Making Queer Space: A Homosexual Agenda
Keith Haring draws on a New York subway advertisement panel, mid-1980s, an act for which he was periodically arrested.
In her 2018 book ‘Mothers of Massive Resistance’, (available at New Orleans’ Community Book Center!) Elizabeth Gillespie McRae explores the ways in which White women in America have used the positions given them within the political, economic, and social condition of patriarchal domination to reinforce White supremacy from the grassroots up. White femininity is employed to simultaneously construct systems of racial and patriarchal domination which undermine the humanity of the very women who express it.
As I work my way through McRae’s excellent book, I am struck how the same can be true for White gay men like me. Like the White supremacist suffragettes, pioneering female bureaucrats and public servants McRae profiles, our ‘difference’ of sexual orientation is celebrated by the system author bell hooks names the White supremacist imperialst capitalist patriarchy to represent its supposed achievements in tolerance, acceptance and progress. Depoliticized Pride parades are sponsored by multinational megabanks headquartered in Philip Johnson skyscrapers and escorted by police officers prone to beat Black queer and trans people to the ground for speaking out against murder. Because, what better way to honor the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera?
If your tolerance uplifts White queer people while continuing to deny the humanity of Black queer people and other queer people of color, it’s garbage. If your acceptance denies nonbinary people’s existence, it’s worthless. If your progress perpetuates the invisibility of disabled queer people, it’s not really progress at all.
Beyond that, queerness is more radical than acceptance, tolerance or progress. Queerness is an understanding that the world is designed to privilege certainty, to categorize people into groups so that we can order these groups in ways that maintain the status quo.
“In our society, ‘What race are you?”, says the sculptor Martin Puryear, “is really just a euphemistic way of asking, “Where do you fit?” Of sexual orientation, I say the same.
To maintain queerness is to reject the idea that we have to ‘fit’. Because we know what it is like to feel wrong on the basis of something we can’t change. To be told we are immoral, dirty, deviant and to deeply internalize that feeling. Any system which inflicts that pain is no system worth upholding.
The depth to which I experience my own difference is not on the level to that of anybody racilaized as Black, and certainly not to a queer person racialized as Black. It is different from the experience of a White queer woman, and from a White gay man of more feminine presentation. But it is comparable, when salient, because fundamentally it’s premised on the same attempt at social expulsion: I don’t belong. I am in error.
2019 has been rough so far. Virginia politicians are exposed for wearing blackface and committing sexual assault, and a West Hollywood donor who murders Black men by injecting them with drugs to watch them die. In a world which constantly asserts otherwise, gay is good, just as Black is beautiful, and no means no. These categorizations and practices were created, and are reinforced, to compartmentalize us and to enable our continued oppression. But they are also causes around which we can unite, within an intersectional framework, to express our common humanity through all means available to us.
Culture can catalyze collective liberation through art and music, dance and poetry, food and design. As a designer, practicing in the profession of architecture, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it means to queer space as antiracist intersectional feminist design.
To queer space as the practice of antiracist intersectional feminist design is to use design an allied means of cultural expression to perpetuate queer existence, with a particular focus on the voices, stories, programmatic and spatial needs of Black people and other people of color who are queer, trans, and nonbinary.
This can be done through means including the design of non-gendered restrooms in all public and private accomodations - a rejection of a White supremacist, imperialist, colonialist conception of binary gender created to enable White Euro-American global political and economic domination;
‘Decolonizing the Toilet’ - Patrick Lynn Rivers, Briarpatch
‘Stalled!' - Joel Sanders, Susan Stryker, and Terry Kogan
the design of health facilities to meet the particular needs of queer communities - particularly for people affected by HIV/AIDS, mental health crises, and disabilities, and diseases of poverty, which disproportionately affect queer people in systemically disinvested communities;
‘Whitman-Walker’s new home’, Washington Blade
‘Strategies for delivering LGBTQ-inclusive care’ - Jennifer Comerford and Cynthia Wallce
the design (and development) of shelter and supportive housing for unhoused people - a disproportionate number of whom are queer and, particularly, trans, who cannot live at home, particularly as teenagers
‘The Cost of Coming Out: LGBTQ Youth Homelessness’
the design of housing for queer people and families - whose needs are not met by the design of most American housing, which in multifamily typologies privileges single young people, and in single-family typologies privileges heteropatriarchal nuclear families
‘Delivering housing services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers’ - Chartered Institute of Housing, UK
‘The Feminist Architect who Tried to Liberate Kitchens from Houses’ - Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite
the preservation, programming and design of equitable queer social spaces - as digital technologies render gay and lesbian bars, traditional queer spaces, even more economically obsolete, and those spaces which do exist frequently exclude, disrespect and dehumanize queer Black people and other people of color, and that these communities may be denied access to the resources necessary to create their own spaces
‘Queer Black Chicagoans talk about isolation, lack of safe spaces where they can explore identity’, The Chicago Tribune
‘Grindr and Tinder: the disruptive influence of apps on gay bars,’ The Financial Times
the design of monuments, memorials and museums which tell queer stories - which have been hidden and obscured from American public space since colonization under a heteropatriarchal settler colonialist regime
QSPACE, New York, NY
Paper Monuments, New Orleans, LA
and the design of spaces and places for restorative justice - recognizing that physical confinement is inherently inhumane, decarceration for all but the most extreme cases is a moral necessity, and that queer people, particularly queer and trans people of color, are disproportionately subject to incarceration which does not actually make any community ‘safer’
Dana McKinney’s GSD graduate thesis, ‘Societal Simulations: A Carceral Geography of Restoration’
Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, Kyle Rawlins and Deanna Van Buren
Homophobia, transphobia, and other anti-queer ideologies are rooted in the idea that queer people do not exist. We are made to believe that the condition of our existence is a ‘lifestyle’, a ‘choice’, and that we are making the wrong one. In reality, queerness is not a deviation of human sexuality, because there is no norm of human sexuality from which to deviate. Queerness is a deviation from a White supremacist cisheteropatriarchal capitalist imperialist culture. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re designing some deviant shit.