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The trench work for equality is happening in cities many blue-staters couldn’t pinpoint on a map. “Cities are the most immediate iteration of democracy that we have,” says Xavier Persad, senior legislative counsel for the HRC in Washington, DC.
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In every one, cities are ahead of the curve in making life more welcoming-and more safe-for all residents regardless of sexuality or gender identity.
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Did you know that Norman, Oklahoma, population 124,086, scored higher than Baltimore, Maryland, a city that hasn’t voted to elect a republican presidential candidate since 1988? Maybe those divisions aren’t as deep as they seem. But in reality, using hard numbers provided by the Human Rights Campaign’s 2021 Municipal Equality Index to determine the most LGBTQ+ friendly city in each state that went for Donald Trump in 2020 can only help to strengthen the idea that we’re all in this together. What a time to be alive.īreaking things down into red states and blue states, especially at a time when the country is so politically and socially split, might seem like we’re reinforcing that ol’ problematic us vs. But on the other hand, we’ve got powerful lawmakers coming out against LGBTQ+ rights at an alarmingly rapid clip, throwing around bills that threaten to destroy all the progress of the Civil Rights Movement with a single signature. On one hand, we’ve got swathes of motivated young elected officials and organizers committed to popping the over-inflated balloon of structural inequality by any means necessary. At the same time, particular versions of gay masculinity are privileged, namely ones that can be described as white, middle-class and focused on consumption, gay identity politics and non-romantic forms of sexual activity.The state of the LGBTQ+ nation-much like the state of the rest of the nation-is quite precarious these days. At the same time, the signage on Wilton Drive is highly exclusive in the sense that it represents predominantly gay male experiences, whereas heterosexualities, lesbian and other sexualities are discursively marginalized or even silenced. Same-sex sexualities are discursively constructed as the local norm. It is shown that homonormativity plays a central role in this context. More specifically, I analyze how signage is used to discursively construct sexual identity, gender, desire and sexual practices. In my multimodal analysis, I investigate linguistic and non-linguistic signage, identifying mechanisms that render Wilton Drive a gay space. The data for the study were collected during a daytime walk on Wilton Drive and consist of photos of store fronts, restaurants, bars, advertisements and other signs, supplemented by printed material collected on the Drive and information provided by the official website of Wilton Drive. The study thus makes a contribution to the field of linguistic landscapes and sexuality, using normativity as a central theoretical reference point. Wilton Manors is a community with one of the largest LGBT populations in the US. This study analyses the linguistic landscape of Wilton Manors, Florida, as it surfaces on its main street, Wilton Drive.