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The dissertation brings together queer theory, oral histories, poetics, and autoethnography to track queerspaces and sexpublics indirectly and from multiple angles through stories about sex, race, spaces, publics, addictions, fantasies, and violence. Queerspaces and sexpublics emerge as real, virtual, and affective sites and circulations that accrete and produce same-sex desires and practices. Based on five years of ethnographic research conducted among queer men in Austin, Texas and via the Internet, Queerspaces and Sexpublics argues that fears about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Texas anti-sodomy laws, and urban redevelopment efforts which hoped to refigure Austin as a high technology center, a" Silicon Valley of the Southwest," pressured queerspaces out of public spaces and into commercial and/or virtual private spaces.