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London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
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Sheppz
mid season mood board drop
Gay Assimilationist All Terrain Bicycle (GAATB):
The GAATB comes from the lineage of the gay bike, but it's tempered by class anxiety and an ever increasing alienation from the queer community as a person, be it for survival or desire, is absorbed into the cis-hetronormative core. Radical underpinnings and rejection of mainstream concepts mean the bikes are not optimised in the eyes of the general, straight, population, no doubt a result of at least some life spent outside hetro group think. The design choices, the colours and the composition of the bike may retain some radical underpinnings but at most it manifests metrosexual, at worst, assimilationist. This is not a term of derision, but more a branch of a expansive, complex, rhizomatic community which bends and flows around the hetrosexual rock it finds itself in a war of attrition with. When i think of the GAATB rider i think of Steph, in the book Nevada by Imogeon Binney, a once free, radical, dyke who finds herself drinking topshelf whiskey wearing a pantsuit, in a brooklyn bar.
When we look at the bicycle itself we see much of the things which define a gay bike. the sloping top tubes, the smaller wheels. On a close inspection the top tubes are not as sloped, they're physically straighter, the wheels are ever so slightly larger and thus closer to the hetro zeitgeist. Gone are the battle marks, scuffs, stickers and signs of conflict from the frames, replaced with a clean coat of paint, sometimes in a campy hue. A direct reflection of the rider and how they themselves went under the same transformation to make themselves presentable for the audience they seem themselves in front of with more regulatity. Gone are the parts bin, often complicated parts forced together to make the machine run and hobble to its destination. Replaced with new, shiney effiecient pieces. Sometimes a artisinal simulacrum of the parts they're replacing. They are selected with a curatorial eye and maybe refrencing in jokes or direct counter cultural decisions against macro trends in an industry which at its heart rejects the queer rider, but tempered and shaped by the income bracket and peers they find themselves both freed and confined by.