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Hygiene
aesthetics on London’s gay scene: the stigma of AIDS
Johan
Andersson,
Department
of Geography,
University
College London
(Reino
Unido)
This
paper explores how stereotypical notions of gay venues as corrupting
spaces, primarily derived from cinema, were recycled in media
representations of London’s gay scene in the 1980s in the reporting of a
number of high profile gay murders and the outbreak of AIDS. These media
representations stigmatized London’s gay venues as dangerous and
contagious spaces associated with violent crime and sexual disease.
The
architectural features of gay pubs at the time, which tended to be dark
spaces with discreet entrances and exteriors, came to symbolize an
unhealthy and hidden subculture associated with sexual contamination. This
paper suggests that the emergence of a new type of gay venue in the early
1990s, characterized by open-fronted facades, minimalist interior design
and natural light, can be read as a commercial response to this earlier
stigmatization.
In
particular, the use of hygiene aesthetics and certain forms of aesthetic
labour were effective attempts to rid the commercial gay scene of some of
its unhealthy connotations in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Drawing on the
anthropologist Mary Douglas influential theory of dirt and the
architectural historian Adrian Forty’s application of this theory to
design history, this paper looks the interior design of Soho’s gay bars
and their emphasis on hygiene aesthetics as a response to contemporary
anxieties about homosexuality and AIDS. Gay men were increasingly visible,
but this visibility was restricted to the sanitised spaces of the new gay
economy, which seemed to protect society at large from the contamination
associated with an earlier homosexual subculture.
Douglas,
M. (1970) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Forty,
A. (1986) Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750, London: Thames
and Hudson.
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