Queer encounters: Navigating ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhoods with (and against) cultural maps of homophobia

Abstract

This article provides an intersectional analysis of LGBTQ definitions, experiences and perceptions of the ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhood. It draws on interviews with a diverse group of LGBTQ people living in the London neighbourhood of Brixton to provide a situated interrogation of the ways that evaluations of place-based ‘gay-un/friendliness’ are made. The article argues that LGBTQ people’s experiences of local places are frequently framed through cultural maps, which sustain and connect racialized and classed spatializations of sexual progress across multiple scales. Despite this tendency, however, other accounts – in particular those of long-term residents and queers of colour – provide contradictory evaluations of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’. These trouble dominant assumptions about the conditions needed for LGBTQ flourishing and thereby suggest an expanded horizon for urban sexual politics. Examining the paradox of Brixton’s designation as ‘gay-unfriendly’ even as it is a vibrant site of LGBTQ life, the article demonstrates the importance of an intersectional approach that attends to variations and specificities in the relationship between sexual politics, local places and LGBTQ experiences.

Keywords

gay-friendly LGBTQ intersectionality neighbourhood QTPOC

This article explores LGBTQ people’s definitions, experiences and perceptions of ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhoods. It draws on interviews with a diverse group¹ of 19 LGBTQ people who live in Brixton, South London: a neighbourhood that has been associated with the UK’s African Caribbean community since the 1950s, and which has more recently gained international attention as a site of gentrification (Jackson and Butler, 2015; Lees, 2016). Through a close reading of the interview material, I explore residents’ assessments that Brixton is not ‘gay-friendly’, unpacking the everyday ways that LGBTQ people engage with and produce spatial knowledge. By considering the spatio-sexual knowledge animated by LGBTQ people in a neighbourhood that is moving from an association with ‘black’² poverty to both less poor and less black desirable vibrancy, this article provides a situated interrogation of the cultural map that puts ‘poverty and/or nonwhiteness … at the crux of homophobia’ (Hanhardt, 2013: 14; El Tayeb, 2011; Judge, 2017; Rao, 2014; Spruce, 2020). It examines the extent to which cultural maps of ‘gay-friendliness’ and ‘homophobia’ are used by LGBTQ residents to navigate their local environments, and – where divergent and resistant accounts are evident – how alternative maps are formed.

Following vernacular usage, I use ‘gay-friendly neighbourhood’ to refer to residential and commercial districts that are considered to be particularly hospitable towards LGBTQ identified people. Whilst the nomenclature of ‘gay-friendly’ often enables male, white, middle-class experience to stand in as representative of non-white and working-class lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer experience, this article foregrounds the narratives of a diverse group of LGBTQ residents and turns to a neighbourhood rarely discussed in accounts of LGBTQ London, contributing to an ‘other’ geography (Oswin, 2020) that puts side-lined people and places at the heart of knowledge production. Focusing on the ways in which evaluations of ‘gay-friendliness’ produce local space and impact everyday practices, this research thus contributes to critical intersectional sexualities scholarship ‘asking how, when, and where categories of difference make a difference’ (Lane, 2016: 224; Held, 2015, 2017; Oswin, 2008; Taylor, 2010).

The article proceeds by teasing out the ways in which existing scholarship frames and engages ‘gay-friendliness’ as a characteristic of certain neighbourhood formations before providing a brief description of the research site and methodological approach. I then analyse participants’ accounts of ‘gay-un/friendliness’, foregrounding a distinction that emerged between ‘incomers’ and ‘long-timers’ (respectively those who have lived in Brixton for less than ten years, and more than ten years³), then focusing on the significance of ‘race’ in accounts of embodied dis/comfort. I conclude the article by reflecting on the spatio-sexual politics that might be built from these quotidian and diverse accounts.

Finding and defining the ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhood

Although the city is frequently imagined as a site of sexual and gendered tolerance (Weston, 1995), a more localized topography of ‘gaybourhoods’,⁴ ‘cosmopolitan neighbourhoods’⁵ and ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ has also been identified (Brown, 2006, 2014; Castells, 1983; Ghaziani 2015, 2019; Goh, 2018; Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009; Knopp, 1997; Nash, 2013a, 2013b). Whilst each of these formations imply slightly different ‘ideal subjects’ and conditions of production, they all invoke ‘gay-friendliness’ as a spatial characteristic that is attached to specific neighbourhoods and can be discerned by the presence of particular kinds of people, practices and symbols. ‘Gay-friendliness’ thereby becomes a recognizable feature, which is mapped onto specific areas in cities and needs to be defended against an ever-present homophobic threat.

This understanding of ‘gay-friendliness’ is most evident in the gaybourhood: areas occupied by gay men (and to a lesser extent other LGBTQ people) that emerged across North America and Europe from the 1950s (Castells, 1983; Ghaziani, 2015, 2019; Knopp, 1997). The gaybourhood mobilizes logics of occupation; ‘gay-friendliness’ is secured through LGBTQ population density and the presence of LGBTQ residents, recreational spaces and businesses symbolically and materially govern who is made to feel welcome. Classed and racialized assumptions, which associate homosexuality with relatively affluent white people (Bérubé, 2011) and homophobia with poor and/or non-white people (Hanhardt, 2013), circulate to distinguish who ‘belongs’ from who is ‘out-of-place’ (Held, 2017; Lane, 2016; Moran et al., 2004; Nero, 2005).⁶ The gaybourhood is, in other words, not experienced as ‘friendly’ by all LGBTQ people.

‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘queer-friendly’ neighbourhoods seem to move away from this logic of territorial dominance, providing possibilities for a more expansive understanding of spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’. The cosmopolitan neighbourhood is associated with a ‘post-modern’ generation of people who seek out mixed spaces that are not organized around sexual identity. In contrast to the gaybourhood, presence in the cosmopolitan neighbourhood is therefore not strictly policed so they ‘offer [] a degree of camouflage in which [working-class and/or non-white men can] explore and perform queer identities’ (Brown 2006: 144). Despite this relative openness, however, urban cosmopolitanism is highly commodified⁷ and the capital needed to participate in these neighbourhoods increases over time, ultimately rendering ‘the ability to feel “post-mo” […] contingent on racialized, gendered and classed privilege’ (Nash, 2013a: 250; Binnie and Skeggs, 2004; Brown, 2006).

Distinguished from the cosmopolitan neighbourhoods where sexual identity appears deprioritised even as same-sex sexuality is accepted, Gorman-Murray and Waitt (2009) suggest that ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’ are characterized by an explicit affirmation of LGBTQ presence: rainbow flags drape from storefronts and local politicians tout their queer-friendly credentials. Rather than signalling LGBTQ territorialization, however, these markers of ‘gay-friendliness’ form part of broader emphasis on cultural diversity. Whilst this implies a more heterogeneous community than the gaybourhood, in the queer-friendly neighbourhood, a set of societal values and norms of comportment – again linked to white, middle-class modes of expression – differentiate those who belong from those who threaten the ‘tolerant’ community (Brown, 2017; Oswin, 2015; Spruce, 2020; The Roestone Collective, 2014). ‘Gay-friendliness’ in the queer-friendly neighbourhood again, in other words, involves keeping the ‘wrong’ kind of people out.

Whilst these neighbourhoods are framed as islands of sexual tolerance produced against a heteronormative landscape, other research diverges from this view. Browne and Bashki (2011) argue that, following socio-political change in the UK, ‘generic social space’ no longer necessarily excludes LGBTQ people and places cannot, therefore, be understood as ‘straight’ until proven otherwise (see also Visser, 2008). Their assessment builds, in part, on longstanding research that explores the ways that LGBTQ people who do not have the resources to occupy neighbourhoods or move to desirable cosmopolitan or queer-friendly locations engage with their local environment (Corteen, 2002; Gieseking, 2016, 2020; Mason, 2001; Voss et al., 2014). This research points to the limits of cultural maps of ‘homophobia’, suggesting that the lived experience and place-making practices of LGBTQ people who are not (literally or figuratively) ‘at home’ in the gaybourhood might trouble assumptions about where ‘gay-friendliness’ is found, and what it entails.

A relational approach, which recognizes the intersubjective ways that place comes to have meaning (Ijams et al., 1995; Massey, 1994; Pink, 2004), further troubles the idea that ‘gay-un/friendliness’ can be objectively mapped: suggesting instead that ‘gay-un/friendliness’ is partial (only experienced by certain LGBTQ people) and dynamic (dependent on specific configurations of time, people and place) (Corteen, 2002; Gieseking, 2016; Mason, 2001). Attending to the different kinds of cultural knowledge that mediate individuals’ experience of place, moreover, draws attention beyond the visual codes that predominate in analyses of place-based sexual politics, to consider the multisensory ways in which individuals experience places as ‘gay-un/friendly’ (Skelton, 1995; Patel, 2015; Pink, 2004).

To see place as relational and multiple is not, however, to dismiss the ways that meaning becomes sedimented in space such that anticipatory knowledge frames encounters between people and place (Wacquant et al., 2014). This relationship between preconception and experience is vital for understanding the sexual politics of the city, particularly in those places that are designated as ‘gay un-friendly’. Indeed, whilst the research above describes and begins to challenge dominant mappings of ‘gay-friendliness’ in the city, ‘cultural maps of homophobia’ conversely describe the way colonial and classed logics locate ‘gay-unfriendliness’ in poor and/or non-white neighbourhoods, reproducing ‘old divides between the civilized and the savage’ (Rao 2014: 171; Butler 2008; Hanhardt, 2013; Judge, 2017). Extending the insights of postcolonial feminist critiques of cultural maps of gender-based violence (Abu-Lughod 2013; Amos and Parmar, 1984; Spivak, 1993), an increasing body of work has turned to the politics of place, space and sexuality in neighbourhoods marked as dangerous or inhospitable for LGBTQ people (Lane, 2016; Nero, 2005; Haritaworn, 2015; Bacchetta et al., 2015; Kosnick, 2015). Brixton, as a European neighbourhood linked to immigration from African and Caribbean states associated with Christianity; a site of racialized gentrification; and a place in which many LGBTQ people have made their home, presents a distinct opportunity to further consider the ways cultural maps of ‘gay-friendliness’ and ‘homophobia’ sediment (in) place and are negotiated by differently positioned LGBTQ people.

Methodology

The following analysis draws on interviews conducted with 19 LGBTQ people between 2014 and 2015 as part of a larger project interrogating the relationship between (homo)sexual progress narratives and place. Interview participants were recruited through Internet message-boards (both local-interest and LGBTQ+ focused), as well as through snowball sampling. Ten participants identified as women, six as men and three as trans or other.⁸ All participants identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or queer. Eleven participants identified as white, three as black, three as mixed race, one as Latinx and one as South Asian. Participants ranged in age from twenty-two to sixty-four years old, and their duration of residency in the neighbourhood spanned from just a few months, to over thirty years. Participants came from a range of economic backgrounds and had current, prior and prospective occupations that are typically associated with both working-class and middle-class socio-economic categories. Although pseudonyms are used to preserve anonymity, each citation is followed by classed, raced and sexual-gendered⁹ identifications. Whilst far from an exhaustive description of participants’ identities and social locations, these factors have emerged as central to the ways that LGBTQ people experience space: a pattern that was illustrated in participants’ own accounts of the identities they felt were important.¹⁰ A further salient distinction between ‘incomers’ (<10 years residency) and ‘long-timers’ (>10 years residency) emerges in the below analysis: this broadly aligned to age categories, but – despite the common assessment that Brixton had become whiter and more middle-class over time (see further below) – did not have strong racialized or classed correlations.

At the time of the interviews, all participants were residents in Brixton. Stigmatized in the latter half of the 20th century as a site of criminality and poverty, today Brixton has been rebranded as a site for cosmopolitan consumption. Intensive redevelopment, including Brixton’s covered markets and railway arches (Brixton Buzzs, 2017), has been hotly contested. Redevelopment is particularly contentious because, since the 1950s, Brixton has served as a symbolic and material home for Black communities – initially from the former British West Indies then increasingly from the African continent. Even as it animates an ‘exotic’ reputation, redevelopment has been accompanied by the displacement of Black, immigrant (and) working-class residents (Amoodir, 2016; Butler and Robson, 2001; Lees, 2016; Jackson and Butler, 2015; Mavrommatis, 2011). Brixton’s ‘regeneration’, in other words, has led to racialized gentrification.

Brixton is also central to London’s gay and lesbian political and social geography. From at least the 1970s, Brixton has served as a hub for lesbian and gay activism, provided an alternative social scene in the form of ‘radical drag discos’ and cruising zones and housed large numbers of LGBTQ people, including in sexually demarcated squats and co-operatives (Cook, 2013; Spruce, 2016; 2020). This history is not reflected, however, by the kinds of rainbow symbols, dedicated venues, or shared norms that are identified as the signs of ‘gay-friendliness’ above (Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009). Indeed, rather than being presented as a neighbourhood of particular sexual tolerance, Brixton is more often evoked as one of London’s dangerous neighbourhoods. To better understand and ultimately disrupt the production of neighbourhood-space through ‘cultural maps of homophobia’, in the remainder of this article, I turn an intersectional lens on individual accounts (Taylor et al., 2010; Emmel and Hughes, 2009; Lane, 2016; Patel, 2015). This approach allows me to examine the fine-grained and complex interplay of experience, perception and practice in different LGBTQ people’s navigation of their local space.

Sounding out ‘gay-friendliness’

Whilst the heterosexualization of space frequently goes unremarked as a naturalized expression of heteronormativity, LGBTQ people often experience themselves as ‘out of place’ in such landscapes (Corteen, 2002: 260). Amongst LGBTQ incomers, dismissals of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’ are frequently articulated through a description of the neighbourhood as a heterosexualized terrain. Kate and Ciara, who have lived in Brixton for five and two years respectively, reflect:

…if I were making a list of gay-friendly places in London [Brixton] wouldn’t be in there. … People tell you that you are going to the Devil when you walk into the tube, never mind doing anything gay so I think that would be one reason for being more cautious about it. (Kate, middle-class, white, lesbian-woman)

I wouldn’t hold or kiss my girlfriend here, whereas I would in central London … [gay-friendly] wouldn’t be one of the top five things to describe it as, but I would never say not to come here. I could never imagine there being a “gay day”… it’s not somewhere you think of going if that was your mind-set. (Ciara, white, middle-class, lesbian-woman)

For those who have moved to Brixton within the last decade, the negation of ‘gay-friendliness’ rests largely on their experience of the neighbourhood as a strongly heterosexualized landscape. Whilst Browne and Bashki’s research in Brighton finds that ‘spaces can be simultaneously “gay” and “straight”’ (2011: 180), Brixton’s LGBTQ incomers characterize the space as one in which heterosexuality dominates and ‘doing anything gay’ would be censured. Placing LGBTQ residents’ experiences of the two urban contexts of Brixton and Brighton side by side suggests that further attention needs to be paid to the particularity of which places can ‘move beyond the gay/straight boundaries’ (Browne and Bashki, 2011: 186), and which places get ‘stuck’ as sites of exclusionary heteronormativity. Heterosexualization, for Ciara and Kate, is produced through homophobia, rendering ‘gay-friendly’ space and ‘straight’ space mutually exclusive. As a result of the assessment that Brixton is heterosexualized in this way, most LGBTQ incomers describe regulating their behaviour. To make the neighbourhood inhabitable as LGBTQ people, they avoid public displays of affection and attempt to contain non-normative gender expression. Evaluating the sexual norms of the space thereby materially impacts these LGBTQ people’s daily navigation of the neighbourhood.

While Browne and Bashki argue that Brighton is considered hospitable apart from ‘certain nights…certain areas…and certain crowds’ marked as working-class and immigrant (Questionnaire 354 cited in Browne and Bashki, 2011: 186), Brixton frequently appears definitionally ‘gay-unfriendly’ in incomers accounts. One participant, Naledi, explains the central place that cultural maps of homophobia have in this negation of Brixton as a site of LGBTQ life:

No, [people don’t think Brixton is gay-friendly] because it's black. So no. I don't think the current media shit, which is interacting with people’s internalized racism, will allow any black place to be presumed to be gay friendly, whether it's Brixton, Uganda, Peckham... I think if you've got a black majority, the presumption is it will be homophobic (Naledi, working-class, black, lesbian-queer)

Here, Naledi points to the intractability of the association between blackness and sexual intolerance, which builds on longstanding tropes that positioned colonial subjects as sexually ‘uncivilized’ and in need of governance (Butler, 2008; Hoad, 2000; Puar, 2007). Identifying the implications of this cultural mapping of sexual attitudes in the post-imperial neighbourhood, Naledi describes contemporary media coverage of sexual politics laminating onto prejudices and rendering Brixton unthinkable as a site of ‘gay-friendliness’ even as it is a site of LGBTQ life. It seems that, echoing the way that black bodies are interpellated as a threat prior to encounter (Ahmed, 2004; Fanon, 1952; Lorde, 2007: 147), cultural maps of ‘homophobia’ ‘stick’ sites associated with black communities to sexual intolerance. Dominant cultural maps thus operate as an ‘interpretative framework’ (Corteen, 2002: 262) for most incomers, framing their evaluation of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’. This is the case even where, as we shall see, there is only tangential evidence of homophobia and transphobia. Emblematized by Naledi’s account, however, several black incomers critically engaged with the dominant mapping of homophobia onto Brixton. These resistant accounts drew on participants’ intimate knowledge of racialized sexual narratives, and – because of its significance as a black cultural and political hub – a familiarity with Brixton that complicated their incomer positions. This points to an alternative QTPOC interpretative framework for evaluating spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’, which I return to below.

Whilst Kate and Ciara suggest that heterosexuality would be enforced in Brixton’s public spaces, the form that regulation would take – implicit or explicit, verbal or physical – remained amorphous. In fact, none of the recent residents could recall having directly experienced anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the neighbourhood, raising questions about how they came to know Brixton as a heterosexualized/homophobic space. Existing research points to the importance of visual symbols such as stickers and flags for conveying and producing ‘gay-friendliness’ (Gorman-Murray and Waitt 2009: 2867; Browne and Bashki, 2011: 184), but the modes through which ‘gay-unfriendliness’ is signified have received little consideration. Amongst incomers, negations of ‘gay-friendliness’ pointed specifically to the role of soundscapes in sexualizing space and producing a sense of ‘gay-unfriendliness’. Residents cited aural encounters with street-preaching, ragga music lyrics and homophobic slang as the evidence of local sexual and gendered attitudes. What is described is a black and – at least in the case of the music and slang – specifically Jamaican soundscape (Skelton, 1995) but also a ‘noisyness’. Turning speakers out onto streets, soap-box preaching, ‘catcalling’ and loud public discussions are dissonant to middle-classed British norms of containment and public comportment and it is notable that the participants who experienced the ‘noise’ of Brixton negatively predominantly identified as middle-class and white. These accounts suggest that for incomers who experience the space itself as ‘Other’, cultural maps of homophobia are substantiated through the classed and racialized soundscape of Brixton that is understood as the proxy of local attitudes. That no long-timers flagged the noise of Brixton as evidence of local sexual attitudes suggests, as elaborated below, that duration of residence renders the unfamiliar familiar, diminishing the bearing that the soundscape has on LGBTQ people’s feeling of safety in the neighbourhood.

Whilst incomers overwhelmingly suggest that the neighbourhood is not yet ‘gay-friendly’, they position it on a progressive trajectory towards ‘gay-friendliness’. Michael reflects that:

[a]t the moment, it is still very much not fully gone through the transformation [to gay friendliness]. I don’t know that we will be getting the Pride parade going down the street (Michael, working-class, black, gay-man).

Whilst not as definitive as Ciara’s claim above that she could ‘never imagine a gay day’ in Brixton, Michael nevertheless dismisses Brixton as a site for a Pride parade because the neighbourhood has ‘not fully gone through the transformation’. This belies the rich history of LGBTQ life in Brixton, including the two Pride celebrations that were held in the area in the mid-90s, but it is a common assessment amongst incomer LGBTQ residents. Apparently unaware of Brixton’s longstanding importance to LGBTQ life, incomers believe the neighbourhood is more ‘gay-friendly’ now than in the past. Rather than reflecting national political change, this ‘improvement’ is primarily attributed to the progress of gentrification.

Incomers position gentrification as a handmaiden in the production of ‘gay-friendly’ landscapes in two key ways. Firstly, local demographic shifts towards a more middle-class (and) whiter resident were perceived as diminishing the likelihood of anti-LGBTQ sentiment, or at the least ensuring that it would take a privatized form. This reflects raced and classed perceptions of norms of public comportment and is also consistent with the maps that I outlined above, which emphasize spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’ contingency on keeping certain people out of the neighbourhood. Secondly, gentrification was identified as producing safer space through improved lighting and increased levels of securitization and surveillance. Concerns about public safety, then, are central to incomers’ evaluation of ‘gay-unfriendliness’ even as this is not grounded in histories of censorious encounters. For the majority of Brixton’s LGBTQ incomers, in other words, neither national shifts towards social and legal LGBTQ equality nor the absence of experience of anti-LGBTQ violence is sufficient to make the neighbourhood feel safe and comfortable for LGBTQ practice: the cultural map of homophobia orients their experience of the space. As the next section shows, although long-timers also overwhelmingly rejected a characterization of Brixton today as ‘gay-friendly’, their accounts complicate the dominant narrative of ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhood progress.

Problematizing the path to ‘gay-friendliness’

Unsurprisingly, long-timers’ evaluations of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’ frequently included reflections on neighbourhood change. Referencing the dissolution of a local gay scene, long-timers’ negations of Brixton’s contemporary ‘gay-friendliness’ mobilize narratives of loss and nostalgia. James reflects that:

I don’t think [of Brixton as gay friendly] because there are no venues for people. There are no specific gay bars and restaurants. … I think once Substation South closed it was like, well why would you come to Brixton? There was nothing for us. (James, working-class, white, gay-male)

As was the case for several long-timers, for James, ‘gay-friendliness’ is associated with the presence of a commercial scene that caters specifically to gay people. He argues that as gay venues in Brixton shut, the area’s claim to ‘gay-friendliness’ diminished. In part, this derives from the perception that Brixton’s ‘cosmopolitan’ bars cater to younger and middle-class incomers: even if a long-timer’s sexuality does not mark them ‘out of place’ in these new social spaces, their socio-economic status or age does (Taylor, 2008). This means that even as several long-timers suggested that newer venues catering to incomers were likely to be places where expressions of gendered and sexual diversity would be accepted, they continue to express nostalgic desire for spaces delineated by sexuality. Amongst long-timer LGBTQ residents, in other words, the ‘post-gay’ neighbourhood does not dominate imaginaries of spatial sexual progress precisely because of the classed resources required to access its spaces of consumerism.

Indeed, rather than understanding the demise of the gay venue as the result of decreased desire or need for sexually demarcated space (Nash, 2013a), long-timers typically attributed closures to the onset of gentrification. This assessment aligns with research in London and New York which has linked securitization and sanitization to the displacement of same-sex male public sex venues and cruising zones (Andersson, 2011, 2012; Delany, 1999; Patrick, 2014). Whilst residents did talk about Brixton’s closed bars and vacated ‘sexscapes’, however, this was just part of the broader tapestry of spaces that were considered lost to the forces of gentrification. Max, for example, laments that:

Brixton is not a gay place at all; there is nothing here…it’s really straight. …when I moved here it was a really gay place. Like I said, Nursery Road, also Tunstall Road as well had loads of lez houses on it and things, and there used to be a lesbian blues night on where women would queue up the stairs…it used to be full of gays. Now they’ve gone: North London, West London. (Max, middle-working-class, white, dyke-transmasculine)

For Max, it is not only the loss of scene space but the loss of a residential community of ‘queer neighbours’ that leads to the dismissal of the idea of Brixton as a ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhood. Even the recollection of the lesbian blues night emphasizes the queue, a site of mundane public encounter, over the bar itself. Although it is gay male territorial practices that have gained the most recognition, owing to their visibility and commodification (Podmore, 2001; Gieseking, 2016), in Brixton the importance of residential density for ‘gay-friendliness’ is most strongly articulated by people who identify as women and/or trans. This reflects the importance of the home as a site that accommodates LGBTQ social networks, particularly for those who are not considered the ‘ideal’ customer of the gay bar (Rowntree and Zuffrey, 2017). Pointing to the intersection of sexuality and class, Max emphasized the spatial conditions of possibility for producing a localized LGBTQ social network made up of less privileged people. Notably, in the 1980s and 1990s, Brixton had very high levels of empty properties that could be squatted and/or purchased as co-operatives; these collective forms of residency, which have been eradicated in the production of a cleaned-up and more desirable Brixton, were crucial to the settlement of the area by more marginal LGBTQ people (Cook, 2013).

Reflecting on the neighbourhood as a site of LGBTQ life, if not ‘gay-friendliness’, long-timers noted and negated the area’s ‘dangerous’ reputation, specifically challenging the narrative that Brixton is particularly dangerous for LGBTQ people because it is a Black neighbourhood. Sam reflects:

I wouldn’t say gay friendly, but nobody bothers the gays or lesbians particularly. There are so many of us that I don’t feel like I will be attacked for being gay. I think Brixton is a place where loads of people live side by side in relative harmony. We’re just another branch: there are all the different races and religions (Sam, working-class, white, queer)

For most long-timers, rather than experiencing public space as comprehensively heterosexualized/homophobic, the neighbourhood is understood as a space where multiple communities ‘live side by side in relative harmony’. Often grounded in an account of local LGBTQ life that charts the loss of social spaces rather than the progress of sexual inclusion, long-timers do not put spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’ into an incommensurable relationship with black and/or working-class space but suggest the neighbourhood is able to accommodate ‘all the different races and religions’ in ‘relative harmony’. This again suggests that longstanding residency provides an alternative interpretative framework to the cultural maps of homophobia that circulate in contemporary political and media discourses, and which frame most incomers’ experience of Brixton.

That communities in Brixton live ‘side by side’ was an almost universal feature of long-timers’ rejection of the neighbourhood’s dangerous reputation and assertion of the area’s potential as a site of LGBTQ life. Tyler speaks about her family’s concerns when she moved to Brixton, commenting that:

my family would say that Brixton wasn’t safe, because they remember the riots; it’s all they think about, all they ever knew. Black people’s riots. They thought it was unsafe. But I have never felt unsafe in Brixton. OK there was a big West Indian community and a big gay community… the communities don’t mix, they are very side by side, but you just get on with it. I wouldn’t even say “tolerate”, you just don’t ever mix […] in communities everyone has different opinions. (Tyler, working-class, mixed-race, lesbian-female)

Dismissing her family’s evaluation of the neighbourhood as an unsafe place, Tyler depicts Brixton as a site where ‘a big gay community’ can make their home. This is in keeping with the description of Brixton as a ‘socially tectonic’ neighbourhood where ‘relations between different social and ethnic groups … tend to be of a parallel rather than integrative nature; people keep, by and large, to themselves’ (Butler and Robson, 2001: 2157). Although social mixing and integration is frequently figured as the ‘holy grail’ of redevelopment (Jackson and Butler, 2015: 2352), Brixton’s long-timers see the lack of social integration as a way that multiple perspectives can coexist. In other words, long-timers’ approach to sharing space challenges the claim that social cohesion and the emergence of shared sexual norms are crucial to the development of neighbourhoods where LGBTQ people feel at home (Gorman-Murray and Waitt, 2009).

These accounts of everyday life in Brixton point to ways of living together that do not assume that a consensus beyond the parameters of ‘live and let live’ can be reached. They suggest that feelings of LGBTQ comfort do not require that differences in sexual attitudes or social comportment are resolved. This framework potentially troubles the alliance between LGBTQ urbanisms and neoliberal governance and development (Oswin, 2015), diminishing the grounds for displacing or disciplining putatively homophobic communities in the name of ‘gay-friendly’ neighbourhoods. The socially tectonic conceptualization of Brixton does not, however, fundamentally challenge the cultural maps that erroneously ‘fix’ homophobia as an attribute of black and/or working-class cultures. Indeed, Tyler’s description of ‘a big West Indian community and a big gay community…side by side’ reanimates a racialized logic that makes LGBTQ identity and ‘West Indian’ identity mutually exclusive, erasing intersecting black LGBTQ life from the sexual map of Brixton.

‘Sinking in’ and sticking out

Several participants’ negation of Brixton’s ‘gay-friendliness’ appeared to arise precisely because the space is understood to be heterosexualized, rendering them out of place: this corroborates the argument that embodied comfort emerges from a sense of alignment, of ‘fit between the body and the spaces surrounding it’ (Rooke, 2010: 664). Indeed, faced with the discrepancy between experience of violence and fear of violence (where – as with the incomers discussed above – a lack of direct experiences does not diminish the sense of threat), analyses of dis/comfort offer a necessary complication to safety-based definitions of spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’ (Corteen 2002; Held 2015; Moran et al., 2004). An intersectional lens reminds us, however, that sexuality is by no means the exclusive line of ‘fit’ along which comfort is secured. In particular, whiteness operates as the somatic norm in the UK, allowing white bodies to comfortably ‘sink in’ to the environments around them and rendering QTPOC bodies out of place (Ahmed, 2006; Puwar, 2004; Held, 2017). This final section explores the extent to which Brixton’s association with blackness troubles these national norms, and the impact this has on differently racially positioned LGBTQ people.

Reflecting on their feeling of comfort in Brixton, Maz – who only recently moved to Brixton, but like many of the black participants had longstanding local ties – describes the neighbourhood as:

so full of interesting people, different looking people that I’m not, I don’t stand out … there are a lot of people who are...who look gay and aren’t...they’re just fashionable. […] I feel like twenty years ago a dyke would have been a dyke you know with her shirt tucked into her pants and doc martins […] now I think queer people are just good looking. (Maz, black, curious-queer¹¹)

Reflecting the significant role that feeling invisible as LGBTQ plays in spatialized comfort (Mason, 1997; 2001), Maz suggests that they feel comfortable in Brixton because they do not ‘stand out’ in its public spaces. This blending in of their ‘curious-queer’ body is attributed to shifts in fashion, pointing to the dynamic – and spatially and temporally located – relationship between dis/comfort and gendered and sexualized forms of embodiment. In particular, Maz identifies the contemporary moment as one in which gender non-conforming aesthetics have been delinked from homosexuality: ‘people …who look gay [are] just fashionable’. Whilst Brown describes the metrosexuals of cosmopolitan neighbourhoods as ‘young urban men (of all sexualities) who are turning their backs on more traditional expressions of masculinity’ (2006: 136), a decade later Maz draws attention to the adoption of a ‘dyke aesthetic’ amongst Brixtonites. In both cases, the blurring of the visual signification of queerness helps to make LGBTQ people feel less exposed by misalignment to the public sphere. Maz’s account, with its lack of gendered specificity, also implies a blurring of the signification of binary gender that might render bodily expressions of gender non-conformity less declarative of trans or non-binary identification.

In the wider context of the interview, it was apparent that Maz’s evocation of ‘different looking people’ was one which invoked diverse forms of black embodiment. Whilst Maz felt like the lack of venues precluded Brixton from being considered ‘gay-friendly’ they describe a profound sense of local belonging, stating: ‘it's the only place in London where I feel like genuinely this is where I am from, I have a right to be here so to speak… in terms of race and culture, it has everything I could possibly want.’ Indeed, in contrast to the white incomers’ experience of the space as Other (discussed above), several black participants described Brixton as a place where, quite uniquely, they could relax in public space. This is in marked contrast to black experiences of the neighbourhoods that are dominantly coded as ‘gay-friendly’, where sexual inclusivity remains structured around whiteness (Held, 2017; Lane, 2016; Nero, 2005).

Whilst intersectional analyses of LGBTQ dis/comfort predominantly focus on the way that the individuals’ body feels in the space, often as a result of the white gaze (Held, 2017), Maz’s account points to the significance of a black queer gaze. They reflect:

It’s fair to say your average Rastafarian man is not going to be okay with you being gay […] on the other hand, there are plenty who are so gay, and you would never know because it’s not the usual indicators. I have seen proper yardies and Rastas with their boyfriends. (Maz, black, curious-queer)

Rather than encountering Brixton through a cultural map of homophobia, Maz draws on their insider status as a black queer of Jamaican heritage to deploy an interpretative grid that punctures the homogenous characterization of black Jamaican culture as necessarily heterosexual and homophobic. They engage in a ‘looking practice’ (Held 2017: 546) that does not restrict the possibility of homosexuality to ‘the usual [white] indicators’. Both a sense of sinking into the populous and ‘strategies of social reading’ (Hall, 2017: 97) are implicated in making black queer bodies comfortable in Brixton.

Amongst white LGBTQ residents who have more recently moved to Brixton, there was a pronounced sense of being an anomalous white body in a ‘black place’.¹² Tom, for example, suggests that:

I still walk around Brixton and it seems to me that I still am a minority as a white person. I try to not look at it like that, but crudely it is still a very multicultural place to live. (Tom, middle-class, white, gay-man)

Where Maz experiences local diversity as ‘cosmopolitan camouflage’ (Brown, 2006), Tom appears to place whiteness as something that is outside the parameters of a ‘multicultural place’. This reflects the way that whiteness passes (at least for white people) as an unmarked category, a norm that other racializations are marked against (Kern, 2005: 367). For the majority of white incomers, accounts of discomfort and self-censorship were connected to assertions of minoritized whiteness. This suggests that the unfamiliar experience of ‘feeling’ their racialized bodies contributes to white incomers’ evaluations of Brixton as uncomfortable, and thus not ‘gay-friendly’. That white long-timers did not produce the same narratives of discomfort suggests that this self-consciousness abates over time.

This feeling of discomfort arising from ‘out-of-place’ whiteness was not, moreover, shared by all of the white-identified incomers. Indeed, Tom’s account points to the complex effects of whiteness in ‘black spaces’, as well as the importance of intersecting factors in producing place-based feeling. He reflects:

I have always been flamboyant myself, wearing the most outlandish things walking through Brixton-make up, sequins, wigs...I've always felt really accepted actually, it feels like the kind of place where you get characters and difference. I feel quite safe and protected. (Tom, middle-class, white, gay-man)

Tom goes from a description of his ‘outlandish’ gender non-conforming attire to an emphasized account of feeling ‘accepted’, ‘safe’ and ‘protected’ in Brixton. In fact, echoing Kern’s research (2005) which finds that race and class can mitigate or exacerbate women’s feelings of dis/comfort in the city, Tom’s is the most affirmative account of comfort as an LGBTQ person that I encountered during my research. The extent to which Tom’s sense of comfort is produced through his other social locations becomes clearer as he continues:

I met a guy who lives in Tulse Hill, and he is Jamaican and gay. He has a very different story to tell, he gets a lot of verbal and physical abuse, he wears make up and so on. I told him I don't get that at all, and he said well no, because the Jamaican community and African community you are not them, you're a stupid white person so it's ok to do that, but if I do it, I am betraying my people. Maybe I look like a slight parody; I'm not a target because I am harmless. (Tom, white, middle-class, gay-man)

Tom’s comfort appears to emerge precisely through the lack of fit between body and place. Invoking the ‘insider’ testimony of a local gay Jamaican man, Tom maps cultural expressions of homophobia as a ‘black on black’ phenomenon, and thus one that his whiteness grants him immunity to it is sticking out rather than sinking in that makes Tom feel safe. His sense of being ‘protected’ and comfortable in Brixton cannot, however, be isolated from his relationship to misogyny and institutional racism. Despite Tom’s flamboyant outfits, his interview makes it clear that he is unambiguously read as male and thereby escapes the double-bind that women face, whereby non-normative gender presentation results in homophobia, but normative expressions of gender lead to sexual harassment (Corteen, 2002). Further, as Tom moves through the neighbourhood with a sense of his body as protected, rather than prejudicially targeted, his experience shows that even in Black neighbourhoods the somatic norm of whiteness is maintained.¹³

Conclusion

The accounts of a diverse group of LGBTQ people analysed in this article disrupt a conceptualization of spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’ as a binary and abstract characteristic. Instead, spatialized ‘gay-friendliness’ emerged as relational (given meaning in relation to other places and times), contingent (dependent on a range of other factors) and contested (with a meaning and significance that is not universal). Through a close reading of interview material, I have revealed that LGBTQ+ feelings of comfort and safety, inclusion and exclusion, constitute – and are constituted through – axes of difference. The intersectional approach illuminated the dynamic interrelation of dominant epistemological frameworks, in particular cultural maps of ‘homophobia’ and ‘gay-friendliness’, with other resources for spatial knowledge production (Falconer Al-Hindi, 2020; Held, 2015, 2017; Lane, 2015; Taylor, 2008). As well as asking which differences make a difference, the article therefore suggests a need to attend to which forms of diversity are not included in the ‘diversity and tolerance’ rhetoric so often adopted to depoliticize demographic neighbourhood change.

This research shows that cultural maps of ‘homophobia’, particularly for incomers, orient the encounter between LGBTQ people and their local places. Racialized and classed stereotypes framed both the way individuals feel in the neighbourhood and the changes that they consider necessary to secure ‘gay-friendliness’. As demonstrated through my analysis of the long-timers accounts, however, it appears that familiarity can trouble the individual’s interpretation of homophobic ‘signs’. Whilst largely leaving the cultural map of homophobia intact, long-timers’ accounts thereby challenged the presumption that ‘gay-friendliness’ is contingent on the displacement and disciplining of putatively homophobic populations. Contrasting the accounts of incomers who identified as black, and those who identified as white, the third analytic offered a closer account of ‘how the somatic norm operates’ in Brixton (Held, 2017: 552). For QTPOC, Brixton provided a respite from ‘standing out’: both blackness and queerness are rendered unremarkable through local aesthetic norms. The experience of whiteness, whilst contradictory in its production of both discomfort and comfort, emphasized the hold that whiteness has on somatic norms, even in a place that is associated with black life.

This article has shown, moreover, that LGBTQ spatial politics do not inherently align with neoliberal development agendas. Whilst several residents did suggest that the sanitized and securitized spaces brought by gentrification increase feelings of safety for LGBTQ people, long-timers and black incomers argued that such prospective gains were matched by particular costs in terms of queer sociality. In particular, they named gentrification as the force that closed LGBTQ bars, priced out LGBTQ people and scattered important social networks. Building on this, further research should critically develop the ‘right to stay put’ as a resource for LGBTQ place-making: recognizing that intimacy – produced through duration of residency at both individual and community levels – holds significant potential for a coalitional sexual politics that maintains and strengthens neighbourhoods of mutual respect and comfort where LGBTQ people, particularly those who are also black and/or poor, can be at home.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Emma Spruce

Notes

Emma Spruce is Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Emma currently teaches courses on Gender and Human Rights, Gender Theories, and Gender, Sexuality and Culture. Their research examines the intersections of sexuality, space and place; exploring the movement of sexual politics across scales (from the nation to the neighbourhood), as well as the ways that place and space acquire meaning through narratives of sexuality and gender. In particular, Emma’s work interrogates the way that race, class and sexuality work on each other to govern ‘the right to the city’, render sexual progress narratives amenable to ideologies of gentrification and urban management and construct spatial and social imaginaries. The conceptual potential that working from ‘the local’ and practices of ‘neighbouring’ holds is central to Emma’s approach to these questions.

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