Queer New York

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of GeographersThe first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York CityOver the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home.Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away.Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development.

Jen Jack locates and studies hard-to-find, and still harder to maintain, lesbian and queer spaces and places that were built and also lost over several decades in New York City … Jen Jack works within groups of lesbians who made the places of queer New York: thinking together about how assimilation, gentrification, gay, queer, and trans identities, racism and sexism, and ultimately capital shaped our cities, and the lives we make in them., In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking offers a stunningly trenchant and much needed study of lesbian-queer spaces in the city. He deftly demonstrates how place and belonging can be mapped into lesbian-queer generational shifts. With light, elegant, and sometimes humorous prose combined with an incisive analytical approach, Gieseking showcases the processes of urban emplacement and displacement of lesbian-queer lives and bodies from Greenwich Village to Crown Heights to Park Slope. A fabulous geographical portrait of an-other Big Apple., Plaiting personal testimony, with group interviews and with archival research, A Queer New York is an exemplary study. May its emulators come soon. Yet, although this multimethod approach might prove a paradigm, the clarity and wit of Gieseking’s prose will be more difficult to match. A Queer New York is not only a lodestar for queer geographies but radiates for urban geography more broadly as a brilliant excursus on the lived realities of neoliberal urbanization., The histories and geographies of sexually and gender diverse New York, especially the ones that travel outside of the city, are often told from the limited and limiting perspective of cis white gay men. A Queer New York offers a timely and needed historical geography of the city (1980-2010) that displaces the centrality of these experiences and highlights the role played by lesbians and queers in producing space in the city.

Jen Jack Gieseking is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and editor of The People, Place, and Space Reader.