Gay Space

Gay space, particularly urban clusters of leisure venues serving a male homosexual clientele, first attracted the attention of urban geographers and sociologists in the late 1970s. As historians have demonstrated, there were vital (and often overt) urban homosexual subcultures in many major cities from at least the eighteenth century onward. However, it was not until the 1970s, with the growth of the modern gay liberation movement, that concentrations of gay venues were consolidated in the landscape of major North American and European cities and became the subject of academic and popular attention. The title of this entry consciously highlights the uneven gendering of the geographies that have examined these spaces.

Early studies of gay space centered on the experience of major metropolitan centers in the United States. In a much cited study, Castells and Murphy focused on the development of the Castro district in San Francisco as gay territory. Their study mapped concentrations of visible bars, clubs, and retail outlets patronized by gay men; it also attempted to map residential clustering by gay men and examined the spread of votes cast in municipal elections for pro-gay candidates. In the 1980s, this work was extended to examine the role of gay men in the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods.

Initially, (male) researchers could not find similar territorial concentrations of lesbians and theorized that women had been socialized not to claim space in the same way and furthermore were materially disadvantaged by the systemic inequalities in women's income. Subsequent research has identified districts (such as Park Slope in Brooklyn) where lesbians have been primary agents of gentri-fication; of course, lesbian bars also exist, but they have frequently been more precarious and shortlived than male-oriented venues. However, lesbian and feminist scholars have contended that most analysis of urban space is overinvested in reading for public visibility and, consequently, overlooks women's use of the city. In contrast they advocate expanding analyses to include women's social networks, domestic spaces, and quotidian routines to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the spatiality of lesbian lives. Such an approach also offers further insights into bisexual space, as bisex-uals operate in both gay and heterosexual space as well as creating bisexual spaces, and yet are seldom visible (as bisexuals) in either.

Early studies of gay space tended to stress how these were liminal spaces occupying marginalized areas of the inner city. During the 1990s, many clusters of gay space became recentered within their cities, being integrated into urban regeneration schemes and place marketing initiatives. This, in turn, led many users of these sites to complain that they were becoming systematically “de-gayed” [Page 293]as they attracted heterosexual consumers keen to demonstrate their cosmopolitan cultural capital. For some critical queer theorists, the incorporation of gay space into urban planning regimes is indicative of how it has become colonized by the market and also has become a privileged site that is complicit in the reproduction of normative masculinities, class prejudice, and White supremacy.

For most of the last three decades, theories of gay space have centered on the experience of inner-city neighborhoods in the metropolitan centers of the global North. Increasingly, geographers of sexualities have highlighted how the predominance of these theorizations may obscure far more than it reveals; they have embarked on the spatiality of gay urban life in other contexts, such as the suburbs, small towns, and cities in the global South, where gay identities (as they are understood in Europe and North America) may be the preserve of a privileged, transnational elite and coexist with indigenous homosexualities that have their own distinct spatialities.

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