Queer Sites

Queer Sites surveys ten case studies in San Francisco and along the Pacific coast. These are physical environments characterized by unique aesthetics, discursive structures, and organizational priorities, ranging in size, scope, and attitude toward mainstream culture. The exhibition is organized chronologically covering a period that spans from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s presenting each site through visual material and archival documents. This exhibition reveals the human actors, passions, material experimentation, and grassroots activism that has animated queer sites throughout the brief history presented here. These are examples of desire, loss, resistance, and queer joy in challenging structural oppression that offer insights for queer spatial activism today.

Undoing normative social identities

Queer sites reveal the construction of sexually and gender-nonconforming identities as contingent upon the physical spaces that LGBTQ people have historically inhabited. They then instrumentalize those identities to achieve further social and political goals. It is important to ask, then: How does contemporary identity discourse create blind spots that hinder the recognition of embodied difference, for example, by prioritizing white, middle-class cis-male homosexual identities? And what are the political consequences of these blind spots?

Breaking down binaries

The marginalization of non-normative groups based on their sexual and gender non-binary public cultures has led to displacement and their dispossession of the physical spaces and associated material cultures in US cities. These phenomena have also led to acts of dissent. Complicating pessimist narratives of the inevitability of cultural assimilation, this exhibition asks: Can we think beyond the binaries of inclusion/exclusion, urban/rural, natural/cultural to frame queer and trans dispossession as an ongoing process of cultural erasure that includes within itself the possibility of political dissent?

Thinking with queer archives

Finally, presenting material relating to queer habitation requires acts of discovery and empathic interpretation. To tell the stories of the physical spaces in this exhibition included trips to rural sites and urban archives, talking to scholars and activists, and making decisions about what to show and how. This process raised important questions that scholars of queer and trans life must contend with within their work: How do existing and emergent queer and trans archives communicate affect and meaning? And what would non-binary spatial analysis and design practice look like?

The exhibition is curated by Stathis G. Yeros and Chandra M. Laborde (University of California, Berkeley) with generous support from the Draper Architectural History Fund. The curators want to thank C. Greig Crysler, Susan Stryker, Ari Bible, Ramon Silvestre and Isaac Fellman at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society Archives, Carol Newhouse and Billie Miracle from the WomanShare collective, Carmen Goodyear and Leona Walden from the Country Women magazine, David Eifler at the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Library, John Cunningham and Roddy Williams at the National AIDS Memorial.

Stathis G. Yeros

Chandra M. Laborde

Stathis is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida. He completed his Ph.D. in Architecture (History, Theory, and Society) at the University of California, Berkeley. His work examines how space affects and is affected by struggles for social justice with a focus on contemporary queer culture and politics. He has published essays on transgender and queer place-making and is currently working on his book project, Queering Urbanism: Architecture, Embodiment, and Queer Citizenship. Stathis also holds a Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley, where he was the recipient of a yearlong Branner Traveling Fellowship and has practiced architecture in San Francisco.

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Chandra M. Laborde

Chandra is a Ph.D. student in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies the history of radical environmental communes and queer ecological aesthetics. She holds an M.S. from UC Berkeley, a master’s in advanced architectural design from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and a Bachelors in Architecture from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. She has professional design experience with ecological architecture in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.

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QUEER SITES BAY AREA AND BEYOND

Stathis G. Yeros

Chandra M. Laborde

Chandra M. Laborde

Chandra M. Laborde

Chandra M. Laborde

Chandra M. Laborde

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