Staging Sex and Masculinity at the Mineshaft

This article serves as an inquiry into masculine space: it uses the gay male clubs of the 1970s to discuss masculinity, performance, and spatial configuration. Within these spaces, gay men underwent a conversion (public to the other men at the clubs, private to society at large); they inverted dominant culture for their own purposes, projecting, acting on, and maybe even transcending their imaginings and desires. The reciprocity between space and program as conceptual frame and the individual’s practices as intervention are important parts of this article.