Since the 1970s in South Korea, theaters, bars, and dance clubs at Jongno, Euljiro, and Shindang districts in Seoul were the places where the people performing non-normative sexual and gender practices —who could be identified as sexual minorities from the view of today — gathered. There has been a varying degree of social stigma in the places thereabouts. The gay ghetto and the people around there were situated in a gray area between legality and illegality. In such places, there were juridical or arbitrary acts of violence by the police and thugs, and one’s sexual orientation could be disclosed at any moment under the gaze of heteronormative society. However, at the same time, there were tight bonds among the people who performed non-normative sexual and gender practices, avoiding heteronormative society. This research illuminates the social stigma and the gay subculture whereby conceived which have been firmly interconnected in the oral life history of a gay man who has been active on Jongno 3-ga for his lifetime. Before the identities of sexual minorities formulated by the LGBT social movement and community, male homosexuality was not often clearly separated from the performing of heterosexuality, especially with the individuals who are called gihon iban —a man married to a woman and still have sex with men. The narrator, different from them, has had domestic partnerships with men throughout his life. The narrator states that it was possible only because his family-of-origin neither offered sufficient care and intimacy to nor imposed heterosexual marriage on him. In other words, the narrator did not “become” gay because of having family-of-origin being far from normal, as the pathological perspective on homosexuality prevalent at the time dictates, but rather has been living while embracing his identity as a gay man owing to them. His life history tells a substance of the institutional heterosexuality operated to the people performing non-normative sexual and gender practices at the time.