Jack Jen Gieseking’s A Queer New York defies easy characterization. At once, the book is:

• A work of urban studies that renders—from an under-represented and fresh perspective—a rich account of shifting structural conditions across multiple decades
• A queer feminist work that subtly unsettles familiar distinctions and connections among personal, public, private, and political  
• A detailed account of experiences, practices, knowledges, and geographies that have deep histories, and yet speak directly to urgent contemporary questions
• A testament to a meticulous research process afforded time to outgrow the already capacious bounds of its original conception  
• A passionate argument that invites further questioning, critique, and research about the issues and tensions it raises    
• An undertaking that—in all the above respects and more—ultimately holds with striking fidelity to queer modes of knowing and relating.

And that’s not an exhaustive list. The book builds, foremost, on group interviews conducted with 47 lesbian and queer participants invited to take part in at least two different rounds of collective conversation within and across cohorts organized generationally. Gieseking supplemented these interviews with novel mental mapping methods, extensive follow-ups among participants, and archival research, among other elements. While the project may have germinated a decade ago with an ambition to document, situate, and spatialize participants’ stories and identify distinct generational experiences among cohorts, the culminating book focuses strongly on structural matters experienced and negotiated, with difference, across all cohorts along the way to a precarious present.

The central paradox animating A Queer New York might be framed as follows: Liberal popular discourse—not least within lgbtq+ communities—holds that urban spaces like New York City, and especially specific neighborhoods within, offer unrivaled opportunities for liberation and connection among people whose identities may make them targets for discrimination elsewhere. But the lived experiences of lesbians and queers trying to make good on these promises over recent decades reveal a much more complicated situation. Indeed, they reveal that urban life—and the mode of liberalism that underwrites imaginations of its promise—in the most desirable spaces is dominated by regimes of property and exchange-value secured by forms of rights-bearing and enforcement predominantly ordered (not least via policing, but also markets and gentrification) according to the relations and structures of what Gieseking calls “white cis-hetero settler colonial capitalism”. (The book is focused predominantly on US contexts, but the arguments might be extended to urban spaces in other contexts where similar structural tensions are at play.) For the participants we meet in the book, the upshot is that ostensibly liberating urban spaces and neighborhoods are so expensive, exclusive, privatized, made secure, etc. that most people can no longer—and younger generations have never known a time when they could—thrive or maintain gathering, commercial, and cultural spaces over duration and/or with any critical mass. Hence, the core question of this book: What shapes do (primarily lesbian, queer, and gender non-conforming, but Gieseking is also mindful of trans) lives, subjectivities, and relations take when conditions that may seem to promise degrees of liberation in some regards are revealed to be deeply uneven, inequitable, and unjust—exclusionary, restricted, and fleeting at best; by and large unattainable; and always countersigned by palpable forms of segregation, enclosure, and indeed violence? That is a trenchant and timely question.

Addressing the above contexts and questions, Gieseking offers a novel and explicitly partial argument about lesbian and queer urban spatial-sociality. Outright, he rejects “the myth of neighborhood liberation,” or the idea that lesbians and queers might—or even should aspire to—secure ownership stakes sufficient to achieve critical mass at the scale of particular neighborhoods. This is both a practical (as suggested by myriad past and ongoing experiences of displacement among the book’s participants) and a political injunction (because where it might be attainable, the ongoing pursuit of such ownership can abet gentrification, contribute to the displacement of others, and is ever vulnerable to cooptation and enclosure by the very regimes of exchange-value, property, and policing at issue). In place of neighborhoods, then, Gieseking offers a counter-spatial imaginary of “constellations”—perhaps the core conceptual contribution of book—as both a description of and a radical aspiration for lesbian, queer, and trans lives connected across spaces and rooted in extensive relationality rather than notions of territorially or possession.

Other contributors to this forum discuss the nuances of Gieseking’s formulation of “constellations” in some detail, so I won’t. But I will note the conceptualization here maintains but does not resolve tensions that are palpable throughout the book, namely, between, on the one hand, the empirical realities of the lives, politics, and commitments of the research participants we meet and, on the other hand, Gieseking’s ambition to rend from them a radical counter-imaginary. There are numerous moments in the book where the qualitative accounts reveal research participants’ varied degrees of enacted alignment with some of the same pernicious ideological, legal, racial, political-economic, and even gendered formations that are argued to be unevenly antithetical to the thriving of lesbian, queer, and trans people. But there is also a steady undercurrent of what Gieseking calls “dyke politics”—a tradition of queer, collectivist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist sensibilities and practices cultivated and shared across generations in the face of repression and harm. Parsing complex life-worlds in which all these aspects are present, Gieseking does not to paper over the tensions, but unapologetically chooses to attend less to the contradictions in participants’ actions than to dyke politics and—taking up Cindi Katz’s work on social reproduction—the forms of “resiliency, reworking, and resistance” that persist and might be cultivated and multiplied even and especially amid the contradictions. This choice seems to have been made in the spirit of honoring, amplifying, and carrying forward an under-recognized radical tradition. And it is here that both the limitations of the book and the open questions it poses are perhaps most evident.

The limitations of the book are simply that—things which could not be adequately undertaken or addressed given the project’s original design, and so could be matters for possible future research echoing and building on Gieseking’s work. For instance, as an ethnographer I found myself wishing to get a deeper sense for participants daily lives beyond the group interview setting—for their everyday socialites, practical sensibilities, micro-geographies, and indeed contradictory entanglements. Likewise, while A Queer New York offers us a rich inventory of, to follow the metaphor, some of the brightest stars in the constellations it identifies (which tend to be concrete spaces like businesses and features of the built environment in only a few neighborhoods), the group interview methods yield a less-than-thick sense for the practices that occur in and across, let alone between and away from them, perhaps especially in domestic and liminal spaces and private moments.

Along these lines, future work could refine and extend insights from A Queer New York ethnographically and intensively. To name but a few possibilities, such extensions might echo Samuel Delany’s work on contact (which Gieseking does cite; Delany 1999), Diana Taylor’s (2003) work on distinctions and relations between archive and repertoire, or Lauren Berlant’s (2016) work on queer social infrastructures. Delany vividly describes what he calls “contact”—forms of intimacy, care, relational community, and heterogeneous encounter (albeit largely among men) sustained in spaces around Times Square in earlier decades. Taylor highlights the cultural and historical significance of repertoires—embodied practices, rituals, performative acts, etc. that create and enact connection and transmission across generations—that are often suppressed or not recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge and attainment in cultures which over-value written records and other possessable artifacts (of the kind privileged in many archives). Berlant seeks affective and practical infrastructures that might allow us to respond to moments of unsettling, disruption, and even catastrophe with non-normative and de-habituated modes of living and being together in common.  

By articulating constellations and resilience-reworking-resisting as dyke politics in the open-ended manner Gieseking does, A Queer New York could be a tremendous resource for many future projects, both scholarly and practical, along these and other lines. Ultimately, A Queer New York offers a provocation to attend to dyke politics-aligned ways of relating, being, and making space which persist and which could be multiplied across urban and other constellations, even and especially amid pernicious structural conditions, stunted dreams of liberation, and contradiction. That work feels vital, and Gieseking’s decade of work has furnished a lodestar that will no doubt compel others to and help others navigate it for decades to come.            

References    

Berlant L (2016) The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3): 393–419.

Delaney S (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: NYU Press.

Taylor D (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham.: Duke University Press.

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Christian Anderson (he/him) is associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. His work is situated at the intersections of human geography, urban studies, ethnographic and participatory methods, and critical social thought.