Queer Enough

At the dawn of 2019, I broke up with my then boyfriend, now husband, packed up all my things into a U-Haul, and embarked on what would prove to be a traumatic move to DC to live as a lesbian. This was the culmination of a very long, confused, and graceless journey into queerness and a desire for belonging that was ultimately never satisfied and remains as such. I am not, have never been, and will never be heterosexual, but having grown up in the culturally conservative South, I came to terms with that later in life than many of my peers. When I came out as bisexual, I was full of optimism and hope for community and fulfillment. That hope was swiftly crushed by the difficulty, strange etiquette, and sheer individual loneliness of queer dating. I remember complaining to an acquaintance: “Man, this is torture. I just want a girlfriend.” It was like that scene in The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes. I didn’t know how to be queer, but it seemed to me like everyone else did and that whatever mistakes I made were quickly punished. Worst of all, I didn’t know how to inhabit queer space without realizing those spaces represented a very narrow, commodified, and policed definition of queer spaces, often the only kind available to those coming into queerness from the outside in the modern gentrified American metropolis. I stumbled in the dark and instead of finding help or love, I was introduced to a world of discourse—inclusion, exclusion, proper terminologies—all of which I tried to grasp as quickly as possible and integrate into my nascent understanding of myself. Recently, there was a viral tweet that went something like this: “If you don’t feel queer enough in queer spaces, maybe you should just become gayer.” That’s what I did. It didn’t help.

The loneliest I have ever felt was when I would go sit in A League of Her Own, the lesbian bar in the northwest DC neighborhood Adams Morgan, and try to talk to strangers, wearing my little pride pin, book in hand for when it got slow. I wasn’t entitled to a conversation, but I was lost and wanted someone to help me. Each night I sat alone, I thought, I’m a lesbian in a lesbian bar—surely it shouldn’t be so hard to talk to people. I went because there were no other spaces for me that I knew of, and every time, the feelings of rejection became more unbearable. It took me a while to realize that the difference between me and the others there was class-based. Many were congressional and NGO staffers whose incomes were twice my own. They were almost entirely cisgendered, able-bodied, and white. And they all seemed to know each other. They’d developed cliques and social networks that were deeply entrenched in their social positions within DC. This wasn’t an inclusive community just because it was gay; it was merely a rainbow replication of an existing social order.

It can be hard to find spaces in big American cities that aren’t that way. Radical queer community centers and autonomous spaces were decimated by the simultaneous knockout blows of the AIDS crisis, neoliberal economic policies that ruined the poor and working class, and a resurgent hyperconservative politics that took root around the globe at the end of the twentieth century. What remained were faceless liberal nonprofits, a corporatized pride, and gay bars and gay bookshops, whose existence was predicated on points of sale. Emancipatory spaces proved temporary and fragile because space itself was such in rapidly unaffordable urban centers. To paraphrase Holly Lewis in the chapter about homonormativity and homonationalism in her book The Politics of Everybody, confronted with austerity and attacks from all sides, queer people started to eat their own in a battle for recognition and more importantly limited and diminishing resources, leading to separatism, discursive policing, and intracommunity exclusion. These phenomena often occurred along the lines of race, gender, and ability, in addition to a more naked class conflict exposed by rising inequality that queerness, unifying as it may be, couldn’t patch up. These isolating dynamics played out in my own life, leading me to bear my crises alone and give up on understanding and coming to terms with my queerness. I was still bisexual, but I thought it didn’t matter, since there weren’t any queer spaces that I knew of that would be welcoming toward someone who gave up on being queer because it was hard—until I stumbled into Metelkova.

Metelkova is an autonomous social and arts center in Ljubljana, formed in the early ’90s when students and creatives occupied (in a quasi-legal arrangement with permission from the city) the former Yugoslav military barracks located in the Tabor neighborhood. It would be right at home in the pages of Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories, a new volume edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell that compiles, as its name might suggest, queer spaces from around the world and across time.

Within Metelkova, there are several performance venues, bars, sculptural structures covered in graffiti, murals, and jungle gyms. (One of these bars is Klub Tiffany, a queer club, whose exterior walls are painted with a parody of an egg-and-dart motif consisting of alternating pairs of vulvas and nut sacks.) At Metelkova with my friends of varying identities and backgrounds, I was always happy, always at home, always safe.

Metelkova is not a policed space—the presence of police is limited, and drugs are sold in the open, deterring many tourists— and as such it is a safe gathering place for all the city’s weird kids, artists, students, and queer people. At night, these crowds descend upon the monkey bars and other ad hoc structures. There are few light fixtures, making it so dark that sometimes it’s hard to see, adding to the potential and aura of transgression. Like most queer spaces, Metelkova is subversive and inherently fragile, having only barely braved many eradication attempts by both liberal and conservative governments throughout Slovenia’s history since the collective’s founding in 1991. These two qualities link many of the spaces in Furman and Mardell’s book.

Queer Spaces is divided into three spatial categories: domestic, communal, and public. Each space it features is accompanied by an essay; writers range from academics to activists, with a notable focus on spaces in Britain and former British colonies. (The book is published by the Royal Institute of British Architects.) Some of the inclusions are fairly well-known (New York City’s Stonewall Inn, the now-defunct London Lesbian and Gay Center), but many are not, and there are even a few creative rereadings of spaces formerly seen or presented as heterosexual, such as King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s various castles and estates, all of which are now tourist destinations. Many spaces were once totally anonymous and kept purposely hidden. Helen Smith’s account of English working- class bars that were sites of mixed male socialization and cruising before the formation of modern gay identity is a standout entry. Others are deeply personal and moving. The book’s powerful opening essay, by trans writer Ailo Ribas, describes the train from her conservative Catalan hometown toward Barcelona as a space of transition where she would change from her attire of forced assimilation to one of gender liberation. It sets the tone for the entire book. The diversity of examples, including a wide selection from the global south, demonstrate the verve of non-Western expressions of queer joy and also serve as a reminder of the precariousness and often violent repression of queer life.

As curators, Furman and Mardell should be commended, as the architectural choices in the volume are satisfyingly vast. On the domestic side, they range from the self-isolated estates of the queer upper class in the British Isles, including the Neogothic Fonthill Abbey (where Alderman William Beckford took up exile after scandal) and the Georgian-style cottage of eighteenthcentury Irish “companions” Lady Eleanor Butler and the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby, to avant garde architectural practices exemplified in Dracula’s Den, Osamu Ishiyama’s windowless, early-decon house for a gay couple, which served as a rejection of the traditional, family-oriented floor plans of typical Japanese houses. Private space is often the hardest to document with regard to queer life, which is perhaps why so many examples are limited to upper-class queers with the means to live securely and with some permanence and architectural flair, a problematic that shouldn’t be interpreted as a slight toward Furman and Mardell.

The communal section expectedly focuses on nightclubs and bars. These places serve a very important place in queer history as places of performance, experimentation, and, yes, sex. In a testament to their subversiveness, most of these places are gone now, regardless of who built them. The ’80s PoMo Palladium in New York City, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Arata Isozaki ultimately met the same destructive fate as the pop-up queer spaces of Dhaka, Bangladesh: the former through the value of land in a gentrifying city and the latter through violent and bloody repression enacted by religious fundamentalists. As Timothy Moore and John Tanner write in their essay about the similarly renowned Inflation Nightclub in Melbourne, Australia: “The only permanent thing about a city and its queer spaces is its temporariness.”

Finally, there is public space. I find this section most compelling, as the fight for queer autonomy is often intimately linked with a fight for the commons writ large. For example, Caminito Verde, a wooded space near the Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico City, is a common spot for cruising and public sex despite the fact that the authorities keep trying to crack down on it. Many entries in this category deal with queer memory making and also with grief: the Amsterdam Homomonument to the queer victims of World War II, for instance, and museums covering trans existence in the UK and Argentina, both places where an escalation of anti-trans violence in recent years makes such spaces ever more necessary. We are often reminded, in a visceral way, that liberation is a struggle, and, like all struggles, it transpires spatially. David Eskenazi sums it up well in an essay about the first “Queer Space” course at UCLA: “Space is the site of architecture’s impact on the everyday, the real and the politics of bodies.”

Queer Spaces is a colorful, moving tribute to the resiliency and optimism of a people now facing some of the most brutal repression they’ve seen since the AIDS crisis, echoes of which can be found in the current right-wing fearmongering around monkeypox. The book is particularly refreshing in that it does not include what most of us see or have to accept as “queer spaces”—the sanitized, commercial spaces pandering to a gay clientele. In fact, it gives us a history and practice of something better. Like Metelkova, the book is frank about the fact that queer life is messy and subversive: queers fuck, dance, do drugs, organize, and fight and mourn together. In a discursive environment obsessed with the right and wrong way to be queer, Queer Spaces shows that there is no answer to that question. Public sex in bathhouses is just as queer as the anarchist bookstore in Edinburgh. Also like Metelkova, itself precarious (its sister squat, Rog, was shuttered by the city in 2021 and is being turned into a makerspace), Queer Spaces implicitly demonstrates the limitations to spaces that try to exist outside of or in the face of capitalism, gentrification, and repression. Many such spaces in the book were lost to eviction (Women’s Anarchist Nuisance Cafe, a famous queer squat in London), persecution (Central Cultural Guanuca in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, a queer gathering space shut down by that country’s repressive government), and economic changes (Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a historically queer bar sitting on valuable land in a changing London, which has recently been sold to a developer). These offer a cautionary tale: a queer spatial politics untethered to the broader, class-based fight for the right to the city will only lead to a continued cycle of building and destruction in public space and the self-isolation of wealthy queers in the private, domestic realm while the rest of us are thrown to the wolves. We queers are not entitled to queer space. We will have to fight for it.