Queer Infrastructures and Architectural Histories
In the sixth of our pieces on queer heritage, Ben Campkin (@BenCampkin) reflects on queer spaces in London and their relationship to architectural history.
Cultural Infrastructure Map
Plotting the location of cultural infrastructure, this evolving map created by the Mayor of London enables the user to view cultural infrastructure, including LGBT+ venues, alongside useful contextual data such as transport networks and population growth, and has the capacity for user feedback.
In the 1960s, scholars and activists began to study spaces associated with newly visible groups of gay men and lesbians in US cities. These discussions first arose in disciplines outside of architecture and architectural history, such as geography and sociology, with their interests in the construction of identity, urban development and politics. British academics who were active in the lesbian and gay movement, such as the sociologist Mary McIntosh and the historian Jeffrey Weeks, contributed empirical and theoretical work on the longer history of homosexuality and same-sex desire, and on the relationships between constructions of identity and cities. In the 1990s, the geographies of sexuality developed into a lively field, exploring the variety of ways that sexuality, gendered identities and space were reciprocally produced. As well as the British gay and lesbian scholars of the 1980s, these studies were informed by the work of Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality, by Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the production of space, and by Judith Butler and other feminist and queer theorists who were troubling the categories of gender, sex and sexuality.
A small group of writers, mainly in the US, also developed queer agendas for architecture and architectural history in the 1990s. Their work connected with the new field of queer theory, and with feminist architectural historians and practitioners who were examining architecture’s role in constructions of sexuality and gender in the UK and US. They conceptualised ‘queer space’ and sought to queer, to disrupt, the architectural canon. Their work was notably multi-media, with historical and critical texts working alongside installations and curatorial projects. There was a lag in these architectural debates in the 2000s. The geographies of sexuality continued apace and has, more recently, begun to connect with trans studies.
Today, prompted by international policy agendas, equalities legislation, local diversity initiatives and calls for decolonisation, cultural and educational institutions, scholars, policy-makers, activists and practitioners are increasingly paying attention to the ‘intangible heritage’ associated with minorities. This includes the buildings, built heritage, places, landscapes and cultural practices of historical and contemporary populations minoritised because of their sexuality and gender. Built-environment professional networks, such as Planning Out, FreeholdLGBT and Architecture LGBT+ have been established to ‘provide a safe, inclusive and prejudice-free environment for LGBT+ Architects and those working and studying within the profession’. These networks also attend to queer histories and heritage.
In global cities that feature accelerated gentrification, such as London and New York, there are lively conversations about how to protect or sustain sites marked as important in the struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Queer venues, for example, are seen as significant artefacts of the past, as well as having continuing value to present and future queer communities. They are seen as important to the history of urban and cultural innovations, for example, or to cross-generational education and public memory. In these complex and diverse contemporary urban contexts, heritage designations, planning systems and equalities protections are being activated to assign value and recognition to sites that have often been necessarily ephemeral and discreet. These tools are instrumentalised through policy-makers’ use of the identity categories of today, such as ‘LGBT’. These serve a useful purpose, but fail to capture heterogeneity. Similarly, the planning tools are crude. In the UK, for example, achieving an ‘Asset of Community Value’ listing requires vast amounts of voluntary labour from community groups, and is set up for local communities, while the pattern of LGBTQ+ groups’ use of venues is typically more dispersed. Where venues remain under threat, once listed as assets, local authorities lack the resources to use Compulsory Purchase powers.
In the context of the renewed attention to LGBTQ+ populations across different disciplines and urban practices, with practitioners engaging with heritage associated with these groups, what would it mean to queer architectural history? Is architectural history a ‘safe space’? Could it productively be troubled? What contributions to knowledge, or to practices of caring for queer heritage, can architectural history make? One consideration is that the early scholarship on gay space, and recent activism in response to the gentrification of queer venues, emphasise that buildings are nodes within the networks that support these populations. They therefore call to be examined as interdependent with the wider and international systems, processes and communication technologies that shape places and identities. The current policy framing of LGBTQ+ licensed venues as ‘social and cultural infrastructure’ by the Mayor of London is interesting in this regard.
The Glass Bar, Euston, 2007. Photograph: Stephen McKay.
Drawing for planning application indicating alterations to convert 190 West Lodge, Euston Square, into a bar, 1996.
A women-only members’ club, The Glass Bar, established by Elaine McKenzie in response to a lack of venues for women and black lesbian and gay people, in a scene that was experienced as homogeneous and white. It occupied the Grade II-listed West Lodge, Euston, designed by J.B. Stansby. Perhaps the most monumental of London’s recent LGBTQ+ licensed premises, it was also well-hidden in the urban fabric. The building had previously been a British Rail office and, in the mid-1970s, provided temporary accommodation for GALS (Girls Alone in London Service), an advisory for homeless girls. After dramatic rent increases and faced with high maintenance costs, McKenzie was forced to close the venue in 2008.
Diverse queer communities have successfully embedded themselves within infrastructural sites associated with past phases of London’s urbanisation: They have often been situated in infrastructure or ex-infrastructural spaces, camouflaged within the everyday city fabric: in London, examples include nightclubs in 19th-century railway arches or in canalside storage warehouses, bars in former stables, and so on. . Through its historical associations, infrastructure, referring to substructural parts, signals both underground spaces and militarised fortifications. These resonate appropriately since the spaces that have served queer populations have often had to be defensive and subterranean. They still are in many places.
Given the earlier empirical studies of lesbian and gay populations’ networks from the late 1960s, we can think of today’s LGBTQ+ venues as a dynamic queer infrastructure. This encapsulates the profile of dispersed, interconnected, heterogeneous LGBTQ+ communities, where venues vary in the ways they attach to, traverse and disrupt international lines of property, heritage and identity in processes of social and cultural reproduction; and where more marginalised groups within LGBTQ+ populations have least access to formal spaces.
Infrastructure comes into play in other ways, however. Opportunistically located in precarious sites and buildings during temporary breaks in redevelopment cycles, LGBTQ+ venues of all types are proportionately vulnerable once such cycles accelerate. They are often threatened or eliminated through practices of densification, and by large-scale infrastructural developments – roads, bridges, stations – and retail-led projects. Such schemes are incentivised at the national, metropolitan and local level as part of competitive global-city strategies, strategies that paradoxically also contain policies on inclusion that set out to protect minorities. In these contexts, the survival of queer populations and spaces are often at odds with urban development and progress narratives.
Architecture and urbanisation spatialise power in processes through which specific groups are othered or minoritised. Architectural history can therefore attend to the differential access to and uses of built resources of distinct groups within LGBTQ+ populations, according to their embodiments as sexualised, gendered, racialised, pathologised subjects, marginalised or affirmed through multiple intersections. It is positive, therefore, to see new generations of activists and practitioners collaborating creatively, taking expansive, intersectional approaches to queer placemaking, driven by social-justice agendas. These groups work to improve understanding of the ways that the most marginalised LGBTQ+ populations are adversely affected by multiple exclusions that are enacted through urban development and make critical design interventions in response.
As they approach queer memory, aesthetics, sites and practices, architectural historians are well placed to forge relations with such groups and with other scholar-activists who prioritise transdisciplinarity and decolonisation. Such alignments will necessitate a continuous unsettling of methods, evidence, categories and curricular.
Ben Campkin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism, UCL, and Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory. He is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), which won the Urban Communication Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Award in 2015. His co-edited publications include Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the series Urban Pamphleteer (2013– ), including the special issue ‘LGBTQ+ Night-spaces: Past, Present and Future’ (2018). He was one of the founding members of qUCL, UCL’s LGBTQ+ research network.
Further reading
Jon Binnie and Gill Valentine, ‘Geographies of Sexuality – a Review of Progress’, Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 2 (1999), pp. 175–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913259902300202.
Kath Browne, Catherine J. Nash, and Sally Hines, ‘Introduction: Towards Trans Geographies’, Gender, Place & Culture 17, no. 5 (2010), pp. 573–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503104.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary edition. Ebook Central (Collection). London and New York: Routledge, 1999. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203902752.
Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall, ‘London’s Nocturnal Queer Geographies’, Soundings 70, no. 70 (1 November 2018), pp. 82–96. https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN.70.06.2018.
Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall, LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006–present, UCL Urban Laboratory, July 2017.
Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. UPCC Book Collections on Project MUSE. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816678686/.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin, [1978] 1998.
Kian Goh, ‘Safe Cities and Queer Spaces: The Urban Politics of Radical LGBT Activism’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers: Social Justice and the City 108, no. 2 (2018), pp. 463–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1392286.
Jack Halberstram, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette and Yolanda Retter (eds.), Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance. Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1997.
Mary McIntosh, ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems 16, no. 2 (1968), pp. 182–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/800003.
Natalie Oswin, ‘Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space’, Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 1 (2008), pp. 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507085213.
Laura Marshall, ‘Castle and Cell: Exploring Intersections Between Sexuality and Gender in the Domestic Lives of Men with Trans Identities and Histories’, in Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression, edited by Brent Pilkey, Rachael M. Scicluna, Ben Campkin and Barbara Penner, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 183–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474239653.
Jeffrey Weeks, ‘The “Homosexual Role” After 30 Years: An Appreciation of the Work of Mary McIntosh’, Sexualities 1, no. 2 (1998), pp. 131–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/136346098001002001.
Barbara A. Weightman, ‘Commentary: Towards A Geography of the Gay Community’, Journal of Cultural Geography 1, no. 2 (1981), pp. 106–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873638109478645.
‘YU Event / #MyQueerCity Workshop’. Accessed 3 July 2020. https://www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/events/yu-event-myqueercity-workshop/.
