Tracks to gay elsewheres: cultural attachment and spatial imaginaries

Abstract

This article considers how cultural narratives of queer migration to urban centres are understood through media and cultural references that mark specific non-urban places and times. Through an analysis of queer migration narratives in Smalltown Boy (1984), a song and music video by UK band Bronski Beat, and Boytown (2012), its suburban Sydney reimagining by artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen Allkins, I argue that the interconnections between visual, media and cultural artefacts are not merely an additive way to understand queer cultural geographies but rather signal intertwined geographic and aesthetic registers. In Boytown, the explicitly gay lyrics and imagery of Smalltown Boy are paired with other songs and music videos that connote queerness but also directly relate to suburban images of youthful alienation. The attachment to urban narratives and images is supplemented by this distinctly suburban attachment. In this article, I argue that conventional statistical figurations of changes to gay ghettoisation and now well-established critiques of queer urbanity are usefully combined and expanded by considering cultural attachment. This article demonstrates the generative intersection of creative geographies and geographies of sexualities attuned to the queer suburban.