The term gay is often associated with a certain gender-dichotomous, liberalising paradigm. As such, it is juxtaposed to the term queer understood as open to gender and sexual fluidity, as well as critical of liberation in the name of identities. Yet the experiences of being gay in (queer) academia do not fit neatly into any of these paradigms. Based on biographical reflections on our academic trajectories as openly gay scholars in gender and queer studies, anthropology, and sociology, in this presentation we want to explore the everyday institutional politics (Ahmed 2012) of being gay in (queer) academia and the affective dissonances (Hemmings 2012) that they lay bare. Difficulties fitting into homosocial groupings of any gender as well as problematizations of gay identity in contemporary gender and queer studies speak to the inherent in-determinability of ’gayness’ and point to the normative frameworks of contemporary (queer) academia. Thus in this presentation, we will suggest to understand gayness as immutably fluid in order to investigate the onto-epistemological boundary work of contemporary (queer) academia and to explore the analytic potentials of gayness as a form of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988).