Provincial paradoxes: 'at home' with older gay men in a provincial town of the Antipodes

In this paper we explore the importance of ‘home’ in the everyday lives of older gay men living in Townsville, a provincial town in tropical north Queensland. To do this we deploy the work of Alison Blunt and Robin Dowling (2006), who present a spatialised understanding of home. Drawing on interview materials with ten men who identified as gay, and who are also over forty years of age, we demonstrate that home is a crucial site in the production of their subjectivities. We argue that a spatialised understanding of home reveals paradoxical qualities of Townsville-as-home for older gay men. Furthermore, we argue that conceiving Townsville-as-home as a provincial paradoxical space is crucial to understanding how non-heterosexual subjectivities are sustained beyond the metropolis.