The Right to the City: A Verso Report by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2017-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

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The Gay Right to the City

Huw Lemmey

It’s impossible to imagine gays—our cultures, habits, presence—without cities, without urban spaces. The sparse freedoms of urbanisation, starting in Europe in the early modern period, created a crack in society, large and dark enough for men who prefer men to meet, socialise, mix, and grow something in. What we grew was an identity; not just a sexual identity, but a collective identity, and a cultural one.

Likewise, it’s almost as hard to imagine cities without gays, although many people have tried. I remember as a young teen visiting London from a quiet and pretty rural county, and realising that something was different here, something anxiety-inducing and thrilling, in the presence of bars which hung flags from their windows. A few years later I came to realise that these bars were a key part of a social and sexual infrastructure for gay men. Later still, I visited them, and then I took them for granted. I’m only just realising that there’s nothing about gay bars that isn’t entirely contingent, transitory, vulnerable. Perhaps the last few decades of the 20th Century will be looked upon as a brief social peace, when such places could operate openly, profitably, and provide a home for a few snatched moments of joy. A peace, of course, straddling a cataclysm.

The bars and saunas have always been commercial ventures, and lucrative ones at that. Prior to decriminalisation in the United States, they were frequently run by organised crime, and profitable enough to be worth the kickbacks to law enforcement. The Continental Baths , a vast subterranean bathhouse opened beneath the Ansonia Hotel in New York City in the late 1960s was an early honourable exception of being one of the first run for gay men by gay men. Even then, Malcolm Ingram’s documentary on the baths strongly hints that funding for the premise, which quickly became a cultural lodestone for the city, wasn’t all above board.

The premiums paid by customers remain, and so now they’re often prohibitively expensive for many LGBT people, who are priced out. This remains a contentious issue, but highlights an important truth about them: for generations, private gay bars have been de facto public spaces for gay men. Their gayness is often strictly policed, and by punters rather than landlords. The exclusion of otherwise hegemonic heterosexuality is somewhat the point, but whilst some work hard to be welcoming and vibrant community hubs for queer people, others display worryingly restrictive cultures, excluding people of colour, queer women, trans people, or any gay subculture deemed unworthy, inappropriate, or, godforbid, unsexy.

Significant problems notwithstanding, these curate’s eggs help demonstrate that gay men, through choice, necessity and oppression, have created a different relationship towards a simple public/private dichotomy within our understanding of urban space. There’s a reason they call us queers , after all. In his excellent history of London’s queer life in the early 20th Century Queer London , Matt Houlbrook draws attention to this: “Residential space was only legally private if it were domestic space.

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