What Do We Mean by Queer Space - Azure Magazine - Azure Magazine

14/2/23, 15:12 What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
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Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
E N I Z AGA M E H T T E G
WORDS Evan Pavka
POSTED Jun 29, 2020

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14/2/23, 15:12 What Do We Mean By Queer Space? - Azure Magazine | Azure Magazine
SHARE Twitter,
My Research Folder After the New York Times unveiled its
2
Facebook, dramaticCuriosity What

May 24 front Do We
page thatMean
listedBy Queer Space?
LinkedIn,
Pinterest, Email a small fraction of the 100,000
coronavirus deaths in the U.S. to that
date, another story concerning
What Do another virus began circulating on
social media. Back in 1991, the Times
We had republished a piece by the
Associated Press titled: “U.S. Reports
Mean AIDS Deaths Now Exceed 100,000.” It
had been printed on page 18 without a
By single name included.
Queer The marked difference between that

almost 30-year-old article, which
Space? appeared below the newspaper’s fold,
and the Times‘ coronavirus coverage
The highlights a broader issue of space for
architecture LGBTTI2QQA people, from the printed
of desire is page to the streets to the dance floor.
Though space — both material and
storied and metaphor — has long been a salve
complex, and a refuge for communities
whether it’s a operating beyond heteronormative
nightclub, a binaries, it has also been the site of
seniors ongoing violence and erasure.
centre or Just two weeks ago, we
something commemorated the fourth anniversary
else entirely. of the shootings at Pulse nightclub in
Florida, where 49 people lost their
lives in an ostensibly safe space. We
WORDS Evan Pavka

also continue to bear witness to the
POSTED Jun 29, 2020 senseless murders of trans women of
SHARE Twitter, colour, such as Dominique “Rem’Mie”
Facebook, Fells in Pennsylvania and Riah Milton
LinkedIn, in Ohio, in cities across North
Pinterest, Email
America.
LGBTTI2QQA
My Research Folder At the same time, celebratory events
2
refers to lesbian, Curiosity

such as Pride What Do
gatherings We Mean
around the By Queer Space?
gay, bisexual, world have been suspended as a
transgender, result of the COVID-19 pandemic,
transsexual, although digital spaces such as Club
intersex, two- Quarantine continue to provide virtual
spirited, queer, environments for various forms of
questioning and queer belonging. These shifts in how
asexual. For we come together in times of
brevity, I use the mourning and celebration are a
term “queer” to reminder that, though queerness may
refer to broad not be a place, it is inescapably
spectrum of of spatial.
non-
heterosexual What exactly, then, might queer space
identities and be?
desires.
The Metaphors of Queer
Space
When we think about queer space, we
may first be drawn to the architectural
metaphors long intertwined with non-
heterosexual identity: the closet and
the washroom. The very idea of the
closet is rife with contrasts, invoking
both interior and exterior, storage and
room, pride and repression, homo-
and heterosexuality. Although it wasn’t
until the 1960s that the term “coming
out of the closet” entered the cultural
lexicon, the closet itself is

foundational to queer narratives and
how they’ve been told.
2
My Research Folder
PHOTO: National Museum of American History
During the Gay Liberation movement

in the United States, the slogan “Out
of the closet and into the streets” was
emblazoned on buttons, T-shirts,
flyers and countless other kinds of
highly visible pulp material. Interior
space, however, is more opaque
when it comes to queerness, even if
its role in sexuality is longer and more
complicated.
Around 1840 or so, posited the late
SFMOMA curator Henry Urbach in his
1994 essay “Closets Clothes
disClosure,” the standalone wardrobe
(made popular in consumer
catalogues all over the world) was
absorbed into the walls of the home,
becoming a codified extension of its

“moral property.” With the publication
of homemaking guides such as 1969’s
American Women’s Home, which
included a chapter dedicated to the
requirements of a proper “Christian
Home,” the domestic interior took on
My Research Folder a new role as the locus of

2
Curiosity
constructing Whatideas
normative Do WeofMean By Queer Space?
family, gender, class, race and, of
course, sexuality.
The closet was central to this image
of heterosexual whiteness. “Holding
things at the edge of the room, at
once concealing and revealing its
interior,” writes Urbach, “the closet
becomes a carrier of abjection, a site
of interior exclusion for that which has
been deemed dirt.” As much as the
closet drew speculation about what
was inside, it largely functioned to
conceal as well as “cleanse” unruly
objects and identities that might “soil”
the pristine image of heterosexual
domesticity. Hence its later
connection with the veiling of
homosexuality. But the storage closet
isn’t the only kind of closet designed
to obscure non-normative identities.
The washroom (or water closet) has
been at the heart of architectural
discourse since modernists such as
Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier
championed plumbing as a cultural
boon. Yet pristine white fittings
alongside pipes and drains are as
much about concepts of gender as
they are about modern technology.

As poet and theorist Lucas Cassidy
Crawford outlines in Transgender
Architectonics: The Shape of Change
in Modernist Space (2015),
architectural plumbing is a resounding
My Research Folder metaphor for our bodily plumbing. If

2
the closetCuriosity Whatfrom

is indivisible Do We Mean By Queer Space?
homosexuality, the washroom is
inescapably linked to transgender
identity. “Plumbing is not a ‘gender-
neutral’ term,” says Crawford. “When
applied to bodies, the word conceals
histories of normative ideas about
gender, race, ability and other bodily
modes.” Expectations of plumbing run
parallel to expectations of bodies, and
access to these spaces have likewise
been at the core of transgender
rights.
Stalled! (here and next two renderings) is a project

by transgender historian Susan Stryker, architect
Joel Sanders and professor Terry Kogan.
Conservative legislation, such as

North Carolina’s controversial 2016
“Public Facilities Privacy & Security
Act,” known as “House Bill 2,” has
often looked to limit access to public
restrooms by dictating that washroom
use must correspond to one’s gender

as listed on a birth certificate. Largely
touted as safeguards to protect
cisgender occupants, the motions
have not only demonized transgender
individuals but have led to a number
of violent attacks, primarily against
My Research Folder trans women, in shared public

2
facilities. Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
Elsewhere in Transgender
Architectonics, Crawford issues a bold
call to arms for designers: “To exhume
these ideas and address them, we
must redesign actual washrooms and
metaphorical “plumbing.’” It’s a
challenge that transgender historian
Susan Stryker, architect Joel Sanders
and professor Terry Kogan have taken
up with their ongoing project Stalled! .
“To
exhume
these
ideas and
address
them, we Using space to explore constructions
must of bodies, gender and accessibility,

redesign the design provides a conceptual
template for a new kind of public
actual facility. Comprised of three distinct
washrooms zones — one dedicated to washing,
and one to grooming and the other to
eliminating — the project looks to
metaphorical
My Research Folder “address an urgent social justice
2
“plumbing.’” issue: theCuriosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

need to create safe,
sustainable and inclusive public
Lucas Crawford restrooms for everyone regardless of
age, gender, race, religion and
disability.” The two iterations — one
proposed for Gallaudet University’s
Field House and the other for a
standard airport renovation — “re-
conceive the restroom as a semi-
open agora-like precinct,” where the
acts of defecating and cleaning are
transformed into shared public
activities.
In doing so, Stalled! asks us to
reimagine our own relationships with
ourselves, our bodies and the
architectural scaffolds that surround
us by transforming what was once
constructed as private acts into safe,
anti-discriminatory communal
experiences for all.
Making and Re-Making

Queer Space
Thinking beyond the closet and the
washroom, nightclubs, bars and
dance floors have also been key
environments through which queer
folks have found safety, community

and belonging.
When architect Louis Kahn famously
quipped, “You say to a brick, ‘What do
you want, brick?’ and brick says to
you, ‘I like an arch,’” he hadn’t
My Research Folder anticipated the material’s response in

2
the handsCuriosity What

of activists Do We
during theMean
1969 By Queer Space?
uprising at New York City’s Stonewall
Inn. Though there are countless
opinions on who thew the first brick —
or if one was even thrown — during
the two nights of rioting that followed
a particularly brutal and unexpected
police raid on the Greenwich Village
gay bar, it’s a compelling and enduring
myth.
The Stonewall Inn today
“Stonewall was, at its core, about

people reclaiming their narratives from
a society that told them they were
sick or pitiful or didn’t even exist,”
writer Shane O’Neill says. Whether
occupying the bar or the streets
outside, it was a deliberate act of

asserting presence in urban space
that had long been used as a vehicle
of erasure.
But as much as these places provided
room for marginalized communities,
My Research Folder they were still fraught with their own

2
Curiosity
anti-Black, anti-transWhat Do WeIt wasn’t
politics. Mean By Queer Space?
until well after its establishment, for
instance, that the first drag queens,
among them transgender activist
Marsha P. Johnston, was welcomed to
the bar, which had long been
frequented by cisgender men
exclusively.
The riots and protests that followed
the 1969 uprising, unfortunately, did
not quell the violence that continues
to permeate these spaces. In the
early 1970s alone, arson attacks at
UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans as
well as the Aquarius bathhouse in
Montreal collectively claimed 35 lives.
Many bodies were never identified
and were laid to rest in pauper’s
graves.
The 1981 raids on four Toronto
bathhouses by over 200 police
officers similarly revealed something
particular about the relationship
between queerness and space.
Whether through a terrorist act or
police intervention, the goal was to
destroy a certain physical place in an
attempt to destroy the communities
who used them. Here space was
inseparable from queerness itself.
“For me, These spaces remained for as long as

the ephemeral nature of nightlife
photographing architecture would permit. But what
queer happens to their records, narratives
spaces
isn’t
My Research Folder and cultural relevance when they
2
voyeurism. Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

disappear?
I feel I have
a duty to
preserve
it.”
Wolfgang Tillmans
PHOTO: Alexander Popov
“For the many nightclubs — such as

Loft, Danceteria or Mudd Club in New
York — designed by unknown
architects or short-lived architectural
firms, archived information is difficult
to find,” explains critic and historian
Ivan Lopez Munuera , a contributor to
the upcoming exhibition “Night Fever:
Designing Club Culture” at V&A
Dundee. Though essential in the
formation of queer enclaves and their
relationship to space, he notes, “their
architects, communities, contexts and
contributions to the built environment
are missing from histories of
architecture.”
2
My Research Folder
Wolfgang Tillmans “Outside Snax Club” (2001) ©

Wolfgang Tillmans
“Nightclubs test the limits of what

societies deem acceptable,” adds
photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who
has chronicled these performative
milieux, from Berlin to New York, since
the 1980s. “For me, photographing
queer spaces isn’t voyeurism,” he
says. “I feel I have a duty to preserve
it.” Aiming to ensure the stability of
these enclaves in our current climate,
Tillmans recently brought together 40
artists to sell posters, thereby keeping
a number of nightclubs, venues, bars
and other art spaces open as they

reel from the impact of COVID-19
lockdowns.
Blockorama 2017 (Official Video)
2
My Research Folder
Queer space, in this regard, is

intimately tied to its inhabitants — the
performances on countless dance
floors by innumerable individuals who
make and remake space. “As an artist
and an activist, I’ve learned how
important the dance floor is for queer
people,” writes Syrus Marcus Ware,
co-founder of Toronto Pride’s
Blockorama event and a Black Lives
Matter member who recently
spearheaded a sit-in outside the city’s
police headquarters alongside the
larger-than-life painting Defund the
Police to protest ongoing police
brutality. “These spaces are
essential,” he notes. “We’ve met our
lovers in these spaces. We’ve met
activists in these spaces. We’ve
become politicized in these spaces.”
“As an
artist and
an activist,
I’ve
learned
how
important
the dance The cast of “Paris is Burning.” © Jennie Livingston
floor is for
queer
My Research Folder In addition to bars and nightclubs, the
2
people.” Black andCuriosity What DoofWe

Latinx members Mean By Queer Space?
Harlem’s
1980s ball culture — immortalized in
Syrus Marcus Ware Jennie Livingston’s controversial
documentary Paris is Burning (1990)
and the subject of FX’s current series
Pose — appropriated existing
structures like New York’s Rockland
Palace to hold their expansive
pageants and gatherings. Participants
would walk in themed sections
ranging from “Butch Queen First Time
in Drag” to “Executive Realness,” the
winner achieving the goal of being
almost indistinguishable from the
character being emulated. “You’re not
really an executive, but you’re looking
like an executive,” says drag queen
Dorian Corey in the film. “You’re
showing the straight world that ‘I can
be an executive if I had the
opportunity.'”
Venus Extravaganza walks in the 1986 Brooklyn Ball

in “Paris is Burning.” © Jennie Livingston
In a sense, queer space is also about

this realness, which is “not just a
sassy by-word for a convincing
My Research Folder costume, but a tragicomic disguise of

2
the chasm Curiosity

betweenWhatwhatDois We Mean By Queer Space?
being
emulated and what is absent (namely
racial justice, class equality and
safety),” according to writer Shon
Faye. These spaces, frequented
primarily by queer people of colour,
were mediums for finding community
as well as challenging the status quo
that other forms of architecture
framed; space-making was integral to
their efforts at defying injustice.
Instead of simply “passing” as
heteronormative, as countless queer
bars the world over did, the realness
attempted was a more radical
aesthetic vision, assuming visual and
physical space that had been denied
through skillful artifice.
Another blatant architectural reference
in Harlem’s ball culture were the
“houses” — entire queer families
named after opulent fashion dynasties
— that defined the scene. Along with
their competitive role, the houses
served as important places for queer
youth to establish systems of support
denied to them by their biological
families or society at large. In addition
to their respective “children,” each
house consisted of a “House Mother”
or “House Father.” Like the dance

floor, the house is central to
understanding queer space.
2
My Research Folder
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera march in the

third Pride Parade in New York from “The Death and
Life of Marsha P. Johnson” (2017). PHOTO: Netflix
In 1970, Johnson and fellow trans

activist Sylvia Rivera founded and
financed STAR House as an extension
of the STAR project (Street
Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).
Operating until 1973, it provided
desperately needed housing to queer
youth and, as Rivera notes, “was part
of the people’s revolution.” Domestic
space was and remains central to
equality. With between 25 to 40 per
cent of the 40,000 homeless youth in
Canada identifying as LGBTQ2S,
access to adequate housing is still a
pressing issue.
2
My Research Folder Leong Leong’s LGBT Center in Los Angeles. PHOTO:
Iwan Baan Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
So, too, is accessible housing for

queer seniors. As critic Mimi Zeiger
points out, queer futurity — the
potential for aging — seemed
unattainable with the emergence of
the HIV/AIDs epidemic. How could
one even consider growing old when
the lives of friends, colleagues and
lovers, such as those chronicled in
the Instagram archive The AIDS
Memorial , were so tragically cut
short? Thanks to more recent
advances in advocacy, education and
treatment, however, the possibility of
a queer future is something real,
accessible and now even
architectural.
PHOTO: Iwan Baan
Take, for instance, New York-based

studio Leong Leong ’s recently
completed LGBT Center in Los
Angeles, which will see youth and
senior housing (slated for completion
My Research Folder early next year) added to its existing

2
Curiosity What
17,000-square-metre Do We AMean By Queer Space?
footprint.
similar proposal, in Boston, involves a
74-unit complex designed by DiMella
Shaffer. The first of its kind in the city,
the structure is described as being
“LGBTQ-friendly,” although it’s not
exclusively reserved for the queer
community.
“The number one issue for LGBT
seniors is housing,” Bob Linscott,
assistant director of Fenway Heath’s
LGBT Aging Project, told The Boston
Globe. “There’s a big fear of going to a
place where people will be bullied and
harassed [in the same way they might
have been harassed] decades ago.”
Marvel Architects Stonewall House
In December 2019, another queer-

friendly seniors facility also opened its
doors, this one in New York. Dubbed

Stonewall House in honour of the
eponymous bar, the 17-storey, 11,600-
square-metre structure designed by
Marvel Architects is, like many others,
not entirely reserved for queer elders,
even though a reported 53 per cent of
My Research Folder
LGBTQ seniors experience social
2
isolation Curiosity
and are farWhat
moreDo We toMean By Queer Space?
likely
experience discrimination in securing
housing.
“Fundamentally, Nonetheless, these spaces offer
environments for meaningful
queer community building at the
space is convergence of queerness and
space in shifting modes of domestic life.
the “Queer time, even as it emerges from
process of, the AIDS crisis,” explains Columbia
University’s Jack Halberstram , “is not
literally, only about compression and
taking annihilation; it is also about the
place, of potentiality of a life unscripted by the
claiming conventions of family, inheritance and
territory.” child-rearing.”
Christopher Reed What unifies these seemingly
disparate structures across an
expanse of history is the fact that,
though used by queer people, they
are not actually conceived by the
communities they serve. From
nightclubs and ballrooms to affordable
housing, these queer spaces are
essentially acts of appropriation — a
calculated repurposing of existing
typologies of building, claiming of
space whether visible or invisible.
These structures become queer only
in the sense that they are activated,

inhabited and transformed by queer-
identifying individuals. As academic
Christopher Reed suggests:
“Fundamentally, queer space is space
in the process of, literally, taking
place, of claiming territory.”
2
My Research Folder
A Few Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
Queer Strategies
Rather than merely actions or
occupancy, queerness might also be
regarded as a way to think beyond the
very binaries inherent in building.
Much of this exploration has — and
continues to be — investigated within
the context of exhibitions and
galleries.
Shortly following the establishment of
ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power) in March 1987, the New York
collective — formed to highlight the
severity of the AIDS crisis and the
American government’s blatant
indifference — was invited to produce
an installation for the New Museum’s
window overlooking Broadway in
Manhattan. The resulting neon
emblem, the now-iconic SILENCE =
DEATH with its glowing pink triangle,
transformed the storefront into a
spatial manifestation of absence, one
that still feels relevant as reports
circulate about the editing of queer
narratives from the Canadian Museum
of History in Winnipeg.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CB0oS9Jlam0
Running parallel with this activism was

the work of theorists such as Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (author of
1990’s Epistemology of the Closet,
which first anchored said construct as
My Research Folder not only a metaphor but a

2
fundamentalCuriosity
way ofWhat Do We Mean By Queer Space?
understanding
non-heterosexuality) and architecture
historian Beatriz Colomina (co-editor
of the 1992 compendium Sexuality
and Space, which grappled with the
spatial tendencies of non-
heterosexuality). Both would
participate in an important exhibition,
fittingly titled “Queer Space,” at New
York’s Storefront for Art and
Architecture in 1994.
Cover of the “Queer Space” exhibition pamphlet.

PHOTO: Storefront for Art and Architecture
Held to commemorate the 25th

anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the
exhibition, which was organized by
Colomina and fellow historian Mark
Wigley with Sedgwick, Urbach, Dennis
Dollens and Cindi Patton, featured a
variety of installations by interior

designers, artist, filmmakers, theorists
and architects, among them Jurgen
Mayer and a young Charles Renfro
(before he was the +R in DS+R).
Advertisement
2
My Research Folder
Documentation of Documentation of
“Queer Space” at “Queer Space” at
Storefront for Art and Storefront for Art and
Architecture. PHOTO: Architecture. PHOTO:
Gordon Brent Ingram Gordon Brent Ingram
These spatial investigations not only

pushed the limits of architecture
through queer critiques but moved
beyond the traditional models and
drawings more common in exhibitions
of its time. A number of similar shows
would soon follow, addressing the
architectural echoes of normative
ideas of bodies, genders and
sexualities within the home.
“Cruising Pavilion” mounted at ArkDes in Stockholm.

PHOTO: Johan Dehlin
More recently, the traveling neon-

soaked exhibition “Cruising Pavilion:
Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising
My Research Folder Culture” examined, as its title

2
suggests,Curiosity Whatstructures
the material Do We Mean By Queer Space?
intertwined with sex — from historic
cruising sites to the implication of
apps like Grindr. Organized by Pierre-
Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup,
Octave Perrault and Charles Teyssou,
the show drew vast connections,
ranging from DS+R’s Blur Building
(considering it akin to the atmosphere
of a steam room, a cloaked public
space that “makes private action
possible,” according to Renfro) to
works by Studio Odile Decq and
Andreas Angelidakis.
“Cruising Pavilion” mounted at ArkDes in Stockholm.

PHOTO: Johan Dehlin
Part of a growing interest and

resurgence of queer architecture over
the last decade, “Cruising Pavilion”
My Research Folder was a deliberate response to a

2
particularCuriosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

lapse in architectural
thinking: namely a tendency to ignore
the explicit role of sex in buildings,
expanding on the ideas instigated in
“Queer Space” as well as in Berlin-
based contemporary art duo Elmgreen
& Dragset’s original 1998 glory-hole-
punctured “Cruising Pavilion.”
“Queer, in
this sense,
is the
possibility
of
behaving Advertisement
differently.”
Andrés Jaque
Andrés Jaque / Office For Political Innovation’s
“Intimate Strangers,” first showcased at London’s
Design Museum.
One of the more thought-provoking

participants was Spanish architect and
educator Andrés Jaque, who, with his
Design firm OfficeMagazine Jobsand
for Political Innovation
their project Intimate Strangers,
Spechow dating appsCompetitions
Architecture investigated
map desiresSheets
not only
Events
but project the very
Interiors
potential AZ Schools
of sexual activity onto any
space. Awards
Subscribe
Curiosity “Architecture
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is the way our societies
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like tables or lamps or walls, but also

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streets and light posts and many other
My Research Folder Contact

things come
2
together to mediate the
productionCuriosity What Do We
of the situations Mean By Queer Space?
in which
SUBMIT CONTENT
we live,” Jaque explains to a cohort of
children in a video produced by DIS.
“Normative spaces are spaces where
rules are very strict, but you can feel
that there are other places with many
different layers to them, where many
things could happen. Queer, in this
sense, is the possibility of behaving
differently.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxp7DTznhdc/
In these conceptions, queer space or

queer architecture is not simply a
place used or appropriated by non-
heterosexual people, but a
performative strategy to challenge the
behaviours, rules, expectations and
situations framed by the built
environment. “[Queerness] is an open
mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances, resonances, lapses and
excesses of meaning,” explains New
Affiliates co-founder Jaffer Kolb in the
proceedings of the 2017 conference
“Stand By Your Monster and Some
Queer Methods,” held at Princeton
University. “In other words: it exists as
a counterpoint, a reconfiguring
agent.” Queerness is not so much a

place, but an expanded strategy of
interrogating place.
So what, then, do we mean by queer
space? Is it a metaphor — like the
washroom and the closet — that
My Research Folder continues to shape our relations to

2
ourselvesCuriosity What Do We
and one another? Do Mean
we By Queer Space?
consider material spaces that once
played host to queer communities the
definition of queer space? Or can
queerness be seen as only one of a
number of spatial tactics? In the end,
is there even a queer space?
“Queer individuals,” writes Sedgwick
in Epistemology of the Closet, “are
located within an irreducible set of
minoritizing and universalizing views
on sexuality. These two views contrast
the ideas that people really are gay
while simultaneously preserving that
desire is inherently unstable.” So, too,
is the very idea of an architectural
queerness — between spaces that
really are queer and the ephemeral
spatial strategies that move beyond
modernist binaries to occupy places
that have historically functioned to
erase or harm.
PHOTO: Alexander Popov
My Research Folder From closets to washrooms,

2
Curiosity
nightclubs What Do
to exhibitions, We to
parks Mean By Queer Space?
homes, these spaces are, as the
curators of “Cruising Pavilion” assert,
“laboratories for political futures…
central to understanding new ways of
thinking, living, loving, meeting and
belonging.”
Though the many ideas surrounding
the conception of queer space have,
as much of the architecture
profession, been centred on white,
cisgender men (myself included,
ultimately informing how the narrative
of this very piece is shaped), ongoing
work by Stryker, Halberstam, Crawford
and more offer new strategies — such
as scraping and cutting — to dwell
more deeply in architecture’s liminal
space.
In the end, locating a permanent,
stable and material queer space may
not be possible. But that’s the point.
It’s in the revisiting of these pasts and
presents, through a variety of
strategies, that allow a glimpse at the
potential of queer futures — even if, as
noted throughout, they are only a
small fraction of the many ways queer
individuals and communities navigate
space.
“There is no queer space,” the
historian George Chauncey aptly
concludes. “There are only spaces
put to queer uses.” And as we begin
to slowly enter the world after
My Research Folder sheltering in place, witnessing

2
ongoing Curiosity
anti-Black What Do We Mean By Queer Space?
and anti-trans
violence, it has never been more
important to remind ourselves exactly
whose uses these spaces are being
put to.
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14/2/23, 15:12 What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

- Azure Magazine | Azure Magazine

WORDS Evan Pavka

POSTED Jun 29, 2020

Facebook, dramaticCuriosity What

Queer The marked difference between that

WORDS Evan Pavka

refers to lesbian, Curiosity

lexicon, the closet itself is

PHOTO: National Museum of American History

During the Gay Liberation movement

becoming a codified extension of its

My Research Folder a new role as the locus of

they are about modern technology.

My Research Folder metaphor for our bodily plumbing. If

the closetCuriosity Whatfrom

Stalled! (here and next two renderings) is a project

Conservative legislation, such as

use must correspond to one’s gender

My Research Folder trans women, in shared public

facilities. Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

must of bodies, gender and accessibility,

“plumbing.’” issue: theCuriosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

Making and Re-Making

folks have found safety, community

My Research Folder anticipated the material’s response in

the handsCuriosity What

The Stonewall Inn today

“Stonewall was, at its core, about

outside, it was a deliberate act of

My Research Folder they were still fraught with their own

inseparable from queerness itself.

“For me, These spaces remained for as long as

voyeurism. Curiosity What Do We Mean By Queer Space?

PHOTO: Alexander Popov

“For the many nightclubs — such as

Wolfgang Tillmans “Outside Snax Club” (2001) ©

“Nightclubs test the limits of what

and other art spaces open as they

Blockorama 2017 (Official Video)

Queer space, in this regard, is

people.” Black andCuriosity What DoofWe

Venus Extravaganza walks in the 1986 Brooklyn Ball

In a sense, queer space is also about

My Research Folder costume, but a tragicomic disguise of

the chasm Curiosity

or “House Father.” Like the dance

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera march in the

In 1970, Johnson and fellow trans

So, too, is accessible housing for

PHOTO: Iwan Baan

Take, for instance, New York-based

My Research Folder early next year) added to its existing

Marvel Architects Stonewall House

In December 2019, another queer-

doors, this one in New York. Dubbed

in the sense that they are activated,

Running parallel with this activism was

My Research Folder not only a metaphor but a

Cover of the “Queer Space” exhibition pamphlet.

Held to commemorate the 25th

variety of installations by interior

These spatial investigations not only