LGBTQ situated memory,place-making and the sexual politics of gentrification

Introduction

Whilst recent work has crucially identified the significance of stigmatisation in naturalising and normalising processes of displacement and disciplining in the city (Kallin and Slater, 2014; Slater, 2006, 2008, 2018; Wacquant, 2007, 2016; Wacquant et al., 2014), the place of sexual politics in these accounts is undertheorised. This is a significant oversight given the primary role that sexual and gendered norms play in marking populations and the places they reside in as ‘modern’ or ‘backwards’ (Butler, 2008; Hoad, 2000; Puar, 2007; Rao, 2014; Rifkin, 2010). Indeed, that sexual norms mark spatio-temporal hierarchies is evidenced by the widespread belief in a ‘cultural map for homophobia’ (Hanhardt, 2013: 14) or ‘bigot geography’ (Spruce, 2016), which claims to reflect knowledge about zones of sexual in/tolerance. Of specific relevance to this article, positive depictions of LGBTQ ¹ life are associated with white and middle-class communities and spaces, whilst non-white ² and/or working-class communities and spaces are associated with homophobia and anti-LGBTQ violence (Bérubé, 2011; Judge, 2018; Konrad, 2014; Nero, 2005; Skelton, 1995). Transposed to the urban neighbourhood where gay place-making signals sexual modernity, cosmopolitanism and development potential (Bell and Binnie, 2004; Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Florida, 2002, 2005; Rushbrook, 2002), the displacement and disciplining of racially and/or economically marginalised subjects therefore appears necessary for progress (Bacchetta et al., 2015; El-Tayeb, 2012; Hanhardt, 2008, 2013; Haritaworn, 2015; Nero, 2005). These classed and racialised logics of sexual in/tolerance, moreover, render LGBTQ place-making in impoverished and/or racialised neighbourhoods, and by impoverished and/or racialised LGBTQ people, ‘unthinkable’. ³

Drawing on material from an ethnographic study in the gentrifying/gentrified London neighbourhood of Brixton, this article therefore develops the interrogative lens of earlier work on ‘gay gentrification’ to consider the ways in which contemporary place-making and space-taking in the name of LGBTQ people interacts with racialised and classed ideologies of displacement and disciplining. ⁴ Due to Brixton’s particular relationship to Black (and) LGBTQ life in London, along with its interrelated figuration through tropes of disinvestment and development, this research also contributes to the epistemically and politically critical process of disturbing the tautologies which frame middle-class white gay male practices as the example of LGBTQ urban place-making.

My research reveals that in Brixton the politics of neighbourhood change are often ‘made sense of’ by turning to situated memory: that is, site-specific narratives about the individual or collective past. This reflects an understanding of the past, which is used to rationalise, drive and trouble logics of un/belonging and un/worth, as a key player in contemporary spatial politics (Andersson, 2012; De Cesari and Dimova, 2019; Loughran et al., 2015, 2018a, 2018b; Mathews and Picton, 2014; Morrell, 2011). Despite its importance, however, there has only been minimal analysis of the specific relationship between LGBTQ public memory and place-making (Andersson, 2011; Dunn, 2016; Mort, 1998; Patrick, 2014; Schulman, 2012; Zebracki, 2018). ⁵ By tracking three memory tropes that LGBTQ people in Brixton deploy, this research begins to chart a more nuanced, contradictory and pluralised account of the relationship between LGBTQ people, situated memory and the politics of urban change. ⁶

This article proceeds with a brief description of the neighbourhood of Brixton, along with other salient methodological information. I then move on to review the dynamics of occupation, displacement and disciplining that are outlined in the literature on LGBTQ urban place-making, before providing to a fuller conceptualisation of LGBTQ situated memory. In the second part of the article, I turn to a close reading of the empirical material in order to interrogate the ways that LGBTQ situated memory appears in the place-making and space-claiming practices of Brixton’s LGBTQ residents. I conclude that, although amenable to (homo)normative progress narratives, LGBTQ situated memory also has the potential to expand the horizons of LGBTQ place-making and push back against the racist and classist logics of disciplining and displacement. The pursuit of multiplicity is central to realising this potential that LGBTQ situated memory holds as a strategy for resistance.

Plotting Brixton

Although previously a bourgeois suburb, throughout the latter part of the 20th-century, Brixton became synonymous with high levels of poverty, criminality and dilapidation. This association ossified as the area became linked with African-Caribbean immigrants who travelled to England in the mid-1950s to fill post-war labour shortages. Reflecting beliefs that continue to circulate today, Sheila Patterson’s (1963) ethnography on African-Caribbean settlement in Brixton places sexual politics – in particular supposed deviation from normative (white, middle-class) family forms – at the heart of ‘the problem of integration’. Routed through colonial logics of black violence and ungovernability (Hall, 2002), the neighbourhood gained further infamy in the 1980s and 1990s as the key location for uprisings (referred to in mainstream press as ‘race riots’) that protested rampant police brutality and institutional racism.

Following years of neglect and stigmatisation, over the last decade and a half the neighbourhood has experienced massive levels of investment and development. The neighbourhood’s change (and opposition to it) has frequently been covered in regional and national press, leading to Brixton gaining prominence in the UK as an emblematic site of racialised gentrification. ⁷ Although it long justified disinvestment in the area, the neighbourhood’s association with immigration has more recently provided fodder for its revaluation, blended into generic tropes of internationality and cosmopolitanism. ⁸ Paradoxically, the increase in positive representations of the area’s ‘ethnic difference’ comes at the same moment as the residential population and socio-cultural infrastructure of Brixton has been whitened. Despite this ongoing erasure and displacement, however, Brixton retains particular significance for Black British social, cultural and political life.

Whilst Brixton’s popular mediatisation is through tropes of black heterosexuality, the larger research project upon which this article draws explores Brixton as a historic and contemporary site for multiracial and interracial LGBTQ residency, culture and politics. ⁹ Contrary to trends observed in other contexts, Brixton’s LGBTQ associations have yet to be incorporated into its diversity (re)branding. There are no memorials, plaques or statues to mark this heritage, and the official narrative of the area is as likely to decentre its LGBTQ history, as Brixton is likely to be displaced from an account of London’s LGBTQ geographies. ¹⁰

In the process of visiting archives, ¹¹ browsing the internet, talking with interviewees and conducting participant observation, however, Brixton’s LGBTQ memories rang clear. Looking back to the 1970s I found traces of the radical drag discos held in Lambeth Town Hall and of drag queens in wedding-dresses lining the route of an anti-racism march (Author Fieldnotes). I learnt about the houses on Railton and Mayall Road that were squatted by the Gay Liberation Front (Cook, 2011) and the Gay Community Centre that, for two years, housed gay wrestling, a gay switchboard and an agit-prop gay theatre group (Hassan, 2014). ¹² From the 1980s, I was told stories about houses squatted by Black-anarchist-lesbians, the pub where male strippers enlivened Sunday afternoons (Author Fieldnotes), and the radical policies of lesbian feminist and Black activist Lambeth Council Leader, Linda Bellos (What’s Left, 2013). ¹³ Then, moving on to the 1990s, I discovered videos of the Pride festival held in Brockwell Park (Lewis, n.d.), ¹⁴ was caught up in the nostalgic tales of club nights in Substation South or The Fridge, and found myself swept along with the excitement of cruising for sex in a badly lit backstreet (Author Fieldnotes).

This patchwork of stories reflects just some of the pasts that I encountered during the ethnographic project into LGBTQ life in Brixton. The analysis below, however, focuses on 19 anonymised semi-structured interviews that I conducted with LGBTQ residents of Brixton, as well as a short film Brixton recreation with Ajamu (Solle, n.d. [2014]). ¹⁵ Amongst the interviewees, 10 participants identified as women, six as men and three as trans or ‘other’. Eleven participants identified as white, three as black, three as mixed race, one as Latinx and one as South Asian. They ranged in age from 22 to 64 years, and their duration of residency in the neighbourhood spanned from just a few months, to over 30 years. Participants’ classed locations were difficult to parse, as markers of education, house-ownership and upbringing were frequently contradictory; reflecting this, three identified as middle class, six as working class and 10 suggested their class was mixed, complicated or irrelevant. The subject of the short film, Ajamu X, is a black gay artist and activist who has lived in Brixton since the 1980s and has spearheaded efforts to document Black gay life, in part as a cofounder of the Black queer archive ‘rukus!’ (Ajamu et al., 2009). This combination of materials allows for an exploration of the complex, vernacular, ways in which a diverse range of LGBTQ situated memories are animated to ‘make sense’ of place-making in Brixton.

LGBTQ place-making: belonging, displacement and disciplining

One of sexual geography’s key impulses has been to distinguish the ways in which LGBTQ people engage in place-making, particularly at the local level in urban contexts. A loose taxonomy of three kinds of LGBTQ-related neighbourhoods is outlined in this literature, with distinctive dynamics of displacement and disciplining attributed to each. The first model to gain attention, the ‘gayborhood’ or ‘gay ghetto’, ¹⁶ denotes a neighbourhood that is occupied by, and oriented towards, gay people. It has been expansively theorised in work on ‘gay gentrification’, which since the 1980s has explored (predominantly) gay male practices of urban occupation and renovation (Castells, 1983; Caulfield, 1989; Knopp, 1992, 1995, 1997; Lauria and Knopp, 1985 [2010]). For research on lesbian territorialisation, see Adler and Brenner (1992), Podmore (2006), and Valentine (1995). In his landmark research, Manuel Castells acknowledges that, whilst gay territorialisation in San Francisco was instrumental for gay community and political development, ‘the improvement of the urban space by the gay community might … represent a new form of residential displacement and social inequality’ (Castells, 1983: 167). Specifically, he recognises that a ‘gay influx’ into San Francisco led to black and Latino communities being displaced ‘without compensation’. For Castells, displacement is an unfortunate by-product of gay progress: ‘ethnic’ place-making and gay place-making are depicted as two distinct struggles to occupy disinvested land in the broader context of mainstream homophobia and racism. Whilst providing an important recognition of displacement, this analysis has two fundamental blind-spots that are widely shared in the gayborhood literature: first, it implies that ethnic minority and sexual minority identifications are mutually exclusive, erasing the experience of queer people of colour – a point I return to below – and, second, it suggests that gay place-making and ethnic place-making are similarly positioned in relation to wider urban processes. This parallelism is robustly refuted by research that identifies dominant strategies of gay place-making as widely (and increasingly) complimentary to neoliberal forms of urban development (Florida, 2002, 2005; see further Oswin, 2015: 558) whilst, in contrast, ‘ethnic’ place-making remains associated with neighbourhood decline and urban delinquency. ¹⁷ Binnie and Skeggs (2004) further elaborate the ways in which the gayborhood is produced through the policing of classed norms in their research on the Gay Village in Manchester, UK. They note that ‘uneducated working class people who … do not know how to behave in the gay village … are spatially located as provincial’ (2004: 55): a displacement that is also marked in time as the working class becomes stigmatised through association with ‘out of date’ attitudes towards sexuality. Belonging in the gayborhood is contingent on ‘appropriate’ behaviour which – placed in tension with ‘antisocial behaviour’– is defined, and enforced, along racist and classist lines. As Hanhardt compellingly argues, in the US (and I would suggest perhaps even more so in the UK) some forms of LGBTQ place-making are now recognised and protected by dominant economic, political and judicial institutions (Hanhardt, 2008, 2013, 2016). The continued cultural association of homophobia with impoverished and/or non-white communities therefore means that the ‘establishment of protected gay territories … must be paired with two of global capital’s own “spatial fixes”: gentrification and mass imprisonment’ (Hanhardt, 2013: 14). In other words, rather than myopically celebrating the decreasing stigmatisation of LGBTQ urban place-making, we must recognise the ways in which this shift further legitimises the displacement and disciplining of poor and/or non-white residents of all sexualities in the name of progress.

Often motivated by a desire to challenge the overrepresentation in existing research of relatively affluent white men, over the past two decades sexual geographers have increasingly sought to identify LGBTQ urbanisms ‘beyond the gayborhood’ (Doan and Higgins, 2011; Ghaziani, 2019). ¹⁸ Gavin Brown’s research in Spitalfields, a historically Bengali neighbourhood in East London, conceptualises ‘post-gay space’ to describe neighbourhoods where ‘sexual difference is visible and acknowledged without being a central marker’ (Brown, 2006: 133). Seeming to trouble the zero-sum model of gay gentrification that suggests LGBTQ place-making is contingent on others’ displacement, post-gay spaces are instead characterised by a ‘cosmopolitan’ mix of ethnicities, classes and sexualities. Brown finds that the fluidity of space (i.e. the lack of a clear demarcation of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ zones), along with the circulation of ‘metrosexual’ masculinities, initially provides a spatial ‘camouflage’ that allows men from less privileged social groups to participate in same-sex sexual encounters (Brown, 2006: 141). However, he concludes that ‘[t]he people who gain most, materially and culturally, from the cosmopolitan experience of Spitalfields remain mostly young white middle-class professionals’ (Brown, 2006: 143) and that, as gentrification proceeds, non-heterosexual men of colour are increasingly absent (Brown, 2006: 141). As such, the promise that ‘post-gay’ spaces hold as sites to explore more diverse forms of LGBTQ place-making is curtailed (see also Nash, 2013). The conceptualisation of ‘post-gay’ space also reaffirms the association between LGBTQ place-making and processes of displacement and disciplining because of the work that the prefix ‘post’ does to associate these neighbourhoods with particular claims to sexual modernity. In other words, ‘post-gay’ spaces are widely represented as an expression of LGBTQ place-making that becomes possible after homophobia (Nash, 2013) and is most commonly claimed of neighbourhoods that have undergone significant levels of gentrification. Again, therefore, the association between the displacement of poor and/or racialised minorities, and the cultivation of neighbourhoods for LGBTQ place-making, is sustained.

Offering a third expression of LGBTQ place-making, Gorman-Murray and Waitt identify ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ as areas where ‘gay and lesbian residents, institutions, and businesses are not dominant, but are welcomed’ (2009: 2858). Unlike in post-gay spaces, ‘interaction and cohesion across sexual difference is a key characteristic’ of queer-friendly neighbourhoods (Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009: 2859), and both local institutions and individual residents are expected to contribute to the upkeep of this character. For example, a white lesbian participant in Gorman-Murray and Waitt’s research offers up the reflection that ‘you’d be … like an outcast by being homophobic, racist or whatever in this town’ (2009: 2865). This comment gestures towards the increased centrality of ‘tolerance’ as a criterion for belonging in neighbourhoods that are marketed partly through the claim to being ‘queer-friendly’; intolerance would merit disciplinary action, which could ultimately lead to the outcast being ‘cast out’. Whilst this participant suggests racism and homophobia would be equally condemned as out of place, El-Tayeb finds that in European cities that define themselves ‘around shared values of humanism, equality and tolerance, there is an increasingly intolerant and repressive attitude towards migrants and racialized minorities – justified by their supposed threat to exactly these values’ (2012: 80; see also Bacchetta et al., 2015; Haritaworn, 2015; Kosnick, 2015). The pernicious circulation of ‘homophile islamophobia’ that El-Tayeb identifies draws on longstanding colonial logics that cite (supposed) sexual norms to distinguish the ‘premodern savage’ from the ‘modern colonizer’ and thus naturalise racial hierarchies (Butler, 2008; Hoad, 2000). Like the other configurations, celebrations of ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ are compatible with the disciplining and displacement of marginalised subjects.

Although temporal claims are absolutely central to the above spatial conceptualisations, relatively little attention has been given to the role that evocations of the sexual past plays in LGBTQ place-making. ¹⁹ Despite this, it is clear that the development of London’s LGBTQ neighbourhoods has drawn heavily on the sexual past in order to justify occupation and ground claims to authenticity and distinction. ²⁰ Mort, for example, notes that Soho’s reinvention ‘has been achieved principally by astute marketing of its spatial and cultural distinctiveness and its historical accretions of bohemianism’ (1998: 898). Similarly, Andersson’s research on the emergence of Vauxhall as a neighbourhood for gay sex venues finds it was ‘kick-started … through a process of re-imaging and place-marketing of Vauxhall as a historical and contemporary centre for hedonism’ (2011: 91). Pushing the relationship between sexual memorialisation and development logics further, Patrick’s research into the gentrification of New York’s High Line finds that white bourgeois gay men whose interests align with real estate developers were able to reference the area’s history as a cruising ground ‘to immunize against meaningful political opposition’ (2014: 921). He cautions: ‘[i]ndeed, while the High Line’s gayness is invoked as a cultural “value added” according to the logic of the creative class, the reality of the project’s uneven impact on the queer community, itself differentiated along racialized, classed, and gendered lines, is powerfully obscured by such pinkwashed statements as “The High Line is totally gay”’(Patrick, 2014: 929). As these writers reveal, the pursuit of development and the preservation of the LGBTQ situated memory appear co-dependent: development becomes naturalised as the best way to preserve the LGBTQ past, and the LGBTQ past is commodified in the pursuit of neighbourhood development.

Another facet of the sexual past’s implication in the developmental logics of displacement and disciplining becomes apparent through a queer-feminist reading of the concept of ‘territorial stigmatisation’ (Wacquant, 2007). Developing this concept, Kallin and Slater argue that ‘stigmatisation lays the foundations for state-sponsored gentrification … symbolic defamation provides the groundwork and ideological justification for a thorough class transformation’ (2014: 1353). Narratives about the situated past are crucial in identifying the ‘blocks’ (including populations) that need to be removed in order for neighbourhoods to realise their (economic) potential. Whilst sexuality remains liminal in these analyses, feminist theory reveals that territorial stigmatisation relies centrally on the association of working class and/or ethnic minority groups with ‘bad families’, delinquent youth and sexual violence (Collins, 1998; Jensen, 2018; Razack, 2002; Tyler, 2008; Walkerdine, 2009).

Brought into dialogue with the literature reviewed above, the role that narratives about the sexual past play in framing contemporary spatial politics is therefore of central interest here. Specifically, I conceptualise ‘LGBTQ situated memory’ to explore the everyday and dynamic ways that the sexual past is evoked in relation to questions of occupation, displacement and disciplining in the neighbourhood. This builds on scholarship that focuses on collective memory as ‘a powerful tool for framing and advancing urbanites’ actions for and against particular forms of development’ (Loughran et al., 2015: 3). Whilst certain versions of the LGBTQ past are clearly amenable to market-led development, the following discussion reveals that LGBTQ situated memories also have the potential to challenge the sexual politics of gentrification by depicting impoverished (and) racialised neighbourhoods as sites of residence, culture and socialisation.

Situated memory and LGBTQ place-making in Brixton

The following discussion explores LGBTQ situated memory in Brixton, paying particular attention to its imbrication in logics of occupation, disciplining and displacement. I focus on snapshots of narrative, producing a fine-grained analysis of the tropes of belonging, differentiation and gay-friendliness that dominate participants’ LGBTQ situated memories. Taken together, these narratives emphasise the centrality of memory practices for LGBTQ place-making and sharpen ‘situated memory’ as a lens that reveals the role that narratives about the past play in urban politics. Drawing on the empirical material in this way also illuminates that LGBTQ experiences of neighbourhood change, disciplining and displacement are intersected by other axes of privilege, most notably here race and class. ²¹

Towards a disorderly past

In this article, I investigated the role that LGBTQ situated memory plays in sustaining and challenging dynamics of discipling and displacement. I began by outlining the ways that dominant conceptualisations of ‘gayborhoods’, ‘“post-gay” spaces’ and ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ reflect and reinforce the notion that neighbourhood’s become sites of LGBTQ place-making through the disciplining and displacement of non-white and/or economically marginalised people. I then conceptualised ‘LGBTQ situated memory’ to explore the significance that site-specific narratives about the past have in practices of LGBTQ place-making and space-taking. Where other work has lamented limited political horizon offered by ‘officially sanctioned narratives’ of the LGBTQ past (Castiglia and Reed, 2012: 2), here I explored the political potential of the more ‘disorderly’ (Halberstam, 2005: 87) narratives that emerge in everyday evocations of LGBTQ situated memory. Halberstam argues that a strategy of prioritising and proliferating ‘disorderly narratives’ (2005: 187) can help to counter narrow stories that circumscribe – according to classed and racialised logics – what sexual progress consists of and where it can be found. The importance of proliferation here is joined by a move away from seeking to produce definitive accounts, and instead produce sexual geographies that foreground contradiction, ambivalence and multiplicity. ³¹

In the first theme, the collective memory of a ‘queer’ past clearly naturalised and grounded contemporary claims to LGBTQ belonging. In the context of Brixton, however, this remembering of a distant ‘queer’ past also entrenched an association between LGBTQ identity and whiteness, delegitimised non-white claims to spatialised belonging in the UK and depoliticised local processes of racialised gentrification. Primarily articulated by white and middle-class residents, this cautioned against a reading of LGBTQ situated memory as necessarily disruptive to the sexual politics of gentrification. The second theme turned to memories about a more recent past, where participants’ knowledge of the area as a site of political activism were foregrounded to articulate their attachment and investment in the neighbourhood. This revealed the politicising function of collective situated memory, where incomers’ connection to the past generated a sense of responsibility for the present. The collective memory of queer-black-feminist place-making also troubled the spatialised racialisation of homophobia, which renders post-1950s Brixton an unlikely site of radical sexual politics. This turning to the past, however, remained politically ambivalent as it allowed incomers to distinguish themselves from the ‘real’ gentrifiers and promoted classed cultural values and capacities as a condition of ethical residency. The third memory trope to be explored directly challenged the correlation of gentrification to ‘gay-friendliness’ by remembering a pleasurable sexual past in Brixton. This contests practices of gentrification, most notably the securitisation of public space, which have been justified primarily through a sexual politics that invokes women and LGBTQ people as subjects in need of protection. Nostalgic memories of public sex in Brixton foregrounded the racialised figuration and experience of ‘threat’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘protection’; emphasising the plurality of LGBTQ urban desires, challenging the stronghold of ‘gay respectability politics’ and (thereby) providing a strong counter-logic to the sexual politics of gentrification. Prioritising complexity over coherence, however, this use of memory did not provide a clear agenda for LGBTQ place-making or urban politics.

Taken together, the three themes emphasise the political utility, as well as the ideological flexibility, of LGBTQ situated memory as a strategy for place-making. Whilst cautious of the potential for co-optation into ‘heritage-value’, this research shows that LGBTQ situated memory can challenge the sexual logics of displacement and disciplining. Demonstrating this, the ambivalent and contradictory accounts of change made available through LGBTQ situated memory crucially interrupt the a priori assumption that – for all its ills – gentrification provides the conditions for LGBTQ flourishing. Moreover, by focusing on LGBTQ place-making in Brixton, a neighbourhood that is rarely recognised in cartographies of LGBTQ London, this research contributes to the critical project of recognising and redressing sexual geography’s own biases. The amplification of memories beyond the ‘white gay ghetto’ and beyond the ‘gay gentrifier’ must be prioritised in research on LGBTQ urbanisms as it is through these memories in particular that the racist and classist logics that underwrite contemporary celebrations of ‘gay-friendliness’ are clearly challenged.