Empire’s New Grooves: San Diego’s Queer Military Leisure in the Long 1970s

My dissertation project explores the makings of queer subcultures in San Diego, California between 1965 and 1981. San Diego provides a particularly fruitful site of new understandings of queer subcultures, as San Diego was and is a critical node of exchange on the U.S. imperial circuit of military labor migration. My dissertation posits that the U.S. military’s response to what soldiers did to have fun off-base—and who they did it with—is critical to understanding the ways in which the U.S. negotiated shifting domestic mores concerning race, gender, and sexuality with its continuing military presence in the Pacific Rim.