sacrilege in the sitting room: contesting suburban ... - Fritz Haeg

HOME CULTURES
184
MARTIN DINES
must not allow oneself to get too aroused from reading them lest one
be “finished before anything started” (p. 28). But importantly, these
“lurid concoctions” also literally inscribe the physical structures of the
public toilet with scenes from a gay sexual fantasia. It is, therefore,
not difficult to see how the physical place can be conceived of as,
reciprocally, a gay space in a gay imaginary.
A further positive aspect of suburban gay sex and its associated
social interaction is the manner in which it transfigures the environment’s
bland and joyless terrain. Filtered through the eyes of a member
of the secret subculture of cottaging, suburbs are transformed,
rendered in explicitly exotic and carnivalesque terms. Cottages are
referred to as “pleasure palaces” (p. 35). The act of cottaging is
described as a play, with cast lists (p. 41), a carnival (p. 41), and a
“parade” (p. 98) but most often as an elaborate dance, the “toilet
tango.” These carnivalesque transformations do, in part, make up for
the seediness and tedium of aspects of cottaging. Indeed some of
the descriptions focus in on the exoticness and the eroticism, and
then the banality and repulsiveness of the locations and practices,
within the same paragraph, or even in a single sentence. For example,
the excitement and the perpetual motion, the elegance and close
physical involvement with other participants of the “tango” describe
the highs of cottaging. Yet the dance also incorporates David’s
experience of the flipside: the wasted hours and the boredom of
standing motionless; the frustration of not connecting, or of failing
to satisfactorily, after which David is hit by a postcoital “grey wave
of depression” (p. 39).
Whilst distinctly ambivalent, the cottaging “scene” still constitutes
A Matter’s most substantial and positive evocation of a sexually
dissident subculture. In particular, the sense of the cottage’s history
is one of its most reassuring aspects. Other AIDS narratives seek to
uncover (and recover) gay suburban histories. James Robert Baker’s
Tim and Pete (1993), set in Los Angeles, immediately after the riots
of 1992, unearths several sites rich in gay history. The predominant
metaphor of rediscovery is archaeological: the eponymous duo’s
journey takes them through the temporary ruins of a metropolis that
is constantly rebuilding itself; through the evacuation or destruction
of the urban fabric, this history is rendered visible. Much of the gay
history is to be found not in, say, West Hollywood, but in outlying
areas. At Long Beach, for instance, amongst the foundation grids
of the amusement park’s demolished buildings which are laid out in
the manner of the site of an archaeological dig, Tim comes across
“an expanse of brown, tile-patterned linoleum” (Baker 1993: 55).
Like a crumby equivalent of a Roman mosaic, the old flooring
constitutes a historical stratum that evokes memories of teenage
sexual pleasure in the seedy arcades. This reconnection with sexual
histories demonstrates how gay characters like Pete and Tim have
to deal with their promiscuous pasts before AIDS. That both come to