The Gang's All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members. by Vanessa R. Panfil (review)

In The Gang's All Queer, Vanessa R. Panfil effectively challenges hegemonic beliefs about who is a gang member. Panfil reveals how violence, gang membership, and crime not only can coexist with a gay identity, but they can also establish a gay support system that enables gay gang members to explore and accept personal gender and sexual fluidity. To make this claim, Panfil documents the inner dynamics of three different gang groups in Columbus, Ohio, from 2010 to 2012: gangs that are publicly primarily straight, hybrid gangs with a mixture of straight members and masculine-presenting gay members, and gangs with an entirely queer makeup. Through firsthand participant interviews, Panfil illustrates how gay gang members navigate and balance cultural expectations of who they should be with their own principles and the politics of gay respectability.

By putting the fields of criminology and queer studies into conversation, Panfil establishes a framework for analyzing the relationship between gay people and gang membership. The majority of the book is centered on gay men in gangs, but Panfil does focus a few chapters more broadly on the gender and sexuality of a variety of gang participants. Chapters 1 through 3 document "gay gangs." In Chapter 1 Panfil illustrates how her research participants navigate and find balance among expectations of who their community says they should be, concepts of gay "respectability," and their own personal principles. For example, she focuses on the concept of gay members acquiring girlfriends prior to gang involvement as "cover-ups" that counteract their "effeminate" presence and assumptions about their identity. Through participant testimonials in Chapter 2, Panfil outlines how her participants resist buying into the negative cultural messages about gay men while also acknowledging how they consistently uphold some of these messages by patrolling and disparaging flamboyant or feminine men. In Chapter 3, Panfil focuses on how gay participants use gang fights to build their reputations through being "known," as well as how gay gangs are chosen families that offer protection and blankets of acceptance bound though queerness. In particular, Panfil illustrates how gay gangs work to be taken seriously through their displays of violence. However, because participants describe violence as important and necessary primarily when other members of society are threatening their gay community, these testimonials demonstrate that participants do not necessarily always view their group as a "gang."

In Chapter 4, Panfil shifts focus to how gay people navigate membership in predominantly straight gangs which included managing expectations to remain closeted as well as participating in violence as a bonding activity. This chapter outlines how their gang involvement transcends the superficial: it is necessary to guarantee protection and also to reinforce masculinity. Panfil makes this point by including examples of some of the more detrimental repercussions gay members face if they "come out" in such a toxic hypermasculine community. In Chapter 5, she introduces hybrid gangs and how they differ in membership, dynamic, and culture from either straight or gay gangs. In an innovative and captivating execution, Panfil compares the stigmatization of gay men's "effeminacy" in these gangs to queer women who are deemed more masculine. This is the first clear reference pertaining to the presence of gay women in gangs, and Panfil concludes that they are more openly accepted in straight gangs than by gay men because of their relationship to hegemonic masculinity. Panfil also shows how heterosexual women are "sexed in" or in other words, required to have sex with all or a number of the members of a gang to be granted membership, whereas queer women are typically accepted in male-dominated gangs because of their direct relationship to hypermasculinity. In Chapter 6, she documents the defense mechanisms gay gang members use to defend their sexual identity such as "fagging out," or "reconceptualizing the insult by inverting it" (226). These actions serve to defend their own and others' rights to be gay...