W
ait before you cry, “Not another gay New York book!” Although queer geography has long been perceived as oversaturated with work focusing on gayborhoods within North American cities like New York and San Francisco, Jack Gieseking’s A Queer New York changes how this genre understands queer space.
On the surface, A Queer New York is a lesbian historical geography text centered around New York City during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, Bed-Stuy, and Park Slope. However, approaching this book as a simple recounting of lesbian-queer history in NYC does it a serious injustice. Gieseking’s larger project is to challenge how attempts at gayborhood liberation so often center deeply racialized processes of territorialization, gentrification, and colonization. In reframing lesbian space through constellations—or “alternative production[s] of space [and] urban political economy”—Gieseking reveals both the potential and the tensions around networked communities without permanent spatial anchors (2020:13).
Imaginary geographies and the metaphor of constellations play a significant role in A Queer New York; as one participant put it, “if people feel like something’s a lesbian neighborhood then by dint of their believing it, it is” (Gieseking 2020: 191). Yet, Gieseking seeks to decouple claims to neighborhoods—through, for example, bar ownership—with sexual citizenship. In disavowing settler-colonial tactics of property ownership and neighborhood exclusion, constellations fundamentally undo the underlying logics within white gay and lesbian liberalism.
One of the greatest strengths of A Queer New York is the sheer breadth of methods Gieseking utilizes in their project. Gieseking draws from an impressive array of individual and multigenerational group interviews, mental mapping, participant-driven artifact sharing, and extensive archival research. Further, participants had access to summarized research findings after data collection and were key in formulating the book’s theoretical arguments (2020: 37). Throughout this research project, participants actively shaped how their narratives are used for A Queer New York. Gieseking embraces a participatory research ethic, even when it makes his project significantly more challenging, awkward, or even painful.
Although A Queer New York makes essential interventions into lesbian geographies, I found myself frustrated at the absent geographies of gender within this book. All participants were assigned female at birth (AFAB), and few were trans or gender nonconforming. It is no surprise, then, that the voices of trans people—particularly trans women—are largely absent from this book. Gieseking emphasizes that, during recruitment, transmasculine people who may have once upon a time identified with lesbianism were not comfortable participating in a “lesbian and queer study” (2020: 42). One can hardly blame them upon hearing people such as participant Eve describing an older lesbian friend’s response to what Gieseking calls the FtM trans-surge: “In the eighties, they [trans men] were just baby dykes!” (2020: 34). As such, even transmasculine people who consider themselves to have some current or past proximity to lesbian spaces, then, have stories untold due to the anticipation of being misrecognized among cisgender lesbian women. On the other hand, no transfeminine people participated in this study, although many have relationships to lesbian identity and space, and participants often placed them as being “elsewhere” (2020: 34). At the same time, one cisgender lesbian participant proclaimed that, during the 1980s, “The trans [women] were crashing into the women’s communities, into the lesbian community. We’re like ‘No, you can’t be in our space.’” This contradiction speaks to how transmisogyny is often an insidious and unspoken underpinning of many cisgender queer-lesbian spaces.
A Queer New York is a thoughtful, thorough, and often humorous rendition of the complex lesbian historical geographies of NYC. I am particularly compelled by the care that Gieseking places in ensuring that their project was truly participatory, even when this process was uncomfortable or required critical reflexivity. However, I ended this book with a hunger to know more about the absences of trans space in the lesbian constellations of NYC? Where is this “elsewhere” that trans people—particularly women—are alleged to be. In the sparse accounts of trans people throughout A Queer New York, trans women are simultaneously understood as invasive and elsewhere with regard to lesbian spaces. Meanwhile, many trans people—both transmasculine and transfeminine—have current or past proximity to lesbian spaces, and their experiences likely hold unique insights about gender, sexuality, and space in NYC. However, the fear of gender misrecognition—particularly within the context of Gieseking’s group-based ethnographic methods—presents a serious barrier to research inclusion. I remain hopeful that future work on queer-lesbian NYC will also explore how trans geographies are intertwined with lesbian history.
Theodore Davenport is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Washington. His research centers trans political geographies, digital spaces, and care ethics.
