p.1). In a co-authored paper in 2008, Dervin looks back on 30 years of exploring sense-making and lays out some key hallmarks of this method as an approach to understanding information seeking as being constituted by communication praxis, certainty-uncertainty, ‘verbs’ instead of ‘nouns’, method between the cracks, power as a core concept and humans as theorists (p.3). In each of these component parts, Dervin shows a key underlying concept of the interpersonal nature of sense-making as a method of inquiry that is essential. In this model, it would be hard to understand sense-making in a community, say a gay bar, without understanding what is being communicated there, and how it is communicated, if we are to look at just one example by way of communication praxis. In concert with Savolainen, Dervin provides a key basis for my personal understanding of the gay bar as a site of information seeking and sharing.
Interviews
I conducted two short informal interviews as part of this research. I interviewed Professor A, a tenure track professor in political science at a public university in the Mountain West region, who holds a JD and PhD in political science. His research focuses on law and society, legal rhetoric, representation of queer subjects in political legal discourse, and importantly for this topic, he was engaged in a current study about the role of drag queens in gay small town gay bars. Professor B, holds an MA in conflict resolution and is a PhD candidate in political science at large private university in California, and an adjunct professor in critical theory at small liberal arts college in California where she taught courses covering queer ballroom culture and the history and contemporary effects of slavery in the US. Through a Black radical lens, she studies political identity formation, social movements, decolonial theory and transitional justice. I have worked personally with both in other contexts and given the nature of their experiences both as queer academics, and as academics who study queer subjects, I though their opinions, thoughts and experiences related to the topic of gay bars as information seeking environments would be insightful and thoughtful.
One of the reasons I was comfortable with taking this job in [a rural area] was because there was a gay bar here. The existence of the gay bar is information in and of itself. It means there is enough support for there to be one. - Professor A
In the context of information seeking the mere presence of the gay bar according to Professor A is something to take note of. As this quote shows, queer folks recognize the symbolic value of living in a community in which there is a communal gathering space. In the Dervin model, this can be seen as an epistemic move towards certainty. The existence of the gay bar for Professor A is a marker, a sign post if you will, that marks this community as being alive and marks a site for community gathering, and as a result a site for the local queer folks to be able to share and seek information. Just before making the above comment, Professor A, identified that he seeks out information about local gay bars before traveling, attempting to find out what the safe places to travel are, where queer folks can and should frequent, and what things to be wary of (Interview of Professor A with author, May 2021). Through this lens, we can see the value of the symbolic existence of the gay bar within smaller communities which may not otherwise have visible markers to queer people regarding their perceived safety, welcomeness or other key considerations. Professor B offers additional insight in this vein.
I know this couple who hosted Black lesbians’ parties left [the city] and if there are people who are just not present, that interaction is just not there, it just leads to destination events. Sweet Heat Miami WOC lesbians focused and led one week in Miami instead of it being a place where I can go to a bar and chat with people and instead here's a crazy week where we constantly party and go until after midnight. - Professor B
Professor B identifies a key problem with gay bars that target a particular affinity group, in this case, Black lesbian bars, which were scarce prior to the pandemic, have completely left Los Angeles during it. As a result, much of the behaviors that she used to engage in through those environments are just not occurring. Thinking back to the question of the value of online space as compared to physical ones, Professor B articulates clearly “that interaction is just not there.” I think it also shows relatively explicitly the limitations on relying on other fill ins to meet the need of the gay bar as a site of communal information seeking and sharing. While the WOC lead trip to Miami may satisfy needs within that community in one regard, it does not fill the need that would have otherwise been occurring through conversation, again here thinking of Dervin’s communication praxis or verbs instead of nouns, that is to say, what is being done in these spaces is as important as the spaces themselves. As Savolainen points out, when it comes to issues of everyday life, “people tend to favor a limited number of easily accessible sources, which have been useful in previous use contexts” (Salvoleinen, 1995, p.1786). In this framework, the presence of a reliable and familiar group of trusted confidants is essential to building networks of knowledge sharing and seeking, and relative lack of availability of recognized spaces in the form of gay bars, or for Professor B, Black lesbian bars, means that function goes unfulfilled and is not addressed in other ways.
An idea which she took up later in the interview.
The craziest thing this semester was someone who asked me to be masc presenting mentor, I wore a binder and before I watched Aggressives (2005) people were duct taping themselves. You invest in compression shirts, that gets to the generation where did I learn that? I learned that by going out with people, being out with people and watching, studying, dancers, and seeing what they had on or didn't have on. - Professor B
Encountering Professor B for this student was the first time they had experienced what it was like to interact with someone who presented in a way in which they wanted to. This illustrates the power of real person to person interaction in terms of seeking out information. Dervin et al. articulate that sense-making “assumes that the person is a carrier of both structure and agency” and they go on to add that, “even though there are homogenized and hegemonic collective forces, there are no collective minds” (2016, p.3). Carrying this idea forward into the example Professor B articulated, what emerges is the value of person-to-person communication, for the student they did not share this particularly salient identity with their family of origin, and while they could have sought out any number of online sources to learn about the ways in which they could enact that identity, it was instead the encounter with Professor B which allowed them to identify with, and seek out information about that identity formation. As Professor B expressed to me earlier in the interview, it was not until she was in the club that what she was watching online became real (Professor B interview with author, May 2021).
I think we need to maintain our culture in the ways people are assimilating. I think about this like third generation immigrants. I think we are going through that as queer people as post stonewall. I do not think that if every baby gay need so to know the ins and outs of Judy Garland, they should have those shared things that create a culture. That's not static and evolves. - Professor A
What Professor A here raises is the important to understanding how the gay bar can be thought of in terms of a site of collective memory. Returning to the idea of salient identity that is not shared with one’s family of birth or origin, it becomes important to be able to access social and cultural memory. What Professor A is pointing to is that the gay bar in many ways served as cultural heritage institutions as much as anything else for the Stonewall generation. In this framing, the queer folks of this generation were treated as outsiders, as first-generation immigrants often are, and the memory making of the gay bar was an essential place for collecting and sharing in cultural histories. Armstrong and Crage take up this question in their provocative work about the making of the Stonewall mythology (Armstrong and Crage, 2006). This is an information seeking function. Before YouTube and Tumblr, before the Human Right Campaign, and before ACT-UP, young queer people would have struggled to find information about their history, about themselves, and about what it means to be queer. What Professor A is elevating in this segment, is the value in a shared sense of self. In Salvolainen’s terms, the impact of separation of everyday knowledge due to a lack of shared identity with a family of birth or community of origin, is that there likely exists no safe source for one to seek information from. There are no, “easily accessible sources” and there is also likely to not be someone who has “been found useful in previous use contexts” (p.1786) relating to their queerness When this reality is considered, the value of the gay bar as a site of collective memory is elevated to the realm of critical information seeking behavior as well.
Then move into the AIDS era and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to learn to have sex safely and you could go into bars and get information. I think we as a community have not talked about the radical sex positive culture was the thing killing us. -Professor A
Professor A, who studies the role of drag queens in community activism, highlights a key function that the gay bar played during the AIDS epidemic, namely, a site of knowledge sharing about safe sex practices. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence played an important role during this period in disseminating the most current information about how to have sex safely, distributing condoms and lube and keeping the community connected with the most up to date knowledge about the AIDS crises (“Sistory”). This groups remains one of the most iconic and powerful symbols today, the Sisters, will still be at every pride parade, can be found in numerous gayborhoods across the country and still provide information and sex education in gay bars everywhere. In this way the Sisters offer a kind of lineage of information seeking behavior occurring in gay bars going back to the Castro in 1979 and addressing one of the key tenets of ELIS, health information.
Are we performing for ourselves or are we in the zoo performing as the gays for straight people? I can remember when people were scared of us and I kind of miss that and I miss gay culture. The need for gay culture? Queer cultures talk about things that straight people pretend not to talk and I think we are losing a lot of that in our civil rights and move to acceptance and that is something we need to think about and we have not necessarily wrestled with what we are missing out on. - Professor A
This last quote from Professor A raises a number of interesting points and questions in the context of this paper. First, the idea of performativity. Thinking back to Professor B’s example of her encounter with a student, we can see the importance of connecting with the performance of identity as a key source of information to be sought out. I think taken in the whole, however, Professor A, is highlighting a slightly different phenomenon here. He has identified that peculiar experience of being a collective of outsiders in a community, as when he describes how gay people used to be avoided and not sought out. As he indicates, queer peoples’ conversations in his experience are substantively different, and in spaces absent straight people, somewhat protected from outside view. Today, if one attends a popular gay bar in most major metropolitan areas, you quite likely to encounter bachelorette parties and other groups of straight women, who inevitably are followed by straight men. This effectively changes the dynamic nature of the gay bar as a site of resistance. I propose that this is a potential unintended side effect, which I believe Professor A is alluding to, that through acceptance and assimilation, the gay bar has become sanitized of at least some of its protected status, some of its value as a source of reliable and trustworthy information, and has become more a site of consumption, in the language of Lefebrve, leaving behind a new kind of gap in the information seeking landscape.
Findings and Conclusion
Having considered the intersection of the information seeking behavior models of Sense-Making and ELIS together with an analysis of the interviews conducted with two university professors I have sought to better understand the role of the gay bar are a site of information seeking behavior. While I have not focused on the impact of Covid as a distinct factor, it has been present throughout every aspect of this paper that I have considered, changing the modalities of interactions, closures and openings change the landscape of the information seeking world, and impacting the ways in which community members are able to access them as sites of knowledge. Throughout my research on the subject, I continue to come back to the importance of these places in my own experience, in learning about myself, and to a lesser extent being able to share that with others. As with numerous past experiences, I think the ways in which this particular historical moment alters the world will be felt in some ways similarly and yet in some ways differently, in the queer community. It is with this in mind I have attempted to draw out several findings to understand how that difference may be understood.
Family of birth, community of origin, and learning about oneself
The emergence of the theme of needing to learn about a salient identity from others who belong to that group who are not from your family of birth or community of origin is the clearest example of the need for gay bars in the information seeking behavior. In most cases, we share salient identities with those in the places where we are from. We learn by mimicry as children, and then learn by tradition and culture as we grow. For many queer folks, they will be the only one to possess that identity in the place of their birth and youth. As I have shown in both Savolainen’s model and Dervin’s we must ask who is the reliable source of information for these queer people, of any age, who are coming into themselves? When considering this question, I think it undeniable that the gay bar has historically been the only site of safety, and while we now live in an era with LGBTQ community centers, Queer coffee shops, and gayborhoods, where folks can seek out information in other environments, I think there is something to be said for the value of coming together in a place to celebrate the everyday experiences of life which a gay bar allows that the others do not. Professor A pointed out in our interview that the simultaneous decisions on marriage equality and emergence of location-based dating apps occurred in the mid-2000s leading to a marked decline in attendance at gay bars, as assimilation became easier, and cruising moved online. In my estimation, this current crisis, marks another turn away from the gay bar for fear of the public health implications of attending them. In this manner, I think the threat to the local gay bar is a real one, and as I have argued throughout this paper, its function will not be easily replaced or usurped by other actors.
Performance and living, the value of moving from online to IRL
The next theme which emerged through my research was the importance of online resources for seeking information, coupled with the limitations of accessing such information. As my interview with Professor B revealed, watching a movie, show or web series provided an opportunity for exposure, while meeting others with shared identity and conversation about any number of given topics made those learning experiences a reality, something she could actually live and not just an idea to aspire to. To me this function is invaluable. I think we would be hard pressed to imagine a future in which this function is replaceable. While the idea of performativity may be a relatively new one (See Judith Butler, 1999) it is not so new as to be transient. I think as our boundaries for what we understand queerness to be ebb and flow over time, the value of seeing and interacting with others who are living those experiences is an indispensable feature of the gay bar. For Professor A, this was an important feature of his experience of gay bars as well. Who are we performing for? If we are performing for ourselves, do we put on a different show? I think the answer would clearly be yes, but I would require additional research to seek out the truth of that assumption. In either case though, what is clear is that the nature of the gay bar and who occupies that space is continuously in flux. Professor A also pointed out some of the limitations gay bars as being the dominant space of the performance for queerness, highlighting the prevalence of alcoholism and drug addiction within the community, and pointing out that for many reasons gay bars are often not safe spaces for queer people. Even in light of this, I think the function they serve far exceeds the role that may be attributed to them and as sites of information and knowledge they continue to serve a vital community function.
What we talk about, when we talk about sex(uality)
The final salient finding that emerged from while doing this research was made explicit through both of my interviewees. When discussing queerness in public or private non-queer spaces, there is a tendency towards abstraction. Alternatively, the gay bar offers a site for both of my interviews to make those abstractions explicit. While this may on its face appear to be somewhat of a truism, I think what became clear to me throughout this process was the need to speak with others like oneself in clear and real terms. For Professor B, for example, presenting herself in a way which both feels comfortable and represents her internal self truthfully was a skill learned through discussing it with peers, for Professor A, it is more literal as he articulates, queer folks just talk about things that others don’t. For the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, these frank discussions were matters of death or survival for the community, how many people learned how to have safe sex from a queer nun in a gay bar in the 1980’s and 90’s? We will likely never know the real number behind that but I think their continued existence today indicates that there is still a need for that today.
Conclusion
I have set out to use Dervin and Savolainen in order to better understand the nature of the gay bar as a site of information seeking behavior. I have shown through interviews and a review of the literature that these spaces offer unique opportunities to serve as sites of communication of knowledge and information seeking in a way which is not replicable in online or other environments. I have highlighted some key features which emerged from my research regarding the nature of the kinds of information seeking behavior which occurs in them. I have left the door open for additional research into the role of the gay bar in queer communities and their function as sites of information seeking. I would just like to highlight what occurs to me as the most important finding, at least for me personally. While I had a vague and shapeless understanding of the role of gay bars before this research and they role which I believed they play in queer community, I think finding A for me was the most transformative aspect of this research. The idea of being apart from the traditional and conventional modes of learning about oneself as a function of identity is not a new idea, but I think in the sphere of creating a drive for information seeking behavior it likely is. For me, the consideration of Dervin and Savolainen allowed me to question what the value of these spaces really is in a meaningful way, it exposed a desire for me to continue to seek out answers. In a sense, encountering the idea of the gay bar as a site of information seeking behavior has in itself acted as a sign post to me seek out more information about the topic.
Bibliography
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