Risk! Pleasure! Affirmation!

The city has a long association with same-sex desire and identities, occupying a prime position in the gay imaginary, not only representing a site for queer sexual performance but also offering the potential for the broadening of sexual and emotional relationships. ¹ Critical mass too has played a significant role in the queering of the city. Bob Cant has discussed how queer men and women, having no ‘homeland’ to validate their identities, migrated in numbers to cities, ² and as Henning Bech has discussed: ‘The city is the social world proper of the homosexual, his life space and the vast majority must get out into “the city” one way or another, into the open mass of strangers’. ³ In the years before the proliferation of gay ‘quarters’ or ‘ghettos’, ⁴ the city presented the queer subject with ‘a productive space that generates and stabilizes a new form of selfhood and way of life’. ⁵ The sexual act, if performed, is just one feature of this form of urban spatial engagement, where public spaces acted as locations for the performance, constitution and configuration of queer identities, which are not only sexual in their nature but political. These engagements constitute an ‘affirmation of the self, personality, body politics and identities’. ⁶