LGBTQ America

The Preservation of LGBTQ Heritage
preservation on the queer planning agenda. 92 Beyond professional
associations, citizen planners began to organize in the mid-1990s to
protect queer interests in gay neighborhoods facing runaway development
pressures, for example the Bay Area group Castro Area Planning +
Action. 93
The intellectual foundations for efforts to map queer space have been
reinforced by academic work at the intersection of geography and urban
and regional planning, as spatially-oriented social scientists began in the
1990s to engage with sexuality as a category of analysis in addition to
race, class, and gender. 94 While early architectural publications tilted
toward the experiences of white gay men, geography proved to be more
inclusive of the spatial dimensions of lesbian lives. 95 Within the
Association of American Geographers (AAG), the specialty group Sexuality
and Space formed in 1996, arising out of serious concern about the
92
Early and influential articles explaining the import of LGBTQ populations for planning practice
included: Ann Forsyth, “Sexuality and Space: Nonconformist Populations and Planning Practice,”
Journal of Planning Literature 15, no. 3 (2001): 339-358; and Michael Frisch, “Planning as a
Heterosexist Project,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21, no. 3 (March 2002): 264-266.
The edited volumes by Petra L. Doan include: Queerying Planning: Challenging Heteronormative
Assumptions and Reframing Planning Practice (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Planning and LGBTQ
Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2015).
93
Anthony, Designing for Diversity, 105.
94
Influential early work on the geography of LGBTQ communities included: Sy Adler and Johanna
Brenner, “Gender and Space: Lesbians and Gay Men in the City,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 16, no. 1 (March 1992): 24-34; David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Gill Valentine’s article, “Out and About: Geographies of Lesbian
Landscapes,” also published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19, no. 1
(1995): 96-111; and Ruth Fincher and Jane M. Jacobs, eds., Cities of Difference (New York: The
Guilford Press, 1998).
95
Examples of scholarship in the geography of LGBTQ communities include: Adler and Brenner,
“Gender and Space: Lesbians and Gay Men in the City”; Bell and Valentine, Mapping Desire; Valentine,
“Out and About: Geographies of Lesbian Landscapes”; Fincher and Jacobs, Cities of Difference; James
T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Post Stonewall South (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Michael Brown and Larry Knopp, “Queer Cultural
Geographies: We’re Here! We’re Queer! We’re Over There Too!” in The Handbook of Cultural
Geography, eds. Kay Anderson et al. (London: Sage, 2002), 460-481; Charles I. Nero, “Why Are the
Gay Ghettos White?” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 228-245; Michael Brown and Larry Knopp,
“Queering the Map: The Productive Tensions of Colliding Epistemologies,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 98, no. 1 (March 2008): 40-58; and Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry
Knopp, "Queering Gay Space," in Seattle Geographies, eds. Michael Brown and Richard Morrill
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 155-162; J. Gieseking, “Crossing Over into Territories
of the Body: Urban Territories, Borders, and Lesbian-Queer Bodies in New York City,” Area,
doi: 10.1111/area.12147.
05-35