Gay spaces
People like to make assumptions about the feelings of our queer ancestors. I spent a lot of my life, especially as a young person, doing the same. I’d understand about a new injustice and, rightfully in those cases, imagine how awful or horrifying it must have felt to exposure it. But that imagining also often extended to other aspects of gender non-conforming history. I’d read about secret queer spaces, lavender marriages, hidden relationships between artists I admired, and the coded ways lgbtq+ people had to signal to one another prior to the 1960s and 1970s, and I’d perceive a lot of heartache. I’d wonder if I would have the courage and wherewithal to exist my life with the utmost confidentiality. Could I live a life of only revealing who I truly was once I entered into extremely specific spaces? I’d make calculations in my head, placing myself in a moment much different than the one of my initial 2000s teendom, and endeavor to figure out who in my life I’d confide in, where I’d have to live for even a modicum of safety, and how I’d live. My thoughts were heavily focused on only the difficulties of existence anywhere besides South Florida in the early 2000s, and I’d make conjectures based on what I learned th
Mapping the Gay Guides
Visualizing Queer Space and American Life
Welcome to Mapping the Same-sex attracted Guides!
While operating one of his many gay bars in the 1960s, Bob Damron started a side project publishing gay travel guides that featured bars like his. Called the Bob Damron Address Books, these guides proved widespread and became a valuable resource for gay travelers looking for friends, companions, and safety.
First published in an era when most states banned same-sex closeness both in general and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) detect bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people enjoy themselves. Much enjoy the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find kind businesses that would cater to jet citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of homosexual people in spotting sites of group, pleasure, and politics.
Damron’s guidebooks were part of a growing interest in homosexual travel guide publications that began in the early 1960s. Bob Damron wasn’t the only entrepreneur looking to present gay consumer
Are gay spaces really exceptional?
How do we gauge the homosexual and queer potential of cities and urban spaces? What do designations of gay-friendliness do, or set in motion? Is gay-friendliness a useful framework for understanding “gay life” in cities? In this piece, I draw from my research on everyday life disruptions and queer strategies in Beirut to test how “gay spaces” have been used to provide exceptional narratives about cities. I offer my concept of “fractal Orientalism” or Orientalisms within the so-called Middle East, to address how accepted media and some academic studies create frameworks that rely on narrow assumptions about what homosexual and gay-friendly spaces are or entail. Academic studies and journalistic accounts that address queer urban spaces almost exclusively explore gay-male-dominated spaces in major cities and metropolitan centers. Moreover, existing literature privileges gay spaces in the global north, particularly Euro-American cities, although more recently there has been a advance to explore these spaces (or the potential of such spaces) in the global south.
Mar Mikhael district, Beirut. Photo: Ghassan Moussawi.
The process of queering urban spa
"Out long enough to be historic": Racialized Gay Space in Pre-Stonewall San Antonio
To Historicize the Gay Bar
The origins of San Antonio's two nicknames—Alamo City and Military City, USA—lie in the city's history as a contested colonial space and as dwelling to one of the largest concentrations of military bases in the United States. Founded by Spanish explorers and missionaries on the lands of the Payaya Indians in 1718, San Antonio de Béxar was capital of the Spanish and later Mexican colonial province called Tejas. After its 1821 independence from Spain, the newly established Mexican government began offering free land grants to Anglo-American settlers, who primarily took up residence in lands northeast of San Antonio. These Anglo settlers, who identified as Texians, and Hispanic settlers, who identified as Tejanos, fought against the Mexican Army led by President General Antonio López de Santa Anna during the Texas Revolution: the conflict from which the phrase "Remember the Alamo!" comes.
Sparked by the Battle of Gonzales on October 2, 1835, the Texas Revolution resulted from decades of rising tensions between Tejas residents and the Mexican government, ranging fro