In this presentation I analyze sports bars geared towards LGBTQ+ communities in order to better understand how their existence influences notions of, and experiences with, sport/media and spaces of queer culture.  

Utilizing interviews with bar owners, field studies of the spaces themselves, and archival material, I consider how these bars present unique contradictions: they both undergird traditional hegemonic and heteronormative practices and performances and offer opportunities to reclaim and queer sport culture.  

Building off scholarship that situates public (ambient) television spectatorship as a dominant force in structuring the routines of everyday life, I examine how queer potentiality and/or ruptures are regulated via traditional sports structures, media rhythms, and consumption patterns and I problematize what it means for an LGBTQ+ space of belonging, situated within the language of safety and community, to rely on traditional capitalist consumer practices.