Critical Concerns
The year is 2020. London, a city credited as the most progressive on Earth, has been losing its LGBTQ+ establishments due to the menacing forces of gentrification and the rise of online dating apps. A recent study by UCL’s Urban laboratory department, conducted by Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall, has shown that London has lost 58% of its LGBTQ+ venues in the last decade, with councils like Tower Hamlets losing 70% of those premises.[1] Ever since, queer expression has been moving from the dancefloor to secluded high-rise apartments [2], away from the public eye. The latest victim in a macabre list of closures is XXL, a men's only nightclub that catered to London’s bear and leather communities. Although controversial because of its strict door policy that rejected any visible signs of femininity, it held a special place in London’s gay scene as the last remaining super club equipped with a labyrinthine darkroom. XXL was a space where gay men could freely perform a hyper-masculine and sinister identity, and it counted 100.000 active members. In the case of Joiners Arms, a celebrated LGBTQ+ pub in East London that shut its doors in 2015, a local activist group has been campaigning against its closure and succeeded in securing certain protections [3]. But the gap in the queer heart of London remains.
Chelsea Arts Ball , January 1938 source: British Pathe archives FILM ID:993.14
“I have only being queer since I moved to London...”
In his book ‘Queer London’ Matt Houlbrook gives a detailed account of queer urban life in the pre-war years. From the debauchery of the Chelsea Art Ball[4] to the cruising public urinals behind the National Gallery.
In his introduction, Houlbrook reveals the story of a young man called Cyril. Cyril lived and worked in 1930s London and found a family of his own in Caravan, an underground members club that catered to the queer community of that time. In a letter to one of his lovers he pens: “I have only been queer since I moved to London...” That point of departure, of the migration to London coincides with the change of self (Houllbrook,2005,p.3). Judith Butler, a third wave feminist writer, notes that: ‘Identity is performative’ and better acted out within the confinements of progressive city centres (Butler, 1988, p. 519). Cyril’s story and the liberation he encountered in London resonates with the experience of so many LGBTQ+ people, including myself. Thus, being queer is associated with the experience of modern city life. In Houllbrook’s words, “London is both symbolic and experimental rupture, a productive space that generates and stabilizes a new form of selfhood and a way of life...the city as a queer space. (Houllbrook,2005,p.4)”
‘Queer space and the city’ is a relatively new subject in the academic discourse and emerged in the early 1990s. Following the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK during the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic, the experience of the ‘other’ citizen was high on the agenda. The 1994 exhibition at the Storefront of Art and Architecture in NYC titled ‘QUEER SPACE’, co-curated by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, was truly ground-breaking. It raised significant questions regarding sexuality and space, at a time when homosexuality was still a taboo. The exhibition’s manifesto claimed that ‘QUEER SPACE’ sought to uncover various definitions of the terms: ‘queer’ and ‘space’ and the conceptual bonds that unite them. How can minorities define their rights to occupy spaces within the city? How can such space be legitimized, given a history and a future? The various public installations and interventions created for the exhibition were an attempt to generate new ways of thinking about the social politics of space in the city.[5]
While there is a lot of historical and theoretical background on Queer space there is hardly any example on how queerness can be materialized and manifested in space. Theorist Christopher Reed argues whether ‘queerness’ can be embodied as a building or a landscape. For him queerness is constituted not so much in space but in the body of the queer: his/hers/its inhabitation (Reed ,1996, p.64).