Abstract
Ex-girlfriends’ apartments, riot grrrl burlesque shows, and “vast swaths of the city . . . [where] no one was openly gay/queer” (p. 206). These populate the mental maps hand-drawn by the lesbians, transgender, and queer people who narrated how places had nurtured them—or not. Jack Gieseking’s A Queer New York comes at a moment when queer sociology is shifting its gaze toward the global, the rural, and the provincial. Similarly, LGBTQ+ studies has for years now called for correctives to the “metronormative” focus on big-city LGBTQ+ life. That said, to dismiss Gieseking’s book as just another book about gay New York would be a grave error.
A Queer New York is animated by a central paradox that Gieseking details: “my participants were contradictory as they asserted: neighborhoods are the lesbian-queer spaces—and yet then described how they were unable to afford, sustain, or be sustained by them” (p. 7). The central tension in the book is thus how to explain lesbians’ and queers’ attachments to the physical places that have so utterly failed them, and how to describe the placemaking they were doing while they were living otherwise.
Queer constellations are the conceptual solution to the book’s motivating puzzle. Grounded in feminist geography, queer theory, and the LGBTQ+ love for astrology, Gieseking explains how lesbian and queer sites flicker in and out of existence even as they leave durable patterns behind. Some stars shine bright and long, like the WOW Theater. Others burn fast and hot, like the short-lived Clit Club. And some stars are faint and personal: the corner where a woman told you never to call her again.
Epistemologically, the book is animated by dyke politics, the “antiracist and anticapitalist politics that fuel queer feminist ideas of community” (p. 25). Methodologically, the book relies on three archives. The first is the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn whose holdings detail marches, bars, and activist zaps. The second is 47 group interviews with lesbians and queers who came out between 1983 and 2008, who drew mental maps during these often-intergenerational conversations. Third, Gieseking draws autoethnographically on his own shifting pronouns and identity, tracing how he felt while walking down certain streets at night or while working at the (in)famous Park Slope Food Co-op. Gieseking refutes the widespread view that LGBTQ+ neighborhoods are both desirable and necessary, calling it the “myth of neighborhood liberation.” He excoriates those who view the gentrification of gay neighborhoods as evidence of LGBTQ+ social acceptance, riposting with the financial struggles of his poor, POC, and visibly queer interlocutors. Not incidentally, a book about the inability of the concept of “neighborhood” to contain LGBTQ+ lives is grounded by three chapters on neighborhoods. Greenwich Village is the sine qua non of gay neighborhoods and hosts the LGBT Center that was so frequently drawn on maps; nobody could afford to live there and it was often inconvenient to visit.
Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights act as correctives to the fact that “neighborhoods of color are rarely read as queer in the mainstream media, again reconstituting the lgbtq subject as white” (p. 103). The chapter draws upon the very few POC interviewees to demonstrate that the neighborhoods dismissed as hostile to queers often nurtured women who asserted “if there are more than three of us, we got a community” (p. 124). Park Slope is the quintessential lesbian neighborhood for many participants even as they all described, regardless of the year they first encountered it, that it had been more lesbian before they got there. This chapter allows Gieseking to describe the tectonic, place-destabilizing changes within the lesbian community away from essentialized women-loving-women and toward queers and transgender people (pp. 185–86). It is also a clear-eyed exposé of the role of whiteness in constituting the neighborhood as safe for only some LGBTQ+ people and the gentrifiers that accompanied (and were) them.
While strongly about place, constellations are firmly grounded in time: interviewees described the number of bus and subway transfers necessary to move from star to star. Constellations also implicate generations defined not by arbitrary years but by their relationships to places while they existed: the people who attended those ACT-UP meetings or that incandescent sex party. Constellations provide a model for studying any number of communities dismissed as invisible or for whom durable places are undesirable, unattainable, or both. Gieseking shows how constellations help understand lesbian cruising, that queer practice of looking for sex in places where it shouldn’t be: the ring of keys or undercut haircut that draw the eye and libido are themselves stars in lesbian and queer wayfinding. Second, Gieseking skewers the stale joke of lesbian “U-Hauling”—moving in together on their second date—by exposing it as a cruel necessity for survival in the hypercapitalist city. Furthermore, the erosion of LGBTQ+ bars and neighborhoods suggests that all queers may soon be navigating by constellations, including those of us who were not already doing so: “as (white, middle-class) gay men’s territorial holds ebb, the queer feminist work of producing lesbian-queer constellations becomes more legible and important in sustaining queer culture and politics” (p. 97). Constellations are thus not things we encounter but things we create, and queers of color and poor LGBTQ+ people have been building them longer than others.
A Queer New York is a model of sharing. The book is open access, free to anyone with a computer. Second, Gieseking’s website has a host of color-coded maps to complement those in the black-and-white book. One overlays LGBTQ+ organizations by year and thematic concern against median housing value. Another overlays the addresses listed in lesbian publications over 25 years, showing the shifting constellations of sites in the physical archives. I can imagine a prehistoric positivistic argument that the dyke politics that animate this study predetermined its findings. But Gieseking has skin in this game, and for his interviewees, this is survival. I can imagine a critic arguing in better faith that Gieseking is merely making a virtue out of a necessity when he argues that constellations give LGBTQ+ people “another way of shining through the clouds of oppression” (p. 234). Gieseking’s insistence that constellations are things we must build and that we cannot rely on algorithms or yesterday’s business owners to provide them, strikes this Capricorn sun/Virgo ascendant/Gemini moon as both realistic and a queer call to action.