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We're from Oz: Marking Ethnic and Sexual Identity in Chicago

2003; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1068/d372

1472-3433

Christopher Reed,

Public Spaces through Art

In 1998 the City of Chicago installed street furniture (including twenty-two twenty-three-foot-high, illuminated, rainbow-ringed pylons) designed to mark a gay neighborhood known as Boys Town. In this paper I describe the historical context for this project and the debates it occasioned in a US context where, sociologists suggest, sexual and ethnic identities are increasingly convergent. I challenge, from a visual-studies perspective, the values attached to invisibility by critics who would prefer that sexual identity remain unmarked.