Gays and Lesbians, Geography and/of

Gays and lesbians (but mostly gay men) began appearing regularly in Anglophonic geography in the 1970s. A few brave geographers—including Barbara Weightman, Bob McNee, E. M. Ettore, Jacquelyn Beyer, and Bill Ketteringham—wrote and presented papers that sought modestly to document gay spaces and the impacts of gay people on (mostly urban) landscapes. These early works tended to be isolated and marginalized within the discipline. Meanwhile, more theoretically ambitious work was going on in sociology, anthropology, history, and other social sciences and humanities. One particularly important contribution, published in the early 1980s, was by the famous sociologist Manuel Castells. Along with his graduate students Don Lee and Karen Murphy, Castells mapped and interpreted the development over time of a spatially concentrated gay community in San Francisco. ...