The cultural event I attended that is in contrast to my heterosexual environment was a Friday night party at a Gay bar called The Rooster. Obviously, my first shock of the evening was being told by my homosexual friend who invited me to attend was that ôroosterö was an obvious play on the male word for the animal, a ôcock.ö Needless to say, with my own Christian upbringing and fairly normal by social standards sexual experience, this precipitated many more shocks as the evening unfolded.
There are similar events to Friday night bar parties in heterosexual culture, but these are fairly tame in comparison to what I witnessed at The Rooster. First of all, the dress and makeup of the clientele, all male but for about a dozen or so women who were obviously lesbians, were quite different. In my own life, such parties entail the normal outfits of jeans, dress slacks, dress shirts, sneakers or what have you. At The Rooster, there were many men dressed in leather pants and black boots with only chains around their neck or leather collars, some with spikes emanating from them. Likewise, many of the men had multiple tattoos, piercings, and others body modifications. Some were traditional but others were distinctly gay, like the one tattoo I saw on one manÆs back that was the gay pride flag in color. As Pitts (443) notes, body modification offers subcultures an added outlet for expression and independence in mainstream society: ôBy creating anomalous bodies that provoke shock and consternation, body modifiers not only underscore the bodyÆs symbolic significance as a site of public identity but also conceive it as a resource for opposing hetero dominant culture.ö
My sense of discomfort fluctuated throughout the evening. I was shocked that these men seemed so different than the typical stereotype of the clean, well-groomed, designer-dressed feminine gay men often pictured in the media and on TV shows
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