Whither queer suburbanisms? Beyond heterosuburbia and queer metronormativities

1 Rupturing the Binaries of Heterosuburbia

Around the world, metropolitan areas have undergone intense suburbanization – ‘a combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion’ (Ekers et al., 2015: 22). Accelerating in urban regions, suburbanization is now interpreted as a global process fuelled by rising incomes, increased central city housing costs, innovations in transportation and communications and the decentralization of employment (Harris and Keil, 2017; Keil, 2011). Although highly differentiated, it is argued that suburbanization constitutes the dominant structural process shaping contemporary cities (Filion, 2010). Research also highlights the many distinct styles of suburbanization resulting from the ongoing contours of this expansion (including self-built and state- and private-led types of development) and attends to suburbanization’s multiple scalarities, (dis)connectivities and regulation through planning, policy and legislative frameworks at the global scale (Hamel and Keil, 2015). But for all its emphasis on reimagining post-suburbia as a diversified space (Keil and Addie, 2015), the field has largely occluded any consideration of its changing sexuality.

One reason for sexuality’s absence from the new suburban studies is the field’s emphasis on more structural political–economic processes at the expense of social relations, an arena that might implicate sexualities. Three key dimensions of suburbanization have instead been prioritized (Keil, 2013): governance (e.g. Ekers et al., 2015; Hamel and Keil, 2015; Keil and Addie, 2015), land development (e.g. Filion and Kramer, 2011, 2012; Harris and Lehrer, 2018; Moos and Walter-Joseph, 2017; Pavlic and Qian, 2014) and infrastructure provision (e.g. roads, sewers, water, transit, schools and airports) (e.g. Addie, 2016; Phelps, 2015, 2017). With a focus on the power relations involved in decision-making (e.g. homeownership, dynamics of capital accumulation as well as annexation and incorporation) (Ekers et al., 2015; Hamel and Keil, 2015), the suburban governance literature draws attention to pressing political problems of redistribution, sustainability and racialized segregation, but other social processes are largely absent. Demonstrating that Anglo-American suburbs are no longer predominantly low-density and residential (with many jurisdictions now containing mixed use, high-density developments organized around public amenities and pedestrian- and transit-oriented environments) (Garde, 2008), research on suburban land development suggests that changing suburban zoning can result in uneven and complex patterns of (re)valorization and socio-economic and racialized exclusions (Hanlon and Airgood-Obrycki, 2018), but these have rarely been thoroughly analysed. Emphasizing ‘hard’ (technical, material and digital) assets at the expense of the softer ‘social arrangements’ and ‘everyday rituals’ that ‘condition the capacities of people in places’ (Addie, 2016: 274), studies of suburban infrastructure draw attention to the unevenness of its provision, but seldom adequately interrogate the impacts of these new socio-spatial imbalances on suburban communities (Gleeson, 2002). While sexuality is arguably implicated in such forces of suburban change – starting with the presumption of a heterosexual nuclear family that once lay at the heart of suburban citizenship, housing design and service provision – continued inattention to the social has, at least partially, perpetuated its neglect in new scholarship on suburbanization processes.

Other scholarship on suburbanization has highlighted its entanglement in the creation of an urban–suburban binary shaped by racialized, classed and gendered relations. Suburbanization’s intersections with socio-economic dispossession and racialization, especially in US cities, has been well-documented (cf. Freund, 2007; Kruse, 2005; Lake, 2017 [1981]; Shabazz, 2015; Sugrue, 1996). Clapson’s (2003) Suburban Century highlights the multi-ethnic arcs of suburbanization for Black, Jewish and Asian (Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese) households in US and England. Early feminist geographies certainly neglected the whiteness and ethnic intersections of suburbanization, but they revealed how patriarchal ideals became intertwined with suburban capital accumulation strategies (Mackenzie and Rose, 1983; McDowell, 1983) reinstating gender norms that made suburban heteronormativity synonymous with ‘middle-classness’ (Bondi, 2005: 7). Feminists also uncovered how the masculinist planning ideology and sexist housing policies underpinning suburbanization processes, naturalized unequal gender relations (Dyck, 1989; L Johnson et al., 2000; Weisman, 1994) and reinforced women’s reproductive role through suburbia’s built form and interior design (Hayden, 1980; LC Johnson, 2006; Ryan, 2018; Spain, 1992; Wright, 1980). Most notably, feminist scholarship proposed a gendered urban–suburban binary whereby cities were characterized as masculine, public, extroverted and spectacular while suburbs were feminine, private, introverted and passive (Domosh and Seager, 2001). Although rarely examined, the spatiality of heteronormativity has also been discursively mapped through this binary but in reverse: the privatized landscape of suburbia supports a very public reproductive heterosexuality, while the ‘publicity’ of the central city is designated as the place for more hidden and marginalized sexualities (Hubbard, 2008).

If by relocating the reproduction of the white middle-class heterosexual nuclear family to the city’s periphery suburbanization became paradigmatically associated with heteronormativity, its relational opposition to the urban was always incomplete and open to transgression. In Visions of Suburbia, Silverstone (1997: 5) argues that suburbia can only be effectively understood through the ‘paradoxes and contradictions that define it’. Indeed, suburbia’s cultural erotic may lie in the potential transgression of its respectability and the possibility of its private, domesticated ‘perversions’ (Bell, 2001; Hartley, 1996; Langford, 2000). While the city may be the ‘sign of desire’, the suburb is interpreted as a potential place of ‘perversity’, mythologized as a site of ‘illicit pleasures (wife swapping, sex parties)’…‘hidden behind net curtains’, a place of ‘sin clothed in respectability and mundanity’ (Bell, 2001: 92). However, this centre-margin construction is never so neat and tidy: suburbs may sit at the political centre of a nation’s mainstream, but their subjects are still physically peripheral to the more ‘libidinal’ metropolis (Langford, 2000). As Langford (2000) argues, suburban subjects may look to the city for a release from suburbia’s repression, but suburban sexualities are more complex, ambiguously shrouded in an indeterminacy that is neither wholly normative nor ‘depraved’. Lesbian and gay histories in the post-war era demonstrate the fluidity of suburbia’s boundaries: suburbs contained sites for gay male public sexual transgression (road houses, cottages and wooded areas); they were also places from which heterosexually married lesbians escaped on the weekend to join urban subcultures and, for middle-class gay men, they were domestic havens from what was an increasingly surveillant city (Cook, 2014; Dines, 2010; Houlbrook, 2005; Jennings, 2006; Oram, 2012).

Although disrupting the urban–suburban dichotomy potentially opens suburbia to narratives beyond the heteronormative, it is still a location built upon purposeful policy-based exclusions, in which LGBTQ+ subjects have figured as unwanted ‘invaders’ of heterosexual space. Much like Sibley (1994: 300) describes for the urban–rural binary where various ‘others’ (teenagers, travellers, racialized people) are treated as ‘pariahs’ and ‘sinners’ when they ‘come out of the city into the country to do things which…disturb a purified rural space’, exclusionary plans and policies have been leveraged to keep ‘invading’ queers out of suburbs. Prior and Crofts’s (2011) examination of municipal permits for gay bathhouses in suburban Sydney, Australia, demonstrates how zoning maintains the heteronormative ‘cleanliness’ and ‘order’ of the suburbs. In the US, Frisch (2002: 256) argues that the large-lot zoning and deed restrictions used to bar lower income populations from suburbia also prohibited the encroachment of ‘non-family households’, spatially maintaining ‘heterosexual constructs of family, work, and community life’. Through redlining, the US federal housing policies that contained African American households in the inner city also assisted in halting the ‘contagion’ of the suburbs by queer sexualities. As Howard’s (2013: 935) study of the San Francisco Bay Area suggests, such housing policies reinforced suburbia’s heteronormativity by aggregating and isolating gay and lesbian households in the inner-city and permitting suburbanites to assume ‘heterosexual norms were nearly universal’.

2 ‘Diversifying Suburbs’ Without Sexuality?

Today’s suburbs barely resemble the white, single-family, middle-class, heterosexual landscapes of the post-war period. Much like inner-city gentrification, suburban diversification has thus become an object of fascination in suburban studies because it so significantly disrupts established urban ecological models (Hall and Lee, 2010). Pivotal research has explored suburbia’s historic class diversity (Harris, 2004; Lewis, 2008; Nicolaides, 2002) and the processes surrounding African American suburbanization (Weise, 2004). Suburban studies also document the increasing ethnic, racial, religious, life cycle and household heterogeneity of suburbs, with some suggesting that the inner-city-suburban dichotomy has become irrelevant (Bourne, 1996). Growing suburban diversity is attributed to reductions in housing discrimination, high central city housing costs, the centrifugal settlement patterns of immigrants and the construction of demographically targeted housing developments (Hall and Lee, 2010). While this literature does understand diversification intersectionally, sexuality remains a neglected variable. Its absence not only reinforces the power of heterosuburbia as a concept, but more critically, extrapolating from Puar (2006), homonormative biases are also renewed by presupposing that the ethno-culturally diversifying suburbs are either impossibly queer or implicitly homophobic.

As queer scholars have argued, gender and sexuality are positioned within ‘multifaceted constellations of power’ (Oswin, 2008: 100) that should be inseparable from the ethnic, racialized and classed concerns of suburban studies scholars. Influenced by immigration and refugee studies, suburban studies researchers have critically examined experiences of ethno-cultural discrimination amid suburban ‘diversity’ (Ray and Preston, 2015) and the transformative agency of immigrants and refugees to reshape suburban patterns of settlement, homeownership and ethnic business practices (Fong et al., 2005; Teixeira, 2007). Recognizing that suburbs accommodate immigrant ‘gateway communities’, research is directed toward growing concentrations of new and second- and third-generation migrant populations in ‘ethnoburbs’ where socio-economic capital and mobility are leveraged via transnational linkages (Li, 2009) and diasporic networks (Huq, 2013). Moving beyond the ethnoburb, more recent scholarship considers how such spatial and scalar multiplicity is used to rework suburban spaces. For example, in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Basu and Fiedler (2017) describe the multidirectional flows of integration shaping how diverse immigrant and refugee communities living in close proximity use and transform suburban public sites. Intersections with religious identities have received increasing attention from suburban scholars. Hackworth and Stein’s (2012) study of Toronto’s inner suburbs details how immigrant communities adaptively reuse underutilized and vacant warehouses in deindustrializing areas as affordable places of worship. Dwyer’s (2015: 2402) analysis of suburban faith spaces reframes suburbs as ‘extroverted sites of transnational connectivity’, demonstrating their potential ‘for creativity, flexibility, and innovation’ (Dwyer et al., 2013: 416). While queer communities may not have such tangible architectural property anchors in suburban landscapes, like peripheralized immigrant groups, they too mobilize heterogeneous networks to temporarily transform suburban spaces into ‘ambient’ peripheral hubs for micro-communities (Bain and Podmore 2020c; Brown-Saracino, 2018). And, within those sites of suburban diaspora connectivity are queer subjects living transnational lives through submerged but-no-less mobile suburban-centred networks.

While the ‘ethnically diverse suburb’ is a preoccupation of this field, as Cohen (1997) has argued, sexuality is central to all such constellations, intersecting with gender, ethnicity, racialization and class, to create inequalities. Suburban studies of inequality emphasize the intersections between ethno-racialized and economic marginalizations, documenting growing social inequality, poverty and disadvantage (e.g. Bailey and Minton, 2018; Randolph and Tice, 2017), a general ‘fraying’ of the suburban ‘good life’ brought by increasing income polarization, inner-city displacement and the arrival of economic refugees into older suburbs and beyond (Abramowitz and Teixeira, 2009; Hulchanski, 2010). Research on the suburbanization of poverty demonstrates that peripheral areas experiencing social distress often lack the breadth and depth of social service infrastructure to support the multiple exclusions of low-income suburban residents (Lo, 2011; McLean et al., 2015). While ethno-cultural and socio-economic changes are predominant features of current suburban change, sexuality remains unaddressed, leaving this literature saturated with heteronormative assumptions that relegate queerness to scholarly elsewheres. To separate queer subjects from these processes of exclusion is to negate their embodied placement within suburban diasporic and low-income communities, especially in inner suburbs ‘in crisis’ where racialized and newcomer poverty is increasingly aggregated (Hanlon, 2008: 447). Case studies of suburban communities also increasingly indicate that it is in suburbia that metropolitan ethno-cultural, socio-economic and racialized exclusions are being challenged by activists (Basu and Fiedler, 2017; Carpio et al., 2011), yet few have attempted to examine suburban queer activisms (Bain and Podmore, 2020d; Podmore and Bain, 2019). This is especially important for queer of colour activisms which may have strong links to suburbs (Haritaworn et al., 2017, 2018). In the case of metropolitan Toronto, for example, Verma (2017: 228) describes a largely undocumented but ‘long, complicated history of queer and trans organizing in the burbs’ that lives on as an archive ‘in the minds and bodies of individual people’ providing ‘a new future for QTBIPOC communities’.

Suburban studies’ emphasis on ethno-cultural and class diversification also reproduces queer suburban absence by neglecting the available macro-scale data on same-sex households. Despite significant changes in the composition and location queer households brought, in part, by changing marital status and the presence of children, this neglect also stems from the field’s overemphasis on ‘racial and socioeconomic composition’ at the expense the analysis of ‘life-cycle and household patterns’ (Hall and Lee, 2010: 5). At the most basic level, same-sex households are embedded in the ‘detraditionalization’ of the suburban household associated with the rise of alternative family forms and practices (e.g. single person, child-free, empty-nester and blended families) evident in macro-scale data since the 1980s (De Jong, 2013; Duncan and Smith, 2006; L Johnson et al., 2000). Wyly’s (1999) factorial analysis of Minneapolis–St. Paul in the 1980s and 1990s provides a rare US example of the role of the changing ‘family status construct’ in the restructuring of urban space. More recently, a multi-city US study found that household type is actually more variable in the suburbs than ethno-cultural identity and social class (Hall and Lee, 2010). Not only is it necessary to critically deconstruct how same-sex households represent queer suburbanites in the census but also to reconsider the invisiblization of the multiplicity of queer household configurations by suburban studies scholars who have thus far neglected LGBTQ+ suburbanites in their interpretative mappings of the emergent contours of suburban demographic change.

3 ‘Suburbanism’ as a Heteronormative Way of Life?

Suburban studies scholars have also begun re-examining suburbia’s distinctive ‘ways of life’ or the sets of social and cultural norms that ‘define the spread of the urban tissue’ (Keil, 2018: 498) – what is referred to as ‘suburbanism’ (Ekers et al., 2015; Moos and Walter-Joseph, 2017). Suburbanism describes a familiar heteronormative model of dispersion, privatism, homeownership, modest comfort and car-dependency that has dominated scholarly and public imaginations in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia (De Jong, 2013; Keil, 2015) with little consideration of alternate queer readings of these well-worn tropes. For example, automobile use might not be perceived as negative by LGBTQ+ people for whom long commutes within often-fragmented suburban public transit routes can expose them to violence and harassment. Similar disruptions can be read through notions of the privacy and domesticity shrouding potential control and marginalization of LGBTQ+ youth within suburban family homes.

Suburbanism was first used in the post-war period when Fava (1956), drawing on Wirth’s (1938) arguments about urbanism, proposed a distinctive ‘suburban way of life’ stemming from the self-selected migration of middle-class heterosexual white families and the privatism it produced, resulting in a potentially surveillant dynamic of ‘neighbouring’ (see Walks, 2013). Gans (2005) [1968] challenged this environmental determinism, asserting that class-based self-selection rather than the environment itself produced homogeneous communities of ‘limited liability’. Whether or not suburbanism is distinct, it is portrayed in both popular and scholarly discourses as ‘tied to – but usually opposite and subservient to – the city, and an urban way of life’ through binaries such as ‘inside/outside, concentrated/dispersed, powerful/weak, collective/individual, big/little, heterogeneous/homogeneous, unique/conformist, commercial/residential, accessible/isolated, densely formed/loosely formed, vertical/horizontal, high culture/mass culture, exciting (with drama)/boring (with no drama)’ (De Jong, 2013: 34). Constructing suburbanism through these historic dichotomies discursively produces suburbs as the antithesis of the urban. In so doing, suburban queers are cloaked in its registers of apolitical domesticity and privacy, and queer suburbanism is rendered an impossibility (Dines, 2010).

In contrast with the urban ecological approach to the suburban way of life, the new suburbanism provides a more structural but equally determinist approach that recasts subservient suburbia as denser, more diverse and autonomous, but still private, dispersed and conservative. For example, Filion (2015) presents ‘dispersed suburbanism’ as a persistent urban form characterized by low-densities, mono-functional land-use specializations, coarse-grained scatterings of activities and flattened, car-reliant accessibility gradients. Like Peck (2011), he views it as a product of neoliberal urban restructuring that prioritizes market forces and privatization, creating a new suburban disposition through an opposition to the urban. Dispersed suburbanism ‘creates an illusion of self-reliance among its residents, fed by their dependence on market-delivered goods and services, and the predominance of owner-occupied detached housing, which translates into political conservatism’ (Filion, 2015: 635). As Keil (2015: 579) argues, this newer interpretation of suburbanism overemphasizes ‘US-style individualized suburbanization’ resulting in ‘a focus on a cultural politics of social conservatism, property ownership and privilege’ that obscures ‘alternative social and built forms in suburbia’ and ‘other, more progressive, collective consumption-oriented and social-justice seeking forms of everyday suburbanism’. Thus, while much of the new suburbanisms' research agenda details the structural power of neoliberal capitalism to shape suburban landscapes, social life and political dispositions, an overemphasis on a dynamic between the ‘conservative’ suburbs versus the more ‘progressive’ city continues to mask a multiplicity of alternative visions hidden under these large structural forces that surely intersect with other relations of power, including heteropatriarchy and its post-structural counterpart, heteronormativity.

Walks’s (2013) re-evaluation of the suburbanism concept, however, provides a potential opening for queer suburbanisms. He argues that ‘alongside neo-liberal suburbanisms, exclusionary suburbanisms and auto-mobile suburbanisms, there is the potential for diversifying suburbanisms, innovative suburbanisms and suburbanisms of progressive mobilization’ (Walks, 2013: 1485). While suburbanism is ‘the dominant mode of existence’, it is not ‘a static characteristic of particular places and spaces’, but rather, ‘a multidimensional evolving process within urbanism that is constantly fluctuating and pulsating as the flows producing its relational forms shift and overlap in space’ (Walks, 2013: 1472). This place-contingent and flow-oriented understanding of suburbanism allows for its decoupling from a more universalized interpretation of the suburban environment as a place that only reproduces individualism, homogeneity, conformism, isolation and conservatism. For Walks (2013: 1472), ‘[d]ifferent places are…infused with varying levels and hybrid forms of suburbanism’ with variable everyday life impacts stemming from ‘the intensity of the flows producing them’. This reformulation thus makes queer suburbanisms a possibility: suburban ways of life can be multiplied, disrupting a monolithic casting of the suburbs as always-already heterosexual in opposition to the queerer urban.

Such an argument makes place for queer suburbanisms in two ways. First, it may be used to contest the idea that suburbs are only ever ‘bastions of heteronormativity’. As Hubbard (2008) argues, it is impossible to describe any space as completely heterosexual since spaces are defined through sexual practice, which is more ubiquitous, often transgressive and temporally unstable. While the impossibility of containing individual sexual practices to specific urban locations does not create a distinct queer ‘way of life’, paradigmatically labelling suburbs as heterosexual does not disrupt the binary logics that inform their production (Hubbard, 2008). This distinction is the crux of Hodge’s (1995) argument that the relational construction of suburbia as inherently heterosexual discursively defines gay villages as the proper place for queers making gay suburbanism an impossibility. Second, the place contingency component of Walks’s (2013) argument opens the possibility of variable queer suburban ways of life. As Cooper (2009: 122) submits, we may consider ‘the suburban as a space in which sexualities, not all of them normative, are constituted’. Literary studies such as Dines’s (2010) Homecoming Queens provide insights into the distinctive ways of life produced by gay suburban subcultures. They complicate reductionist narratives of suburban heteronormativity and hint at the vernacular richness of queer suburban subcultural interpretations of urban space that remain under-examined in social science accounts of the suburban ontologies of queerness. To continue the project of destabilizing the sexual contours of heterosuburbia, this article proceeds to locate the fragments of already documented sexuality studies literatures that may be interpreted as initiating queer suburbanisms.

1 Unravelling Queer Metronormativities

‘Metronormativity’ is a neologism coined by Halberstam (2005) to describe a historically specific spatial and temporal narrative of queer sexualities in the urban West. It articulates Weston’s (1995: 274) argument about the ‘great gay migration’ and its ‘sexual imaginary’:

The gay imaginary is not just a dream of a freedom to ‘be gay’ that requires an urban location, but a symbolic space that configures gayness itself by elaborating an opposition between rural and urban life. It is also the odyssey of escape from the isolation of the countryside and the surveillance of small-town life to the freedom and anonymity of the urban landscape.

To undermine metronormativity, geographers have turned their attention to ‘a series of non-metropolitan spaces’ (Gorman-Murray et al., 2013; Phillips, 2013), which precludes suburbia because it lies within the metropolitan. Rural communities and queer rurality (see Gorman-Murray et al., 2013; McGlynn, 2018; Phillips et al., 2000) along with small towns (Eaves, 2013, 2016; Gorman-Murray et al., 2008, 2012; Smith and Holt, 2005) and smaller cities (Brown, 2008; Brown-Saracino, 2018; Muller Myrdahl, 2013) take priority. This non-metropolitan framework reveals spatial power relations – including the binary between the urban West and all the rest (Phillips 2013) – and destabilizes foundational assumptions about queer life and activism that are naturalized through the urban: the politics of sexual visibility, the primacy of queer versus kinship-based support networks and the need for a critical queer urban mass located in a central-city neighbourhood (Brown et al., 2016; Browne and Brown, 2016; Gray, 2009). Non-metropolitan queers are shown to create a sense of belonging using alternative techniques to navigate queer invisibility and infrastructural absence in peripheral spaces (Bain and Podmore, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Gorman-Murray et al., 2013). As the periphery of the metropolis, the suburban potentially shares much with such decentred queer worlds.

Despite this engagement with the non-metropolitan, research in this field continues to train on the gay village. Over the last decade, analysis of gay village homonormativities, exclusions and concomitant displacement relationally re-centred such inner-city areas in LGBTQ+ urban studies (Brown, 2012; Brown, 2014; Brown-Saracino, 2019; Podmore, 2013; Reynolds, 2009; Visser, 2013). Such processes are attributed to the consumer mainstreaming of gayborhoods (Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2014; Visser, 2014), their gentrification and redevelopment (Doan and Higgins, 2011; Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2015b; Ruting, 2008), the practice of homonormative entrepreneurialism (Kanai and Kenttamaa-Squires, 2015; Mattson, 2015), queer virtual worlds (Collins and Drinkwater, 2017; Usher and Morrison, 2010), a generational shift towards ‘post-gay’ identities (Brown, 2004; Lewis, 2012a, 2013; Nash, 2013a), the individual internalization of neoliberal values (Lewis, 2017) and lifestyle or life-cycle changes (Collins and Drinkwater, 2017; Ghaziani, 2014b). Overall, research on gay village decline signals a gradual displacement by inner-city change, a diminished reliance on identity-based enclaves and a metropolitan dispersal of LGBTQ+ life.

Although gay village decline has signalled LGBTQ+ metropolitan ‘relocations’, the emphasis is on the inner city (Bain et al., 2015; Brown, 2004; Gorman-Murray and Nash, 2014; Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009; Kanai and Kentamaa-Squires, 2015; Nash and Gorman-Murray, 2014, 2015a) rather than suburbs. Ghaziani’s (2014a) There Goes the Gayborhood links the decline of Chicago’s gay village to the emergence of post-gay subjectivities that minimize sexual identities and spaces and instead circulate through multiple urban neighbourhoods that form ‘cultural archipelagos’ of ‘within-group’ LGBTQ+ heterogeneity (Ghaziani, 2019). Using a comparative mobilities framework, Nash and Gorman-Murray (2014, 2015a) trace such locational shifts to less visible, more decentralized ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ (Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009; Nash, 2013b) – defined by Gorman-Murray and Waitt (2009: 2855) as areas outside of the central city with a ‘visible and acknowledged but not overwhelming presence of gay and lesbian residents, businesses, and organizations’. Such inner-city enclaves are characterized by an ‘openness’ signalled by the social, cultural and economic diversity of their residents where queer identity is visible in public spaces through a subtle iconography (Bain et al., 2015). Queer inner-city dispersal is marked by clustering and reconcentration (Brown-Saracino, 2011; Kanai and Kentamaa-Squires, 2015; Nusser and Anacker, 2013) but is further parsed by gentrification and racialization, contributing in some places to the spatial retrenchment of homonormativities (Smart and Whittemore, 2017). While new research probes the complexities of LGBTQ+ migrations at the interurban scale (see Brown-Saracino, 2018; Di Feliciantonio, 2020; Lewis, 2012b), intra-urban LGBTQ+ relocations within city regions have rarely extended to suburbs and remain limited to qualitative case studies that lack comparative macro-scale analysis.

2 (Re)mapping the ‘Same-Sex’ Metropolis

Variably available in North American, Australasian and European countries since the 1990s, census data on same-sex couples can be used to trace LGBTQ+ relocations within metropolitan areas, but the use of these statistics raises epistemological, methodological and political issues, especially when extended into lower density areas such as the suburbs. Using a study of Seattle, Washington, Brown and Knopp (2006) critique the biopolitical imperative of same-sex census data collection and question the inference that GIS (Geographical Information Systems) polygons and census tracts can represent LGBTQ+ places and communities. Same-sex census data pose even more basic methodological issues. First, they are limited by the variable measured: such data underestimate LGBTQ+ populations by only including self-reported, adult, cis-gender, same-sex couples living in married or common-law relationships, disqualifying singles, bisexual and/or transgender people or those with more fluid and/or non-designated identities and relationships (Doan, 2016). Second, these data do not represent a 100 per cent sample of cis-gender, same-sex couples: some individuals may not report their relationship status to a government agency, skewing the sample towards younger households, those already ethnically, racially and socio-economically empowered by homonormativities and those living in larger more ‘progressive’ inner-city urban areas (Anacker and Morrow-Jones, 2005; Brown and Knopp, 2006). Finally, same-sex household data samples are tiny, limiting census tract-based spatial analysis in less densely populated areas where a ranking in relation to an index for a metropolitan area makes their values appear even lower (Anacker and Morrow-Jones, 2005; Brown and Knopp, 2006; Gorman-Murray et al., 2010).

Notwithstanding these limitations, macro-scale analysis of census data usefully decentres the queer metropolis. Paying close attention to scale and adjusting for small numbers, it demonstrates the presence of same-sex households throughout national space, including the suburbs (Gorman-Murray et al., 2010). For example, Gates and Ost’s (2004) The Gay and Lesbian Atlas illustrates that same-sex households were reported in 99 per cent of all US census tracts. Such research further reveals areas of high relative concentration in both the US and Australia with evidence of higher density clusters ranging from smaller LGBTQ+-friendly cities to suburban concentrations within particular Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) (see Gates and Cooke, 2011). Gorman-Murray et al. (2010: 383), for example, found that there were same-sex households in most Australian Statistical Divisions (including high concentrations in inner-city areas in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) with ‘significant suburban and regional concentrations’.

At the metropolitan scale, such preliminary research also suggests important gender differences among same-sex households and proposes different explanations for these patterns. In general, US studies indicate that male households concentrate in the central neighbourhoods of specific large metropolitan areas and relocate to contiguous inner areas, while female households are more dispersed in different inner-city locations across a wider range of metropolitan areas (Anacker and Morrow-Jones, 2005; Baumle et al., 2009; Compton and Baumle, 2012; Hayslett and Kayne, 2011). Black et al.’s (2002) ‘amenity hypothesis’ argues that, higher disposable incomes and lower levels of child-rearing draw male same-sex households to amenity-rich areas, while family responsibilities and lower economic flexibility constrain female same-sex households in their pursuit of ‘quality of life characteristics’ (Hayslett and Kayne, 2011: 149). Florida’s ‘gay index’ inspired the study of links between amenity-rich inner-city neighbourhoods, creative-sector job growth and housing markets (Anacker and Morrow-Jones, 2005; Black et al., 2002; Christaphore and Leguizamon, 2018; Florida and Mellander, 2009). While male same-sex households choose amenity-rich poles of creative sector employment (Anacker and Morrow-Jones, 2005), ‘there is not even a weak relationship between the residential patterns of the creative class and lesbians’ (Hayslett and Kayne, 2011: 149). Gender differences are also apparent in proximity to heterosexuals, with displaced male households persistently attached to the inner city so as to avoid suburbia’s perceived heteronormativity (Lewis, 2017; Smart and Whittemore, 2017) and female households (more likely to have children) less segregated from partnered heterosexuals possibly because they are willing to navigate ambient heteronormativity (Baumle et al., 2009; Hayslett and Kayne, 2011). Nevertheless, the strongest factor determining the location of all same-sex households is the presence of other same-sex households, both male and female (Compton and Baumle, 2012). Hayslett and Kayne (2011: 151), for example, find that the perceived openness and safety of a residential area for same-sex households is signalled by the co-creation of a ‘gay/lesbian defined space’, a finding confirmed in other studies (Compton and Baumle, 2012; Whittemore and Smart, 2016).

While statistical portraits of same-sex households in the US and Australia do not prioritize suburbanization dynamics, they do suggest it is an important area of further inquiry. In the US, Gates (2007: 1) observed that between 2000 and 2006, ‘same-sex couples appear[ed] to be moving to the suburbs in some cities’. Metropolitan case studies show patterns of dispersion and a re-clustering in more peripheral neighbourhoods (e.g. Whittemore and Smart’s, 2016, study of the Dallas-Fort Worth MSA) as well as intersections with ‘race’, ethnocultural identity, social class and gender. Lewis (2017), for example, found that when displaced from gay districts, African American male same-sex households in Washington, DC, prefer surrounding middle-class, African American suburbs. Compton and Baumle (2012) found that female same-sex households in San Francisco exhibit strong patterns of age, ethno-cultural and class differentiation which were accentuated with distance from the centre of the city. Newer studies also show the decentralization and clustering of same-sex suburban households (Forrest et al., 2019; Goldie, 2018; Poston et al., 2017; Spring, 2013). Moreover, Australian census data indicate that the suburban areas of larger metropolitan centres actually house more same-sex couples than the inner-city areas of medium-sized cities (Gorman-Murray et al., 2010). Such (re)mappings of the same-sex metropolis indicate important intersections between sexuality, gender and other aspects of identity, but without further multivariate analysis, the rich diversity contours of the queer metropolitan map remain unexplored.

3 Queering ‘Gay’ Suburbanisms?

While macro-scale data analysis indicates a stronger decentralization of lesbian households, the tiny and outdated American literature on LGBTQ+ suburban lifestyles is focused on suburban gay male identity formation and its spatial practices in the 1980s and 1990s (Brekhus, 2003; Kirkey and Forsyth, 2001; Lynch, 1987). The most in-depth is Lynch’s (1987) ethnography of 26 individuals in an unnamed southern California suburb. After analysing their coming out processes, social and institutional networks and collective values, the study concludes that suburban ‘homosexuals’ differ from their urban counterparts: they have looser connections to gay networks, prioritize commitments to heterosexual family and friends and choose the middle-class goals of homeownership and career over gay friendships, long-term love relationships and communality. Like their heterosexual suburban counterparts, they are ‘strongly individualistic and assimilationist’ and less inclined to ‘collective action or organizational membership’ (Lynch, 1987: 39). They adhere to what Hall and Lee (2010: 3) describe as the ‘suburban dream perspective’, viewing suburbs as sites of goal fulfilment where one can ‘buy a home, avoid urban ills…and climb the social mobility ladder’. Although a useful starting point in queering suburbanism, the study’s small sample size and its specificities of both time and place limit its generalizability to contemporary suburban diversities and the multiplicity of LGBTQ+ experiences therein. There is a clear disjuncture between the sample’s middle-class homeownership and careerism and the plethora of complex contemporary pressures (re)shaping the peripheralization of LGBTQ+ households (e.g. choice, parenting, kinship and cultural networks, psychosocial removal from urban gay scenes, displacement due to high rents, inner-city gentrification and the decentralization of labour markets).

Although steeped in the environmental determinism of urban ecology and constructed around the seemingly discrete urban–suburban binary, the goal of Lynch’s (1987) project was to purposely challenge metronormative understandings of gay life by determining whether suburbanism, and its heightened levels of privacy, domesticity and individualism, produces a different social order for gay men. This challenge is also echoed in Hodge’s (1995) argument about Sydney, Australia, where the invisibility of suburban gay men results in negative consequences for health services access and community affiliation. Both authors also assert that suburbanism actually impacts gay men’s perceptions of inner-city communities and spaces with detrimental impacts on their sense of belonging and inclusion. For Hodge (1995), fears of rejection by organizers of inner-city gay events negatively impacted gay suburbanites’ access to crucial HIV/AIDS health services. Lynch (1987) also observed that inner-city gay communality and the ‘radical’ public activism of HIV/AIDS organizations in the 1980s produced tensions for gay suburbanites, limiting their access to important support networks. The iteration of gay middle-class suburbanism that Lynch (1987) documents not only positions the inner city and its collective radical politics as scary, unfamiliar and ultimately undesirable, but also shapes typologies of identity.

Older research has also suggested spatial variations in gay ‘ways of life’: non-metropolitan gay men were more likely to come out later, to pass for heterosexual, have fewer relationships and have less ‘homosexual’ social involvement (Troiden and Goode, 1980; Weinberg and Williams, 1974). Lynch (1987: 25) characterized his participants as ‘fence-sitters’ because they did not overtly demonstrate a commitment to gay identity by living openly with a male partner. Hodge (1995) made similar observations and pointed out that men who have sex with men (but do not identify as gay) are important participants in suburban gay life, especially in the social worlds surrounding suburbia’s public sex sites. In an ethnographic case study in suburban New Jersey, Brekhus (2003) developed a typology of the density, duration and dominance of suburban gay identities across metropolitan space that distinguished ‘the gay lifestyler’ (who proudly expresses gay identity all the time and everywhere), ‘the commuter’ (who expresses it sometimes in specific gay locations in the city) and ‘the integrator’ (who mutely expresses it all the time but prefers to prioritize being politically neutral and hetero-friendly).

If these studies propose that gay suburbanism is more covert, contingent and less communal, other American and Australian studies complicate such a spatial narrative by centring the suburban home as a site of identity construction, community building and activism (e.g. Hodge, 1995; Gorman-Murray, 2012, 2013; Kirkey and Forsyth, 2001). Gorman-Murray (2012, 2013) argues that the negotiation of the public and private boundaries surrounding the home is crucial to the forging of gay identities within suburban residential areas. Kirkey and Forsyth’s (2001) study of the ‘suburban-rural fringe’ in Massachusetts centred the home as a site for a gay communality that is neither hidden nor rejects gay social networks. Retzloff’s (2015) history of the Detroit’s Association of Suburban People (ASP) in the 1970s provides another example of white, middle-class suburban gay men using their living rooms and backyards to host get-togethers and create networks of social support. However, in neither case was gay identity and communality hidden in the suburban private sphere: Kirkey and Forsyth’s (2001) subjects described being openly gay in public and feeling a sense of integration with the wider community; Detroit’s ASP asserted a gay identity in suburban public space by organizing events in local hotels, banquet rooms, legion halls, roller skating rinks and public parks (Retzloff, 2015). While limited to a handful of highly varied American and Australian suburban spaces, these works suggest that gay suburbanism in the late 20th century was more home-centred and publicly discreet but not completely disparate and fragmented. However, without more research on a wider array of LGBTQ+ suburban subcultures, heterosuburbia and queer metronormativities will remain empirically in place.