Queer Spaces within Cities

A city is built around its countless number of cultural, social, economic and environmental systems that interact with and learn from one another, each playing a unique and necessary role in the composition and functionality of a city’s complex system.  In order for a city to reach its maximum potential success and effectiveness, its system must be highly adaptable, heterogenous, and autonomous.  Often times, though, the biases and discrimination that exists within our societal norms impede a city’s ability to expand and improve its complex system.  For so long, minority groups such as African Americans, Latinx people, the LGBTQ+ community, etc. have been isolated, denied a space in the larger community, and therefore denied the right to contribute to society’s growth.  In order to delve as deeply as possible into the effects that prejudice and intentional homogeneity have on a city, I will focus on one minority group’s presence and influence on the shaping of New York City: that of the LGBTQ+ community.   In order to understand the relationship between the queer community and the city’s complex system, we must ask some important questions: What constitutes a queer space, where do queer spaces exist, how has the access to queer spaces been regulated or denied in New York City, and how has the modernization of the city affected the normalization or adoption of queerness in society? Using the writings of George Chauncey and Beatriz Colomina, and the perspectives of theorists such as Marx and the Situationists, we can begin to understand the relationship between the built environment and queer communities, along with other minority groups, and how that relationship continues to change and be redefined throughout the shifts from the modernist period to postmodernist period, and beyond.