Review: Queer spaces – ADC

Spaces for queer people are in precipitous decline. In 2017, a study led by Ben Campkin at UCL found that, in London, they had more than halved over the previous decade. And this problem is not confined to the UK: around the world, financialisation has forced inexpensive venues from urban centres, taking with them the subcultures that they once sustained. At the same time, a rising tide of conservatism has brought renewed oppression and erasure. This, then, is a good time to take stock, to re-examine and hopefully to protect the spaces that survive, and to imagine what kind of queer spaces might still be possible.

A new ‘atlas of LGBTQIA+ places’, as the subtitle describes it, edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, does just that, by anthologising an impressive variety of queer spaces from around the world. The book is significant for its ambitious scope, which encompasses spaces of the privileged and the underclass, the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, the virtual and the grittily real. Its case studies range from the Sri Lankan villa of Geoffrey Bawa’s brother to the toilets of the VI Lenin Institute in Moscow, from the Zoom-based Queer House Party that took off during lockdown to the communal home of a group of third-gender Hijras in Dhaka.

These are often stories of adversity, but also of collective resistance against such adversity, and this resistance is sometimes successful. The rear carriages of Mexico City’s Metro trains, famous hook up spots known as the ‘happy box’, were shut at night by the authorities in 2011, but reopened the next year after protests by the queer community.

As these examples demonstrate, Furman and Mardell’s book incorporates spaces that are both intentional – that is, designed for queer use – and adopted, or queered. The former are often the dwellings of the privileged, such as Ludwig II’s castles, in which private fantasies could be expensively but also rather tragically enacted, while the latter can be perilously ephemeral, among them a tract of greenery on the famous modernist campus of UNAM in Mexico City known as the Caminito Verde, the little green road. This cruising ground is periodically cleared by the disapproving authorities but sprouts anew each time. Such spaces are sites of intangible heritage, as UNESCO might put it, and in view of this, all the worthier of recording. Yet, confronted by such rich diversity, the problem arises: what makes a space queer?

This question first entered architectural discourse in the 1990s, as queer and gender theory began to filter into the discipline’s more advanced centres of theoretical production in the USA. (The moment is marked in the book by an entry on the student seminar that initiated this conversation.) The works of Aaron Betsky, Joel Sanders and Beatriz Colomina were pioneering in this regard, but not unproblematic.

Betsky attempted a theory of queer space which focused on the homes of rich, white gay men, and when he considered the impact of this constituency on urban space, his tone was triumphalist: ‘They made the city inhabitable again, leading the charge of gentrification that finally liberated the city from the working class.’ It is hard to imagine anyone writing in such terms today.

The opposing perspective was already formulated in 1999 by Black communists ci-fi author Samuel Delany. In his memoir-cum-sociological study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany mourned the passing of semi-public spaces in which working-class men could meet for sex: the porn theatres of Times Square, which was then being gentrified by Giuliani.

Furman and Mardell’s book continues in this vein, while not neglecting the kind of bourgeois spaces celebrated by Betsky. Despite its encyclopaedic approach, there are some notable absences, among them pivotal Berlin spaces of the interwar years, such as Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology and the famous transvestite bar, Eldorado. While it is unreasonable to expect a book with such admirably global ambitions to aim for completeness (if such a thing were even possible), I think that both of these particular lacunae are significant, since neither of them appear unambiguously positive today. Hirschfeld’s thought is increasingly recognised as being entangled in contemporaneous racist ideology, and, although Eldorado is mourned for having been shut down by the increasingly conservative German authorities in 1932, when it was transformed into a headquarters for the Brownshirts, Ernst Röhm, a regular patron of the bar, remained in situ. In other words, both of these venues were problematic, as many queer spaces are. Another recent re-examination of queer history, Ben Millerand Huw Lemmey’s Bad Gays, has argued that such difficulties should not be elided if we are to develop a critical understanding of the complexities of queerness.

These grey areas are not entirely avoided by the book, but in general it tends to the celebratory – understandably, given the situation to which it responds. Nevertheless, thanks to its global approach, Queer Spaces achieves complexity. The plural in the title is enacted in the editorial policy of the book: after a brief introduction, the mic is passed to the contributors, who hail from places just as diverse as the buildings they describe.

This programmatic circumvention of grand statements allows a particularist picture to emerge, which does not cohere as a unitary theory of queer space. Instead, it confirms the radical reading of queerness as a denial of identity. For this reason, there can be no queer space in the singular, only a fundamental indeterminacy – and a refusal, furthermore, of the direct mapping of an identity onto a particular aesthetic .And while the protean and evanescent quality of queer space may seem a weakness, allowing such places to fizzle out almost as soon as they come into existence, it is also a source of strength. Any space can be queered; indeed, perhaps space itself, fluid as it is, might be a little bit queer.