Urban Geography ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20 Beyond heteronormativity? Gay cruising, closeted experiences and self-disciplining subject in People’s Park, Guangzhou Junxi Qian To cite this article: Junxi Qian (2017) Beyond heteronormativity? Gay cruising, closeted experiences and self-disciplining subject in People’s Park, Guangzhou, Urban Geography, 38:5, 771-794, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2016.1139408 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1139408 Published online: 02 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 92 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rurb20 Download by: [The University of Edinburgh] Date: 10 May 2017, At: 06:57 URBAN GEOGRAPHY, 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 5, 771–794 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1139408 Beyond heteronormativity? Gay cruising, closeted experiences and self-disciplining subject in People’s Park, Guangzhou Junxi Qian Centre for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography, School of Geography, South China Normal University, Shipai, Guangzhou, China ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY In this paper, I examine relationships between public space, gay people’s cruising and construction of gay subjectivity in People’s Park, Guangzhou, China. In particular, I interrogate the complex dynamics between the performance of homosexual identity and the dominant heteronormative ideologies in China’s cultural–political sphere. I articulate how public cruising can be mobilized as a space of alternative socio-spatial ordering and simultaneously a closeted space to experience and reassert hegemonic divides of public/private, normal/abnormal. This paper employs an analysis of self-disciplining and the production of docile bodies to examine how gay cruisers construct gayness as deviant identity and thus attempt to reconcile gay subjects with dominant norms and values. The production of self-disciplining subjects is centered on the discursive formulation that gay men in public need to act in self-regulated and “lowprofile” ways. This paper intends to enrich our understanding of the intrinsically dialectical relationships between public space and sexual subjectivity in concrete time spaces. Received 13 October 2012 Accepted 20 January 2014 KEYWORDS Public space; cruising; gay identity; closet; self-disciplining subjectivity Introduction This paper examines the ways in which heteronormativity unfolds in gay men’s cruising in public space. The importance of public cruising spaces in organizing both homosocial and homoerotic relations has been recognized in various studies (Leap, 1999). Ever since Humphreys’s (1970) groundbreaking ethnography on tearoom trade, public spaces for gay cruising have been viewed as crucial sites in which vernacular sexual knowledge is produced, and a collective gay identity is bred (Brown, 2008; Iveson, 2007; Turner, 2003). Cruising places are not only spaces in which normative sexual cartographies can be subverted temporarily, but urban locations where regulatory powers of the state and society have always already been established. As Leap (1999) has argued, complex intersections of sexual visibility, spatial politics, and regulation unfold in the lives of gay cruisers, and also shape their collective sexual experiences and gendered identities. CONTACT Junxi Qian junxi.qian@gmail.com © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 772 J. QIAN Figure 1. The location of Guangzhou in China and the location of People’s Park in Guangzhou. The bulk of extant studies on gay men’s public cruising have contended that the appropriation of public spaces challenges heteronormative orderings of socio-spatial relations. However, as Nash (2006) argues, the entangled relationship between particular places and homosexual identities “is far more complicated than merely a battle over the ability to visibly inhabit and appropriate identifiable territories” (p. 2). Spaces implicated in the constitution of sexualized selves are highly contested and fluid. Thus, it may be postulated that there are ways in which queered or sexualized public spaces reinscribe, rather than challenge, heteronormative identities, and practices. My paper engages with this under-theorized issue. By investigating geographies of gay cruising in People’s Park, Guangzhou, China (Figure 1), it reports how public cruising places can be mobilized as spaces of alternative socio-spatial ordering and simultaneously spaces to reassert the dominant divide of private/public. It also discusses how gay men attempt to reconcile gay subjects in public with the hegemonic divide between deviancy and normalcy, through the discursive and embodied practices of self-disciplining. This paper suggests that while public space queered by sexual minorities counters the erasure, the concealment of the closet, it may simultaneously contribute to continued invisibility and oppression of sexual minorities’ cultural differences. Closetedness does not necessarily mean that homosexual desires are thoroughly unknown or unseen to outsiders, but that they are denied as legitimate claims to identities (Sedgwick, 1990). In People’s Park, while gay cruisers’ entry into a public social space can undoubtedly be seen as an act of “coming-out”, they also carefully police and manage behaviors to render homosexual identity less conspicuous. This, I would argue, has reinstated the self-enclosure of the closet, even though their sexual and cultural difference can be clearly perceived by other park users. While China is less burdened with religious doctrines condemning and stigmatizing same-sex desire, its social order is nonetheless reliant upon a culturally distinct regime URBAN GEOGRAPHY 773 of heteronormativity. In Confucius tradition, the continuation of family lineage is viewed as everyone’s sacred responsibility. Same-sex behaviors are tolerated only if one fulfills the commitment to heterosexual marriage. Yet, even this seemingly harmonious coexistence of heterosexual marriage and homoeroticism is increasingly unimaginable in contemporary China, with the institutionalization of monogamy and emphasis on genuine emotional connection between two parties of a contractual marriage. On the other hand, China’s nascent modernity in the Republican Era (1912–1949) witnessed the introduction of Western gender binary which reified the “natural” bonding between men and women. Same-sex desire, as a result, was thoroughly pathologized (Chou, 2000). The Maoist regime imposed even stricter moral discipline on homosexuality. Same-sex behaviors were often criminalized as specific expressions of hooliganism (Li, 2006). In this paper, the production of cruising space in People’s Park is situated within China’s recent social and cultural transformation due to its economic reform, the process during which a limited degree of political liberalization allowed increased visibility of gay identity. Meanwhile, however, Chinese gays and lesbians in the postreform era have to once again negotiate Confucius family tradition, which was largely irrelevant in the Maoist period dominated by class rhetorics. What makes the situation more complicated is that in a fast expanding market economy, neoliberal ideas such as personal merit and personal quality tend to encourage socially “appropriate” ways of being gays and lesbians (Rofel, 2007). This paper attempts to grasp the complex, competing forces and subject positions in the construction of a recently emerged urban social space in China, in order to illustrate the ways in which sexual subjectivity is rendered relational and unstable within a constellation of social relations, cultural norms, and power. Public space, sexuality and the formation of subjectivity Public space as site of emancipatory potential The public/private divide in sexual norms is inscribed in the cultural and discursive construction of both public and private spaces. The idea that certain sexual identities are deviant and should be kept away from visibility in public space has enormously powerful effects in structuring the moral geographies of spatial practices (Bondi, 1998). Heterosexual codes of conducts are powerfully inscribed in established norms and rules regulating conducts in public; spaces of sexual dissidents are thus relegated to a closeted sphere of the private (Valentine, 1993a). The existing literature has provided ample evidence of spatial processes through which public spaces are policed and disciplined to ensure that hegemonic heterosexual norms are solidified via spatial configurations (Brickell, 2000; Valentine, 1993a, 1993b). Naturalization of heterosexuality in public constitutes one important element of what is called heteronormativity, an aggregate of norms and rules which are deeply embedded in a wide range of social institutions and our standard accounts of the world (Warner, 1993). In this sense, as Bell and Binnie (2000) contend, contesting the confinement of the private to enter public presence or visibility is pivotal for sexual minorities’ 774 J. QIAN empowerment and resistance. Such queered and sexualized public spaces can be roughly categorized into two types. The first type includes urban sites which are occupied by sexual minorities for both sociality and sexual eroticism (Hubbard, 2002). The gathering of members of sexual minorities rewrites dominant sexual geographies of particular urban spaces and, therefore, challenges their established cultural meanings. Spaces of the second type are produced by transgressive performance of dissident sexual and gender identities. Deviant and creative performance disrupts the normative dichotomies of private/public, homosexual/heterosexual, and renders the articulation of sexual identities highly fluid (Bell, Binnie, Cream, & Valentine, 1994; Bell & Valentine, 1995a, 1995b; Brown, 2004). Following Shields (1991), it is possible for us to conceptualize sexualized and queered public spaces as places on the margin which incubate political potentials of resistance. As Berlant and Warner (1998) comment on public sex culture, public displays of sexual identities are processes of world making, and foster the “recognition, memory, elaboration, or institutionalization of all the nonstandard intimacies that people have in everyday life” (p. 560). Such spaces empower sexual minorities to envisage alternative collective cultures, as well as creative configurations of futurity (Muñoz, 2009). Outside/inside heteronormativity Relatively less attention, however, has been paid to the diversity of sexual minorities’ experiences in public spaces, and those experiences and subjectivities at odds with accounts of emancipation and resistance. The complexity of meanings of sexualized public spaces mirrors a problem underlying the emancipatory tone reviewed above, namely ignorance of complex negotiations with dominant cultural norms and relations of power. The presence of dominant heterosexuality always shapes nonnormative sexual subjectivity, and this subjectivity may not always imply resistance and transgression. Do the subtle, largely inconspicuous strategies employed by gays and lesbians in public spaces to articulate queer presence transgress norms and boundaries (e.g., Valentine, 1996), or simply reinscribe the dominant heteronormativity? There is no unidirectional answer to this question. Minority sexualities in public can be coproduced by a resistant political consciousness and simultaneously negotiation with, or even compromise to orders, rules, and norms prescribed by heterosexuality. The constitution of sexual self is imbricated in the web of connections, relations, and encounters into which any social subject is always-already woven (Barnett, 2004, 2005). With such an analytical logic, the heterosexual other should not be seen as a pre-given and abstract backdrop against which sexual minorities’ identity politics stages itself, but concrete social reality which marginal sexual subjects actively negotiates. In a series of commentaries on Bell et al. (1994) now classic article on gender performativity, Kirby (1995), Probyn (1995), and Walker (1995) all questioned a presupposed political radicalism in gender performers and exaggerated fluidity in gender and sexual identity. Probyn (1995) and Walker (1995) remind of the necessity to recognize that conditions of gendered or sexed space can be historically, materially, and strategically different. Hence, we need to consider how people are constrained by the very regulatory norms which are also the condition of resistance. It is also to be URBAN GEOGRAPHY 775 recognized that many people with nonnormative sexual identities continue to experience confinement and oppression. Kirby (1995) argues that certain strategies in gender performativity do little to subvert heteronormative discourses, and an analytical emphasis on the visual display of sexual exoticism can render the discussion on identity politics formless and alienated. Although this line of arguments concerns the particular theme of performativity, it speaks much to analyses of queered and sexualized public space. It indicates that we can never assume an a priori political transgressiveness in dialectics between space and nonmainstream sexual identities. Several studies on the public geographies of sexuality have made gestures to the contradictory and ambiguous meanings of sexualized or queered public spaces (Bell & Valentine, 1995a; Browne, 2007a, 2007b; Hubbard, 2001; Johnston, 2005, 2007; Waitt, 2003, 2005, 2006). For example, inspiring studies of Johnston (2005, 2007) on gay parades in different contexts have documented that resistant consciousness and a sense of shame can coexist in the public display of homosexual pride. More intriguingly, she discusses how some gay organizations attempt to construct “normal” and hygienic gay images by excluding certain “deviant” gay expressions. Waitt’s (2003, 2005) discussion on Sydney’s 2002 Gay Games also suggests that there are recursive relationships between power, discourses, and critically reflexive, geographically embedded sexual subjects. In particular, he points out that by carefully forging an eroticized, yet nonthreatening gay imagery, gay men’s transgression of heteronormativity seems to be significantly compromised. A tentative conclusion which can be drawn from those arguments is that spaces of sexual minorities do not necessarily transgress dominant socio-spatial norms. Any queered or sexualized space, in this sense, is the product of struggles between competing meanings and subject positions (Oswin, 2008). Social encounters between a dissident self and “mainstream” others are concrete historical events that do not privilege any singular, disembodied, and authoritative voice. Political potentials of such spaces, in this sense, cannot be taken for granted, but require nuanced analyses of variegated discursive practices and processes of subject formation. Such an analytical approach concentrates on ways in which subjectivity is produced relationally, intertwining both a dissident self and dominant others. How individuals’ subject positions are shaped by the movement into the public often depends on how the relations to others are imagined, interpreted, and practiced. It echoes Probyn’s (1996) contention that subjectivities and identities are always configured in the domain of the social, always performed within proximity to each other. It is a field of connections and encounters which also incorporates the relations of power, and thus has enormous implications for the disciplining and governance of social subjects. Sexual identities perform subject positions as unfixed and fluid, but do not necessarily extend them beyond the normative. It does not always transcend categories or boundaries, but often work within confines and constraints of dominant norms and relations of power (Oswin, 2008; Probyn, 2003). The ways in which we understand the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal are negotiated through practices often constrained by established social and cultural institutions. As Bell and Valentine (1995b) have persuasively pointed out, subject positions available to those with dissident sexual identities are in part products of the very regulatory regimes which constrain the articulation of the same identities. 776 J. QIAN So overall, this paper argues that sexual minorities’ subjectivities in public can be outside, but simultaneously inside, heteronormativity. It also proposes that the construction of heterosexuality depends, at least in part, on how homosexuality and other nonnormative sexual identities are socially practiced and discursively configured. As Fuss (1991) argues, it is homosexuality which delineates the discursive boundaries of the conception of heterosexuality. Socially produced categories of nonmainstream sexual identities project back onto the question of what can be counted as mainstream or normal. Most sexual dissidents are both inside and outside dominant discourses of heterosexuality at the same time—“being ‘out’ is always depends to some extent on being ‘in’” (Butler, 1991, p. 16). Therefore, coming out is simultaneously a closeting. Public space may reinscribe the power structure it simultaneously struggles with (Butler, 1991). Visibility can paradoxically lead to other forms of concealment, denial, or oppression (Brown, 1996, 2000), often in quite subtle ways. As Sedgwick (1990) argues in terms of the epistemology of the closet, no one can take full control over all the multiple, often contradictory cultural codes about sexuality. Hence, no sexual identity can be circumscribed in itself. Dissident sexual subjects can never be “out” completely, and it is possible for any nonmainstream sexual subject to be inside and outside the closet at the same time (Brown, 1996). The making of a closet involves a whole set of social interactions and discursive practices mediated by the working of cultural institutions and power/ knowledge; and it happens in both private and public spaces. Methodology This study is the product of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2012. During that period, I worked as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS)-prevention volunteer in the cruising space in People’s Park. My volunteer work was informally affiliated to Chi-Heng Foundation, a local non-governmental organization (NGO) specializing on homosexual issues. As a university-based researcher, my positionality was essentially that of an outsider. But thanks to the good relationship between Chi-Heng and gay cruisers, which was cultivated by many generations of volunteers, I was soon accepted as a “friend,” if not necessarily a comrade, and established good social networks with the cruisers. Volunteer work allowed me to interact extensively with them and to be involved in their everyday sociality in the park. I took advantage of those chances to engage in constructive dialogues, and draw from their own ideas, views, and attitudes. My identity as a researcher was stated explicitly, and the use of fieldwork data was conditional upon the informants’ permission. Chi-Heng’s philosophy toward HIV/AIDS prevention advised that while we gave tips on safe sex and use of condoms, we should avoid making pre-given judgments about cultural “decency” or “appropriateness.” This echoed the ethical stance underlying my analyses in this research. As will be shown, my primary focus was placed on the power relations between gay cruising and broader institutions of heteronormativity, and I did not concur with gay cruisers’ attempt to render cruising “low-key”, and everyday spatial practices less “troublesome.” Meanwhile, as an outsider and volunteer working for a local NGO, I admit that there was a risk that informants might deliberately distort their URBAN GEOGRAPHY 777 accounts to emphasize culturally more “acceptable” images of gayness. During the fieldwork, potential distortion was reduced in several ways. First, gay cruisers’ generally positive and friendly attitude toward volunteers helped me to construct more sincere relationships with my informants. Second, the fieldwork was highly reliant on exchanging with gay cruisers knowledge, ideas, and views which I had about their social life in the park. The sharing of information and ideas helped to build openness and trust. Finally, I also compared findings from interviews with observations of social and verbal interactions between gay cruisers. Qualitative data were collected from intensive observational work and interviews conducted in the cruising site. Thirty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews and a number of informal interviews were conducted with gay cruisers and local NGO leaders. Most questions in the interviews were concerned with how gay men positioned their sexual subjectivity in relation to both the space and the self-other ecology in the park. Interview data are analyzed through the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. CDA does not view languages as passive representations of absolute truths, but social construction contingent on specific social contexts and relations. Moreover, it highlights the constitutive and productive power languages and discourses can exert. Discourses are constitutive of identities and subjectivities, and also organize the ways in which social subjects make sense of social phenomena and navigate behaviors. Contextualizing homosexual identities in China As Kulpa and Mizielińska (2011) edited volume on sexualities in Central and Eastern Europe has clearly demonstrated, non-Western homosexual identities are always situated in tensions between the globalized politics of gay emancipation, trumpeted largely by identity categories and theories conceived in Western contexts, and geohistorically specific national cultures. While catching up with Western standards of cultural tolerance and sexual citizenship is usually an explicitly or implicitly stated goal for Chinese gay communities, homosexual identities in China are distinct from their counterparts in post-Stonewall North America and Europe, in both symbolic contents and political ramifications. First, there is no direct cultural referent for a coherently demarcated identity for homosexual people in modern China, despite the country’s rich tradition of male homoeroticism. As Ho (2010) and Rofel (2007) have pointed out, the formation of homosexual identity in post-reform China finds much of its resource from incomplete and fragmentary knowledge of Western gayness. Hence, for Chinese homosexuals, understandings of their sexual identities are at best fragmented and ambiguous (Li, Holroyd, & Lau, 2010). Second, discourses of national identity and cultural authenticity are deeply rooted in the framing of Chinese homosexual identities. Homosexual people in China tend to shun “Western-style”, confrontational identity politics (Chou, 2000; Ho, 2010; Rofel, 1999, 2007). Cultural affinity to Confucius tradition and the pursuit of harmonious coexistence with the mainstream heterosexual society have profoundly shaped shared cultural orientations for many Chinese homosexuals. Third, homosexual community in China is highly divided across lines of class, social status, and home region. Rural or lower-class homosexuals are seen as 778 J. QIAN undesirable others and excluded from more powerful gay groups (Ho, 2010; Rofel, 1999, 2007; Wei, 2007). As Jones (2007) argues, Chinese homosexual communities have actively absorbed state-sanctioned ideologies of civility and personal quality into the articulation of modern gayness. Personal quality, therefore, becomes a pivotal yardstick for distinguishing good, worthy homosexuals from lower-class or rural gays. Interestingly, divisions alongside class and social status have been projected onto representations of queer spaces. Public cruising places in China, such as parks and streets, have been continuously stigmatized by middle-class homosexuals (Ho, 2010; Li, 1998; Wei, 2007). Finally, the ambiguous legal status of homosexuality in China warrants some attention. In China, no law explicitly criminalizes homosexual activities in public. In the state discourses, homosexual identities and activities are neither condemned nor officially endorsed. Gay men, for example, can be traced only in public health documentations, where they are referred to simply as the MSM group (men who have sex with men). This legal vacuum indeed created some favorable conditions for the survival of public cruising spaces. Yet, it does not entail that law and state power are irrelevant to the constitution of gay identities. It cannot be denied that the Chinese police do enjoy considerable freedom in monitoring, harassing, and punishing gay people (Li, 2006; Rofel, 2007). On the other hand, as Johnson (2007) has noted, even if laws do not target explicitly at gay people, certain rationalities of social regulation serve a particularly effective role in disciplining dissident sexualities. In China, police campaigns in the name of maintaining public security and eliminating crimes often make gay cruisers direct subjects of state regulatory power. Discourses of emancipation and the making of collective gay culture Why People’s Park? People’s Park is located in the center of Guangzhou’s old town. Prior to1998, the park charged a small entrance fee to its visitors. But in 1998, walls surrounding the park were demolished by the Guangzhou Municipal Government, and since then entrance has been free of charge. Soon after that, gay men began to gather in the park for socializing and cruising for sexual encounters. According to local NGOs, the gay space in People’s Park is the largest public gay cruising ground in South China. The locational advantage of the park fostered its queering, since it is connected conveniently to other parts of the city via public transport. Two public lavatories built in the park can also be used by gay men as venues of casual sex. Gay cruising in People’s Park demonstrates a recognizable class dimension. Most gay cruisers are less educated and from lower social classes. As a result, they seem to be sensitive to economic costs involved in cruising, and an urban park whose entrance is free is seen as an ideal cruising space (Figures 2 and 3). But for cruisers who have actually dared to “go public”, People’s Park is exalted as a crucial site for both homosociality and erotic sexual experiences. The park is called a “fishing ground”, a place for fleeting relationship and instant sex. Partner hunting is fulfilled and somehow ritualized through the production and circulation of vernacular sex codes (Iveson, 2007)—acts such as bench sitting, walking, and eye contacting are charged with particular cultural meanings. Homosociality in the forms of URBAN GEOGRAPHY 779 Figure 2. The layout of People’s Park and the location of the gay cruising space. chatting with other gay men, rendezvousing with partners, making and meeting friends is another important element in the production of a public gay culture. The cruising space occupies roughly one-third of the whole park, and is dubbed the “gay belt”. The bulk of the cruising space consists of three long, parallel corridors with stone benches at both sides. The rest of the park is used for leisure activities by straight park visitors. People’s Park as site of emancipation Similar to its Western counterparts, public space in China is coded with hegemonic heterosexuality. So the visibility of gay men in a renowned urban park indeed 780 J. QIAN Figure 3. Gay cruisers sitting on stone benches. Source: Photograph by the author. challenges certain taken-for-granted assumptions of the socio-spatial ordering of sexuality. The cruising space is treated by gay men as an escape from everyday oppression of heteronormative ways of living. For gay men in the park, everyday spaces of work and family are saturated with heterosexual cultural norms. The class status of cruisers seems to dictate that they suffer from even more overwhelming heteronormative cultural environment than middle-class gays. Most of them have not come out to parents or friends; and many are even in heterosexual marriages. But the cruising space in People’s Park undermines and subverts hegemonic sexual norms, and consolidates an unruly space in which people with same-sex desire can build up both homosocial and homoerotic connections. Sexual encounters and the visual and haptic consumption of male bodies constitute an important part, but not all, of transgressive geographies in People’s Park. Gay cruisers are usually bold enough to hold each other’s hands, talk on erotic topics, and caress each other’s body. More explicitly gendered or sexualized acts—such as kissing, dragging, and cuddling—are often seen and generally tolerated by straight park users. The cruising space is also important to community formation. Gay men appropriate a particular urban space to enact their identity as cultural difference experienced collectively through sexually laden spatial practices. Through mutual engagements and interactions, an emotionally charged sociocultural community is emerging in the park. Many cruisers experienced significant anxieties and confusions about their sexual desire before entering the cruising ground, and it is through this semi-public, semiprivate spatiality that their trajectories of life intersect with “those people who are like us”. Lao-Ai,1 for example, is one of the pioneers who initiated the gay culture in the park. A middle-aged gay man, he feels uncomfortable with recently proliferating, commercialized gay venues, which, to him, are merely cocoons of commodity relations URBAN GEOGRAPHY 781 rather than spaces of emotional connections. His attachment to People’s Park, in contrast, is fairly pronounced: The fishing ground belongs to gay men. Here, we feel we are in “our world”. It is our world and our paradise, and we have a strong sense of belonging to it. It is home for us because it is only in this place that we dare to do things that cannot be done elsewhere. (Interview, October 2011) Ambivalent meanings of the cruising space Deviancy as self-experienced cultural trope The discussion above has shown cruiser’s ability to expand possibilities of life by reappropriating social meanings of a public landscape. More importantly, cruisers have made the public presence of homosexuality an “open secret” to straight park users. It forced the heterosexual outsiders to at least acknowledge and learn to live with a social group displaying radical sexual and cultural difference. Yet, gay men’s resistance to the confinement of everyday spaces does not guarantee a challenge to dominant cultural institutions and discursive systems. For example, in People’s Park displays of gay intimacies and performativity in the forms of carnivalesque fun and dragging are understood more as a way to enhance a collective identity, rather than stage a visual challenge to heteronormativity. In fact, gay cruisers follow vernacular codes and knowledge largely unintelligible to straight park users. They are keen to circumscribe the gay space into a cordoned-off social world separated from the tracks of outsiders. Mi, a local NGO leader working on gay community issues, remarked that gay men in People’s Park are more likely to regard the gay space and the rest of the park as “two parallel universes”: What gay people want is that if you are not homosexual, then it is the best for you not to feel anything special in the park. Gay men don’t want to send any signal to heterosexual people. They don’t want their vernacular knowledge to be understood by outsiders. Gay men only send signals to their kind. And the world of gay men and the world of heterosexual users of the park are basically two parallel universes. (Interview, September 2011) Cruisers in People’s Park expect that if heterosexual others cannot sense the signals sent by them, their transgression of the public/private divide would not be viewed as a major threat to heteronormative norms. The attempt to confine their social world outside heterosexual others’ recognition can be partly explained by many cruisers’ discursive construction of gayness as a deviant social identity. The internalization of prevalent cultural stigmas attached to homosexuality is the first step of the discursive reconstruction of homosexual self in relation to dominant heterosexuality (Goffman, 1963), since gay men are a sexual minority in the society and gay identity is inevitably a shame and a deviancy. Some gay men even consider homosexuality immoral and pathological, since it violates marriage and reproduction, and leads to sexual indulgence and degeneracy. One informant, for example, has been a long-time and frequent visitor to the cruising ground. Throughout much of his adulthood, he has been living in self-hatred because of his “deviant” sexual desire. During my interview with him, he extends the internalization of cultural stigmas to such an extreme: 782 J. QIAN Homosexuality is a mistake, it is pathological. It is a problem in your mentality. Homosexuality is also immoral since homosexual love is not allowed in our cultural system. If a gay man could ever have a choice, he would never choose to be a gay, because no one can accept a homosexual relationship. It is just because the vast majority of people are heterosexual that our difference and our deviancy are bound to be condemned. (Interview, September 2011) Indeed, most cruisers concur that it is better not to reveal their homosexual identity or desire to the heterosexual outsiders in the park. Although they demand homosexuality to be more visible at a collective level, they also insist that at an individual level anonymity to heterosexual outsiders is essential. The subtle tension between collective visibility and individual invisibility also needs to be understood beyond the immediate social setting of the park, and within the cruisers’ discursive construction of Chinese national identity. Cruisers are prone to portray traditional Chinese culture as too conservative for radical, confrontational politics of gay liberation. The constitutive outside of this cultural imaginary of authentic Chineseness, not surprisingly, is a “Western culture” which is imagined to be more tolerant, liberal, and progressive: China is more conservative. I know that in Western, or more developed countries, people are quite open in talking about homosexuality and gays. Those countries have already opened up to these issues, and their people are also more liberal-minded . . . [But] our mindset has not progressed very much during the past several decades or so. (Interview, November 2011) This imagined geography articulates gay men’s subjectivity with broader cultural institutions. The self-construction of gayness as a deviant social identity also prompts many gay men to narrate a feeling of being out-of-place: it is gay men who have “invaded” a public space owned naturally by mainstream, heterosexual people. Thus, the gay cruisers often adopt a fairly ambiguous attitude in terms of whether or not the park actually belongs to “people like us.” The dichotomization between deviancy and normalcy elucidates the porosity of discursive boundaries delineating gay identity, as well as the proximity of gay subjects, both spatially and socially, to the presence of heterosexual others (Probyn, 1996). Gay dancing in the park: struggling with the notion of normalcy Gay cruisers’ struggle between discursively constructed deviancy and the hegemonic definition of normalcy is vividly manifested in the practice of gay dancing. In People’s Park, public dancing is organized by straight park users as a leisure activity. Many gay men are active participants in it. For them, cultural meanings of dancing with heterosexual people are rather complex and manifest many subtle contradictions in the formation of gay subjectivity. On the one hand, dancing is seen as a chance of expression and emancipation for gay dancers. Many gay dancers suggest that in dancing they can experience an enhanced gay pride, since gay people seem to have particular talents for arts and choreographed bodily movements. In dancing, gay men are often dressed in flamboyantly decorated costumes. As some told me, most heterosexual people participating in dancing are clearly aware of gay dancers’ sexual identity. But through engaged mutual interactions, the rigid boundary between self and others is URBAN GEOGRAPHY 783 often obscured. As a result, heterosexual people tend to compliment gay dancers on dancing skills, rather than contempt their nonmainstream sexual desire. But in the meantime, public dancing is also an arena for gay dancers to struggle with and even embrace the hegemonic notion of normalcy. During public dancing, various subject positions are enacted by gay cruisers in order to consolidate an atmosphere of normalcy. First of all, dancing is interpreted by cruisers as an asexual and hygienic form of leisure for all park users. It mirrors their expectation that sexual desire, either heterosexual or homosexual, should be made less perceivable in public (Hubbard, 2000). Second, dancing is viewed as an intimate and face-to-face engagement with others, yet without the need to explicitly reveal one’s sexual identity. Gay cruisers insist that they would like their heterosexual dancing partners to feel a certain degree of obscurity about their sexual orientation, since directly disclosed gay identity disrupts encoded “normalcy” of dancing sites. They also carefully monitor boundaries of languages and acts in order to pass as normal and nonthreatening heterosexuals. In some cases, gay men deliberately evade dancing with each other, but prefer a female partner. Although dancing is also used by gay men for socialization, there is a shared rule that sexual desire and identity should not be displayed explicitly in the sociality during public dancing. Through experiences of dancing, the abstract notion of normalcy is actively lived by the cruisers. Many gay men attempt to reenact the identity of a “normal” social member through dancing in a social space where a banal geography of leisure intersects with a forbidden geography of gayness. The “gay belt” is considered by many gay dancers to be too heavily encoded with the symbols and meanings of “abnormality”, and is seen as a Janus-faced spatiality bifurcating into both liberation and a sense of alienation. Dancing, on the contrary, sets up strict limits on transgressive conducts and can be exploited by gay cruisers to restore a sense of “normal” social life. Several gay dancers reflect that dancing with females gives them an opportunity to experience and perform “straight men’s identity,” as dancing often involves unconscious display of “small heterosexual intimacies.” Some gay dancers even avoid entering the “gay belt,” feeling uneasy about explicit expressions of gayness there. But their emotional attachment to People’s Park’s “gay ambience” would always “bring them back.” In this case, those cruisers creatively use the dancing space as a buffer zone between everyday spaces of oppression and too straightforward expressions of homosexual desire: “when I want to be ‘in’, I can just go to the ‘gay belt’, but when I want to be ‘out’, I just join the leisure activities here but still keeps a proximity to the gay ambience here” (Interview, August 2011). Thus, gay men who participate in dancing seem to contravene the transgressive geographies of a territorialized gay space and attempt to bring subjectivity back into interaction with the hegemonic notion of normalcy. During the interviews, several gay dancers affirm that their “difference” is not irreconcilable with the mainstream. In order to survive in existing social and cultural structures, gay men cannot circumscribe their life within a homosexual identity and they need to interact with the mainstream society. So, it is wiser to incorporate certain ideas and norms of the mainstream into the constitution of gay subjectivities, rather than directly challenging conventional definitions of the normal: 784 J. QIAN Even though we are gay, life must continue, right? No one lives in isolation, and we cannot survive if we are not normal enough. We live in this society, and it is ruled by some principles and norms which are not very gay. But we cannot just abandon them and we must live a normal life from time to time. Humans live together and in relation to other humans. (Interview, September 2011) Stigmatization, public/private divide and self-disciplining subjectivity Stigmatization and the discourse of “chaos” Gay men’s construction of gayness as a deviant identity and their attempts to reconcile gayness with the hegemonic divide of normal/abnormal underscore many representations of the cruising space in People’s Park, often outside accounts of emancipation and emotional attachment. Among gay men in People’s Park, a rhetoric constructing the cruising space as a chaotic (in Chinese, luan) place is predominant. The image of a homosexual in the public, despite all the liberatory potentials that it implies, is paradoxically construed as the worst image a gay man can ever expect. Plentiful studies have demonstrated that even within gay and lesbian communities, there are many subtle dynamics of inclusion/exclusion associated with the question of what can be viewed as decent and appropriate homosexual cultures or behaviors (Bell & Binnie, 2004; Bell & Valentine, 1995a; Brown, 2006). Stigmatization of the cruising ground in People’s Park derives in part from the class status of the cruisers. Local middle-class gay men have actively played out essentialized meanings and representations to articulate and circulate the discourses of chaos. Stigmatizing representations of the cruising ground find their root in gay cyberspaces, and are illustrative of middle-class gay men’s disdain of public visibility of homosexuality. In these representational repertoires, decent and nonthreatening expressions of homosexual desire exist only in private spaces; and gay men who cruise in public space are associated with negative tropes, such as indecency, promiscuousness, and disease-carrying. The stigmatization of public visibility of homosexuality mirrors the articulation of what might be termed a Chinese homonormativity (Duggan, 2002, 2003), premised on a limited political loosening and the consumption-oriented citizenship in post-reform China. On the one hand, middle-class gay men in China tend to seek enjoyment in privatized and commercialized gay venues. Although such spaces are by no means immune to state regulation, some degree of protection is endowed as long as they are officially registered commercial establishments contributing to economic development. On the other hand, gay men with higher incomes and education are embracing the prospect of sexual citizenship that imitates heterosexual contractual marriage and advocates stable partnership (Richardson, 2005). Domestic space of sexual coupledom implies not only cohabitation, but also money-spending activities, such as housing purchase and middle-class lifestyles. According to my interviews with local NGOs, this is indeed a rosy future of gay liberty envisaged by middle-class gay men and professional activists. Emphases are placed largely on private spaces cordoned off from public politics and a modern consumer identity. URBAN GEOGRAPHY 785 In contrast, online representations of public cruising are so homogenously centered on rhetorics of dirtiness, indecency, and promiscuousness that many cruisers view these representations as a culturally oppressive online discursive space: When gay men chat online, they sometimes talk about gay spaces in the city. But if you say you would like to go to People’s Park, you will be immediately disdained and criticized. Basically, people think those who go to People’s Park are “bad” guys leading an indecent and chaotic life. In Guangzhou, there is a hierarchy of “good” gay places and “bad” gay places, and People’s Park is apparently at the bottom of this hierarchy. (Interview, October 2011) The image of a disorderly, immoral and undesirable gay space has been incorporated into many cruisers’ own portrayals of the cruising ground. Much anxiety has emerged among gay cruisers, which concerns how they would be able to reconcile their inevitable visibility with the entrenched idea that homosexuality is deviant and should not be seen in public. Among all the stigmatizing representations, two issues disturb gay cruisers the most. First, sexual encounters happening in the two public lavatories in the park are severely contested. Second, in the park there also exist male-to-male prostitution, theft, robbery, and extortion. The presence of these “illegal” acts has led many cruisers to rethink relations between the cruising space, the Chinese state and the established legal framework. These two themes will be discussed more elaborately later. “We need to be low-profile”: the constitution of a self-disciplining subjectivity Stigmatizing representations of the cruising ground, coupled with gay men’s attempt to reconcile their “deviancy” with dominant definitions of normalcy, anchored a selfdisciplining subjectivity into the collective yearning for gay identity. At the heart of this self-disciplining subjectivity is the construction of gay men as an essentially different and deviant minority group whose presence begs acceptance by the mainstream society. One informant makes an interesting analogy that heterosexuality resembles the main dish of a meal, and its importance will never be challenged by appetizers or desserts: That is how our society is built and structured. You know, there is always a need for a mainstream. There must be a mainstream because only with it the society can stabilize. Every other thing is organized around this mainstream. It is just like eating your meal . . . You may like the appetizers very much, but can you totally ignore the main dish? Certainly you cannot. (Interview, October 2011) Here, it is apparent that the heterosexual mainstream is constitutive of, rather than merely opposed to, the production of gay subjectivity. The tension between gay men’s inevitable public visibility and the hope to stand outside negative stereotypes of abnormality leads many cruisers to advocate that they should act in a “low-profile” way. In this rhetoric of self-withdrawal, the discursive focus is placed on gay men’s sameness with, rather than difference from, the mainstream. On the one hand, conformity to a whole system of universal social, cultural, and legal rules is discursively privileged over the performances of difference—constraints on the acts and behaviors of the heterosexual should also limit the boundaries of homosexual cultures and desires. Thus, illegal activities, public sex in toilets and other explicit displays of sexual desire 786 J. QIAN can be critiqued on the basis that “even heterosexual people would not do it” (Interview, October 2011). On the other hand, the wish for sameness also rules out, or at least restricts, explicit expressions of homosexual identity and desire in public, since it undermines the certainties of the mainstream and the dominant. The inclusiveness of public social spaces, in this sense, only comes with the collective disabling of gay cruisers to articulate explicit gayness or experience dissident intimacies. Not surprisingly, some local NGOs working on homosexuality issues are also active advocates of this ideology of sameness and normality. Many cruisers recall that some local NGO volunteers are keen to educate them to comply with normative codes of conducts in public. Ah-Qiang, leader of one local NGO, remarks: As a gay activist, I certainly run for the rights movement for sexual minorities. But we also need to note that homosexual people constitute only 3–5 percent of the entire population. So in our progress towards empowerment we need to make concessions. It is a natural logic . . . What we want to emphasize is our similarity, not our difference . . . If you exaggerate your difference from others, it will be hard for you to survive in a society. (Interview, November 2011) Conflicts between gay cruisers and heterosexual park users, and the daily discriminations received by gay cruisers also strengthened the self-disciplining subjectivity. Gay men mistakenly exhibiting homosexual desire to the straight and straight park users unexpectedly encountering expressions of gayness are the principal sources of conflicts and discrimination. Also, those occasions are often taken advantage of as excuses for abusive police regulation. Consequently, many cruisers end up being convinced that if they too severely transgress the normative boundaries between normal and abnormal, public and private, it may result in even more draconic oppression against gay people. Thinking beyond the immediate social setting of the park, several cruisers consider cultural oppression and discrimination the results of gay men’s own transgression of widely accepted norms and rules. They contend that if gay men abide by the normative divide of normal/abnormal in public space, cultural discrimination against gay cruising will disappear naturally. With reference to the spatial relation between gay cruisers and other park users, a golden rule to which gay cruisers are generally committed is that their presence, conducts, and behaviors should not bring discomfort to straight park users. Thus encounters between gay cruisers and heterosexual others need to be disciplined, monitored, and sanitized. Cruisers also affirm that heterosexual others’ acceptance of gay men in the park is not impossible, but always conditional. At the center of this conditionality is the principle that gay men should be careful not to challenge a coherent heteronormative system of values and norms. Gay men’s emphasis on the self-disciplining of conducts is also interwoven with their hope to present a sanitized and desirable cultural image of gayness to heterosexual outsiders. Discursive construction of self-disciplining subjectivity is largely centered on a conviction that inappropriate conducts will add to the negative aspects of the public image of gayness. As a result, many cruisers describe those who practice dragging or toilet sex as self-depreciating and even immoral, and suggest that deviant and lascivious conducts will reinforce cultural stigmas attached to the gay community. URBAN GEOGRAPHY 787 As Richardson (2004) argues, desire for being normal and good homosexuals who are deserving of inclusion and integration can fundamentally reshape meanings and focus of gay identity. Such a notion of normality presupposes that sexual minorities bear a natural responsibility to monitor and discipline both behaviors and subjectivities, in conformity to dominant cultural institutions and relations of power. AhXing, for example, comes from a family which, in his words, places a great emphasis on moral education. Our conversation in People’s Park was requested by him, rather than me, since he “felt uneasy about many things going on around” and would like my research to “raise as a serious issue the cultural image of gay cruisers”: I need to say five words to all the fellow gay men in the park: self-dignity, self-esteem, sincerity, fidelity and progressiveness. People like us need to regulate our languages and conducts. It is not the case that heterosexual people discriminate you, but that what we have said and done sometimes makes others have to discriminate and hate us. There need to be rules in the park. And we should make this place a hygienic, healthy place. We cannot bring negative influence to the city and to the park. (Interview, October 2011) Filthiness: contesting toilet sex Gay sex taking place in the park’s two public lavatories are almost unanimously criticized by the interviewed cruisers. On the one hand, sexual encounters in public toilets transgress the universal cultural code that sex can only be practiced in privacy. On the other hand, since cruising always risks the exposure of homosexual desire, some of its particular forms need to be especially supervised. Although many cruisers actually engage in toilet sex, still, they tend to describe it as a filthy, inappropriate, and even immoral misbehavior. As probably the most explicit expression of homosexual desire in the park, oral sex, anal sex, or even orgy sex in the public lavatories stages a visual challenge to the dominant socio-spatial ordering which is intolerable even for cruisers themselves. Gay men who conduct toilet sex are often portrayed as immoral and filthy, as well as lacking personal quality and a sense of shame: I think that those who have sex in a public toilet lack a sense of morality. If you really need sex, just bring your partner home or to something like a hostel. But in public spaces if you have sex, it is a manifestation of lack of education and personal quality. Those people are like dogs—dogs do not care about whether it is a public or private space. (Interview, October 2011) Gay cruisers’ strong commitment to normative moralities indicates that the cultural imaginary of the normal, heterosexual social subject always disciplines the extent to which gay identity can be enunciated. Since public lavatories in the park are used by both gay men and heterosexual park users, they are viewed as sites where encounters between gays and heterosexual others are the most frequent and intensive. Hence, many gay cruisers assume that witnessing gay sex in public lavatories or being mistakenly seduced by gay men may result in a strong sense of repugnance among straight park users, which will bring a notorious reputation to the gay community. Three concerns can be identified here. First, many gay men worry that heterosexual men may be harassed by gay cruisers in public lavatories, which may result in direct confrontations and a cultural stereotype of hooliganism attached to gay cruisers. Second, gay men fear 788 J. QIAN that heterosexual outsiders may consider gay men dirty, unhealthy, and HIV-carrying, since most sexual encounters in public lavatories are without the use of condoms. Third, many cruisers also believe that random, anonymous sexual encounters in public lavatories may be considered by heterosexual outsiders a manifestation of promiscuousness and libertinism. Interestingly, cruisers are also concerned that displays of homosexual desire may “contaminate” the mental health of children using public lavatories. As Berlant (1997) suggests fetus, baby, or child is often imagined as innocent, asexual purity immune to homosexual desires. The cruisers’ anxious effort not to pollute children further evidenced how homosexual desire is experienced by gay men themselves to be illegitimate, dirty, and deviant: Being gay does not mean we are not part of the society, right? You see the toilets—they do not belong to gay people. There are old men and also children using the toilets and how would they think of people like us if they find we are having sex there? I don’t like that people think gays are the most licentious group in our society. We cannot bring a gay identity into toilets, and dirty sex in toilets cannot be seen as culture. (Interview, October 2011) Illegal acts: the construction of criminality Like other public cruising places in China, relationships between gay cruisers in People’s Park are not one dimensional. Male-to-male prostitution, theft, and extortion2 constitute another fabric of gay social relations which is not in accordance with romantic sexual encounters and community solidarity. As a result, despite their emotional attachment to the cruising ground, many gay men tend to portray it as a “bad” place where relations between gay men are “too complicated.” More notably, the presence of the abovementioned “illegal” acts also caused gay cruisers’ anxiety about the tension between gay cruising and the legal regime in China. In one sense, gay cruisers in People’s Park seem to adopt a much more relaxed stance toward illegality than toilet sex. This relative liberal-mindedness is attributed to the fact that even though unlawful acts are to be condemned under a universal legal framework, their low public visibility makes them more tolerable than toilet sex. Yet, illegal acts in the park are still of considerable concern to the cruisers. Most cruisers to whom I talked consider these acts socially transgressive. Interestingly, while none of my interviewees seemed to have committed robberies or thefts, some of them were indeed identified by others as sellers of sex. Yet, even these interviewees’ subject positions seem to be subsumed by a prevalent rhetoric that male-to-male prostitution is morally controversial and thus needs to be minimized. The presence of prostitution, theft, and extortion is also exploited by the municipal government to justify regulation and police harassment in the park.3 Although police campaigns are always in the name of regulating illegal acts, gay men are often arrested without ample evidence of having committed crimes. Still, gay men in the park tend to view police harassment as justifiable acts of sustaining social order, rather than manifestation of state-endorsed homophobia. Within a universal legal framework which ostensibly promises equal rights to all the citizens, “it is the gay men’s illegal acts which are responsible for the state’s regulatory practices.” On the other hand, this mentality of URBAN GEOGRAPHY 789 self-blaming also affirms some cruisers’ conviction that due to the inherited difference and otherness of gayness, anything conducted by gay men is always already deviant. Same-sex desire becomes the taken-for-granted referent with which every aspect of gay life is censored and judged, and gay men’s small deviancies will be deliberately amplified by outsiders into significant stigmas. The researcher: But robbery, theft and prostitution, all those stuffs happen among heterosexual people as well. They cannot just arrest every single gay man in the park because they believe some individuals have committed crimes? The interviewee: You are right. But why did the police come to regulate us in the first place? That is because we have done something that cannot be tolerated by the society. If we can behave ourselves, the police would not come. For us who are already different from the mainstream, we need particularly to supervise our conducts. When some gay people did something wrong, the entire group—not individuals—will be assigned with negative labels. (Interview, October 2011) Surely, there are other gay men who believe that the state’s regulation of the cruising place is at least partly out of a homophobic mentality. But even those gay men believe that gay cruisers need to monitor and self-discipline their conducts so that the police can “pick up no excuse” to harass them. In this sense, gay men’s interpretation of state regulation and the construction of the rhetoric of criminality seem to demonstrate their deliberate ignorance of an entrenched structure of unequal social power. As can be seen from the quote above, gay men highlight notions such as a universal system of socio-legal norms, gays’ absolute otherness and the need for self-regulation. The self-disciplining subjectivity, apparently, has been written into the power relations between gay cruisers, the state, and cultural institutions legitimizing homophobia. Negotiating the Chinese state: becoming “legally” gay? To some extent, the making of self-disciplining subjectivity reflects gay cruisers’ hope to be accepted or at least tolerated by the Chinese state. For some cruisers, the refusal to a more blatant visibility is the outcome of the experiences of draconian state oppression of homosexuality during the Maoist era (especially the Cultural Revolution) and even in the 1980s and 1990s. Many elderly and middle-aged gay men recalled experiences of arrest, detention, and imprisonment after sexual desire was exposed. For those, the selfdisciplining subjectivity mirrors their attempt to construct docile bodies in face of the state regulatory regime. On the other hand, and more importantly, most gay cruisers believe that selfdisciplining can help to soothe the relationships between gay men and the Chinese state. As I have discussed earlier, until now the Chinese state has not adopted any official stance toward the issue of homosexuality. The Chinese state’s obscure attitude and its reluctance in recognizing collective identities of gay people have jointly contributed to gay cruisers’ belief that homosexuality will at least be tolerated within the existing legal framework, if gay people do not challenge state power and universal legal codes. Some cruisers even suggest that if gay men behave according to universal norms and values, the state will eventually adopt policies favorable to gay communities. Selfdisciplining subjectivity, in this sense, seems to provide a strategically maneuverable identity for the cruisers. The somehow opportunistic mentality is illustrative of gay 790 J. QIAN men’s complex negotiation with both hegemonic cultural institutions and omnipresent state power. This mentality also helps us to understand why gay cruisers depict acts of toilet sex, prostitution, extortion, etc., as particularly transgressive and deviant, in order to justify state regulation and reenact notions of order, decency, and propriety. Conclusion This place is their kingdom. In this kingdom, all citizens are male. There is no real territory for them, and what they have is a home to their hearts. They call this place a fishing ground, a place for picking up your man. For every one who lingers in this place, there is a history written behind his mask. They would hide who they are and begin to use nicknames. What they want here is pleasure, short or long. But now, this kingdom is at the brink of its collapse.4 So what are the implications of this self-disciplining subjectivity for the collective gay culture in People’s Park? At one level, the emphasis on self-disciplining is practiced largely discursively, and certainly does not eradicate either “illegality” or explicit expressions of gay desire. However, the self-disciplining subjectivity is an ideological contour which has been constantly defining and redefining the transgressive geographies and collective gay identity in the park. Under such an ideological umbrella, blatant expressions of gayness are often interpreted as aberrations from a collective commitment to more civilized, sanitized gay identity. Gay cruisers previously prone to overt, even illegal activities are increasingly disciplining their conducts. Gay cruisers’ resistance to the hegemonic divide of private/public, ironically, reproduces the closet by perpetuating erasure and invisibility. Throughout this paper, it has been argued that cultural and political potentials of the cruising space in People’s Park are less coherent than ambiguous, contradictory. Gay cruisers’ relations to heterosexual outsiders not only express transgression and resistance, but reside in broader cultural norms and discursive systems. Cruisers’ interpretations of sexual identity, collective gay culture and public space are in negotiation with the presence of heterosexual others, the heteronormative cultural norms, and the power of a state regime which is arguably culturally conservative. The argument in this paper is not to deny that political agency can be realized through a politics of visibility in public space. Rather, this paper contends that in order to more comprehensively understand the relationships between public space and the formation of sexual identity, we need to take into account the multiple ways in which difference is assembled, contested and negotiated, and the complexity of meanings and connotations that queered or sexualized public spaces can engender. In People’s Park, different components of Chinese heteronormativity are played out in the social construction of public space, including the pathologization of gayness as aberration and immorality, the cultural imaginary of authentic Chinese national identity, and the rhetorics of universal social order. Heterogeneous temporalities of social and cultural norms—from Confucius family tradition to neoliberal ideas of personal qualities—overlap in the constitution of gay subjectivities. Heteronormativity, in this case, concerns not so much about whom a man should have sex with as the ways in which identity is configured and performed, URBAN GEOGRAPHY 791 always relationally. It is the unsettled, often ambiguous boundaries between the normal and abnormal that are translated into dominant visions and imaginaries of being visible in public. In People’s Park, the visibility of a gay community has to a large extent led to the enhancement, rather than destabilization, of hegemonic ideologies which stigmatize and marginalize gay identity. The cruising space itself is a radical combination of both emancipatory potentials and extended experiences of cultural imperialism and oppression. Entering the public social territory in People’s Park is as much re-closeting into a space of self-denial and self-enclosure as coming out of everyday oppressions. The cruising space in People’s Park is certainly an escape from heteronormative domination, but it simultaneously unfolds in many new forms of oppression, containment, and concealment. As Fuss (1991) so trenchantly points out, homosexual people’s debut onto the stage of historical formation was as much an egress as an entry. It surfaces and resurfaces in the domain of the social, and renders the constitution of subjectivity radically relational and unstable. Indeed, as the work of Cresswell (1996), among others, implies, urban spaces and places are constructed by values and ideologies. Identities performed in space are rendered in-place by demonstrating compliance with normative systems of meanings. To breed resistant momentum in urban space, therefore, is not to dismantle multifaceted connections between spaces and value systems, but to envisage and inscribe alternative, socially progressive ideologies and meanings. Notes 1. All gay cruisers’ names cited in this paper are pseudonyms. 2. Extortion and theft happens between gay men on a frequent basis. For example, one gay man may extort another for a certain amount of money after they have sexual intercourse. 3. In this large-scale police harassment, over 100 gay cruisers were arrested by the police. The police charged the gay men of prostitution and extortion, but could not be able to present evidence for each gay man they convicted. 4. Ah-Qiang, The Secret Garden at the Crossroad, online article addressing gay cruising in People’s Park, 14 May, 2009, source: http://www.infzm.com/content/28370 (in Chinese language). Ah-Qiang is the director of PFLAG Guangzhou, a local NGO working on homosexual communities and LGBT rights movement. Acknowledgement I would like to thank all the friends in Chi-Heng and other NGOs for their invaluable help and support. I am also grateful to Tom Slater, Eric Laurier, Shenjing He, Lily Kong, George Lin, Deborah Martin, and the three anonymous referees for their advices and guidance. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 792 J. QIAN Funding The study is funded by the National Science Foundation of China [grant number 41401139], the Science Foundation of Guangdong Province [grant number 2014A030310295] and Department of Education of Guangdong Province [grant number 2014KQNCX060]. References Barnett, Clive (2004). Deconstructing radical democracy: Articulation, representation, and beingwith-others. Political Geography, 23(5), 503–528. Barnett, Clive (2005). Ways of relating: Hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness. Progress in Human Geography, 29(1), 5–21. Bell, David, & Binnie, Jon (2000). The sexual citizen: Queer politics and beyond. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, David, & Binnie, Jon (2004). 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