What is a queer space?
That is a question I tried to answer 25 years ago when I wrote my book Queer Space: The Architecture of Same Sex Desire. I am not sure I gave a clear definition, but the question has continued to intrigue designers and critics. Now a team of a designer and a historian, Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, has made a vivid and broad stab at the subject with Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (RIBA Publishing, May 2022). A global—(in both senses of that word—survey rather than a critical appraisal, the book collects places inhabited by what we would today regard as members of the LGBTQIA+ community: sites where sexual acts took place that were not gender-normative; locations that marked resistance or coming out events of the community; institutions promoting solidarity and self-knowledge; and some liminal spaces that could best be described as queer-social, such as drag clubs, which act as intersections between various community.
The plural in the title, in other words, is crucial. In the introduction, the writers (after giving my book a nice shout-out) give as their definition of the kind of sites they focus on as “spaces where you can simply be yourself, unmediated and unfettered. Spaces where you can express yourself without fear or shame. Spaces where you can act freely in a manner that is truly consonant with your inner self, going on to claim that such spaces are not only good and relaxing, but can even be “life-giving and often life-saving.” They claim to want to reclaim queer history in and around design by collecting “as broad a spectrum of diverse examples from as many parts of the world as possible.” In that, they have succeeded, but the result is that the book feels rather more like a grab bag than a survey. Furman and Mardell recognize the limitations of the book, and blame both the limitations of the book format, which forces them to make selection, and the lack of enough documentation about many spaces.
They have organized their sites into domestic, communal, and public chapters, although I sometimes had a hard time finding the logic of their definitions evident in their specific examples. Though they say they have traced the emergence of a “set of clear typologies,” they do not define them. They note educational and memorial significance, and notice the oft-occurring appropriation of “hetero-normative spaces,” but do not develop theories about how or why these phenomena occur. This is thus distinctly a survey, or rather a free romp, through what they and an international team of contributors have decided are queer spaces.
Some of the places are familiar, such as William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey or King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s castles and palaces, which were sites where both of those wealthy queer men could live out their fantasies in exile from polite society. The West Village’s Christopher Street is there (though not the Stonewall Inn), as is Derek Jarman’s cottage on the English coast. I noted the Villa Lysis, a Neoclassical aerie on Capri built by Baron von Fersen at the turn of the 19th century as a hideaway for his Italian lover and himself, and which is the site from which I am writing this review.
The authors have at least to a large extent also corrected the emphasis on the more visible and thus famous examples such as these that were built by men, and highlight places made by or for queer women, such as A La Ronde in Devon, England, home of two “spinster” cousins Jane and Mary Parminter or Mårbacka in Sweden, estate of the Nobel prize-winning author Selma Lagerlöf. They note areas where factory workers in England engaged in same sex acts and try to find other examples of proletarian cruising and gathering. There are gay discos in Tokyo and Buenos Aires, and an “underground queer party” in Manilla. There are, in fact, a lot of cruising grounds, bathhouses, and drag clubs, of which my favorite is the Lenin Museum in Moscow, whose bathrooms were, under the Soviet regime, apparently a freezone for male queer desire. There are also educational sites like the Bachillerato Mocha Celis, a “queer school” in Buenos Aires and a bookstore in Bangkok catering to the LGBTQIA+ community. Leafing through the book, you feel as if you can jet around the world and educate yourself anywhere during the day and party all night.
The largest hole in the survey is the United States. Although a few nightclubs and site make it into the book, the extensive history of queer designers and their spaces in this country remains almost completely absent. Perhaps that is a natural corrective to the fact that many other authors, such as myself, have concentrated too much on designers from Elsie de Wolfe to Paul Rudolph, Charles Moore, and Frank Israel, and have written about the hidden sites of queer desire here ad nauseam, but the omission in what wants to be an international survey feels a bit strange.
The book also feels like a retrospective, even when it focuses on contemporary spaces. I missed the experiments in non-physical sites of Andrés Jaque, or even a discussion of the spaces opened up by hook-up apps and social networks. Some of the best queer spaces these days can be found on TikTok, not in drag bars playing and acting out the songs of yesteryear.
That might be because queer space, whatever it was (a site for same-sex acts; a place to build or shelter LGBTQIA+ community; a warping and queering of straight spaces towards stage sets for fictional and gender-fluid personas; or merely the work of designers who are queer) is dissolving as our whole culture becomes more gender fluid and communities of desire and self-definition weave their way through our culture. That is, of course, still largely a Western perspective but, as this volume shows, even in South America, Africa, and Asia such spaces are becoming part of the mainstream despite oppression and violence. Certainly, we must celebrate queerness and what it has produced, and must continue to support spaces of safety and self-expression, but we must also look beyond queer space towards places where we can all live out the complex, multi-definitional lives we deserve in an open, just, and sustainable manner, whether those sites are in “meat-space” or exist in a realm beyond that reality.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
