Press

2020

Sneezy from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books covered AQNY in the “Hide Your Wallet” section with the most terrific summary of my book: “Fuck gentrification.”

Book blurb: “This exceptional book rewrites the recent histories and geographies of New York, and in so doing offers nothing less than a new cartography of cities. In mapping this geography, Jen Jack Gieseking also suggests one way in which all urban transformations might be understood through difference, differently.”—Gillian Rose, author of Feminism and Geography: The Limits to Geographical Knowledge

Book blurb: “Gieseking renders visible the New York City produced, traversed, and inhabited by LGBTQ folks during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By charting this distinct yet complex historical geography, he provides new insights into our understandings of U.S. sexual politics, urban geographies, and queer identities.”—Liz Montegary, author of Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families

Book blurb: “In A Queer New York, Gieseking offers a stunningly trenchant and much needed study of lesbian-queer spaces in the city. He deftly demonstrates how place and belonging can be mapped into lesbian-queer generational shifts.  With light, elegant, and sometimes humorous prose combined with an incisive analytical approach, Gieseking provides a fabulous geographical portrait of an-other Big Apple.”— Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

The Maps

For a quick introduction on how to use these maps, check out the video on the Teaching & Research Tools for AEQNY page.

No one map will ever fully render queer history visible, let alone with a dozen or hundred or even a thousand maps. Our lives are too complex and dynamic to render to fixed points and lines, and assume all is revealed.

The project of mapping queer history then affords a radical way of seeing versions of our lives and pasts, to think in broader and deeper, distinct and more refined way about how gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, citizenship, and so on shape our lives. I offer two maps of LGBTQ history in New York City that show the diversity of queer life in the city.

Drawing on archival research I conducted at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) in Brooklyn, New York, I created . The LHA houses few collections that record the space and time of meetings, often as a way of offering protection and anonymity. For that reason, I am only (yet?) able to map the places listed in publications and LGBTQ organizations spanning my period of research from 1983 to 2008.

Teaching & Research Tools for AEQNY

Check out this first video to learn how to use the An Everyday Queer New York maps for your teaching or research.

A further series of teaching posts for use in high school and college classrooms will be posted soon. Check back for updates!

Wanda '84's mental map of New York City. CC-BY Jack Gieseking 2020.
Wanda ’84’s mental map of New York City. CC-BY Jack Gieseking 2020.
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