Following from the gaymazing work of sexuality / space theorists, I’m dedicating the next few posts to exploring where (homo)sexuality happens; or more specifically the imaginary sexual life of homosexuality. I’ve been browsing old queer pulp book covers, and there was this beautifully fucked up binary of male / female “queerness in space”; an imagined map of where gayness occurs (most obviously decided upon by the locations of same-sex relations). Beaches, schools, prisons, urban alleyways, apartments, gyms - through the covers of 50s / 60s pulp we can see how “the homosexual” is imagined to occupy particular locations, and therefore, to code particular spaces as homosexual. Are these spaces inhabited by queers, or are the spaces themselves creating queers? I like to think both, and so did this undervalued, painful, joyous, destructive, perverse little genre of literature. I highly recommend Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp as an excellent reference, and follow up with Lee Wallace’s Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lesbianism-Cinema-Space-Apartments-Routledge/dp/0415992435/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1306129689&sr=8-1

Following from the gaymazing work of sexuality / space theorists, I’m dedicating the next few posts to exploring where (homo)sexuality happens; or more specifically the imaginary sexual life of homosexuality. I’ve been browsing old queer pulp book covers, and there was this beautifully fucked up binary of male / female “queerness in space”; an imagined map of where gayness occurs (most obviously decided upon by the locations of same-sex relations). Beaches, schools, prisons, urban alleyways, apartments, gyms - through the covers of 50s / 60s pulp we can see how “the homosexual” is imagined to occupy particular locations, and therefore, to code particular spaces as homosexual. Are these spaces inhabited by queers, or are the spaces themselves creating queers? I like to think both, and so did this undervalued, painful, joyous, destructive, perverse little genre of literature.

I highly recommend Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp as an excellent reference, and follow up with Lee Wallace’s Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lesbianism-Cinema-Space-Apartments-Routledge/dp/0415992435/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1306129689&sr=8-1