It is not surprising that these processes are also played out in everyday encounters. Into the asserted authenticity or continuity of tradition, 'secular' blasphemy releases a temporality that reveals the contingencies, even the incommensurabilities, in- volved in the social transformation.1 The discourse and practice of 'ofé cial' multiculturalism is always constituted through cultural hegemony, struggles over representation and prevailing ideo- logical norms. I argue that these latter positive discourses have guided the placement of gay bathhouses within the planning of Sydney over the last few decades. On the other, there are also emerging arguments that sex industry premises such as gay bathhouses can improve the health and lifestyle opportunities for specific communities and residents within particular city environs. On one hand, planning processes reveal ideas about how these establishments contaminate and pollute neighbourhoods and sensitive land uses such as schools or churches. It highlights how the placement of these businesses within Sydney depends on a broad range of shifting and competing discourses on how sex industry premises impact upon the amenity of the city, its neighbourhoods and land uses-that is, their secondary impacts, cumulative effects, and contribution to urban ordering. This paper contributes to this literature through a case study of the emergence of gay bathhouses in land-use planning process within inner Sydney during this period. Within this literature an emerging body of work has begun to highlight how formal urban planning processes and regulations are increasingly used as mechanisms to govern sexuality within later 20th century Western cities, particularly through the placement of sex industry premises.
Much recent scholarship on sexuality and urban spaces has focused on forms of urban governance. We argue that public theologies, mainstream and fringe, play a vital creative role in the planning, regulation, and lived experience of the modern city of Sydney.
The existence of ruins and “undesirable” places, temporary heterotopias where “unnatural” acts of love and sex took place, challenged this order (a Civitas Terrena or Sodom). Churches and other “official” structures represented planning in the service of institutional religion and heterosexual married love (a Civitas Dei), and the clean, modern city as eschatological ideal (the heavenly Jerusalem). Public theologies, initially formulated by Christians, were hijacked to expose tensions resulting from notions of “proper” and “improper” love being mapped onto urban spaces. This article discusses the emergence of a public LGBTQI culture in Sydney that both challenged hetero-normative philosophies and praxes of love and is situated in the context of the problematic relationship between Christianity and the urban throughout history the ideal Civitas Dei negated the real Civitas Terrena, faithful Jerusalem triumphed over decadent Sodom.
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