A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers by Jen Jack Gieseking

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers by Jen Jack Gieseking Cyd Sturgess A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers. Jen Jack Gieseking. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Pp. ix+307, black & white illustrations, footnotes. $89.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4798-4840-9. $30.00, paperback, ISBN 978-1-4798-3573-7. When German writer Ruth Margarete Roellig charted the lines of what was arguably the first mapping of lesbian urban space in her work Berlin's Lesbian Women (Berlins lesbische Frauen, 1928), she conceived of queer inner-city experience in terms of "Light" and "Shadow." Plotting the Sapphic sites that existed for women in Weimar Berlin, Roellig positioned queer establishments as "radiant, luminous diamonds" that could reflect their light onto areas of the city otherwise steeped in a "mysterious darkness" (quoted in Meyer, Lila Nächte 1981, 41). The [End Page 102] fragile and dynamic nature of queer urban experience reveals itself accordingly, however, in the "strangely soft light" that Roellig claimed characterized the lesbian bars of interwar Berlin: a light that would "dim momentarily, only to flare up once again in a different color" (41). The spatialization of urban sexuality through a framework of "dimming" and "flaring" light, as well as the thematization of its fragmentary nature, has been revived most recently in Jen Jack Gieseking's latest contribution to the fields of critical and queer geography: A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (2020). Framed by celestial metaphors of "stars" and "constellations," Gieseking's study offers a timely intervention into narratives of (queer) gentrification and the enduring effects of settler colonialism, as well as a considered examination of the concomitant complexities of engaging in—and resisting—the "myth of neighborhood liberation" (4). Demarcating the districts of Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights as the principal sites for his study, Gieseking carefully weaves the personal stories of forty-seven interview participants, along with their mind maps and "story sheets," into a much wider sociohistorical tapestry of the economic and political dispossession of lesbian and queers in New York between 1983 and 2008. Situating the concept of the "constellation" at the center of his study, Gieseking seeks to "dislodge lesbians and queers . . . from the lgbtq fixation on neighborhood liberation" (198) and to "fuel new geographical imaginations on behalf of social and spatial justice" (230). First conceptualized by German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and later Theodor Adorno, as a way of theorizing the relationship between ideas and objects, the "constellation" metaphor is deployed in A Queer New York to make manifest the ways in which queerness can be enacted onto urban space to "[make] worlds all at once mythical, imaginary, and physical" (xix). Building on Dianne Chisholm's work Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (2005), Gieseking uses his participants' queer mappings to challenge white settler notions of the neighborhood, embarking on a study that is at once highly personal and deeply political. Indeed, Gieseking—a "white, trans, butch dyke" (48)—appears himself as a subject of analysis, identified among the interview participants as "Jack '91." The date following Gieseking's name forms part of the author's attempts to disrupt linear narratives of queer urban experience. While this approach [End Page 103] results in several interesting multigenerational conversations, "coming out" is rarely marked by a singular event or experience, however. (Indeed, Gieseking's inclusion of participant "Janice '79/'91" implicitly acknowledges this point.) Furthermore, in a study that is keenly aware of its own potential for racial and cultural bias, the focus on the year of "coming out" is all the more surprising given that the concept itself is steeped so heavily in white culture. By reconsidering the privileging of Western trajectories of queer experience, Gieseking may have been able to create further opportunities to explore what Asiel Adan Sanchez (2017) describes as the "silences" that shape queer lives in nonwhite urban contexts. After setting the temporal and geographical parameters for analysis, as well as the reflective and playful tone of the book, Gieseking turns his attention in chapter 2 toward one of "the brightest stars in New York's constellations...