Queering Urbanism

Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis G. Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.

“It is challenging to find a book that gives not just an account of a specific place and people but a theory of how queer space works, how it becomes queer. This is that book.” — ROBERT SELF, author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

“This is a timely work that offers insight into a pressing problem not just for San Francisco but for our understanding of cities themselves.” — SUSAN STRYKER, author of Transgender History and codirector of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria

“This lively and illuminating book provides a new and needed history of San Francisco since the 1960s, tracing how LGBTQ people remade public and private spaces while contesting the bounds of normative citizenship. Moving from SROs to renovated Victorians, lesbian bars to community land grants, Yeros revives vital questions about how queer and trans communities remake the cities they call home.” — STEPHEN VIDER, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II

Stathis G. Yeros is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida.