The formation of fear in gay space: the 'straights' story.

It is well-known that lesbians and gay men have long been produced and examined as objects of fear. However, this article analyses lesbians and gay men as subjects of fear. This paper offers an exploration of the formation and uses of fear in the context of lesbian and gay experiences of danger and safety associated with violence. In so doing it explores the politics and geography of fear that inform lesbian and gay perceptions of danger and safety. The evidence provided is based upon an analysis of an established and a non-established arena of lesbian and gay performance and visibility/invisibility.

Introduction

Lesbians and gay men have long been produced and examined as objects of fear (Duggan, 2000; Hart, 1994; Moran, 1996). This article offers a new departure: a study of lesbians and gay men as subjects of fear. More specifically we offer an exploration of the formation and uses of fear in the context of lesbian and gay experiences of danger and safety associated with violence. (1) It is now perhaps a trite point, but one worth repeating within the frame of a lesbian and gay politics of violence, that fear of crime is for many more important than direct experience of criminal acts in the generation of experiences of danger and safety. In this article we begin an exploration of the politics and geography of fear that informs lesbian and gay perceptions of danger and safety.

Our analysis of lesbian and gay experiences of fear of crime uses data generated as part of a major research project, 'Violence, Sexuality and Space'. (2) In general the research concentrates on how three specific groups (gay men, lesbians and heterosexual women-identified as 'high risk' groups by various crime surveys) produce and make use of space in two contrasting geographical areas, a large city and a smaller town both in the North West of England. Manchester is a major city at the heart of a large urban conurbation. It has an identifiable and well established gay space known as 'the Village'. The Village is the location that gives concrete form to what has been described as 'the strongest and most vibrant Lesbian and Gay communities in the country'. This 'gay Mecca' (Healthy Gay Manchester, 1998) offers gay men in particular, high visibility and spatial concentration. It is a 'mecca' characterised specifically by way of various forms of cultural capital: 'pleasure', consumption, 'style', fashion, cuisin e and more specific events such as a Queer arts festival. Lancaster offers a sharp contrast. It is a much smaller provincial city some 50 miles to the north of Manchester. It has no clearly identifiable and durable gay space. (3) The project data was generated using a reflexive, multi-method approach. In each location we conducted a space census survey, semistructured interviews with key informants and focus groups for lesbians, gay men and straight women. (4)

After situating our work on lesbian and gay fear within the wider contemporary fear of crime debates, we begin our analysis by reference to findings generated by the survey, to date the UK's largest survey of lesbian and gay experiences of safety and danger. (5) The surveys generated some unexpected findings relating to the importance of fear of violence in lesbian and gay definitions of safety and danger in our two locations. One difference between the data from the two locations is the appearance of 'straights' as a distinct category of danger in the Manchester data. Having set out a summary of the more general findings we turn our attention to the data on 'straights' as danger. We explore the meaning and significance of 'straights' as danger through an examination of the project's wider research data on safety and danger, generated through the focus group discussions and semistructured interviews. We develop an analysis of the complexity of definitions of fear of violence and safety that are being produced in and through this category. We then turn to consider the spatial themes that inform the fear and danger associated with 'straights'. Our data not only draws attention to the importance of taking the location of fear of 'straights' seriously it also points to the importance of fear of 'straights' in the production of location. We examine the challenges that these spatial themes raise for those who seek to understand lesbian and gay fear and safety and for those who generate policy in response to it.

Lesbian and gay politics of violence and fear of crime

Victim surveys have played a key role in drawing attention to violence against lesbians and gay men. Debate continues as to whether these surveys document previously unrecorded levels of violence or constitute a new 'epidemic' of violence (Jacobs and Potter, 1998; Moran, 2000). However, they consistently show that the wide spectrum of homophobic violence, from physical assault to harassment and verbal abuse, is an everyday experience for lesbians and gay men.

This documentation of violence has been used to demand changes to policing practice and crime control provisions more generally including new reporting procedures, enhanced punishment provisions and new offences. The use of victim surveys by lesbians and gay men appears to follow a standard pattern of political activism (Jenness and Broad, 1997; Jenness and Grattet, 2001; Mason and Tomsen, 1997). In sharp contrast to this lesbian and gay activism has paid less attention to a second dimension of victim surveys; their use to document fear of crime.

In many ways this silence is surprising. Fear of crime has been a major growth area in criminological and criminal justice work at the level of practical interventions, policy debates and within the academy (Hale, 1996). Ditton and Farrall (2000) reported an explosion of interest in this area. In a four-year period, conference papers, monographs and books on the subject increased from just over 200 to more than 800. Reviews of the literature on the fear of crime draw attention to the highly problematic and contested nature of the domain. Most recently Bannister and Fyfe (2001) have suggested that a recent explosion in the literature indicates that interest has outstripped the conceptual development of fear of crime.

The themes of fear of crime literature resonate with many individual and collective ills highlighted by a lesbian and gay politics of violence (Jenness and Broad, 1997; Jenness and Grattet, 2002). For example fear of crime, scholars suggest (Bennett, 1990; Hale, 1996), is closely connected to the processes of victimisation, resulting as the consequence of a breakdown in social control or as being mediated by the urban environment. Others have noted that fear of crime has an important role in the production of social division and social exclusion (Stanko, 2000) by way of its psychological, physical and economic impact on individuals. This has strong spatial significance. In response to fear there is a withdrawal into the private realm. In turn this withdrawal generates the decline and deterioration of the community and the public realm, which in turn gives rise to more crime in public places (Hale, 1996).

The characterisation of fear in this literature is also of interest. It is dominated by a particular set of associations. This fear endlessly portrayed as a threat or danger associated with the unknowable and characterised as the unruly, that which is beyond control (Wurff and Stringer, 1988). More specifically, the fear of crime literature foregrounds the body. It is the primary location of fear experiences. Fear is emotion, pain, uneasiness, anxiety, caused by the sense of impending danger (Bannister and Fyfe, 2001)/ Fear is personalised and individualised in and through the body. In its association with the body fear is predominantly understood in this literature as unreason and irrationality.

Engagement with the fear of crime literature does pose some problems. On occasions 'fear' has been replaced by other terms such as terror, anxiety, worry, anger and loss of trust (Jefferson and Hollway, 2000; Stanko, 2000; Walklate 2000; 2001). These distinctions, their individual significance, their inter-relation and their connection to fear has been used to challenge much quantitative research on fear of crime (Hale, 1996), and to generate calls for new approaches to fear of crime research (Ditton, Bannister, Gilchrist and Farrall, 1999). Another site of controversy has been over the meaning of 'crime' in this context. Work that documents fear associated with aspects of well being, quality of life, life-style (Hindelong, 1978: 244) has been challenged. 'Fear of crime', it is suggested, is a phrase that should only be used in the context of a fear of a particular range of legally proscribed acts, usually limited to serious physical violence and property crime (Hale, 1996). Others have challenged resort to t his narrow, pedantic definition of crime.

Stanko's critique of the resort to narrow definitions of 'crime' in the context of fear is of particular importance here (2000). She suggests that it has had both particular and more general effects. It has been an important factor in reducing fear of crime to a debate about victims, more specifically a debate about good victims and bad victims and the needs of the former and the culpability of the latter. More generally, she suggests, it has had the effect of erasing the structural and political issues of social hierarchies and inequalities that have not only been a key factor in the generation of victim surveys but also a central feature of the data. For us 'crime' (and our interest here is focused on violence as crime) must be widely construed. In part this draws upon feminist and lesbian and gay scholarship, that emphasises the urgent need to recognise the multiple forms of violence and its different effects.

There is also support for this position within fear of crime literature. Sally Merry's work (1981) has particular significance. She argues that broad definitions are necessary. A whole range of experiences generates fear of crime (fear of violence), from physical injury to experiences of minor incivilities that threaten ontological security and belonging. The adoption of broad definitions enables a full account of the 'multi-dimensional nature of fear of crime' to be generated (Hale, 1996: 84). Fear, we argue is linked to ontological security (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Walklate, 2000), the sense of being safe, of having some control over one's life, of being able to make sense of being.

An increasing amount of work has highlighted the spatial dimension of fear (Gold and Revill, 2000) which in general is concerned with how people experience and interpret (urban) space. We are interested in an examination of the physical and social characteristics of place and the familiarity of that space that are implicated in the formation of fear. People effectively read the environment as a barometer of risk and protective factors. En order to make these readings they draw on the discourses to which they have access to make sense of their own and others' occupation of space. This always involves visual evaluation of the built environment as well as visual evaluation of others (Skeggs, 2000). Space is always discursive space; for the individual it cannot be known beyond the information that is used to make sense of it, or even feel it. This information is not equally available and is dependent upon the prior social positioning(s) of the reader, or what Bourdieu (1986) would refer to as predispositions.

There is also another side to the spatial aspects of fear. Some scholars have also noted that as we read spaces for fear in order to know what to avoid, we may also seek out places of fear. Neill (2001) argues (6) that we need to understand how urban fear can attract as well as repel. He suggests that fear can be a better release from boredom and a consumerism, which now threatens to totalise. Fear, Neill suggests, has a close relationship to desire. Furthermore, fear allows us to be heroic. It holds out the illusory possibility of conquest and thereby an experience of escape from anxiety.

With these introductory remarks in mind we want to turn to our survey data and to highlight some of the findings that surprised us.

The survey data

The first surprise is that gay men in the Village sample (37%--the largest group of survey respondents in the Village) were the group most likely to find Manchester's gay Village unsafe (7). Another unexpected result is the stark difference between gay and lesbian respondents using the space. Gay men are twice as likely to perceive the Village as unsafe than lesbians. When we examine the gay men's responses in more detail we find that those who have closest contact with the Village, living in or near the City centre and/or making regular visits to the Village, report the lowest safety ratings. In sharp contrast gay men from out of town report the highest (8).

These findings are perhaps even more startling when we compare the Manchester 'gay mecca' data with the survey data from Lancaster, which has none of the resources and characteristics associated with visible and vibrant concentrations of lesbian and gay men. In the Lancaster survey lesbians and gay men are the groups most likely to find Lancaster safe. There is also little reported difference between the two: 84.1% of gay men and 85.9% of lesbians reported Lancaster was safe (9). In the first instance these findings appear to offer a challenge to a baseline hypothesis of the research; that the 'gay mecca' offers and is experienced as safer space.

But the challenges didn't stop there. The data also suggests that the composition of experiences of safety and danger may vary from location to location. When we asked our Manchester survey participants to tell us their reasons for avoiding parts of the Village (its streets or bars) we were surprised by the responses. Manchester's gay men and lesbians rarely mention experience of violence. In fact they reported the lowest levels of experience of violence. The most important reason given for avoiding bars and areas is 'perceptions of danger' (10). Lancaster differed in this respect. Experiences of violence play a much more prominent role in the rationalisation of avoidance behaviour by both gay men and lesbians. Gay men reported the highest level of experiences of violence as the basis for avoidance (41.7%). In Manchester gay men reported the lowest level of experiences of violence (9.8%) of any sexual category. Violence also played a more important role for Lancaster lesbians (30.6%) in stark contrast to low reports of violence by lesbians in Manchester (8.9%) (11).

One dramatic difference between the two locations is the presence of 'straights' as a distinctive category of danger in Manchester. It is a category that has little significance for the Lancaster respondents.

The data also draws attention to the fact that these different factors may have particular spatial significance within each research location. For example in Manchester 'perceptions of danger' is a reason for avoidance particularly associated with two locations: 'cruising areas' and 'secondary streets'. 'Experiences of violence' is particularly associated with the avoidance of the main thoroughfares, 'central drags' and 'the bus station'. 'Straights' is a category of danger associated, perhaps unsurprisingly, with 'straight bars and areas' and the main thoroughfares, 'central drags'. In Lancaster Council estates appears as a specific location of danger and unsafety. Both experiences of violence (50%) and perceptions of danger (44.4%) inform this finding.

The picture becomes even more complex when gender is added to the data. Reading across our data provides some information about the relationship between identity and the spatial significance of reasons for avoidance. For example in Manchester fear of straights associated with particular locations, ('straight bars' and 'central drags') is a located rationalisation of unsafety particularly in lesbian experiences of safety. For gay men the location most likely to be avoided is 'gay bars and areas'. Here 'perceptions of danger' rather than 'experiences of violence' seems to be a dominant factor.

The survey offers data that not only challenges one of our research presuppositions, that the 'gay Village' would be experienced as safer space, but also complicates our understanding of the impact of public gay space. More specifically the experience of Manchester's gay Village as a space of danger is an experience associated with those who use it most frequently. Perceptions of danger rather than experiences of violence seem to play a key role. Finally, one of the effects of established gay space may be a change in the way danger is perceived. 'Straights' become a category of danger associated with the Village.

How are we to make sense of these surprising Manchester findings? (12) First we want to examine 'straights' as a distinct category of danger. Second we want to explore the spatial context and significance of this danger. In pursuing an analysis of these two dimensions we turn to our qualitative data from Manchester; the structured interviews with key informants and our focus group transcripts.

The 'straights' story

Our qualitative data from Manchester suggests that the category 'straights' needs to be treated with some caution. While 'straights' is always sexualised, it is important the take account of the difference that the distinction between lesbian and gay may have on the formation of 'straights'. As one lesbian explained:

...there are different issues for men and different issues for women. Straight women can't stand lesbians. Although they like to be around gay men they are really threatened about being around lesbians...people have had arguments with straight women in gay bars...

In contrast one of the gay men from our focus group explained, '...its about fear, its about being frightened...I certainly don't feel frightened by straight women, but I do feel frightened, threatened by straight men....' When read together these two extracts draw attention to the fact that while 'straights' as danger may be sex/gender neutral it may also be informed by gender. (13) In different contexts this danger may be 'straight men' in others 'straight women Furthermore, 'straights' may also connote safety. Through sex/gender and sexuality 'straight' is formed both as safe and dangerous.

Our data also suggests that class is important, although rarely directly spoken. It is usually referenced through geography (housing estates or named areas), or appearance (hair = big, clothing = sports wear, opal fruit, i.e. checked shirts, mini-skirts, fluffy bra's, platform shoes), or the terms 'lad' and 'scally'. For example Norman, a gay man who has been involved in several gay businesses, including a gay bar, in the Village explained:

...you only need a couple of straight lads to come down here and have a good time and they start fetching their friends; it's when you get gangs of twelve or fifteen leaving pubs in Salford and it's like, 'Let's go down the Gay Village and kick a fucking queer's head in.' It happens, believe me.

The use of terms such as 'lads', and the reference to 'Salford' (a city that adjoins the northern borders of Manchester and is always historically represented as working class), are terms that give the gendered danger of 'straight' a strong working class inflection (Moran, 2000). Class (Skeggs 2000; 2001) nearly always informs these readings. Thus there is a need to proceed with some caution when considering 'straight' as a sign of danger. It may be just another way of reproducing class through sexuality. As one of the gay men from the Manchester focus group noted there is a tendency to assume that:

...all heterosexual people are gay men haters or that there is some element of homophobia going on with straight people... I think that's wrong... some heterosexual people are being really violent to some gay men--you know it's not generic.

This draws attention to the way that our research participants use 'straight' as both a general category of sexualised danger and as a category of sexualised danger and safety that is formed by gender and class.

This is particularly pertinent in the way that straight women stand out, not as a traditional sign of violence, but as a divisions drawn between groups on the basis of taste. One of our key informants, Steph, a bar manager explained:

I see some terrible sights over the weekend, like hen-parties dragging like 'L-signs' and blow up men, dolls sort of things like that. But again I don't know. I don't think it's the right space for them. That's what I think personally. But there are bars further up the street that do cater for straight women.

When asked whether the bar she managed, was the right place for straight women she explained;

Trendy women, yeah. Trendy, but the normal everyday Sharon and Tracy I would say 'No. I don't think that you would enjoy yourself in Manto. You're best going somewhere like Bar 38', where it's the complete opposite, where it'd be 70% straight and 30% gay.

Fear is here figured through respectability. It is those who threaten respectability that produces a disruption of the space. Their difference is institutionalized in bar policies. They are less a sign of fear in comparison to working-class men but serve to name straights as disruption, matter out of place.

Straights as danger

We now want to turn to the particular dangers associated with 'straights'. Our Manchester focus group data provides examples of the many different forms of danger associated with 'straights'. It ranges from physical attacks and violence, '...who commits the violence...its definitely heterosexual people', and verbal abuse to more abstract characterisations of danger such as 'hostility', '...most of the hostility which people tend to recognise comes from straight men...'. Another manifestation of danger is found in the following extract from one of the men in the gay group. He explained;

...a small but very obnoxious group of straight people, unreasonably pissed [were) affecting the whole character of the bar...they were dancing, there's a dance floor downstairs but you don't do it in the middle of a busy bar...and it was done in a particular way that I don't expect in a gay bar...they seem to be more controlled in gay bars... but the aggression that goes with heterosexual people...was self-evident.

Here danger takes the form of the place and mode of dancing. These straight acts were out of place. As such they might be characterised as disorderly behaviour or acts that violate particular expectations of civility. One of the lesbian focus group participants characterised the problem as, 'sheer lack of respect'. One of the incivilities most commonly referred to in our focus group data is 'looking'. As a member of the lesbian focus group explained;

...there has been a lot of straight people in there and I've been in there with my partner and we don't even hold hands. ..because we feel as though we are being looked at and stared at...we were surrounded by heterosexual people who were snogging.

The danger associated with this incivility is marked in the change ('policing') of behaviour. In general the focus group participants characterised this as an illegitimate restraint on behaviour in lesbian and gay space. It is expressed in various ways but most commonly in terms of 'feeling uncomfortable', and with an inability to be 'relaxed', in becoming 'more self conscious'. The minor incivility functions as a metonym: where the part (minor violence) stands for the whole (heralding major violence). When one of the gay men in the focus group was asked to explain why he felt safe in a particular gay club he explained, '...0.2% straight people are there. You know it is just fully gay...you just go there to loose your inhibitions...to be who you want to be...' Here the virtual absence of 'straights' is an experience of security and belonging. The disturbance that is marked by the policing of behaviour, loss of comfort, and the inability to relax represents the experience of 'straights' as a threat to identity . This talk of danger, safety and ontology also has another dimension. It is also talking about place (Cf. Girling Loader and Sparks 2000).

Geographies of 'straight' danger

Place talk takes various forms. Our Manchester survey data suggests that experiences of fear and their composition are place specific. For example straights as object of fear was particularly associated with straight bars. As one of our gay focus group participants explained;

...when I go into a straight bar then my direct experience is there [i]s an expectation of violence...[gay men] have a sensitivity that they will pick up more quickly that there is something going on...In the straight scene [violence] seems to be the first option.

Here the experience of 'straight bars', as places of violence, seems to bring together direct experience of straight violence in straight bars and expectations of danger. The bus station is another location of fear highlighted in our survey data. One of the gay focus group participants describes his experience of that location in the following terms;

...the bus stop is a bit of a black spot...if you start going in that direction basically then there's a lot more drunkenness, but straight drunkenness or people pissing in corners and that kind of romantic behaviour, then you start feeling a bit more kind of self conscious basically as opposed to just letting your mind drift or be happy or whatever.

In this instance the danger/safety of the place is explained not in terms of direct violence but by reference to a reading of the urban landscape and particular practices as signs of a certain incivility and thereby signs of pending danger.

Reading bars and clubs by way of the relation between straight and danger produces those places not only as 'straight bars' in contrast to 'gayplaces' but also maps those places respectively as dangerous and safe. As one of the men in the gay group explained, '...when I go into a straight pub then my direct experience is there was an expectation of violence whereas if I go into a gay bar or a gay pub I don't expect it'. In turn the characterisation of the Village as the 'gay Village' connotes straights as elsewhere, in another place. Thereby the Village is a place of safety over against danger which is always already elsewhere (14).

This brings us to another spatial theme, which is variously characterised as straight 'colonisation', 'takeover' and most commonly as 'invasion' of the gay Village. The invasion narrative appeared early in our research as a pervasive theme in the Manchester key informant interviews. It was also an important theme in the lesbian and gay focus group discussions. Key informants explained;

Well I think that most gay people feel it's their space.

[...] It's their only place and it's being invaded. Invade sounds a bit dramatic but it is being invaded somewhat by straight people. So there is a bit of animosity there (Ben).

and

You see it doesn't bother me, the fact that there's a lot of straight people in at the weekend because I'm not there. But for the [gay] men who traditionally go out, it obviously seems to affect them because their own private space is being invaded in their eyes (Sue).

These extracts illustrate common features of the 'straight invasion' theme. First, invasion not only constitutes bars as gay in contrast to straight but is also important in the constitution of 'the Village' as gay space over against straight space that lies always already elsewhere. They also illustrate another important dimension of the experience of the Village as a place of danger and safety. As 'our' space and as 'private' space, the Village as a gay place that is understood by way of a very particular relation to space. Here being and belonging is constituted through repertoires and metaphors of investments of 'property', 'propriety', 'entitlement'; of ownership (Moran and Skeggs, 2001 (15). Through these investments an identification is made with the place. Territorialisation becomes a matter of identity. As one gay focus group member explained, '...it is the invasion of straights...you lose the identity of the place so you have to...look further, make a bigger effort to find the identity again which o therwise got diluted'. A final dimension of the spatial theme of invasion is how boundaries are figured. As one of our lesbian focus group members explained, '...the Village has always been the boundaries that have been defined...'. Boundaries not only define the wider entity of the Village but also the particular bars and clubs that make up the Village. Invasion generates boundaries through the threat of their violation.

Borders of fear

The 'straight invasion' context of much of the property talk in the Manchester data is talk of limits: of border and boundaries, their violation and the techniques used to sustain and maintain them. Our Mancunian data is full of references to boundaries. Our examples illustrate practices of marking not only the boundaries of particular bars and events but also the boundaries of the Village.

The borders of fear I: ma(r)king boundaries

Our Manchester research participants offer many examples of techniques of boundary formation. One common technique is the employment of official border guards, doormen or bouncers. They can be found at the threshold of premises. They also appear elsewhere. One of our key informants described the way in which her bar staff function as boundary keepers by the way they, '...walk around all the time'. Another noted that her staff use particular techniques to police the boundary of the bar, 'A lot of them are doing it obliquely, they might say, "you're not a regular", that sort of thing.' In these examples boundary marking and boundary maintenance in addition to making the limits of a place, involves mechanisms of surveillance and evaluation (Cf. Moran and McGhee, 1998) with various degrees of formality and informality.

Other techniques of boundary formation include the continual erasure of the 'C' and the 'S' from Canal Street transforming it into 'anal treet'. Official activities include street banners, wall posters and billboards. On special occasions, such as the Manchester lesbian and gay Mardi Gras events in late August, the Village has been enclosed by a temporary fence. More routine techniques, found in bars and clubs, includes a demand for a formal confession of identity, 'I'm queer' followed by a demand for proof. Less frequently this is followed by an oath, 'I agree to abide by the [bar's] Rules and only fetch in my gay friends'. Another mechanism is the use of a token of membership or identification. This might take the form of a VIP card or a key ring without which access is denied. In 1998 the Manchester Mardi Gras festival policed the boundaries of the event by way of a passport which took the form of a plastic bracelet: 'a pledge band'. Secured on the wrist of the participant, the band gave access to the temporarily enclosed Village. The pledge band, the organisers explained, was explicitly connected to safety. (16)

John, the marketing manager of 'Metz' a bar in the Village described a different range of techniques. He explained the bars brand/slogan, 'don't discriminate, integrate' was marked in the aesthetics of the place; from the menus to the music policy and the choice of design of the tables'7. The brand, makes the place distinct. It marks the boundary of the place on and through the different media.

Finally our data draws attention to the importance of the body as marked by and marking boundaries. Through ways of dancing, ways of looking, modes and topics of speech, the body is marked by the boundary and signifies boundary violation. As Bourdieu, (1987) notes, bodily dispositions always exist to mark distinctions; they are the most intimate of symbolic markers and the most difficult to disguise. Not only does property's boundary mark the body but McNay (2000) argues, that bodily dispositions are the property of the person, owned through embodiment and perceived as an asset, attribute or attitude. In both respects property is experienced in and through the mobile, moving body. The body is the means for generating experiences of entitlement to social spaces through distinction.

Before leaving the issue of borders and boundaries we want to draw out a feature of the data on borders that challenges some assumptions about their location. It is a particularly important point as our understanding of the location of boundaries appears to play a central role in the generation of fear.

The borders of fear 11: locating safety and danger

During the course of an interview with two workers from the Sikh gay men's helpline based in Manchester, we asked for their opinions on safety in the Village. In response, Ali, singled out two locations where safety was at risk (which in this instance took the form of dangers associated with sex workers and pimps). Danger was located, 'behind the Village' and 'just outside the Village'. These phrases characterise the boundary as an outer edge that is geographically remote. This is perhaps the most common understanding of the location of boundaries. An example of this in other work on gay space is to be found in Myslick's (1996) study of Columbus Circle in Washington DC. Myslick locates homophobic violence on this 'outer edge'. However, our key informants suggest that this common understanding is problematic. The boundary is geographically more complex.

For example Terry, a gay men's worker with the Manchester City Council, problematises any simple notion of the geographical specificity of boundaries. While on the one hand they are clear, at the same time, he explained, they are '...a bit fuzzy....'. Another respondent, Lynn, offers an insight into the 'fuzzy' nature of these boundaries. She comments that the boundary is also to be found, '...in the middle you know, in between, not even just like down by the side.. .It tends to be all over.' Lynn's insight draws attention to the way in which the boundary might not have a privileged geographical location. In all of the examples above the boundary is an edge. In some it is represented as a geographically fixed relation of periphery to centre. In others it is a more mobile and multiple mark of propriety. John's explanation of the markings used in 'Metz' is one instance of this. The mobility and multiplicity of the edge draws attention to the way the border and boundary as the edge is metaphorical rather than li teral (Smith and Katz, 1993). Borders and boundaries are (re)made in the experiences of safety and danger. Their location is as varied as ubiquitous as the location of the experience. In turn boundary making and marking is a constant, universal, mobile process.

The borders of fear III: temporality 

Invasion narratives also invest these boundaries with a temporal dimension. One aspect of this might be characterised as nostalgia. They constitute an imagined time, before the invasion, when the gay Village was a pure gay space, a Village without straights, without danger. A second temporal dimension is illustrated by a gay focus group participant, '...Friday and Saturday it can be straights-ville'. Here the invasion takes place at particular times of the week. Others pinpoint particular times of the day;

...come twelve o'clock all the gay people piss off to Cruz and Paradise and Poptastic and then all the straight people who don't want to come into any clubs or anything know these places are still open till two.. .Friday and Saturday is primarily straight, it is very, very straight.

Before we leave the topic of the boundaries of gay space we want to briefly explore two further issues. The first is the relationship between fear of straights and power. The second is boundaries as the locus of a politics of estrangement (18). First let us turn to the question of power.

Gay and lesbian space is about power over against the power of straights. Being in the majority, for a change, puts you into the position of, '...the one in power'. As such, one of our gay male focus group members explained, 'I can do what I want in front of them and they've got to like it or they've got to get out the door...' One of the lesbians in the focus group explained that in the gay Village:

...you are in the majority and for the very first time in your life you are in the majority and it's a fantastic feeling to know that you are with other people who are exactly like you and all the others fade into insignificance.

The production of straights as objects of fear, explained one gay man, is about power over straights and in particular about power over straight men.

The experience of power takes an ontological form (Stanko 1997). It informs the fabrication of expressions of lesbian and gay 'confidence' and 'self assurance'. Another ontological dimensions is mentioned by a gay group participant. He explained:

...we are less tolerant of violence as gay men than heterosexuals are...they go out for a good night out on a Saturday night and.. .they're expecting [violence] so our tolerance of violence is lower than that.. .in the heterosexual environment.

These differences may be given form and are institutionalised not only by a different civility but also by new sensitivities and different expectations;

we will pick up more quickly that there is something going on and our expectations of a civilised response to a challenge is higher...that we don't immediately go to fisticuffs if there was a problem...

This, as one of the gay male participants noted, may make lesbians and gay men, 'more conscious of straight people being on the scene'. It may also result in the number of straights being 'overestimated' producing particular amplification effects within the context of the 'invasion' story. The same participant 'playing devil's advocate' suggested;

...we don't necessarily like straight people accessing the scene quite as much and in order to justify that to ourselves we say it compromises our safety whereas it might not necessarily but it makes us feel better, it sits better on our shoulders if we believe that that's the reason we do not like it...

The power to exclude associated with boundaries is part of a strategy of building identity and community. Articulating and locating threat and fear becomes a necessary part of identity and community formation.

It is at this point that it is useful to turn to the politics of estrangement and to consider the uses of estrangement in the production of straights in the Village as danger.

Of central importance here is the fact that straights as danger are not remote from the gay Village but close to it. As Simmel (1964) and others (Ahmed, 2000; Bauman, 1991; Bhabha, 1996) have noted it is the proximity of strangers that forces, figures and enables the production of difference, in this instance the difference between gay from straight. The straight as danger is not the remote enemy that threatens but the one who is close that presents anxieties to do with reading, interpretation and judgement. It is in their proximity that the need to separate straight from gay, safe straight from dangerous straight has urgency.

Ahmed (2000) argues that it is stranger fetishism that figures difference in contemporary society. She argues that stranger fetishism can be read not only as a displacement of social relations onto an object (in the traditional Marxist take on fetishism) but transforms objects into figures. She argues:' stranger fetishism is a fetishism of figures; it invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as it cuts 'the stranger' off from histories of its own determination (Ahmed, 2000: 5). She shows how that very object, also contaminates narratives that construct 'the strange culture' as their object (distance), (by proximity). They involve, simultaneously, social and spatial relations of distance and proximity:

Others become strangers (the ones who are distant), and 'other cultures' become 'strange cultures' (the ones who are distant), only through coming too close to home, that is, through the proximity of the encounter or 'facing itself. (emphasis added, Ahmed 2000: 12)

Estrangement requires that persons (and things) have to be located out of place primarily because they inhabit the same space. The gay village of our research is a place where people of many differences are made proximate, but only some are metaphorically located outside. Through this politics of estrangement that appears to be at work in the figuring of straight as stranger and thereby danger.

Boundaries are the location where the politics and practices of estrangement are most apparent and most intense. In part this is due to the fragility and plurality of boundary sites. This is illustrated in the following observation by one of the gay male focus group members. He explained, '...a couple of straights...slightly enhance it a bit...' but another responds, '...its when it starts going over the line.. .when it starts to shift that percentage too much...' Here the fragility of power takes the form of the difficulties of deciding the undecidable; how many straights does it take? That fragility is also recognised in the context of the wider landscape and experience of inequality between gays and straights. For example, it is spoken of in the following extract which contrasts the straight invasion of gay bars with gay invasion of straight bars, '...there aren't many bars...that have been straight but invaded by gay people.. .it doesn't happen...'. The power imbalance between gay and straight is in the o ne way traffic described here. Gay has a particular fragility. Fragility is also connoted by way of references to the speed of change and the temporal shift in that shift the nature of the space. At best there seems to be an awareness here that the politics of estrangement has at best a tactical and spatially limited significance.

Conclusions

The novelty of work that explores lesbians and gay men as subjects of fear makes us hesitate to draw firm conclusions from the research data. Our analysis draws attention to the complex relationship between fear of crime, sexuality, and its impacts upon individuals and communities in different locations. Our particular concern in this study has been to examine the unexpected findings which indicated that the gay Village, far from being experienced by its most frequent gay users as a safe space, was experienced as a space of danger and a location that was unsafe. Furthermore we wanted to explore the meanings associated with the emergence of 'straights' as a distinctive category of danger found in that location. Within the parameters of that study we also want to emphasise the importance of the contexts in which the geographies and politics of fear discussed above have emerged and need to be understood.

First, the research data we have used comes from research participants who predominantly were users of the Village. For example those who contributed to the Manchester survey were in the Village on a Friday, lunch time and evening, which the key informant interviewees suggested was the time associated with high levels of 'straight invasion'. More specifically those who expressed the highest concerns about danger in the Village in that survey were the people who had the highest frequency of use. This is important. Those who expressed most concern about fear of crime, had not withdrawn from the public sphere. But there is a need for caution here. This does not suggest that their mode of occupation was not affected by fear. Nor does it suggest that fear of crime does not have dramatic damaging consequences for lesbian ad gay individuals and communities. More research over longer periods of time is needed to. study these issues.

Second, during the period we were gathering our data talk of danger and safety of lesbians and gay men had a high profile in the Village (Stanko, 1997). This culture of safety and danger was produced by campaigns about hate crime and local crime reporting initiatives. It influenced tourist and publicity material about the Village produced to promote the local, national and international profile of the Village by the local authority (Moran, Skeggs Tyrer and Corteen (forthcoming 2003). Within a longer time frame and wider politics of HIV/AIDS which has had a high profile in the Village, danger and safety have been a key theme within contemporary sexual politics to which lesbians and gay men have been alerted for some time.

Third, Manchester's gay Village is predominantly a commercial space, which may produce this culture of safety and danger in very particular forms. While these spaces of entertainment were initially generated from political campaigning, they are now resolutely commercial. The demands of profit generate a very specific social and cultural instability. The form and impact of fear on these particular spaces may differ from its impact upon 'neighbourhoods' characterised predominantly as locations of privacy and domesticity (Valentine and Johnston, 1995). However, at the same time, for lesbians and gay men, commercial and entertainment spaces may have a different significance than that associated with the heteronormative. These 'public' spaces are an important location for experiences of privacy, intimacy and domesticity, of home (Moran, 2002).

Fourth, in the research data most references to straights as danger, violence and the threat of violence are both an effect of invasion and its cause. Straight use of the space is explained in terms of access to late night drinking. Other explanations given by lesbians and gay men include, straight desire to access the high cultural capital associated with gay male culture, it is 'trendy', 'fashionable', 'cool' (19). Another is to be found in the following extract;

...when you get to like ten o'clock and half past ten you are getting groups of lads coming in here you see. Plus there are groups of girls coming in and so groups of lads are following them you know, to cop off. It is the old mentality...

Here male heterosexual desire is the rationale for invasion and straight women act as the medium through which straight men enter the space. Common to all these explanations of invasion is the absence of any direct references to violence.

One of the challenges of the gay and lesbian spaces and politics of fear is to understand how peoples, who have for so long been the objects of a politics of fear, turn to that politics to produce themselves as subject of fear. The data collected in our research suggests that far from eradicating myths of the dangerous other lesbian and gay identity politics re-invents those myths for a different politics. Morley (2000) notes that there is a long history, from the Greeks and the Romans onwards, of imaginary geographies, in which the members of certain social groups locate themselves at the centre of the universe, at the spatial periphery of which they picture a world of threatening monsters and grotesques. They produce these pictures to both centre themselves and enable them to identify and exclude others. Our reference here to myth is not used in order to connote the need to move from the falsehood (myth) to truth (post myth) (Gilloch, 1996). We want to point to the urgent need to examine the nature and effe cts of our very limited repertoire of ways of making sense of being, belonging and social order. Fear is constitutive of many different ways of existing. The urgency of this work is captured in challenges identified by Wendy Brown in her reflections on feminist encounters with the state. We close with one of her questions which has particular significance in the context of our analysis of the formation and uses of fear in gay space. 'What kind of attachments to unfreedom' Brown asks,' can be discerned in contemporary political formations ostensibly concerned with emancipation?' (Brown, 1995; xii) We hope this article begins to address and answer that question.

Notes

(1.) A rare exception to this is Valentine (2000).

(2.) The 30 month project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (EsRC). Data was generated between May 1998- March 2000. LewisTurner and CaroleTruman also participated in some parts of the research. Full details of the project can be found at http://les1.man.ac.uk/sociology/vssrp.

(3.) At the time of the research only one bar in Lancaster appeared in gay listings as gay friendly. In the summer the bar was predominantly a family-tourist space. This bar closed in 2001 due to City centre redevelopment. After the research was completed a gay bar opened in Lancaster.

(4.) 58 structured interviews (21 in Lancaster, 37 in Manchester) were undertaken with key informants chosen because of their commercial, and institutional (both public and private) and community links and interests. Questions dealt with three main themes: the historical and contemporary development and use of space, safety issues and policy and safety initiatives. Six focus groups were held with each group of lesbians, gay men and straight women in each location. We also collected archival data, tourist information, information from local TV and newspapers, council documents and minutes of relevant meetings (see wed site for full information).

(5.) The survey was conducted in our two research locations. The Lancaster survey undertaken over two nights in May1999, in venues identified as lesbian and gay friendly, generated 219 responses from 230 distributed questionnaires. The survey of Manchester's gay Village focused upon 13 of the Village venues (selected so as to provide a sample of the different types of venues). It was undertaken on a Friday (lunch time and evening) in early February 1999. 703 questionnaires were completed (a response rate of 79%). Of those that responded (682) to the question of their sexual and gender identity 19.8% (135) were lesbian, 35.9% (245) were gay men, 19.5% (133) were straight women, 13.6% (93) straight men, 1% were transgender, 2.9% (20) bi women and 3.8% (26) bimen.

(6.) Neill draws upon Gilloch's analysis of the work of Walter Benjamin. See Gilloch (1996) for an analysis of this theme in the work of Walter Benjamin.

(7.) Our statistical analysis (using logistic regression) confirms that being a gay man is significant.

(8.) Gay men are the group that used the Village the most: 86.5% of the gay men surveyed visited the Village once a week or more. Logistical regression added another dimension to this: address was significant. Individuals living outside Manchester perceived the Village to be safer than individuals from Manchester. Those who were most remote from the Village (i.e. from outside Manchester) scored the highest rating for perceptions of the Village as 'safe' (80%) in contrast to those living in the City Centre who had the lowest rating for perceptions of 'safety' (48.6%).The design of the questionnaire also enabled us to examine the impact of other factors upon experiences and perceptions of safety and danger: age, means of transport to! from venues, arriving alone or with friends. However, analysis of the data suggested that none were significant in terms of perceptions of danger. This was true for both locations.

(9.) In Lancaster straight men were the group with the lowest perceptions of safety. Straight men were almost twice as likely to find Lancaster unsafe than our lesbian and gay respondents. There is a need for some caution here as the sample of straight men surveyed is small..

(10.) Perceptions of danger was most popular reasons given by all groups.

(11.) It is important to note here that we were not able to ask the same spatial questions in each location. So in Manchester we asked about safety and danger in the Village. As no equivalent space exists in Lancaster we posed the question in terms of Lancaster more generally with a follow on question relating to safety and danger associated with particular streets and bars in Lancaster. In Manchester the follow on question focused on the Village.

(12.) For analysis of the Lancaster findings see Corteen (forthcoming 2002).

(13.) We have also explored elsewhere how feminine-appearing women are usually read as straight, hence making the femme invisible. There is a long and detailed historical debate within lesbian literatures on how femme is taken as straight (Butler 1998 and Martin 1996)

(14.) At the same time this absolute division is problematic. Straight bars as well as 'mixed bars (dominated by straights, according to our census survey) exist in the Village.

(15.) Comfort, and its associations with home are other modes of investment see Moran (2002).

(16.) The Manchester focus group participants drew attention to the dangers of marking the boundary in this way. Wearing the band was experienced by some as a form of 'outing' that made them feel exposed and vulnerable. Many also complained that the band was not an effective gate keeping mechanism as it gave access to all who could afford to buy one, gay or straight. Thereby it functioned to make the boundary more permeable to the danger of 'straights'.

(17.) The relationship between the aesthetics of the place and safety from drunken violence is also a feature of boundary making and marking in Lancaster. Dennis, the gay owner of a bar in Lancaster, which was described by him as a 'mixed' bar offers an example of this. He explained that while his bar was remotely situated across a car park it was close to several other pubs and bars where violence was common. He did not employ door staff. One of the techniques he used to regulate access was described in the following terms. He explained that if men 'larger louts' came to the bar, '...they just stand out and they just feel uncomfortable and that in itself makes them leave.. .it's a bit too pretty for them.' He described the aesthetics of the bar as 'relaxed', which he explained in the following terms, 'no juke box, no loud music, no pool table, no darts, no big screen, just a bar, a meeting place, with this big conservatory and a macaw [named Oscar]...'

(18.) We have explored other problematic aspects of boundaries in Moran and Skeggs (2001).

(19.) In contrast the straight women's group had stopped using the space because it was no longer seen to be cool. There is a historical time lag occurring here.

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Leslie Moran teaches at Birkbeck College. His work on sexuality and law has been published in the journals Law and Critique, Politics and Society and Modern Law Review. He is co-editor of Legal Queeries (Cassells: London).

Beverely Skeggs teaches at the University of Manchester. She has published her work on sexuality and feminism in Women's Studies, Leisure Studies and Jump Cut. She has authored the books Att Bli Repektabel (Daidalos: Sweden) and Formations of Class and Gender (Sage: London).

Paul Tyrer works at the University of Manchester. His work on fear and homophobic violence has been published in the Journal of Education Policy and in several edited volumes.

Karen Corteen works at the University of Edge Hill. Her work has focused on sexuality and space and the regulation of sex education. She contributed to the book Children in Crisis (UCL Press: London).