Ethogram or Observation and Analysis of Homosexual Body Language Mating Call at a Gay Club

Ethography of Gay Mating Rituals

I took advantage of a recent weekend trip to New York City to conduct this ethogram. I wished to study behavioral interactions among men who are sexually attracted to other men: for this purpose I had a guide, whom I will call (at his request) by the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmoth," who volunteered to take me to a bar/club where he said that such behavioral interactions would be most easily studied. The bar/club is called "The Cock" -- there is no actual name painted on the front of the establishment, merely a window with a glowing red neon rooster advertising the pun in the name. The outside of the building is drab and industrial-looking. Two very large bouncers guard the metal doors to take a $10 "cover charge" from anyone entering. Once inside, "Sebastian" explained to me the layout. The space is a large open loft-like space, approximately three times deeper than it is wide. However, looking down the depth while standing at the entrance, one can see that, about halfway down, the room narrows substantially to accommodate a DJ booth and a raised platform where young men are paid by the establishment to act as "go-go boys," dancing up on the dais, directly in front of the DJ, while wearing Speedos or jockstrap or less. What "Sebastian" pointed out about the layout was that the DJ booth and the raised platform with dancers actually carved out a large chunk of space, creating a "back room" that existed behind this area: the backroom could be accessed by beaded curtains on either side (one just past the end of the bar, the other all the way at the rear of the space, near the entrance to the toilets:

| / / "Back Room" |

| ====Bar====== Curtain |

| Go-Go____x DJ____ Curtain |

(2nd Ave) | Go-Go / / |

| (dancefloor) __ __|

Front Door | |

[ Tables and booths] [ ] _(*)_ |Toilets|

I have tried to give some rough sense of the layout here: standing at the front door looking in, there is a bar to one's left and tables and booths to one's right. One can see the bead curtains leading to the "back room" but one cannot see into the darkness beyond them. But the large central portion of the space is essentially a giant dancefloor, with paid go-go-dancers on the raised platforms in front of the DJ booth. On a weekend night, the place is empty before eleven or midnight, then quickly becomes packed: it is impossible to move through the space without brushing against someone, there are so many people crammed onto the dancefloor area that actual dancing is very difficult. It is also difficult to get in for close ethological observation, but I was eventually able to sit at the table (indicated by the asterisk) located deepest inside the establishment and with a direct view of the dancefloor and the beaded curtain leading to the back room.

My guide "Sebastian" had suggested The Cock as the gay bar/club in New York which was "the most perfect" for the stated purpose of my ethological survey, which was to assess the mating habits of homosexuals males, or males who are sexually attracted to other males. Humphreys and Brekhus both emphasize that there is a difference. And Hart Wolitski et al. (2003) note that indeed the medical profession (in its attempts to track demographics of HIV-infection) draws a distinction between gay men and "men who have sex with men" ("MSM") who vary widely in their level of "gay self-identification" (Hart Wolitski et al. 179). "Sebastian" had explained to me that it is an unspoken rule at The Cock -- although one which is amply explained on the internet, especially on websites which let patrons comment upon their visit -- which has gotten the establishment in trouble with New York City authorities over the past decade, is that men will come here to pick someone up on the dance floor, then take them into the backroom immediately for a sexual encounter. This seemed to me the most interesting ethological contrast to traditional heterosexual courtship in a nightclub-type environment: certainly there have been couples who have gone off to a bathroom for a "quickie" at establishments catering to heterosexuals, but the set-up at The Cock would allow me to view both courtship and mating, if I so chose. This seemed to me to pose a methodological issue, which was extensively discussed forty years ago upon the publication of the first major ethological study on precisely the same topic which I had proposed to cover -- the study was Laud Humphreys' 1970 Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, and it recorded Humphreys' own ethological and sociological observations of what he termed "impersonal sex" in a public restroom -- of the sort that, more recently, got Senator Larry Craig into trouble. Humphreys claims a debt to Canadian Sociologist Erving Goffman, in that his emphasis is on "rules and roles" within the "patterns of collective action" that take place, when one or two men will guard the door to watch for intruders, and others will then engage in masturbation or various sex acts, permitting a