A gay community study in a small city of regional Queensland, Australia

This paper presents one part of a grounded theory of gay men’s interpretations of ‘gay community’. Fieldwork was undertaken in a gay community in a small regional city of Queensland between the summers of 1998 and 2001. The community study method guided fieldwork during which three methods were deployed: documentary analysis, participant observation, and conversations of inquiry. According to the literature of small communities in rural sociology the conceptual scaffolding of ‘community’ was evident in this remote gay community. Qualitative data subjected to the grounded theoretical method generated five theoretical arguments. One theoretical insight is presented within the limitations of this paper. Resistances to, and escapisms from, the capitalist routinization of the heterosexual realities of everyday life are interpreted as pervasive in the social organization of the gay community studied in this small regional city. This discussion leads to the conclusion that gay men’s desire to elaborate their sociality in this place is tantamount in value to their sexual liaisons, challenging the hegemonic mythology that gay community is willed into everyday realities by the desire to increase access to homosexual hedonism.