The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
‘Homosexual behaviours challenged the state’s control over morality in public space’ writes Huw Lemmey in the AR in 2019, ‘and that was made possible because of the de facto absence of private space for gay men within it. If the police can nab you in bed just as easily as in the toilet stall, privacy doesn’t really exist.’
This week’s Reading List considers queer geographies and the boundaries and margins that can serve to both liberate and contain. Observing the edge between public and private, and where that limit is pushed and pulled, we revisit stories of sanction, liberation and upheaval – finding the spaces of freedom that have been carved out or repression and tyranny. We look to where these stories touch down on access to housing, community and privacy, and where these become entangle to shape lives – and sex lives.
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Queer growth: peace and refuge in the garden, AR February 2020, Joe Crowdy
‘These two gardens were both isolated havens, whether from Victorian morality and industrialisation or Thatcherite politics and AIDS hysteria’
Outrage: the prejudice against queer aesthetics, AR March 2019, Adam Nathaniel Furman
‘Marginal groups and identities are tolerated but restricted to private spaces, with any forms of spatial expression kept from the easily outraged gaze of the wider public’
Flights of fancy: masculinity in airspace, AR March 2020, Cassandre Greenberg
‘Like a spectre that haunts the aisles, the air hostess and her domesticated cabin, the male captain at the helm, persist in the cultural imaginary’
Queer gothic: architecture, gender and desire, AR January 2015, Ayla Lepine
‘This sudden pause in the laughter signalled the most outrageously camp gesture of all: taking Gothic seriously’
Cruise control: Moscow’s homosexual hang-outs, AR June 2014, Tom Wilkinson
‘Public love, like other proscribed uses of the city, such as political protest, is gradually being squeezed out by neoliberal planners’
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican, AR March 2020, Elise Limon
‘The conflicting, fluid, slippery ideas of what the masculine constitutes are imprecise, contesting to its irreducibility to the constraints of precise theoretical concepts’
Out of space: changing homosexual geographies, AR March 2019, Huw Lemmey
‘For gay men, the sharp delineation between public and private space has never existed’
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