In this article, these forms of intimacy and their relationship to the pandemic and the glory hole riff with the work of Bersani and Phillips ( 2008) where the pursuit and realisation of bareback sex between men and, more so, the barebacking gangbang are conceptualised as a form of impersonal intimacy inasmuch that they allow the masculine subject to be ‘penetrated, even replaced by an unknowable otherness’ (53). Gay male practices of intimacy have been adapted within this pandemic setting of social distancing, self-isolating and self-regulating, and the adaption and negation of the ‘new normal’. This also takes the form of cultural ‘guidelines’ and informal mechanisms of surveillance and/or criminalisation, with governments variously tightening and loosening criminal provisions dependent upon documented rates of COVID-19 transmission. It is here and within these bubbles of intimacy that units of UK citizens are given apparent agency, whilst being classified and contained by governmental power. Previously, the UK Government Health Secretary Matt Hancock advised in March 2020 that couples needed to rapidly decide whether to move in together or live apart (Walker 2020), underscoring the ways in which the UK Government and the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have created and augmented a conspicuously neoliberal legal and cultural environment. Once a support bubble has been formed, the composition – and the intimacy it potentially allows – cannot be changed.
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In England, a support bubble enables a household to be formed between one adult and an existing household, or one adult plus one or more people who were under the age of 18 on 12 th June 2020. Alongside these new modes of human interaction is the concept of a ‘support bubble’ and the tensions between experiences of intimacy and distance that it has intensified. The regulatory language developed during 2020–21 in the light of reactive governmental controls has also shaped the use of idioms such as ‘social-distancing’ ‘self-isolation’, and ‘new normal’, and the ways in which these connect to socio-legal and socio-sexual modes of gay male desire and experience. These regulations euphemistically inspired the language of ‘lockdown’ and its shifting cultural narratives and meanings, whilst also introducing key doctrinal legal terms that have re-positioned risk, sex and sexual contact between men. This has included local-level regulations in England, localised systems of ‘tiers’, and national measures, which – together with ‘guidelines’ which are advisory but not backed with a legal penalty – add further complexity. Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the UK in early 2020 – and amidst a surfeit of laws in the form of regulations – the various jurisdictions of the United Kingdom have constructed a mixture of legal interventions that seek to regulate and monitor human behaviour so as to minimise the spread of COVID-19. This article explores this potential and situates the glory hole as a cultural and legal site of this tension between the intimate and the impersonal, as well as considering how it is being recast as commercial artefact and performance space during these viral times. These historic partitions and apertures – connecting gay men across legal and cultural boundaries of desire and affirmed through modes of anonymous and promiscuous sex – may once again provide a queer way to experience intimacy as impersonal. This history also provides a space for experiencing forms of impersonal intimacy and queer desire in a way that is arguably well-suited for viral times, namely the glory hole.
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This criminalisation provides a temporal praxis in which gay men experience sex in the shadows once more, an echo of a historic legal and cultural regulation of desire. Gay male sex in the UK has faced the most significant (re)criminalisation and (re)regulation in living memory with intimacy outside of the heteronormative framework of domestic coupledom at best discouraged and, at worst, made into a criminal offence. COVID-19 has transformed the way we live our lives, and sex has been a significant element of that transformation.