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ghettos' into 'gay villages'? Which sexual subjects could be accommodated in the destinations
marketed by the Western gay tourism industry?
Markwell (2002), Rushbrook (2002), Puar (2002), Binnie (2004) and Visser (2003a) have
demanded that we think carefully about the incorporation of sexuality into the marketing
strategies of a range of neoliberal imperatives of particular Western cities and nations. Bell
and Binnie (2002) offered an explicit political-geographic theorisation of identity for under-
standing how citizenship and national identity intersect with sexuality. Following Bell and
Binnie (2002) and Stychin (2003), the rhetoric of Western gay tourism marketing is an illus-
trative example of homonormative nationalism, a political limiting process sustained in this
case through collusion generated between neoliberal governance, the tourism dollar, nation-
alism and forms of homosexuality with particular sexualised, classed, gendered and ethnic
norms. The lesbian and gay visitors who are welcomed into the neoliberal marketplace are
sanitised and respectable versions, queer visitors who pose no challenge to the norms of
heterosexuality. The emergence of gay tourism and how it gave rise to a narrow band of
exception in some Western nations and cities is widely understood as reinforcing rather than
rupturing the broader norms of heterosexuality which inform national imaginaries. This
queer perspective on tourism geographies illustrates the concept of 'homonormativity', which
is a process that normalises and assimilates particular expressions of homosexuality into the
mainstream life of a nation. For example, Visser (2003a: 186) argued that tourism marketing
of De Waterkant, Cape Town, as Africa's 'gay capital', works against social inclusion and
diversity by welcoming 'the empowered gay play-boy'. In this context the gay tourism
industry is read as 'unqueer' because of how marketing campaigns arguably stabilise rather
than decentre the status of heterosexuality as 'normal'.
A parallel strand of research highlighted how the Western gay tourism industry is organ-
ised through class and patriarchy and defi ned by an ascendant whiteness. Nast (2002) drew
attention to the centrality of the white gay male consuming citizen in representations circu-
lated by the international gay tourism industry of events and destinations pitched as 'gay-
friendly', 'gay cities', 'gay villages' and 'gay venues'. She stated (2002: 883): 'From the lucrative
West End in Vancouver and the Castro district in San Francisco to the gay white areas of
Montrose in Houston, South Beach in Miami, Boys Town in Chicago, Mykonos in Greece,
and enclaves in London and Amsterdam, gay white male consumers and aesthetics are in.' She
interpreted this trend as an indication that gay white patriarchal commodity forms are
rescuing a previously 'biologised patriarchy' of virility, paternity and hierarchy. Again,
through how the gay tourism industry consolidated white gay male consumer citizenship
through capitalism, gay tourism destinations are rendered 'unqueer'. Nast's queer perspective
on gay white male desire relies on how gay commercial cultures privileged the constitution
of the image of the homomasculinist subject within particular sexualised, classed, gendered
and ethnic norms.
Elder (2002), Sothern (2004) and Oswin (2005) offered different queer perspectives on
the implications of how sexuality has been colonised by the marketing practices sustaining
the gay tourism industry. Elder (2002) rejected the stereotype of the affl uent gay white male.
He (2002: 989) argued that readings about popular culture's portrayal of gay white men tell
us 'more about marketeers' anxieties/fantasies and little about the lives, desires and erotics of
men who have sex with men'. Sothern (2004) warned against the consolidation of heteronor-
mativity through uncritical acceptance of the essentialised representations of the fi gure of the
affl uent gay white male reproduced in the commodifi cation of gay desire. He focused on how
queer perspectives have drawn attention to multiplicity, performativity and contradictions. In
doing so, Sothern (2004: 187) pointed out how Nast had overlooked 'the messy intermediate
