The Queer Metropolis

Gender, Place & Culture, 2024

At the intersection of queer theory and urban studies, social geographer DamonScott’s long-awaited spatial analysis of the San Francisco waterfront’s queer land andits demise has finally been published, renewing scholarly interest in the social dynam-ics and sexual politics in post-war American urban planning. Building on thesocio-political context of the Lavender and Red Scare in the 1950s –when homosex-uals were expelled from merchant marine and naval forces– The City Aroused exploreshow the San Francisco waterfront became a containment zone for a thriving queernightlife. Scott argues that this gay cruising strip was framed as a vice district bypro-growth advocates such as business leaders and state officials who labeled it a‘blighted’ area to drive down the cost of land for an urban renewal project and a newfreeway network called the Golden Gateway. This project was supported by city plan-ners eager to ‘modernize’ San Francisco as the financial center of an expanding met-ropolitan area. The queer bar culture responded to the cracking down, bar raids,street sweeps, and liquor suspensions, through collective organizing, creating politicalnetworks and local publications to call for equal treatment under the law. Despite thedestruction of the queer waterfront sites and their replacement with office towersand freeway ramps, the displaced queer community managed to continue organizingand resisting within other designated contained zones in the city, such as theTenderloin, where their presence was allowed and tolerated but still tightly controlled.

The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods, 2021

Urbanists have developed an extensive set of propositions about why gay neighborhoods form, how they change, shifts in their significance, and their spatial expressions. Existing research in this emerging field of "gayborhood studies" emphasizes macro-structural explanatory variables, including the economy (e.g., land values, urban governance, growth machine politics, affordability, and gentri-fication), culture (e.g., public opinions, societal acceptance, and assimilation), and technology (e.g., geo-coded mobile apps, online dating services). In this chapter, I use the residential logics of queer people-why they in their own words say that they live in a gay district-to show how gayborhoods acquire their significance on the streets. By shifting the analytic gaze from abstract concepts to interactions and embodied perceptions on the ground-a "street empirics" as I call it-I challenge the claim that gayborhoods as an urban form are outmoded or obsolete. More generally , my findings caution against adopting an exclusively supra-individual approach in urban studies. The reasons that residents provide for why their neighborhoods appeal to them showcase the analytic power of the streets for understanding what places mean and why they matter.

2011

culture has developed in big cities and metropolises everywhere (not only in the West, but also in Asia, Latin America and indeed Africa). This essay examines how cities provide the spatial conditions necessary for the formation of such emancipatory movements based on identity politics and strategies which transcend binary gender dualism. The starting point of this investigation is my thesis that only urban life enables LGBTQ individuals to live their lives fully, realize their (sexual) identities, and furthermore organize themselves collectively, become publicly visible, and appropriate urban, societal and political spaces. This essay argues that the evolution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer and transgender culture over the last 50 years in many big cities has a direct correlation with urban life, the reason being that only life in the city renders possible the creation of movements focusing on identity politics and their urban spatialization. 1

In this paper I ask what forms of affective politics become visible when we move past static ontologies of the “gayborhood” as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorize gay urban neighborhoods as public spaces of social reproduction, as spaces of queer caring labor in which the dislocations of the neoliberal city are “redeemed”. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organized in response to health crises, exclusion, and systemic threats of violence. Returning to Chicago school theories of the city as an organism that metabolizes newcomers, and feminist critiques thereof, this paper draws on excerpts from recent gay cinema as well as empirical work at a trans homelessness services organization to think about gay urban space as a network of interlocking sites at which queer intimacies, socialities, kinships, and politics are forged through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through a politics of unpaid and voluntary sector labor, and argue that the gay neighborhood is a scale that queers, through the messy marrying of public and private, the feminized and racialized work of social reproduction “without which a city is not a city” (Spain 2001: 13). Spain, D. (2001) How Women Saved the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2015

Journalists, activists and academics predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are overly determined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the observation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in today’s so-called ‘post-gay’ era. Assimilation expands the residential imagination of gays and lesbians beyond the boundaries of a specific neighborhood to the entire city itself. Furthermore, as sexual orientation recedes in centrality in everyday life, residents opine that few care if a person self-identifies as gay or straight. These two respective mechanisms of expansion and cultural sameness bring existing economic wisdom into dialogue with a cultural and political perspective about how our shifting understandings of sexuality also affect the decisions we make about where to live and socialize.

Since the 1960s, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) culture hasdeveloped in big cities and metropolises everywhere (not only in the West, but also inAsia, Latin America and indeed Africa). This essay examines how cities provide thespatial conditions necessary for the formation of such emancipatory movements basedon identity politics and strategies which transcend binary gender dualism. The startingpoint of this investigation is my thesis that only urban life enables LGBTQ individuals tolive their lives fully, realize their (sexual) identities, and furthermore organize themselvescollectively, become publicly visible, and appropriate urban, societal and politicalspaces.

2015

This article is part of a book symposium on There Goes the Gayborhood? (Princeton 2014). The essays are based on presentations at an “Author Meets Critics” session at the 2015 ASA meetings in Chicago. Panelists and authors include: Andrew Deener, Harvey Molotch, Mary Pattillo, and Iddo Tavory.

2007

In the past 40 years gay and lesbian populations have established a visible presence in many cities, but recent gentrification has put pressure on LGBT neighborhoods. This paper uses a case study of the Atlanta metropolitan area to examine the effects of resurgent gentrification on LGBT neighborhoods. The study finds that rising housing values have dispersed the LGBT population, and former LGBT neighborhoods have become less tolerant of LGBT people and the businesses that anchor the LGBT community. The paper considers ways that planning practice might seek to preserve LGBT-friendly neighborhoods and the people and institutions that depend on them.

For decades, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (LGBTQ) people have played key roles in these urban gentrification processes, as peripheral »gay ghettos« became gay neighborhoods and eventually »gayborhood« tourist hubs. I lay bare the interdependencies of the margin-center by showing the history of urban queer sexualities. In applying queer theories to read the placement of queer urban bodies, I suggest that the margin and the center are examples of binary mores that, rather than only be seen as at odds, require and reproduce each other.

University of Michigan - Deep Blue, 2022

ix and the management here thinks I'm going to rob the place. Boystown is just not as much fun as it used to be. As he takes another sip of his drink and looks out the window at people passing by, he comments that "Boystown is just not my game anymore." Unknown to me at that time, the agglomeration of gay bars, clubs, and bathhouses with their rainbow flags, lights, and panoply of parties hide multiple structures of inequality that impact the costs of this leisure, who gains access, and how they are received. As Dex's comment reflects, both personal characteristics (such as age and race) and structural ones (such as convenience) influence the degree to which someone is successful within this neighborhood and these spaces. For some, Boystown represents a queer utopia and for others, a queer community deferred. Therefore, the guiding questions that began my study were: (1) who falls into the utopia versus deferred categories and (2) if queer men aren't frequenting Boystown, then where are they going? Over the next three and a half years, I addressed these questions by observing the various queer spaces around the city, both located within Boystown and outside of it. Within these spaces, I witnessed who used them and how to find out who was successful, where, and what they had to do in order to be successful. In talking with patrons, staff members, owners, visitors, and regulars, I learned how these queer spaces were not simply used for leisure, but to structure entire ways of organizing queer life in the city. In turn, this dictated how and with whom individuals interacted. The location of queer places helped guide the mechanisms queer men used to understand Chicago's queer sexual landscape and their own personal queer sexual map. Given this organization, it is unsurprising that when I gave queer men a map of Chicago, they were all too willing and able to circle, star, cross out, and highlight places they go, places they don't, neighborhoods they consider to be good, ones that are bad, and overall, their personal xix List of Appendices Appendix A: Map of Chicago……………………………………………………..