"Stop it, f*ggot!"; Producing East European Geosexual backwardness in the drop-in centre for male sex workers in Berlin

Abstract

In this article I examine the negotiations of national and sexual belonging of a Romanian gay sex worker in Berlin in the contemporary geosexual context defined by binarism between 'modern', 'liberal' and 'tolerant' Western Europe and its 'traditionalist' and 'homophobic' East European Other. I analyse how, by means of an overt display of his own homosexuality, the sex worker symbolically distances himself from his native country. By extension, this reinforces the image of the East and its inhabitants as inherently homophobic and, therefore, backwards. The article is based on ethnographic research in the drop-in centre for male sex workers in Berlin, an environment that reveals how deeply contemporary geosexual differences are anchored in the cultural logic of everyday life.