Ashford comments that -
Over 50 years after Wolfenden the new medium of the Internet offers one possible remedy to the apparent desire of the 1957 and present-day public to ‘clean up’ the streets. One site in particular has become the focus of the online world for gay men in England and Wales — Gaydar.After insightful comments based on number crunching of Gaydar user profiles he notes that -
Gaydar is something of a phenomenon. QSoft Consulting, the company behind Gaydar.co.uk and its related URLs, states it currently has over 3.8 million members. This is an extraordinary number for a company first launched back in 1999 and which had 78,000 members back in November 2000, prompting Fountain to say of Gaydar in 2004: ‘previously, this much sex was available to you only if you were rich or powerful or famous’.
Gaydar is just one example of the consequences of what Cooper has called ‘the Triple A Engine’. According to Cooper, the Internet offers a triad of access, affordability and anonymity and in doing so, the Internet acts as a powerful force in the area of sexuality. Searching for escorts and sex workers from home offers access to thousands of escorts across the country from one central location.
People do not have to spend time, money and resources travelling around seeking out willing sex workers, rendering the use of the Inter- net for this purpose an affordable activity. There is the additional aspect of a perceived anonymity granted by the Internet. There is no risk you will be encountered driving into a red light district by disapproving friends, be seen entering a brothel by work colleagues or one’s own partner. In other respects, the advertisement nature of Gaydar profiles enables parallels to be drawn with the personal profiles and sex worker profiles offered in gay publications.
Eighty years ago, American sexologist, W. J. Robinson, commentedHis 'Queer theory, cyber-ethnographies and researching online sex environments' in 18(3) Information & Communications Technology Law (2009) 297-314 comments that -... it is fair to assume that [prostitution] will continue to persist in the future; but it will persist not because it always has; it will persist because it satisfies a definite and important biological need, and answers it in a way that no other present arrangement does..Though written in the 1920s, it is a view that still holds true today. Technology is supporting the continuous operation of sex work and promoting the growth of new sex industries in online pornography and online exhibitionism. Moreover, Koken et al. noted in their study published in 2004 that male sex workers who have sex with other men ‘operate at the unique intersection of two major taboos: engaging in homosexual activity and the illegal exchange of sex for money’. English culture, however, both legal and social, has changed dramatically over the last decade, rendering homosexuality much less of a taboo, which makes it different to society in the USA at the time of that Koken et al. were writing.
It is perhaps therefore understandable that male-for-male sex work is not merely at the margins of the Internet, but can flourish on a ‘main- stream’ social networking site such as Gaydar, where users can find instant sexual encounters, an online masturbation exhibition, an escort and a plumber within the same virtual queer community.
The growth in technology has not led to the decline of real-world sex in favour of virtual sex despite the predictions of some and the emergence of new technology platforms such as Second Life. Yet technology does offer the possibility to move sex away from the streets. Walker et al. noted that the Internet can transform ‘visible’ crime into ‘invisible’ crime and if the UK government intends to follow the Swedish model of transforming sex work into an ‘invisible’ practice, the Internet may be its greatest tool. If, however, the aim of the UK government is to stop sex work, the search must continue.
It has not been the purpose of this article to contribute to the existing debates on whether the current legal position represents an over- extension of legal paternalism or offers important safety nets for those engaged in sex work. However, that debate must take far more account of the emerging and complex issue of same-sex male sex work that is supported and offered through the Internet.
Both the act and the commission of the act of sex have been transformed by technology. This has in turn led to emerging research that seeks to consider online research methods and methodologies that take account of the new medium, with a number of studies examining specific groups and the behaviour of those groups from a socio-legal perspective. This paper will seek to consider the application of queer theory to researching so-called ‘virtual’ or online sex groups. It will examine how the virtual spaces, and the researchers who survey them, are constituted. The ethical and practical issues that emerge in surveying these groups from a queer theory perspective will also be explored.He goes on to note that -
Sex environments, and their intersection with law, whether it be in the areas of sex work or non-commercial public sex that I have explored, or other sites such as bathhouses and phenomena such as barebacking, have been traditionally difficult to access and study. The Internet has offered a valuable new tool to explore these locations and it has also been an important tool for these groups in the creation of ‘new space’ (Coomber, 1997). Developing approaches to this e-research, and the observation of virtual environments, remains an area of rapid development as researchers develop and explore new approaches to this social phenomenon (DiMarco & DiMarco, 2003; Hamman, 1997; Kanayama, 2003; Livingstone, 2003; Ward, 1999).Worth reading by legal scholars interested in new media and cyberspace.
Riggle et al. (2005) have pointed to the growing popularity of online surveys and the need for an examination of issues specific to conducting online research in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans virtual communities. Although recent years have seen a number of online studies published that do examine specific LGBTQ issues (see for example Ashford, 2007, 2008, 2009), many of these surveys, including my own, often continue to operate within what I would term the ‘heteronoramative straightjacket’.
This ‘heteronormative straightjacket’ should be viewed in the light of Fine's (1993) work which pointed to a series of lies within ethnography that are widely disseminated in print, but known by ‘insiders’ to be false. Fine described these illusions as ‘essential to maintain an occupational reputation’. This may take the form of an absence of information rather than an outright lie but may be an element of the researcher that continues to be shielded from wider view. While Campbell's (2004) assertion that ‘I am less an academic gone native than a native gone academic’ is unusual in that it is in print, it is a statement that researchers may be more familiar with privately. The gay male academic who will use Gaydar or Craigslist in order to meet other men socially or sexually may appear ‘normal’ within the conference community but not within the published academic community. The queer academic almost goes through a process of castration as the words pass from an author's brain and on to the screen or page. Goode (1999) describes ‘thousands of ethnographers who have spent uncountable hours in close proximity with the people whose lives they shared and behaviour they observed, engaging in almost every imaginable activity with them, only a few dozen have had the courage to step forward and tell the world about their more intimate moments’.
Perhaps an earlier example of such can be found in John Alan Lee's 1978 text, Getting sex. The text sought to both explore and celebrate a range of sex locations from the disco and classified advert through to the bathhouse and tearoom/public lavatory, yet it was written with a degree of voyeuristic objectivity to the descriptions of the dynamics of the sex locations. As noted earlier, the later publication of Lee's diary online reveals his academic and personal lives and the inter-connectivity of the two.
Today's ‘cyber-ethnographies’ (Davis, 2009, p. 52) offer an opportunity to explore ‘sex’ and/or ‘sexuality’ at close quarters without engaging in corporeal acts of sex. Queering the body in cyberspace has become routinised and yet our responses to that and wider ‘cyber-ethnography’ issues remain under-explored.
Another such issue is the anonymity afforded by the Internet. Such anonymity may have been believed to enable users to create ‘false’ identities with perhaps the most extreme example being in the arena of inter-generational sex (Simpson, 2005) where people may lie about their age so as to enable them to interact with a group who would ordinarily reject them. More often though, the Internet is a medium of play through which identity can be explored (Turkle, 1995), or ‘queered’ beyond the bounds of the corporeal ‘reality’.
It is perhaps therefore, unsurprising that this anonymity can create dangers in terms of the accuracy of gathered data. Correll's (1995) study of bulletin boards was triangulated through follow up interviews on the phone or in person with many of her respondents but some respondents refused to take part in the follow up via either of these methods. There is a danger that such methods of triangulation, however well accepted by the research ‘community’, may be an attempt to force queer identity into orthodox moulds. ‘Truth’ in the virtual world is established by researchers through seeking to understand the ‘real’ or corporeal dimension to the space rather than appreciating the ‘truth(s)’ that may be grounded within the virtual space.
For the researcher, who may be constrained by their own ‘real world’ gendered or sexual identity (see for example, Berliner, 2008), the virtual space can offer an opportunity to queer their own identity, to create a ‘false’ identity or explore a dimension of their hidden self through the course of their research, yet this may be falsely viewed as ‘masking’ or a ‘smoke screen’ rather than an identity of equal ‘value’ or ‘worth’. Nor is the research limited by ‘real world’ assumptions and definitions of gender and/or sexuality.
The Internet also offers a range of advantages for the researcher in terms of the ‘intimacy’ of the Internet environment (McKenna et al., 2002) and the greater self-disclosure given to strangers outside one's own social circle (Derlega & Chaikin, 1977). This perhaps reflects the ‘liberation’ that can be found in overcoming the bounds of the corporeal and the perceived ‘safety’ that such an apparent separation of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ identities may allow.
This space also offers an opportunity to overcome ‘gating features’ that may be present in the physical space, whether it be on the basis of appearance, visible shyness or social anxiety (McKenna et al., 2002), although virtual sex communities, threatened by the intrusion of the legal ‘real’ world are developing online strategies to ensure that only perceived ‘true’ members of a community, for example, the dogging/public sex community, can discover more sensitive information such as the corporeal identities of online users or the location of the corporeal meeting space.
These virtual sex environments also afford an ease with which to seek out and find those with similar interests and desires or indeed those interested in knowing about people's interests and desires. The use of these spaces by the police and other parties beyond the traditional player is arguably distorting the operation of the space. The presence of these lurkers creates challenges for the researcher in considering the precise nature of their impact on the active participants (Lindlof & Shatzer, 1998) and wider notions of privacy (see more generally Fenwick, 2000; McCullagh, 2008; O'Brien, 2008). The policing of some legal phenomena has already resulted in the use of websites as sites of surveillance for law enforcement officials where groups might otherwise be hidden (Ashford, 2007).
