Abstract

COVID-19 has transformed the way we live our lives, and sex has been a significant element of that transformation. Gay male sex in the UK has faced the most significant (re)criminalisation and (re)regulation in living memory with intimacy outside of the heteronormative framework of domestic coupledom at best discouraged and, at worst, made into a criminal offence. This criminalisation provides a temporal praxis in which gay men experience sex in the shadows once more, an echo of a historic legal and cultural regulation of desire. This history also provides a space for experiencing forms of impersonal intimacy and queer desire in a way that is arguably well-suited for viral times, namely the glory hole. These historic partitions and apertures – connecting gay men across legal and cultural boundaries of desire and affirmed through modes of anonymous and promiscuous sex – may once again provide a queer way to experience intimacy as impersonal. This article explores this potential and situates the glory hole as a cultural and legal site of this tension between the intimate and the impersonal, as well as considering how it is being recast as commercial artefact and performance space during these viral times.

摘要

COVID-19 改变了我们的生活方式，而性是这种转变的一个重要因素。英国的男同性恋在生活记忆中面临着最重要的（重新）刑事化和（重新）监管，在家庭伴侣异性恋框架之外的亲密行为，最好的情况是劝阻，最坏的情况是，成为刑事犯罪。这种刑事定罪提供了一种暂时的实践，在这种实践中，男同性恋者再次在阴影中体验性行为，这是对欲望的历史性法律和文化规范的回应。这段历史还提供了一个空间，可以以一种可以说非常适合病毒时代的方式体验非个人的亲密关系和奇怪的欲望，即荣耀洞。这些历史性的隔断和缝隙——将男同性恋者跨越法律和文化的欲望界限连接起来，并通过匿名和滥交的性行为模式得到肯定——可能再次提供一种奇怪的方式来体验非个人的亲密关系。本文探讨了这种潜力，并将荣耀洞定位为亲密与非个人之间这种紧张关系的文化和法律场所，并考虑在这些病毒式传播时期如何将其重新塑造为商业人工制品和表演空间。