D

ear Davy, Gillian, LaToya, Teddy, Ghassan, and Christian,

Thank you. It’s been exactly three years since A Queer New York (AQNY) was published and it’s still mind-blowing to take in these lovingly critical replies. I sat tenderly with these replies, which share a few wonderful threads that shaped my own reply: your shared love for and questioning of my exhaustive methods, my commitment to reflexivity, partiality, and participatory work, and the usefulness of my concept of constellations in your own or similar work.

Methodological Rejoinders

My interlocutors all touch on my methods and praise their breadth (Theodore Davenport), care and representative complexity (Davy Knittle), extensiveness (Rose), rigor (LaToya Eaves), freshness (Ghassan Moussawi), and novelty (Christian Anderson). (Wow.) Still, LaToya Eaves’ wonders if I agree (and thank goddess you asked): “Now that you have some distance, do you think these methodological choices remain appropriate?” Yes, they are good enough methods, because, as Davy wrote, I believe I queerly turned “chaos into method.” Queer-trans life is forced to be chaotic, fleeting, and fragmented under cis-white heteropatriarchal, ableist, racist, settler colonial capitalism. Selecting methods that allowed women and tgncp to tell their stories about fleeting and fragmented spaces was tough so that I blended cross- and within-generational group interviews of lesbians and queers (women and tgncp) with mental maps and artifact sharing exercises, as well as archival research. These methods enabled, at the time and always again when I revisit them, provocations into deep and often “forgotten” memories about places and experiences, across generations, ages, participants, places, and neighborhoods. In a way, they often seemed to make New York City (of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s) come to life when my participants could rebuild it together again in their storytelling. The archival work was a gift because it helped make generalized statements (I think this happened in a bar or a park somewhere in central Queens in the early 1990s, and then there were protests in the Bronx) become detailed, specific events (when Julio Rivera was beaten to death by two young white men in a gay cruising area of Jackson Heights, there were later protests throughout the city to prosecute “gay bashing sprees” that had become normalized). A sort of enlivened, lived, and date-and-place checked reality of chaos come to slivers of sense-making.

Which brings us to another your next question, Eaves: “And are the methods in geography inclusive enough to allow us to probe in different ways for broader representations in/about placemaking?” In my mind, methods are a kind of credential that legitimates us as “doing research.” But if we cannot hear who we are working with and for in our research, an intervention is needed. We are always working harder to improve our connection and understanding with those we study. I also believe wholeheartedly that a broad and adventurous reworking of social science methods (the likes of the 1970s) would be advantageous for research, policy implications, and, most importantly, our participants. This is why I adore mental mapping. I was told all through undergrad and into my masters that I was an awful writer, until one TA took me aside and taught me about Howard Gardner’s (1993) “multiple intelligences theory.” Gardner argues that we aren’t just verbal and linguistic in our learning and thinking, as most schooling assumes, but we also possess, learn, and think through spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, and naturalist intelligences.

Reflecting during data collection and again now upon these bundled methods, that I was able to tell stories in images and words thrilled some participants (and surely frustrated others), but it definitely allowed all of my 47 participants the ability to share experiences beyond just linguistic communications (Gieseking, 2013). How many of our methods still defer to ableist notions of language-first, and white, colonial notions of English first at that? What kinds of language are privileged around race, class, and gender, and when will drop the “fear of an other” to hear them (Eaves, 2020)? And how many of our methods really fit, let alone push back on, a world whose communication has been reshaped by a global pandemic, AI, devices, algorithms, climate change (Knittle, 2022), and rising authoritarianism?

LaToya’s also inquires: “Methodologically speaking, what would be different now?” Oh my gosh! To get to do it over, what I would do?! Well, after energetically pacing about with this in mind for a bit, I decided this is best answered first with a brief story: I once asked my 70-year-old mother and her friends what they would have done differently. My mother, who still reprimands 46-year-old me for using the f-word said, “I wouldn’t have f**king worried all of the time”—and they all chimed in the same with hoots of glee. (Let all of our mothers make theory with us.) That’s the crux of it: I would have worried less, enjoyed my time with my participants more, and let go of the idea that I could or even should control what could happen in interviews or the archival materials I did or didn’t find. And the lack of worrying and self-critique would have had other effects. I believe I would have been bolder about recruiting BIPOC participants in BIPOC spaces, asking in advance for permission to access these spaces and being even more outgoing in them to welcome people into my study. I would have devoted weeks and not days to find Asian (East, South, and Southeast), Middle East and North African (MENA), and Indigenous participants; no participants identified as such in my study. Because how we approach our work is part of the method. To Christian’s point, further ethnographic work a la participant observations—which you take to a new level for geographic thought and theory in Urbanism without Guarantees (Anderson, 2020)—about the places themselves would have offered the reader a greater, thicker state of “being there.” I was so concerned that I’d be creepily watching lezqueers be/do lezqueerness that I missed out on just taking in the places. Learning to do anything makes us nervous and especially grad school at that, but letting go of some worry—particularly when mentors and trusted colleagues tell us they believe in us—is a generous thing, to trust in the self and community.

Of note and on behalf of taking our own advice, I have hung that last sentence above my desk as I work on my Dyke Bars* book and need to stop f**king worrying all of the time about those methods too.

On Doing Work That Is “Challenging, Awkward, or Even Painful”

Your Author Meet Reader panel replies also speak often on the reflexivity, partiality, and participatory qualities of AQNY. Ghassan Moussawi fittingly describes this as “clarity, vulnerability, and care,” and Theodore Davenport also aptly sums up as “challenging, awkward, or even painful.” Amen, brothers. I make many jokes about lesbian-queer life, and whenever I break into lesbian processing with anyone, I come out with a deeply earnest lesbian feminist-esque sentiment of: “I honor you, sister, and I hear your voice.” What I also mean is that there is no joke here. “Lesbian processing” is a cultural (humorous self-reflection), political (radical listening), and economic (of taking up time that may seem “unproductive”; social reproduction, anyone?) intervention and project. (Lesbian feminism also happens to be wildly awesome and deeply geographic (Ketchum, 2023; McKinney, 2020; Samer, 2022).) Lesbian process is all the more radical in a world made of media given in “feeds.” My commitment to a participatory online, private group interview for all 47 participants to reflect on my findings and cowrite theory comes from the hearty wisdom of knowing that lesbian processing is also, as I say in AQNY, theory making (Cowan and Rault, 2020; LeBel, 2022; Rault and Cowan, 2020a, 2020b).

Partiality, too, fuelled the time it took to write the book, and that was not done merely out of self-doubt but, more so, commitment to difference. Gillian Rose congratulates me on my slow scholarship, which was surely because I rewrote the entire book multiple times with a lens for racism and anti-coloniality. I didn’t possess these ways of thinking as a white, American, mostly able-bodied, not-out-to-his-family-about-being-trans grad student so fixated on gender and sexuality, and I read widely and deeply to listen anew. Having attended the CUNY Graduate Center, I couldn’t have helped but be invigorated by the ethics of participatory work, particularly that of the Public Science Project and co-CUNY GC graduate Caitlin Cahill (2007a, cf. 2007b, 2010). Participatory study was required because of my own ethics but also because lesbian, bi, queer, and trans worldmaking—when it is at its best— relies on mutual respect and worldmaking. Part of the slowness was also my dedication to using the archival data, much of which I turned into data visualizations, and those maps are interactive and online thanks to a team of collaborators also named on the An Everyday Queer New York site.

Rose was right to note that my epilogue is a bummer “full of distress.“ I wrote the epilogue as I slipped into my own queer antisocial turn, because I lost the sense of well-being, permanence-enough, trust, and infrastructure (yes, a la Lauren Berlant (2016), as Christian points out) required to live a livable life in having to leave my tenured position at the University of Kentucky (Gieseking, 2023). For a first book, I didn’t yet have the resources to reply to the work in sociology of sexualities (and, notably, given the size of that sub-field, queer anthropology, and queer and trans geographies, we should all be in constant chats). In fact, my arguments in my Greenwich Village chapter are deeply in step with Theodore Greene’s (2014, 2018) research on homeless street youth: that poor and working-class BIPOC and trans bodies get to make the seemingly queer neighborhood, all the while the white, wealthy, cis elite own these places (cf. Hollibaugh and Weiss, 2015). He calls these LGBTQIA+ gayborhood visitors “vicarious citizens;” I would have loved to riff further on that and am excited to do so in the future. I would have enjoyed bringing in Ghassan’s (2020) beautiful concept of “fractal orientalism” into constellations! I took in your ideas in the earlier paper at new depths while reading your beautiful book, Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (alas, our books were both summer 2020 books). (I also wish we had wee fake book parties for us together—can we yet? If you’re reading this, you’re invited.) Ghassan, you examine the relational, colonial, and contingent forms of queer and trans placemaking, but at the scale of the nation state that would have furthered and greatly shapes my own current work.

Looking back, writing the book did make me feel distressed, by which I meant sad, angry, and frustrated, and I wanted to let my anger out as much as I had grieved (and frolicked!) in AQNY. I had again reread (and reread and reread) Audre Lorde’s “Uses of Anger” (1997) and I wanted to make a space for anger in an otherwise hopeful, critical, and balanced text. It is a politics of “practice” and a “politics of injunction” throughout the book as Christian generously frames. But the ending was on a different key when I was so sad and angry for what LGBTQIA2+ people go through everyday, have gone through for generation after generation, and I was finally released from writing on it through the lens of gentrification. It infuriates me that failure defines so much of queer and trans life—according to cis-heteropatriarchal colonial, racist, ableist mores—and that failure makes us feel bad about ourselves. That’s why I chose constellations to frame the book. So here we are at those stars, where we can see lesbians, queers, and trans people shine.

Seeing the Stars for Who We Are

LaToya’s biggest and final question for me is “Do you still find constellations useful?” I do, and I am honored (“a lodestar,” Christian—geesh once more) and also relieved that my conversation partners took to the main concept of constellations. (Right before I published the book, a colleague-friend said, “Wow, you have a lot riding on that one idea,” and after I caught my breath I whispered, “Hell, yes,” to myself and decided to let her fly, just like witches do.) I also am astounded that scholars like Ghassan and LaToya see constellations in your work in Beirut and the rural and suburban US South (Eaves, 2017). I wanted to make a concept that might be able to travel.

It's a yes, Rose, I admit that I wanted to inspire generations of dykes+. I imagined that offering a concept like constellations for lesbian, queer, and trans audience could actually be useful to shift self-understanding and fuel activism. (Notably, lesbians, queers, and trans people read books about lesbians, queers, and trans people; hence we get such a good theory.) I also wanted to stay deeply compassionate to lezqueer experiences in New York City and how these ideas might travel elsewhere. Merely because it’s about New York City (amen to Theodore’s reading of that too), this book is (annoyingly to me too!) more likely to be taught and read and stocked in bookstores because people don’t read books about Kentucky or Beirut or Palestine or Haiti the way they will about the US and Los Angeles and London and Paris. Ugh. I wanted everydyke to see her/his/their experience in these pages, if only for a paragraph. I’ve been using that anger (and “witty humor,” aw thanks, Ghassan!) to write Dyke Bars*: Queer-Trans Spaces for the End Times. I also allow myself to be much funnier (that feels so good!) and more accessible in Dyke Bars*—especially since most of life I’ve hated dyke bars. But we’re obsessed with the queerness of bars like we’re obsessed with the queerness of large global, coastal cities, and I’m obsessed with how the notion of the lesbian bar—which I didn’t have room to address with any nuance in AQNY—is forever bound to so much power, and how the fabulousness of queerness legitimates those cities as “welcoming.” But more on that in the next book!  

Maybe I couldn’t find my anger until I was done writing about constellations as the central concept because it sat shining out to me among such violence, hurt, loss, and sadness through the effects of processes of gentrification. I remember clearly thinking: what would it mean to not work from a queer antisocial turn in the face of ceaseless queer failure (cf. Halberstam, 2011)? What would it mean to turn that frown upside down (a distinct phrase I kept hearing in my mind as I wrote, said most vividly in my mind by Jeffrey the cartoon spokesanimal from Toys “R” Us 1980s commercials) to create empowerment instead? In other words, what would it mean to point out to my people all of the amazing work that we have accomplished in creating cultures, politics, economies, and recognition in a world that does not want us to exist? For generations? I didn’t need to give queer and trans people hope or something like that. I just needed to point out that they were powerful beyond the ideas of themselves meted out by cis-heteropatriarchy, which is the real bummer here.

I only wish I had done more of three things when it comes to constellations: first, I wish I had the room to unpack dyke politics a tad more. A lot of what the concept of constellations offers and/or hopes to offer depends on the dyke politics concept and there’s a lot in there, and I’m attending to that in my Dyke Bars* book. Second, the concept of the myth of neighborhood liberation is the idea I came to at the end of the book and wrote back in, and it deserved more space on the page. Finally, I’d get to Theodore’s gentle, firm, and oh so fair inquires: how do I account for the “absences of trans spaces in the lesbian constellations of NYC”? I see now so much of this book was me coming into my trans identity. When I finished the final proofs, I walked downstairs holding them and wondering what I would do next. As my right foot hit the bottom stair of that wooden floor, I announced to my then partner I was going to start testosterone. (“Sounds good, muffin,” she replied from the couch.) Now, on the one hand, perhaps with too much devotion to my work, I never wanted any trans exclusionary so-called feminist (aka TERF) to refuse the stories of my participants as anything but real if I was not a lesbian. And oh my gosh I am just such a cultural, political, economic, and happy dyke. On the other hand, writing this book simultaneously showed me that my lesbianism/dykedom is only celebrated in my transness.

I am also super stoked I did a few things by constellations! As this series of reviews and others have noted, this is a very urban work. I wish it would be more central to urban geography and not merely branded queer feminist geography. I am also chuffed that I failed to cite who Rose also enjoys I failed to cite, the “‘giants’ of urban theory.” In short, they just don’t get it and they’re not citing the Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, MENA, queer, trans, disabled work that is so utterly brilliant. Those authors are the stars that guide me, always. I swear by Katzian (1996) “minor theory” forever, y’all—and I think critical geography takes it for granted that “paradoxical space” is perhaps forever core to minor geographical theory. Indeed, as you put it, Rose.

Finally, I am truly happy I got to take all the love and support I had in my family and friends, my committee (Cindi Katz, Michelle Fine, and Melissa Wright), and my colleagues to be an out trans lesbian dyke butch scholar who got to write this book. It wasn’t always easy. I was eventually supported by my academic community as an out trans person. One close colleague took 12 years to use my pronouns, and another took 10 to use my name; they were the last to be converted to reality. And it’s not like support for lesbians or anyone under the LGBTQIA2+ spectrum has been rampant! Unlike almost every lesbian I knew in the 2000s who aimed to research lesbian concerns, Cindi Katz never once asked me why I was writing about lesbians or told me I wouldn’t get a job for studying this. And I handled the doubters and naysayers with a deep pleasant ha in my rebuttal: when I was asked hundreds (yes, really) of times: “Why would you write a dissertation on lesbians?,” I replied with eyebrows askance, eyes squinting as if they too didn’t get it, half smiling, and said, “Who doesn’t want to read about lesbians?” To wit, this query perturbed me to no ends, but it was merely another constant reminder of what lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans were and are up against.

Thank you for letting me vent here so I can also hear what good I did, and to be in conversation about one’s own book—what a gift this is, what a gift you all are. I hope everyone has the chance to get to hear the contributions they made and make in their work, and release their hauntings too. I remain forever grateful to all of you for the care and thought that went into these replies. And thank you for getting it all along.

As usual and always,

Jack Jen Gieseking

Acknowledgments

Lisa Cataldo generously sat with me while I drew out my first drafts into symbols, and then she showed me how to find any sort of order in them to rewrite—and I feel certain that, without her support at that time, my entire career as an academic would have been impossible.

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Jack Jen Gieseking (he/they) is Research Fellow at the City Institute of York University. Jack is an environmental psychologist, cultural geographer, queer and trans researcher, and academic coach and book development editor. They are working on their next book, Dyke Bars*: Queer-Trans Spaces for the End Times.