Place: New York City Time: 1965
(23:26)

An auto-ethnography/auto-biography/auto-ephemera audio/visual production that describes its creator as a member of a culture at a specific time and place: being queer in 1965 on one night in New York City at a famous (straight) mod nightclub, “Arthur”.

Themes include being different, the celebration of being an outsider, seeing oneself from outside of the “norm”, and the interior conflicts of “coming out” within a continuum as a (gay) male in a straight world. These observations are set within the flux and instability of a period of great social change, but which are often viewed in retrospect as consistent and definable. Being straight or being gay can also be viewed in a similar way within the wider culture’s need to set up a sexual binary and force sexual “choice” decision-making for the benefit of the majority culture.

As auto-ephemera, it documents minor transient personal moments of everyday life: something transitory, lasting a day. Through the device of the fleeting moment, the story interrogates the certainties and uncertainties of the “norms” of modernity.

The script for the video is available at:
qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-07/07-3-3-e_app.pdf

An article about how the video came to be, "How Did I Get to Princess Margaret? (And How Did I Get Her to the World Wide Web?)" is available at: qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/281

See also:
geog.le.ac.uk/orm/futures/futuresperformance.htm

Ethnography And The Internet: An Exploration
books.iupindia.org/newarticle.asp?isbn=978-81-314-2205-2