A Queer NY: About the Book & Book Tour

A Queer New York book cover.
A Queer New York book cover.

Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008 (NYU Press, 2020) is a historical geography of contemporary lesbian-queer society and economies in New York City. The book is also the first lesbian-queer historical geography of New York City.

I write about the historic significance of gayborhoods and other lezqueer spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that call and/or once called certain New York neighborhoods home. Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, I show how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away.

I draw upon in-person and online methods (focus groups, mental mapping, artifact sharing, card sorting) with lesbians and queers, and archival research that spans the AIDS crisis to the appearance of The L Word television show. Rather than taking the traditional approach to LGBTQ spaces as merely bars, neighborhoods, and cities, I argue that women and trans and gender non-conforming people (TGNCP) produce urban space in the form of constellations, the material and imagined places understood as lesbian-queer serve as nodes between which participants make their embodied paths through the city. This queer feminist theoretical contribution to cultural geography demonstrates the role lesbians and queers played in gentrification, and also how the structures of white cis-heteropatriarchal capitalism fed their vision of “gayborhoods” and profited from what I call the “myth of neighborhood liberation.”

A Queer New York is available at 30% off from NYU Press with the discount code QUEERNY30. A full version will be available open access on the NYU site soon, or you can read the book free of charge via gBooks here.

A companion website of maps and graphs about LGBTQ+ history in New York City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries can be found here at An Everyday Queer New York.

Book Tour Dates, Locations, and Links

PAST

  • Safeplaces (Stockholm) & Swedish Federation for LGBTQI Rights (2022)
  • Unnameable Books, Brooklyn (2022)
  • Department of Geography, Hofstra University (2022)
  • LGBTQ+ Research Community, Israeli Sociological Society (2022)
  • Dahlem Centre for the Humanities, Freie Universität (2022)
  • First-Year Orientation, Bard College (2022)
  • Department of American Studies (graduate seminar), Penn State Harrisburg (2022)
  • Unnameable Books, Brooklyn (2022)
  • Technische Universität Berlin (2022)
  • Department of Geography (graduate seminar), University of Tennessee — Knoxville (2022)
  • Department of Culture Studies (graduate seminar), Harvey Mudd College (2022)
  • Second Tuesdays at the LGBT Center of New York City (2021)
  • Center for Place, Culture, & Politics, CUNY Graduate Center – with Brandi Summers (2021)
  • Department of Culture Studies (graduate seminar), Claremont Graduate University (2021)
  • Department of Geosciences, Williams College (2021)
  • Preservation League of New York State (2021)
  • Department of Geography (graduate seminar), UCLA (2021)
  • Department of Geography, University of Missouri (2021)
  • Program in Social Justice, Pratt Institute (2021)
  • Department of Geography, Maynooth University (2021)
  • Department of American Studies, Colby College (2021)
  • Queer Politics Seminar, Princeton University (2020)
  • Research Centre for Gender & Sexuality, University of Amsterdam (2020)
  • ONE Archives, University of Southern California — with Cait McKinney (2020)
  • Department of Geography, University of Leicester (2020)
  • Department of English, Mississippi State University (2020)
  • Department of Geography, University of Washington (2020)
  • Treacey Lecturer, University of Wisconsin – Madison (2019)
  • Rosa Luxemburg Initiative, Bremen (2019)
  • Department of Geography, University of Hawai?i M?noa (2019)

And more forthcoming!