Vegas — Not Impressive for the Gays

I had never partied in Vegas until this weekend. I always avoided it without really understanding why.  However, I went this weekend for a bacherlorette party and after two entire days there I realized why. Check out my rant.

After going off on this rant, I emailed my close buddies to see what they had to say about Vegas and one of the responses I got was from my homie Arely Z. who on top of having a doctorate in political science (I can’t exactly remember her entire title) she has a way of breaking it down like no other. She took my Vegas rant to the next level. I am just going to drop it in as is… check it out:

“i particularly like the part where you say: “i like vagina”

but- hey- you’re on to something actually.

Great point:

1) Sexual inhibitions- ‘queer people have had to do that, and they don’t need to go into the desert”

But, something that I felt you were sort of getting at but didn’t unpack fully is the point about how ‘Vegas’ is built around the notion of an ‘adult’ party land, a place to get away, and be ‘sexually free’. An erotic place where people can have a good time, etc. It makes me think about various traditions- like Carnival in Brazil and elsewhere- where it’s based on the same idea- leave your ‘morals’ and ‘inhibitions’ at home, and go expunge yourself. But the ‘expunging’ has its limits. It’s expunge yourself with heterosexually- and EVEN interracially, but not homosexually. So, leaving your morals at the door, is not that at all.

The interesting thing about it is that 1) norms, morals, and inhibitions do NOT apply to queerness. You don’t queer out in vegas. Why? Because it is built not only upon Capitalist Fantasy (that’s for another podcast), but on Heteronormative and Male-Centered sexual and erotic desire that interpellates everyone and everything that enters Vegas. It’s like- Amsterdam- same thing. The Red Light District is supposedly a place to go Animal crazy and fuck like beasts. But, it’s for Male Bodied people that can go on ‘sexual’ vacations and tour and/or troll the women of color in the windows and prostitutes. I didn’t find ANYTHING about the Red Light District ‘freeing’. In fact, it was a psychological imprisonment and I felt nautious.

Vegas is interesting like that- because it is definitely heteronormative to the point of being weird. I mean, why don’t Gays go to Vegas? I don’t know anyone that goes to Vegas- well, I hate it, because anytime I go there I’m reminded why I hate Americans’ notions of “having a good time”. But more than that, why is VEGAS the ‘go to’ for heterosexuals? But not for queers?

I try to avoid Vegas at all costs. Not only does it depress me, but I just don’t feel ‘safe’. I have felt ‘safer’ at Burning Man- where it’s really no rules, no surveillance, nudity, and lots of drugs. And, this brings me to the final ‘ah ha’ moment of your podcast. Vegas in the end is NOT the ‘free’ place it tells people in commercials it is. No, not at all. In fact, Vegas is more corporate owned, privatized, and surveilled than probably any place in the world. The Casinos have the cameras on you at all times. You have to pay to SPIT on the ground. The ‘partying’ is tightly controlled via the velvet rope. The alchohol don’t come cheap.

That’s it for me. What pretends to be a ‘freeing’ place is actually a prison- a hell of the American desert. A place that makes you feel the more money you spend, the better you’ll feel. And, when it comes to sexuality, it is just that. A pretense. It doesn’t ‘free’ people; it chains them down. I mean, why are people that are JUST about to get married going to Vegas? Why aren’t they going to Burning Man to fuck two people at once, to queer out, to smoke peyote, etc/ Cuz they know if they do that, they might really NEVER get married.

Vegas reinforces the norm, it doesn’t cross it.”

What do you think?