We're from Oz: Marking ethnic and sexual identity in Chicago

In 1998 the City of Chicago installed street furniture (including twenty-two twenty-three-foot-high, illuminated, rainbow-ringed pylons) designed to mark a gay neighborhood known as Boys Town. In this paper I describe the historical context for this project and the debates it occasioned in a US context where, sociologists suggest, sexual and ethnic identities are increasingly convergent. I challenge, from a visual-studies perspective, the values attached to invisibility by critics who would prefer that sexual identity remain unmarked.