Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (review)

On one of our last midtown walks together, my late uncle, who worked for decades as a printer in New York City, observed with distaste that in Bryant Park, outside the New York Public Library, lesbians used to meet and make out publicly. This was well before Bryant Park became the site of Seventh Avenue fashion shows, an upscale restaurant, concerts on the lawn for white-collar employees on their lunch hour, and openly amorous heterosexual couples, oblivious to the intermittent moments of those vanished lesbians. Bryant Park, New York City, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, encapsulates the sorts of urban changes—from queer social spaces with a dangerous edge to places of commodity fetishization—that seem to have propelled Dianne Chisholm on a search for a queer city within avant-garde queer narrative.

Such a search is elicited by the disappearance of in-between, contested, mixed zones inclusive of queer presence and queer cruising. In their stead, high-rises filled with expensive office space or unaffordable condos swallow up the cityscape, even right outside Times Square, now sporting a thin “family values” facade. The seedy and marginal Times Square that housed John Rechy’s cruisers and rent boys as well as the wounded warriors of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is now engulfed by mainstream theaters, cineplexes, and chain restaurants.¹ While in the late 1990s there was a last-ditch resistance effort on 42nd Street by installations artists like Jenny Holzer to contest the juggernaut of real estate capitalism through a marquis project and storefront art, the takeover is now complete. Any urban space not originally occupied by the wealthy and powerful becomes a terra nullius—up for grabs—eventually taken over by real estate capitalism. This process is designated by a vocabulary of class erasure, whether one calls it gentrification, urban renovation, urban renewal, or, more cynically, urban removal, in which working-class and poor denizens of global cities are mere flotsam and jetsam to be displaced always a bit farther and, if at all possible, rendered invisible and forgotten.

Where do queer communities and queer space fit in this capsizing, imploding cityscape? Are they also disappearing with their former blue-collar havens? Today’s urban dwellers can be both powerless and angry witnesses to the vanishing city as well as repositories of fragmented memories, theirs or transmitted by others, queer or not, that recompose a strong picture, full of gaps, of absences, and of connections—a sort of constellation. . . . This is the very term that Chisholm has elected to translate an experience of queer memory and queer remembrance that is not so much nostalgic (nostalgia being a luxury of the well-to-do) as it is melancholic if not deeply mournful.

The writers who are the nexus of Chisholm’s study first appear to document the destructive urban processes that have chased out at once the working class and the economically or socially marginal queer. Their protagonists walk, wander, observe, record, demonstrate, disrupt, and denounce. Their journeys across late-twentieth-century cities witness devastation and ruin—but also excavate the fossil “sites/sights of revolutionary foundations” (249). Ruin, utopia, fetish, and fossil are thus four ways the topography of the queer/ lesbian metropolis can be read. These journeys mostly remain couched in anecdotal or sketchy daily form, but the fragmentation is not dilettantism or incompetence; rather, it translates the enormity of the struggle with the forces that are effectuating the devastation and its speed: in its face, can the city even be remembered except in an urgent, halting, breathless sort of way? These narratives are pressed by a sense of emergency; indeed, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that ‘the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” stated Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”² But these writings escape the limits of the documentary...