Queer Infrastructures and Special Relationships: LGBT Activism and Urbanism in the Global City

How have movements for LGBTQ+ rights and equality connected with the governance of cities? How do these populations, and the venues and neighbourhoods they identify with, feature in urban planning and development? Why do mayors march in Pride parades?

New York native Dr Sheldon Applewhite, Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY-BMCC, will open by sharing insights about the importance of visibility and community. Harlem resident Sheldon will also touch on his research into HIV prevention and the challenges faced by LGBT of colour populations.

Ben Campkin, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at UCL, will then further explore these questions, looking at the case of London through the scholarship on gay movements, urban change and ‘queer space’ that has developed internationally across numerous disciplines over the past 60 years.

Using case studies of queer spaces, Ben will bring out connections between scholarship, culture and activism between the US and the UK. He will argue that that individual venues are networked into an adaptive and transnational infrastructure that shifts according to changing frontiers in the politics of gender and sexuality, generational priorities, and institutional socio-economic drivers for diversity.

The Coronavirus pandemic has intensified threats to the survival of cultural venues, especially independent ones and night-time scenes. With this in mind, the lecture will highlight how radical queer spaces, and the practices of urbanism and culture they foster, facilitate utopian imagination, helping to confront local and global challenges, and creating affirmative places for exchange across geographical, political and social divides.

Thursday 24 June, 12pm-1pm EDT | 9am-10am PDT | 5pm-6pm BST