Courtesy of the University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. Originally published in The Nuntius 3, no. These narratives also point to complicated relationships between cruising and other markers frequently used to define queer territory, specifically businesses serving a queer clientele. Importantly, that fractured and contested structure is due in part to the converging efforts of a wide array of disparate agents: queer sex-seekers, Houston residents, local politicians, civic groups, queer organizations, national anti-pornography groups, and conservative political movements. Rather, dissent and conflict over the practice of cruising in Houston shows queer place claiming to be fractured, contested, and structured in part through a politics of respectability inflected explicitly by class but curiously silent on race. At the same time, these narratives also show that queer territorialization in Houston was not a smooth process of collective place claiming and recognition. As Houston's Montrose neighborhood came to be identified as a "gayborhood" between 19, archival evidence shows that cruising narratives played a powerful role in that identification. Using the city of Houston as an example, this essay attends to cruising as an underdeveloped aspect of those models. All these models of queer territory posit collective understandings of place that transcend the social boundaries of queer identity groups.Īll three authors also reference cruising, but offer little detail about how cruising works in their models. Yvette Taylor and Michelle Addison (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 178–200 Amin Ghaziani, There Goes the Gayborhood? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 Amin Ghaziani, "Cultural Archipelagos: New Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Space," City & Community 18, no.
Martin Levine (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 196–218 Jen Jack Gieseking, "Queering the Meaning of 'Neighbourhood': Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008," in Queer Presences and Absences, eds. Martin Levine used spot maps of bars and cruising grounds to substantiate a "gay ghetto" Jen Jack Gieseking analyzed individuals' "mental maps" of queer space Amin Ghaziani critiqued the enclave theory of "gayborhoods" in favor of what he terms "cultural archipelagos." 2 Martin Levine, "Gay Ghetto," in Gay Men: The Sociology of Male Homosexuality, ed. Since the 1970s, social scientists have proposed and critiqued various models of queer territorialization. In general, I argue our politics and communities benefit most when we embrace the untidy polysemy of "queer" and explore the openings it provides. When I intend these specific meanings in this text, I will do my best to flag them. The word can summon all these thoughts and more, regardless of authorial intention indeed, it can carry whatever freight we readers bring to it. To be sure, other speakers and thinkers deploy "queer" with additional senses-an historical term of derision, a specific identity, a verb. What role does cruising play in marking specific areas of the urban landscape as "queer territory"? 1 For the purposes of this essay, I use the word "queer" primarily in its capacity as a contemporary umbrella term intended to include the panoply of non-normative sexual and gender identities concatenated in familiar and unpronounceable acronyms like LGBT, LGBTQ+, and LGBTQQIAA. From a variety of perspectives, and with an emphasis upon the US South, this series, edited by Eric Solomon, offers critical analysis of LGBTQ+ people, practices, spaces, and places. In the course of the discussion, the book highlights the multiple, seemingly contradictory meanings that gayborhoods have for both gays and straight residents why those meanings matter and how they inform the many material stakes that are involved for those who live in and visit these places.Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces is a collection of interdisciplinary, multimedia publications that explore, trouble, and traverse intersections of queer experiences, past, present, and future. It also considers the possibility that new gay and lesbian settlements are emerging, if we just know how and where to look for them. It examines the conditions under which gayborhoods can retain their resonance for certain people, despite ongoing gay flight and a steady stream of straight newcomers into them. This book explores why gay neighborhoods are changing in the so-called post-gay era so as to better understand how shifting conceptions of sexuality-especially allegations that its significance is declining in terms of how we define ourselves and how we structure our everyday lives-affect where we choose to live.