Introduction

      In the early 1980s my family and I lived in Queens, New York, where I studied the Israeli immigrant community, nicknamed Yordim (Hebrew for “those who go down”; singular, Yored). I found that the Israelis there were reluctant to admit that their relocation to the United States was more than temporary. As a result, they organized nostalgic get-togethers, what I defined as “one-night-stand ethnicity,” but did not form the voluntary associations—often leading to enduring social institutions—that other earlier and present-day, Jewish and non-Jewish “permanent” immigrants had (Shokeid 1988). It was during that time that I was invited to attend a service at the gay and lesbian synagogue, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) in the West Village of Manhattan. I was fascinated by that social experience, and a few years later (1989) I returned to New York and started research at CBST. The period of my observation there coincided with a time of challenge for the synagogue. It was faced with the question of whether, as a lay-led, all-volunteer organization, it could still continue to meet the needs of its now sizeable congregation, many of whom were ill with AIDS. Or would it have to hire a full-time paid rabbi and paid staff, thus transforming its founding social bricks and the ethos of a voluntary organization (Shokeid 2003 [1995], 2001)?

      In the mid-1990s, while still maintaining contact with CBST, I broadened my field of interest to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village (the Center). Starting in 1995, during sabbaticals and research fellowships, I observed a number of the voluntary groups holding meetings there. Located in a massive New York landmark school building (on Thirteenth Street), the Center hosts a wide variety of organizations and activities. Actually, anyone can ask to use the Center’s space in order to initiate a new activity aimed to serve the interests and welfare of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. The annual report for 1996, for example, listed about 120 groups that met on its premises. In addition, the Center promotes many public events, discussions, lectures, exhibitions, parties, dances, and more. The website indicates that “established in 1983 the Center has grown to become the second largest LGBT community center in the world” as of 2010.

      My diverse cohort was composed of seniors, bisexuals, Radical Fairies, sexual compulsives, men attracted across race, Leathermen, Bears, Gay Fathers, men engaging in nonsexual physical affection (Gentle Men), and Positive Body (engaging in safe-sex education, advertising its meetings as “Sex Talk”). At this time I also extended my research on the gay community beyond the Center to churches active in the city, offshoots of various denominations: Protestant—the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC); Catholic—Dignity; and the Unity Fellowship Church—a black, Baptist-style congregation. Taken together, this diverse group of sites afforded the opportunity to observe a wide section of the gay community across ethnic, cultural, and social divides. It also provided a chance to become acquainted with individuals from a variety of backgrounds, a number of whom have become close friends and trusted informants. My engagement with these institutions continued in later years (until 2010) on subsequent longer and shorter visits.

      Many social scientists—beginning, most famously, with de Tocqueville (1956 [1835])—have observed what has often been deemed a unique characteristic of American society: the propensity to form voluntary associations and civic organizations (e.g., Huizinga 1972 [1927]; Schlesinger 1944; Bellah et al. 1985; Ginsburg 1989; Wuthnow 1994; Sanjek 1998; Gamm and Putnam 1999; Curtis, Baer, and Grabb 2001). None of these studies, however, have encompassed the gay and lesbian community. Instead, ethnographic work on gay life in the United States, mostly by American scholars, has typically taken one of two directions. The first, much affected in later years by the AIDS epidemic, is the study of sites and institutions that offer a safe space for social interaction, in particular, for anonymous sex (e.g., Humphreys 1970; Delph 1978; Style, 1979; Brodsky 1993; Newton 1993; Bolton 1995; Levine 1998; Leap 1999; Hennen 2008). The other is the study of specific social issues, such as the construction of gay and lesbian identity, history, family relationships, community life, parenthood, patterns of conjugal bonding, youth, language, race, and AIDS (e.g., Newton 1972; Altman 1986; Feldman 1990; Weston 1991, 1993; Herdt 1992; Kennedy and Davis, 1993; Leap 1996; Lewin 1996, 2009; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Faima-Silva 2004; Boelstorff 2007; Valentine 2007; Lewin and Leap 2009).

      To redress this omission, I propose to expand the social science interest in voluntary associations to those of the gay community, drawing together observations I have made in a number of its diverse groups mostly in New York City. My aim is thus to reveal yet another