Queer Placemaking: Inclusivity in Public Space
Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Expanding the Public Realm for the 2SLGBTQ+ Community
Creating public spaces that include and uplift the queer community means looking beyond cosmetic changes—rainbow flags and crosswalks. For members of the queer community, safe and inclusive access to public spaces is a luxury, not a guarantee.
This feature is part of Fieldnotes, a public art blog series by STEPS that promotes inclusive and innovative public art through interviews, storytelling, case studies, and knowledge sharing.
Historically, public spaces have been contentious sites of negotiation with the homophobic and transphobic attitudes of mainstream society. These attitudes were often supported by criminalization of 2SLGBTQ+ individuals in Canadian law by the classification of their behaviours under vague offences such as gross indecency.
Today, simply to exist as a visibly queer person in public space remains a highly politicized action. Indeed, the positive gains of growing visibility come with the unintentional side-effect of vulnerability and exposure to bigotry and harassment. Recent years have seen a growing tide of anti-2SLGBTQ+ hate, in backlash against strides toward institutional acceptance in the past decades. In 2023, Tennessee, Texas, and Montana passed laws banning the performance of drag in various public spaces, such as schools or libraries—harkening back to anti-cross-dressing laws that have historically been used to criminalize transness and gender nonconformity.
Even when queer people are safe to express themselves freely, public spaces aren’t often designed with them in mind. It’s easy to assume that public spaces have neutral, universal appeal, but public planning and urban design frequently assume a cisgender, heterosexual citizen as their default user. When public spaces do consider queerness, it’s often in the form of a token gesture—a pride flag painted on a sidewalk to signal acceptance. These kinds of interventions do have value in signalling to passersby that, regardless of their own beliefs, they are currently in a queer community. However, the deeper issues of queer spatial access remain unaddressed in the very foundations of public planning and design.
Shades of Queer: Commodification and Pinkwashing
What would a truly queer approach to public space look like? While the term “queer” has historically been used as a pejorative slur against 2SLGBTQ+ people, past decades have seen its broader reclamation as an empowering site of solidarity. Queerness can assert an identity that emphasizes the difference between many 2SLGBTQ+ people and the norms of a predominantly cisgender and heterosexual society.
A rainbow pride flag waves in Washington, DC
Photo Credit: Ted Eytan (License CC BY-SA 2.0)
Today, “queer” has become normalized in mainstream vocabulary, from advertising campaigns to academic papers. Far away from its previous connotations of activism and counterculture subversion, “queer” has become a kind of calling card for a relatively sanitized and palatable solidarity—a storefront decorated with flags for Pride Month, a rainbow can of soda, a sticker declaring a business a safe space.
Instrumentalization of queer symbolism without an active commitment to equity typifies pinkwashing or rainbow-washing, the practice of strategically deploying superficially “pro-LGBT” messages in order to promote a completely unrelated agenda. Queerness becomes either a mere rhetorical prop in an unrelated debate or a commodity to entice queer customers.
In this context, it can be difficult to remember that queerness is not simply a label to categorize media and lifestyle products. Marketing reduces queerness to the most generic form, a commodifiable and homogenous rainbow buyer. However, the identity of queerness, which encompasses a diverse and heterogeneous range of sexuality and gender, is a matter of political solidarity, of forming a community in order to organize for resources and legal protections—for the right to exist in public.
By catering primarily to the consumer, this queering of space neglects many of the most pressing issues concerning the queer community. The most vulnerable members of the community—the ones who most urgently need safe and inclusive access to public space—are not the ones whose disposable incomes are targeted by corporate pinkwashing. Despite a common belief that queer people are more affluent due to less money spent on childcare, the average income of 2SLGBTQ+ individuals is lower than that of their straight counterparts. In Canada, 2SLGBTQ+ youth experience homelessness at a significantly higher rate than other youth demographics and must additionally contend with homophobia and transphobia in shelters.
In contrast to the generic brush of rainbow marketing, queering public space should address the diverse concerns and needs of a heterogeneous community. Superficial declarations of allyship and support are not enough to contend with the transphobia and homophobia that people encounter in their day-to-day lives. Indeed, the focus on generic and performative queer-friendliness also covers up the issues such as racism, colonization, and economic inequality that intersect with the struggles of the queer community.
One queer art installation that brings diverse perspectives to the creation of public spaces is Queering Place, a project by former Toronto community arts organization SKETCH Working Arts. Guided by Indigenous teachings about the land, 2SQTBIPOC Artist-Stewards created a series of planter installations to nurture pollinator species and serve as a gathering space for two-spirit, trans, and queer youth. Engaging the deeply intertwined relationship between queer communities and the environment, Queering Place provides space to explore nuances of queerness in the unexpected realm of nature and biodiversity.
To make authentic and meaningful queer spaces, the goal should not be to improve the optics of an organization or institution. Instead, these spaces should address specific material and emotional needs of the most underserved members of the queer community.
Gaybourhoods and Beyond: Making Place in the Time of Gentrification
Considering the historical lack of queer-friendly spaces, it is perhaps unsurprising that 2SLGBTQ+ people have always created their own communities and support networks. One prime example is the urban queer enclave, also known as the gaybourhood or the gay village. These gathering places of 2SLGBTQ+ residents and visitors often include many queer-oriented establishments, such as gay bars and nightclubs.
Generally, these enclaves initially developed in lower-income areas with affordable cost-of-living, but the transformation of these neighbourhoods has often resulted in gentrification, due to the cultural and touristic appeal of the “gay village.” Consequently, rising rent costs price out the lower-income residents of the area—as well as historical queer businesses and independent ventures, resulting in more mainstream, more corporatized, and less queer streets. In these cases, while affluent queer urbanites remain, the most vulnerable members of the community do not have the economic means to access the resources of the gaybourhood.
One example of gentrification’s impact can be found in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood of Toronto, a queer urban enclave home to the world’s oldest 2SLGBTQ+ bookstore, Glad Day Bookshop. A vibrant queer third space, the bookstore is known for hosting frequent cultural events such as drag brunches, poetry readings, and film screenings. Due to high rent costs in the area, Glad Day Bookshop faced the possibility of eviction in June 2024, but was saved by an outpouring of donations from the community. However, the future of this queer cultural fixture remains uncertain, and Glad Day continues to fundraise in hopes of securing a more stable future.
While urban queer enclaves remain valuable sites of queer heritage and community, their existence is difficult to extricate from the frequent side-effect of gentrification that displaces those neighbourhoods’ lower-income residents. Furthermore, the continued existence of these enclaves is precarious as gentrification continues to displace queer-oriented gathering spaces and businesses.
The permanent gaybourhood is not the only possibility for queer-oriented spaces and communities. One more affordable method for creating queer spaces is through temporary pop-up installations and events. Queer pop-ups have the potential to activate transgressive temporary gathering places for queer people who may feel excluded by more mainstream queer spaces, such as many trans and BIPOC queer people. While permanent establishments often need to attract an affluent customer base to keep up with rent and other costs, pop-up events can be stranger, nicher, and more inventive, providing novel experiences that queer in more than one sense.
What do queer pop-ups look like in practice? A 2021 STEPS CreateSpace Public Art Residency project, Queer Gardens: Pleasure in 4 Bases, was a temporary art activation transforming public space in Downtown Halifax into a site of queer connection and pleasure. In collaboration with emerging artists Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Wren Tian-Morris, and Excel Garay, artist-in-residence Arjun Lal organized an art show and community barbecue to explore and celebrate diverse expressions of queer relationships. By bringing queerness into everyday spaces, projects like Queer Gardens assert the belonging of queerness in all parts of our communities, the gaybourhood, and beyond.
Queer Urbanism: Designing the Inclusive City
In a society that marginalizes the needs of its 2SLGBTQ+ members, how do we build queer belonging into all public spaces? A research collaboration between sustainability consultancy Arup and the University of Westminster, “Queering Public Space” presents three primary guidelines for queering urban design: prioritization of safety, design of certain spaces oriented towards specific queer needs (such as those of queer seniors without children) rather than heteronormative nuclear families, and visible inclusivity through markers and celebrations of queerness.
For queer urbanites, safety might not look quite the same as it does for other city-goers. As the report explains, public spaces are “policed in ways which often actively target non-heterosexual activities, accommodating heterosexual desire and romantic encounters while interdicting others.” Thus, in contrast to the status quo of public spaces of surveillance, where the visibility of actions will supposedly deter disorderly acts because of the watchful presence of the police and others, safety for queer people in public space often means the presence of semi-private spaces, refuge from the judgement and gaze of the general public.
The problem of safety is also crucial in designing gender-inclusive washrooms and change rooms. Intentional or otherwise, the lack of safe and accessible public washrooms for trans people can become a “urinary leash,” a tether that restricts trans mobility in public space to those few places where safe washrooms are available. Public washrooms are just one example of the purportedly open spaces that are often hostile to trans people, which also include many women’s spaces that restrict access to trans women.
With decades or even centuries of city infrastructure built with the heteronormative family in mind, transforming public spaces to include queer community members requires a change of mindset, a willingness to challenge assumptions and defaults of good design. To that end, the immediately actionable path for improving the queer-friendliness of public spaces is through the inclusion of 2SLGBTQ+ voices in all levels of planning and design.
Making a Statement: 2SLGBTQ+ Voices in Public Art
Public art has always had an integral role in sharing queer stories. During the 1980s AIDS crisis, projects like the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt raised awareness and publicly asserted grief and love for those considered unmournable by the broader, heterosexual society. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call these kinds of projects counter public art, created against mainstream sensibilities and resisting the regulation of an exclusive and discriminatory public realm. Today, public art remains vital to unearthing the expressions of queerness swept out of the public eye—or hidden by mainstream stereotypes of what it means to be queer.
For some of us, queer public art means excavating the unarticulated queer stories of the past, especially in the public realm from which such stories were barred. In 2020, the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery premiered the temporary exhibition One Queer City, which explores the heterogeneous range of queer identities and the importance of representation in the public realm. The exhibition builds upon One Gay City, a not-quite-realized public art project by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan consisting of a series of transit shelter posters with the slogan “Winnipeg: One Gay City!”
Dayna Danger, Sisters, 2015/2020, digital print.
Photo Credit: Kristiane Church, courtesy of the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba.
Back in 1997, the posters were never installed due to opposition from the ad agency responsible for the bus shelters. Two decades later, the perception of gayness in the mainstream has shifted enough that the posters took their intended place. However, that does not mean the struggle for queer belonging in public spaces is over. Rather, we can look to these exclusive practices in recent history in order to reflect on the types of queerness that are targeted in today’s public forums.
Queer survival, queer resilience, and queer joy: diverse and authentic public art can remind us that queer thriving belongs right in the midst of the public realm.
About the Writer
Wenying Wu (she/her) is a student of English and Chinese literature beginning her MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto in September of 2024. Her research interests include science fiction, body horror, and the representation of dreams. Wenying was the Cultural Content Writer at STEPS during the 2024 summer season.
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