“Leather Bars and Luxury Lofts: Memory-Play and the Changing Landscapes of Queer Alabama.” Sarah Chant, The New School for Social Research.
From the late 1960s up until present day, Alabama has been home to over two hundred queer bars and clubs. Many of these spaces have now become Walmarts, warehouses, and parking lots; indistinct places off a six-lane, interstate highway that was once a pot-holed two lane road. On the internet, however, social media users commemorate the queer history of these buildings through uploading photographs and sharing memories in the comments. Unlike the memory-work of urban re-developers who are converting these former bars into luxury lofts and legal firms, what is happening online is more like memory-play, a productive and imaginative process where space/time is warped and alternate worlds are (re)born. Facebook, its own kind of fluid topography, becomes the host of a living archive in which older queer people are storing their memories, intentionally or otherwise, about these now-gone or radically altered spaces. This paper looks at how historically-queer spaces in Alabama, many now demolished or transformed beyond visible recognition, represent in their material forms and digital afterlives an illustrative node of queer southern spacetime. I explore the southern queer regional imaginary (Gopinath 2018) produced through mapping these spaces, demonstrating the digital architectures which rebuild transient or bulldozed bars through practices of collective memory. Using archival research and original ethnographic data, as well as an extensive digital mapping project of over two hundred former queer bars in Alabama, this paper will ultimately illustrate how the “memory-play” and mapping of these once-queer spaces recreates or sustains their material presence in a way which works against the functions of displacement techniques (like gentrification) which threaten many queer spaces in the South.
Sarah Chant is a PhD candidate in anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Her dissertation looks at affective strategies in activism, archiving, and everyday life among queer and trans southerners, specifically in Alabama, with a particular focus on how affects like humor and imagination operate to make claims to belonging in the American South.
“Haunted Houses: Reading the Memory of Surveillance in Gay Bathhouse Design.” Brian Eberle, Stony Brook University.
The death, resurgence, or uncertain status of the gay bathhouse and sauna—locations specifically designated for sex between men—have been themes in popular writing in LGBTQ publications over the past few years. Typically, these pieces lament the decline of bathhouses and depict them nostalgically as transgressive forms of shelter and safe havens from the dangers presented by heteronormative surveillance and violence, especially by law enforcement.
The impulse to view the space of the gay bathhouse through the lens of nostalgia, while not an inherently problematic one, warrants scrutiny. Admittedly, these sites have, historically, functioned to allow men who have sex with men to have sex and build community while sheltering them from violence and oppressive laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. Yet, their interior design often reproduces the same types of surveilled environments to which they have, historically, been seen as safer alternatives. Bathhouses’ realistic and/or stylized recreations of places like public restrooms, baths and saunas, parks, theaters, and prison cells are simulations of the real-life sites that served as necessary, but risky options for men who wanted to engage in sex with one another. While discussions of gay bathhouses are continually complicated and nuanced in historical analyses, these often ignore how the evolution of bathhouse design has internalized and aestheticized the very surveillance that has characterized the conditions of patrons’ oppression. Accordingly, bathhouse scholarship would benefit from a more pointed analysis of how technologies and techniques of surveillance inform bathhouse design. Through a consideration of memoir, marketing materials, art projects, and histories, this exploratory piece piece proposes to sketch that relationship through an examination of the ways that surveillance functions as a form of cultural memory and is embedded and rearticulated in the architecture and space of twentieth and twenty-first century commercial gay bathhouses and saunas.
Brian Eberle is a fourth-year PhD student in the English department at Stony Brook University in New York. While his field of study spans a range of topics related to 20th-century British and American literature, he is particularly interested in the relationship between narrative, nationhood and national boundaries, and literary depictions of space in Modernist fiction.
“Queer Time and Memory in A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.” Lucien Darjeun Meadows, University of Denver.
Time and memory are often queer. They move in nonlinear, recursive, entangled, and viscous ways that question the frameworks of linear time and bounded memory touted by much of western European and Angloamerican culture. Time and memory reach forward and backward across human and ecological bodies, exciting connection—even when laden in elegy and loss.
Published in 1896, A Shropshire Lad by British poet A.E. Housman has never gone out of print, perhaps due to its “almost timeless quality,” as Victoria Alfano (2017) writes. Housman’s brief lyrics steer away from the longer verse popular in the Victorian period and yet are more formal than much of Modernist verse. In this sense, A Shropshire Lad is not “timeless,” or kindred to multiple periods, but time-less, unhoused from either of its adjacent periods. Time unhoused; memory no longer a home.
Yet, despite their time-less-ness from dominant poetic modes, many poems in A Shropshire Lad echo each other. Across these 63 brief poems, Housman’s speaker (distinguished from the writer via the evocative pseudonym “Terence Hearsay”) watches and elegizes—even in the “present” moment—scenes of youthful dancing, soldiers, fields, exchanged glances, and unrequited love. Such nonlinear echoes cause these elements to be remembered even as individual poems are forgotten. In this way, Housman queers time and memory through poetic form to open, contain, and even foreclose expressions of (often same-sex) attraction and desire.
In this presentation, I will invite attendees to consider how Housman’s poems queer time and memory. In so doing, they dissolve linear time, rupture bounded memory, and offer queer temporalities of possibility in the face of almost certain loss. This work complicates dominant notions of social and ecological identities. I will use research on queer futurity and generative time-folds to connect Housman’s poems to implications across our literary community.
Lucien Darjeun Meadows is a scholar of English, German, and Cherokee descent. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, American Alliance of Museums, and National Association for Interpretation, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver, where he is preparing to defend his dissertation, The Queer Ecology of Clouds in Nineteenth-Century British Poetics. (www.lucienmeadows.com)
