Gay spaces

In a gay guide in the United States you can uncover all the gay events in the city, such as nightclubs or common restaurants, visit Menspaces for a lot more data. The Safe Space Alliance is a LGBTQI+ led nonprofit organisation that helps people identify, navigate, and create safe spaces for LGBTQI+ communities worldwide. Our two core activities include maintaining an online directory of spaces around the world that welcome and support LGBTQI+ communities, and helping LGBTQI+ people get to safety.

While gay men in big cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver used to meet in public places – parks, alleys, public restrooms – for sex, now multiple opportunities existed to do it in private or semi-private spaces – bathhouses, backrooms of bars, and residential parties. Everywhere Is Queer is a public resource (and ever-growing searchable map!) created for the LGBTQIA2S+ and ally community to find welcoming, queer-owned spaces to shop, connect, eat, learn, and grow all over the world even in your own neighborhood!.

With over 90 historic, contemporary and speculative examples from around the world, Queer Spaces recognises LGBTQIA+ life past and present as strong, vibrant, vigorous, and worthy of its own. How do we gauge the gay and queer potential of cities and urban spaces? What do designations of gay-friendliness do, or set in motion? Academic studies and journalistic accounts that address queer urban spaces almost exclusively explore gay-male-dominated spaces in major cities and metropolitan centers.

Moreover, existing literature privileges gay spaces in the global north, particularly Euro-American cities, although more recently there has been a move to explore these spaces or the potential of such spaces in the global south. Mar Mikhael district, Beirut. Photo: Ghassan Moussawi. The process of queering urban space in the global south has often meant using cosmopolitan urban centers in the global north as universal reference points.

As a journalistic practice, cities in the global south are made intelligible to Euro-American audiences by comparing and contrasting them to Euro-American cities and other cities in the global south. To examine gay spaces, popular media and some academic studies often explore the presence of gayborhoods, gay bars, and nightlife that resemble those in Europe and North America.

websites similar to queering the map

Many journalists and some academics in Europe and North America appear to regard gay spaces in the global south as exceptional by virtue of being located in the global south. In addition, it centers white gay formations in Euro-American cities such as Provincetown as a metric to make cities in the global south intelligible to Euro-American audiences.

Second, it glosses over the exclusionary nature of white gay spaces everywhere — especially when it comes to race, gender, and class — and more often than not elides the political economies of gay space. Pride parade. Photo: Quino Al. Moreover, mainstream gay spaces such as bars, pride parades, etc. Perceptions of Beirut and its gay spaces, such as those represented by Healy and others, present a prime example of this flawed logic.

These distinctions extend to classify different areas within Beirut, representing neighborhoods that are predominantly Muslim as less open than their Christian counterparts. Applied elsewhere, fractals distinguish between rural and urban spatial formations, representing gay-friendliness as unique to certain urban spaces. Fractal Orientalism reveals how cities are often compared and contrasted to one other when designating gay spaces.

As a practice, it distances Beirut from both its Euro-American and Arab counterparts—its gay life is not exactly that of Paris, yet it is not Amman nor Damascus. Leaving geographical context aside, Beirut might not be as exceptional as it is represented. Approaching gay spaces through the lens of political economy centralizes who has access to such spaces, such as those who can pay.

In addition, it pays attention to which populations are usually targeted by the state. For example, in the police raid and closing of the gay club Ghost in Beirut , police detained, humiliated, and verbally and physically abused several gay and trans individuals: most notably working-class and gender-nonnormative individuals, and Syrian nationals and refugees. Beirut Skyline City View. Photo: Georg Auffarth.

When we speak of the visibility of gay spaces, we fall into the trap of looking for mainstream understandings of white Euro-American conceptions of visibility rainbow flags, gay businesses, pride parades, etc. In my research, LGBT people in Beirut contest narratives of Euro-American gay visibility — predominately used in gay social movements— that assume that LGBT people and spaces are visible by virtue of their queerness.

Instead, they argue that they are always already relationally visible based on their gender, religious sect, class, and which area or neighborhood they are in. Visibility, like queerness, is relational. It is not a goal in and of it itself. Such assumptions miss how visibility is also about the surveillance of spaces and the tracking of marginalized populations.

Instead of looking for LGBT people in Beirut, it is more productive to think of everyday queer strategies that people employ in navigating cities.