Feb 15 • 10M

Audiences

Notes Towards a Gay Urbanism

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Huw Lemmey
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I learned recently that tinyletter, the email newsletter subscription service, was soon to close, which is something of an end of an era. Services like tinyletter bridged the lacuna between the golden era of blogging and our current age of subscription newsletter, something a little more professional although a little less charming that has again changed the form and the economics of writing online. This very newsletter started its life on a tinyletter I ran, and which many of you subscribed to, back in the day. To mark its demise at the end of this month, I thought I’d post one of my favourite pieces from that tinyletter, a piece that addresses cities, homosexuality, and a critic who remains of great interest to me, the late Herbert Muschamp. Enjoy.

In his history of Edward Durrell Stone’s design for 2 Columbus Circle, New York City, built in 1964 to house the Gallery of Modern Art (GMA), the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp offers an critical examination of the role a “gay audience” played in establishing an alternative narrative to modernism in the city.

In fractious dialogue with the Museum of Modern Art, the collection housed at the GMA gave new significance and space to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists, disrupting the Greenbergian hegemony of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the city at the time. The All American Men of Abstract Expressionism produced an All-American Art: “the dominance of Abstract Expressionism over Surrealism looked a lot like the dynamic between high school jocks and the fairies they'd tortured”, he notes. The GMA, in contrast, provided a home for the fairies; a place where the overlooked aesthetic and political nuances of neglected and decorative movements could find their viewer.

2 Columbus Circle then :)

A gay audience, as in the architecture of 2 Columbus Circle as well as the gallery itself, produced not a reactionary yearning for the past, but a complication of the monolithic International Style that dominated New York architecture at the time, recognising that complexities, outliers and deviations tell us as much about our culture as the hegemonic aesthetic regime. Both building and collection, he wrote,

ran counter to the prevailing standards of High Modern taste with which the city asserted its postwar hegemony in the arts.

What these phenomena had in common was audience appeal - an appeal to the varieties of desire and conflict, to show biz, to memory, and above all to the open-ended heterogeneity of city life. You didn't see that in the perpetual reiteration of abstract paintings and glass towers.

These counter-positions to modernism's restrictive codes needed a stage, and a stage requires an audience attuned to the creative logic behind seemingly wanton events and who seizes the opportunity to help shape its own moment in time. That is where gay men came in.

To me, it’s a wonderful piece of criticism; it offers complications to the narrative of the culture of a city, and to New York’s planning specifically, whilst still offering a passionate, potent and witty defence of all that is great about urban life at a time when the trend was to encourage the shrinking of cities. “By the standards of Eisenhower's America,” Muschamp writes,

gay taste was perverse. In hindsight, it seems more like a corrective to the far greater perversity of postwar "progress." What kind of normality was it to imagine that abandoning American cities was a good thing to do? Goodbye, cities! Adiós, civilization! Good riddance to the repository of cultural memory, the incubator of ideas, the heartbeat of humankind.

Upon first reading it, thrilling to its tone, by turns learned and shady, I felt its focus on a gay audience and its relationship with a city’s cultural history illuminated an important division for me in my own writing. It felt natural, when I started writing about the subject of cities and homosexuality, to call it a “queer urbanism”, or “queer psychogeography”. The phrase felt more inclusive, and trendy, like I was taking into account the broad variety positions and subjects that we now know recognise. But perhaps a “gay urbanism” is more accurate, more honest.

Queer to me is not an identity, but an approach to identities. Queer is about undermining a fixed homosexual subject as the production of a heterosexual form of discipline; it is about positionality. Gay, on the other hand, is about the production of that identity within heterosexual discipline. “The elaborating of certain erotic preferences into a “character” – into a kind of erotically determined essence – can never be a disinterested scientific enterprise” wrote Leo Bersani (adopting a voice) in his introduction to Homos – “The attempted stabilizing of identity is inherently a disciplinary project.” But, like Bersani continues, there is nonetheless political and cultural value in that elaboration, and the “discrediting of a specific gay identity...has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal”.

An urban gayness is the product of a shared history and culture, diverse yet with a specific focus, passed down largely through the oral tradition and through a complex ecosystem of cultural production, through art and theatre, through camp and through political agitation. To me, the queer is a forward-looking and utopian political project aiming to undermine the secure subject position, to disrupt the regime of gender and sexuality categorization that is used to punish the deviant. I’m drawn to that political project, but I have always been someone who can only see the world I live in through the spectres of history. The gay, then – the specific and contingent, the flawed and corrupt, the lost and still living – holds me in its grip when it comes to my approach to the city. It illuminates the city and culture in the explication of its very prejudices.

2 Columbus Circle now :(

A gay urbanism understands the city through an approach that is askew to the mainstream, the heterosexual, the planned, but contingent upon it, existing as a lived experience only in relation to the attempts at control, order, and policing. I think that the historical imagination is ideally suited to the specifics of the gay city, rather than the political projections of the queer city. Please do not read this as a reactionary attitude towards the queer – or, at least, please accept my apologies as I search for the value in the specifics, and try to disrupt me if you will. Bersani continues:

We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us. The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. If many gays now reject a homosexual identity as it has been elaborated for gays by others, the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance.

In historical specifics we can understand better a gay relation to the city as the city relates to gays. The city and homosexuality are almost coterminous in both history, homosexuality as a category emerging out of bourgeois moral panics of the new sexual conditions created by urbanisation, and physically, with urban centres providing the unique mix of darkness and light needed to generate a resistant sexual subculture. From those temporal and physical specificities emerge the stories necessary to create the contradictions and counter-narratives that offer alternatives, in the same way that the contesting cultures of cities provide counternarratives to the isolation of rural fags who find themselves drawn to urban spaces.

As Muschamp elaborates, those contingent new cultures of cities produce not just artists, or performers, but also new audiences. Audiences are themselves silos of memories and references, and are the catalyst that produces meaning and takes it out, from inside the galleries or clubs or theatres, into the world, in order to change perspectives, to change urban space. “In the 60's, the space of the audience expanded from the theater to the city at large. The energy that flowed into that setting was driven by adolescent hormones. We were eager to attach ourselves not only to one another but to the streets.”

Perhaps in further exploring our relationship with the city as a specifically gay experience, we can understand ourselves as an important receptive and productive audience. The AIDS crisis represented both a massive loss of, and a discontinuity in the oral culture that helped created, a gay audience. Muschamp laments this loss as being under-recognised in its significance:

Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?

Those memories were never recounted to younger gays like myself; the skills never transferred, the slow realisation of the impact of urban histories on our senses of self having to be learnt from experience, rather than taught from experience. In picking up the pieces of our specific histories, we can produce challenges to a hegemonic regime which wishes to plaster our city in glass facades, much like they’ve done to 2 Columbus Circle, covering up the distasteful Venetian motifs, the Tiffany lamps, the dirty gay bars, the darkened nooks and crannies, the complex counter-histories to capitalism that don’t sell well but produce lives and loves and meanings and memories. Muschamp understands that “a vibrant city is perpetually recreated from the emotional depths, and from our socialized capacity to empathize with the memories of others”, and in remembering we can recreate our cities too.

Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this essay on the quality of phone screentime, this piece on Orton and Halliwell, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

In Search of Lost Screentime

Dec 6, 2023 • 8M

Bad Streets

Conceits and Conduits

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-7:57
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Huw Lemmey
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Half Price Subscription Sale! It’s Christmas coming up, so I thought I’d give a special offer to new subscribers to Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel. If you subscribe to my newsletter this month you’ll get a full 50% off an annual subscription. Treat yourself, or why not get a gift subscription for a friend who loves reading but already has too much clutter? To take advantage of this half price offer (and support independent writers), click the button below. Thanks, Huw

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The Convent of Santa Madrona, which stood where Plaça Reial now sits

Some streets are good streets. Some streets are bad streets. I don’t why but I do know the difference. Some streets are cut-throughs. All streets are cut-throughs, really; even a cul-de-sac takes you somewhere. Their job is to link. But cut-throughs are even more linky than regular links, like the terrace back alley I used to walk down as a kid, taking me from my street down to the newsagents where once I bought sweets, and then Hooch Lemon. Those streets linked me to all kinds of fucked up. That’s where streets take you: to memories. It’s one of those Morrissey lyrics you’ll never be able to expunge, thank god, but I would rather not go back to the old house.

So this morning I was waiting at the haberdashery on Carrer de Francesc Pujol. In the square in front is an excavation of the tombs of Roman citizens buried along the road that left the city two thousand years ago. Romans always buried their dead on the roads outside the city walls, I believe. The haberdashers is a traditional shop, with racks of wooden drawers and shelves filled with reams of cloth samples and boxes of pins. Ahead of me each little old lady was ordering a few little things: a sample of offcuts used for quilting, a new set of needles for a sewing machine, and so on. Each one would order an item, and the shopkeeper would disappear into the back room and reappear, perhaps with a roll of cloth in hand, which he would lay on the long, dark wooden counter and unroll. With a pair of pinking shears and a wooden metre rule he’d cut the required length, then ask the old lady, in Catalan, “alguna cosa més?” - “anything else?” And there would be something else, and then something more. And with each lady the shopkeeper would exchange a few words, and then the lady would exchange a few words with another lady stood in the shop, and then would leave, and the second lady would walk to the counter and begin the whole process again. I stood leaning on a pillar, a bundle of bobbins and reels in my hand, feeling that strange sensation of frustration arising, a sort of pins and needles of the soul. But then I realised, and set myself straight. If, through the twists and turns of your fate, you’ve found yourself waiting in a haberdasher’s shop on a Monday morning, nothing in your life can be that urgent that you can’t wait your turn. So I wait.

Just off Carrer Ferran is a street that’s always been bad. That’s not something empirical, of course. Nor is it something negative; I like it, as a bad street, dark even though it’s well lit, too thin for anything much wider that a bicycle, quiet, and long, with no side exits. Its false prospect seems born from the fact that Plaça Reial was built much later than the surrounding neighbourhood, a 19th century bourgeois conceit fucked into the mediaeval city, to paraphrase Owen Hatherley on the Shard. Well, that’s how cities work; sometimes here the urban metaphors are a little too on the nose. The pretty neoclassical square replaced the Capuchin Convent of Santa Madrona (itself only early 18th century), the new order subsuming the old, just as Via Laietana, the broad avenue linking the homes of the new bourgeoisie in the extension district uptown with their warehouses at the ports, was smashed through the neighbourhood in which the mediaeval guilds had long resided. But this bad street has been here since the Romans, I reckon, with remnants of the city wall found at its edges, and since it’s held lionesses and women of the night, and all inbetween. It backs on to an old nightclub, one built as the dictatorship crumbled, and one that became a nail in it, a nail with all the threads of the counterculture snagging on to it. As I walked down it a few nights ago I walked down the bad street and saw a man stood, bent over against the wall by the nightclub fire escape. He leant his head against his arm, his leather sleeve a little cushion against the swaying stone. He rocked like he was on a ship. As we passed, we heard that unmistakable sound, when the stomach overrides the limits of the body and the throat opens to release a thick, heavy jet of vomit and bile. Flush, pause, flush, pause, flush. Across the feet, his shoes, and rising into the air, a miasma of acidic vodka painted the surfaces. He would still smell of it in the morning, but the street would be cleaned.

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The plan of the convent overlayed over the street plan for the neoclassical plaça. Carrer Ferran was called Calle de Fernando VII

I arrived at my office on Plaça Reial a little after 11am, later than I had wanted. I sat at my desk and answered the emails that had accrued over the weekend. Pati, the little cat who lives in the office, was padding at my chest. The grim grey cloud that had loomed over the city when I left the house had dissipated and I looked out of the window of my office, which sits in a little attic on the top floor, onto the rhomboid of crisp blue sky that the neoclassical square frames. Around the top of the winter palms seagulls swooped and pigeons fluttered. As I looked back to my work, I got the sudden sense of commotion, perhaps in the corner of my eye. Like when there’s a fight on the very verge of kicking off on the street, sometimes you just sense in your shoulders that something is happening. I looked up and directly in front of my window, on the deep ledge overlooking the square, a seagull had a pigeon pinned to the stone. With an unexpected rigour he was pushing his beak deeper into the chest of the little bird, who, by the time I realised the gravity of the situation, was making his last moments on this earth, a few aggressive but stilted flaps of its wings, attempting to pound against the body of the gull. The enormous seagull had broken through the pigeon’s ribcage and had plucked its heart from its chest. Then it left back into the big blue square. I summoned the courage to assess the grizzly scene, but it was surprisingly bloodless, almost surgical: a small impact wound exactly in the middle of its broad, fluffy chest, and no heart, and its quiet, sad little face resting on the cold slab, eyes now closed to the winter, and that was all that. Another memory.

These linking streets in my mind are all dead ends recently. Old sadnesses bring old depressions. When I walk through the city I get a taste of what life had been for me. This restaurant here, the smile of a drunken friend in love, that corner there, a debt I had to pay. Up here an apartment where I had sex with a tourist, and there where I bought a bag of drugs, even though this morning everything is closed for Constitution Day. This is what makes streets, cities, the urb. It’s why I love some given neighbourhood, even though I remember my own vile sensation of vomit streaming through my own body, and why I can’t visit other ones, even though my mother held my hand there — or maybe not though, but because. Sometimes the streets don’t fit together in our minds; you take one thinking you know where it comes out, and you find yourself in a place you never wanted to be. So things close down. For others, it’s a public holiday, but for you, wanting to live, it’s just a row of shuttered stores. 

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If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this short story, “The Fantasist”, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, this one on “normalising everything”, this piece on Vox and homonationalism, and this essay on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

The Fantasist

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