Bryan Ho, Dennis Sharp, 2021

Closet Door, Underground Carriage, Pride Barricade Thresholds of Queer Interiority in the Public Realm HTS Submission: Political Currency of Stereotype Bryan Ho Passing through a discrete red door, I was greeted with a narrow corridor clad in metal panels and a receptionist who, dubious of my age, requested to see my ID. After explaining the rules of the bath house, he charged me £1 and handed me a towel. A set of stairs led down to a changing room, which was part of a much larger double-height space.

Changed into nothing but just a towel wrapped around my waist, I proceeded down into the hall, where over 50 men sat chattering, bathing in the hot tub, all the while gazing at whoever enters the space, like predators watching their prey enter into the arena.

Beyond this hall, another set of stairs led down to a maze, here, the light was dim and the corridors were narrow. It was a maze, but one full of sweat and literal steam.

On top of this sensorial overload were hands reaching out to grab you, intimate but not close enough to become invasive, unless one reciprocates. While there were cubicles for those who desire more privacy, there were also moments where the walls of the labyrinth opened up to accommodate the scene of an orgy.

As I left the bath house, having lost all conceptions of time, I turned a corner through a short passage and within 30 seconds reached the centre of Oxford Street, jammed with jovial Christmas shoppers and confused tourists, the phantasmagoric spaces of the bath house could not be further away.

Having “come out” to my parents, and subsequently close friends two years prior, this other-worldly experience was the first time I had ever engaged physically with my homosexual identity. What compelled me to visit a bath house (Fig.1), however, had

little to do with expressing my queerness as an external façade, but rather the search

for a true interiority where my sexuality can be explored in a comfortable anonymity.

In this essay, I argue that the queer individual’s search for privacy and publicness is characterised by the lack of both these notions in the home and in the city. Through

the act of subverting the normal orders and hierarchies, queer spaces have sought an

interiority denied to them in heteronormative domestic spaces, from the conception of the closet as a harbour of sexuality, the covert body politics of cruising 1 on underground

trains, to the overt branding and place-making of Pride parades in western cities. The thresholds between the interior and exterior take on a variety of spatial configurations Figure 1. Excerpt from Boyz Magazine advertising Sweatbox Soho (a gay bath house) reopening after renovation Chris Jepsen, Portfolio, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.chrisjepson.com/fullscreen-page/comp-jttzevak.

beyond the classical example of the front door of a house. The nuances of these

thresholds speak to the varying permeability of queer self-disclosure and subjectivity vis-a-vis the construction of a collective sexual identity.

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1. The act of seeking anonymous sexual encounters in public spaces.

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I. The Closet Door

Compared to other forms of storage spaces, the closet is a more important repository of

The contemporary narrative of the homosexual experience is inevitably tied to the

and thus they are seen in selective moments when the wearer puts them on and not as a

individual identity. Clothes, as a medium of self-representation, are held in abeyance,

notion of ‘coming out of the closet’, imagined as an emancipatory moment where the

collection. 10 The act of holding in abeyance here should be stressed, as it illustrates the

individual reconciles their ‘true selves’ with their ‘external selves’. The dramatisation

threshold as a mechanism for concealment rather than elimination. Tied with the moral

the individual’s ‘closeted’ and ‘out’ temporalities, whereas in reality the reconciliation

invisible without being eliminated. The popular phrase, skeletons in the closet, implies

of the act of coming out has led to the construction of an illusionary threshold between

impropriety of excessive material accumulation, storage space enables objects to be

of sexual identity with familial relations constitutes more of a constant negotiation

an innate abjection of objects put into storage, for they affect the perceived comfort and

rather than a sudden moment of acceptance. 2 This definitive reading of sexuality is also

hygiene of a room, but is simultaneously indispensable. The need for access is mediated

reflected in the larger inability for bisexuality to be comprehended, as it is considered

by the closet door, which “undermines separation while stabilising difference”. 11 The

“duplicitous because being attracted to men and women supposedly precludes faithful

invention of the closet concurred with the general tendencies of 19th century Euro-

monogamy”. The term homonormative has become recently popularised to describe

American domestic planning to favour greater degrees of privacy, thus it was inevitable

3

the assimilation of homosexual culture into heteronormative society, at the expense of

to be associated with sexual secrecy.

queer culture at large. The closet, as a physical object and an analogous term, plays a 4

primary role as the boundary between the self and the publicness of the home.

In discussing sexuality and intimacy in Adolf Loos’ houses, Beatriz Colomina writes

The notion of interiority, as coined by Walter Benjamin, has a strong opposition to the

clothing/covering that encapsulates the body of the inhabitant. For example, the soft

that his interiors comprised of an “architecture of the womb”, analogous to a form of

exterior. As a manifestation of the anxieties of the 19th century French bourgeois class

furnishings of his wife, Lina’s, bedroom are like a “bag of fur”. 12 The closet challenges

about the modern city, they sought comfort within the domestic interior. The threshold,

the conception of the bedroom as the ultimate private, interior space, for it is still a

therefore, has a central place in introducing the transition into the phantasmagoric interior.

5

space for display, a space curated for an audience. Henry Urbach describes the closet as

The focus on the ‘coming out’ experience can be attributed to the larger

human tendency to conceive of the temporality of life as a series of stages, marked by defined thresholds that are celebrated by ceremony. Arnold van Gennep’s seminal text, ‘The Rites of Passage’, notes the significance and regularities of transitional states in a man’s life. These states, he argued, represent society as a house with rooms and

corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Mary Douglas elaborates 6

on the dangers of transitional states as they are “neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable”.

7

Within this supposed binary of interior and exterior, the threshold

becomes a space that facilitates transgression.

While the domestic interior has been addressed by much literature, with the likes of

Charles Rice and Beatriz Colomina analysing its spatial implications and situation

a space that houses things that threaten to soil the room, just as queer identities threaten 2. Sander de Ridder and Frederik Dhaenens, “Coming Out as Popular Media Practice: The Politics of Queer Youth Coming Out on YouTube”, Digest, Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 6, no.

2 (2019), 43-60.

3. Jordan Schildcrout, “The Closet is a Deathtrap: Bisexuality, Duplicity, and the Rangers of the Closet in the Postmodern Thriller”, Theatre Journal 63, no. 1 (2011), 46.

4. Amin Ghaziani, “Post-Gay Collective Identity Construction”, Social Problems 58, no. 1 (2011), 99-125.

the stability of the heteronormative domestic space. The architectural relationship between the room and the closet thus determines the conflict and struggle between the

two spaces. 13 Urbach further describes the interstitial space between the closet and the room as the ante-closet, an ephemeral state between the self and the other, and a process of selection and change. 14

The ante-closet could be seen in juxtaposition with the dominant “coming out” narrative of the Gay Liberation Movement. The construction of contemporary queer culture as

a linear development originating from the epiphanic events of the 1969 Stonewall Riots is problematised by claims of queerness as a universal condition transcending

cultural and racial boundaries, when the narrative itself purports an inherent western

domesticity operates as a universal definition of a single unit, and that domestic

5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1999).

interactions are somehow ontologically different from any other form of human interaction in the public realm. For queer individuals growing up in heteronormative

6. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (University of Chicago Press: 1950).

the state, societal institutions, and popular culture”. 15 By pushing queer culture into the

familial structures, the closet constitutes an interior within the interior. As a physical

7. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (Routledge: 1966), 97.

space of the bedroom is challenged. I contend that this space is in fact a primary site

addresses the performance of sexuality, as a voyeuristic space where the protagonist

8. Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Routledge: 2007).

10. Henry Urbach, “Closets, Clothes, Disclosure”, Assemblage, no. 30 (1996), 65.

closet can be applied to a variety of scales, from the body to the city.

11. Urbach, 1996, 67.

8

9

within architectural history. Queer theory offers a critique of the assumption that

space, the use of the closet within cinema is notable in the frequency in which it directly hides the closet gazing onto the enactment of scenes of sexuality or violence, while

simultaneously being shielded in secrecy. The closet, therefore, constructs a space

beyond the room, a storage compartment in which the only occasion for human occupation is for a very primal state of retreat from vulnerability.

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subjectivity. Amin Ghaziani posits that “gay life in the western world is so open that it has ‘moved beyond the closet’, despite a persistent privileging of heterosexuality by

public eye, the threshold of the closet is negated, and the purity and authority of the of struggle and vital to the understanding of otherness itself. The metaphor of the ante-

12. Colomina, 1992, 90-93.

9. Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” in Beatriz Colomina ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press: 1992), 83-85.

13. Urbach, 1996, 63.

14. Ibid, 70.

15. Ghaziani, 2011, 99.

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II. The Underground Carriage Personal space, as an intangible construct, has come to characterise experiences of the modern urban condition. Reyner Banham explores Los Angeles as a “palimpsest of transport”, where the automobile provides a strong threshold in the interaction between individuals in a post-urban reality, and acts as an extension of the private interior.

16

Banham’s argument can be extended to the nature of interactions in the ordinary public

realm, that is, urban spaces comprising of pedestrians in the same atmosphere without the separation of a vehicular windscreen. Take the example of a crowded commuter

train in Tokyo at rush hour, although commuters are physically packed shoulder-toshoulder, the spatial proximity does not necessarily translate into social proximity, as

etiquette prohibits any initiation of conversation. The act of cruising in public spaces,

performed by (mostly) gay men, takes on a similar threshold that safeguards anonymity despite the breaking down of spatial distance.

Marc Hargood argued that the invention of the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones

was a reaction against the supposedly democratic and diverse spaces of air travel, where people of the most different national origins and ethnicities concentrate in a placeless, globalised terminal building or aircraft cabin. 17 Hargood quotes the founder

of Bose, “All I could think about was, my gosh, there must be some way of separating things that you don’t want from things that you want.”. 18 Bose’s headphones are thus

marketed as an apparatus to create a private soundscape, albeit a soundscape centred on the consumption of mass media and the elimination of otherness in one’s space.

This separation of sound relates to the broader culture of suppressing embodied co-

presence, favouring the anonymity of transit spaces where the wearing of headphones have become the norm. 19 Charles Stankievech proposes a Cartesian reading of such an

interiority, where headphones become a technological prosthetic that produces a new type of spatial possibility. 20

The cultural acceptability of headphone-wearing following the popularisation of the Walkman and the contemporary omnipresence of smartphones reflects upon the normalisation of solitude in modern cities.

Unlike establishments such as

community centres, bars and dance clubs, cruising spaces are unique amongst the usual

16. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (University of California Press: 2009).

categorisation of queer spaces as they are the most explicit expression of sexuality

17. Marc Hargood, “Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space”, American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011), 573-589.

aforementioned notion of an ante-closet, for it perpetually lingers in a territory between

18. Hargood, 2011, 573.

yet the most reflective of solitary anonymity. The thresholds of cruising is akin to the

exhibition and masquerade. Unlike the politics of coming out, cruising consists of a more

19. Ibid, 587.

legitimate acceptance of sexual identity by mainstream society, communicating sexual

20. Charles Stankievech, “From Strethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity”, Leonardo Music Journal 17 (2007), 55-59.

covert operation of gay self-disclosure. While the opening of the closet door signifies a interest while cruising signifies a more dangerous territory of illegitimacy.

Figure 2. Intimacy and distance: the eerie quietness of Tokyo’s packed commuter trains

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://blog.grainedephotographe.com/photos-metro-tokyoite-michael-wolf/.

21. Paul Roquet, “Acoustics of the One Person Space: Headphone Listening, Detachable Ambience, and the Biaural Prehistory of VR”, Soundscapes (2020).

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Page 7

The conventional list of public spaces where cruising is popular, regardless of which

city one is situated in, does not stray away from bath houses, underused toilets and urban parks. Some specific places have even gain cultural significance, such as Pier 52 of New York City, the site of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (Fig. 2). As liminal spaces

in the inner city, they share a commonality as being the frequent target of “clean-up” efforts by authorities to rid of the supposed reputation of moral trepidation.

22

Within

the queer community, there is also deliberate momentum to move away from being associated with cruising, for it attracts ill-repute that is potentially detrimental towards

political activism and social assimilation. However, one example stands out from this list — the underground carriage, for it does not ascribe any particular geographic place, but rather transient spaces that belong to a perpetually moving network. David Graham photographs the flourishing of a “cruising labyrinth” underneath Mexico City, as the city’s metro system comes alive at late night as a site for homosexual intimacy (Fig. 3).

23

Ironically termed metrear, the host of Mexico City’s LGBTQ themed radio show

described with precision the locations of these train carriages of sex in article detailing the politics of this phenomenon:

“[In the early 1990s], the last train was gay in the night. They used it for sex –

Figure 3. Gay men sunathing and cruisint at Pier 52

blowing, sometimes even f**king (sic) – but in the day when it was full, every

Jonathan Weinberg, Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along New York’s Waterfront, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://whitney.org/events/pier-groups-a-conversation.

metro line had its own car. For example, on Line 1, it was the fourth car near the second door from the back. It was always very specific. Today it is the last car all the time. The cars of the past are less popular and the men are older.” 24 The article then compares Mexico City’s advancing of LGBTQ rights, such as the

legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2009, with the simultaneous crackdown on metrear by the city authorities who closed the last few carriages of trains during late nights. This

was to no avail as cruisers merely moved to other carriages, and facing much opposition from activist groups, the closure was reversed in 2013. 25 In London, a similar situation

came into the public eye in 2019 when three men were charged for public indecency

as a video circulated online of them having intercourse on a Northern line train passing through busy central stations in the presence of other passengers.

26

It is important to

note here that the illegality of the act concerned the fact that it was committed in the view of other passengers, rather than in the space of the train carriage.

Although the Northern line ménage-a-trois seemingly represents the most conspicuous

and literal expression of homosexuality in the public realm, public cruising is paradoxically more associated with closetedness, for these encounters are characterised

by carefully, though perilous, management of discretion and anonymity. This has special significance in the age of prevalent use of mobile dating applications, such as Tinder

or Grindr, which require a personal profile to be published on the digital platform.

Cruising enables one to indulge in homosexual desires without an online evidence trail, Page 8

22. Jonathan Weinberg, Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront (Blackwells: 2019).

23. David Graham, The Last Car: Cruising in Mexico City (Kehrer: 2017).

24. Josh Mentanko, “Queering the Metro in Mexico City: Cruising Public Transit”, Briarpatch, July 7, 2014, https://briarpatchmagazine. com/articles/view/queering-themetro-in-mexico-city.

25. Mentanko, 2014.

26.

Ella Briarwood, “Gay Porn Star Pleads Guilty After Filming Threesome on London Underground”, Pink News, January 14, 2019, https://www.pinknews. co.uk/2019/01/14/gay-pornthreesome-london-underground/.

Figure 4. Homosexual intimacy on Mexico City’s subway trains

Clayton Conn, “Queering the Metro in Mexico City: Cruising Public Transit”, Briarpatch Magazine, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/queeringthe-metro-in-mexico-city.

Page 9

but also without necessarily identifying with the broader queer cultural symbolisms

of bars and dance clubs. Although the individual has “come-out” by revealing their

homosexual propensities through soliciting sex from another individual, the intersection of anonymity, discretion and inherent anti-domesticity of the spatial setting constitutes a form re-instatement of the self-enclosure of the closet. 27 For cruising, by nature, is an

act of secrecy and not one of public proclamation. The queerness stems from the ability to subvert norms about public behaviour and get away with it, as a sort of playfulness that Susan Sontag sees as a defining feature of the culture of camp. 28 II. The Pride Barricade The forces of public shaming and ridicule form the ante-closet of cruising grounds, trapping cruisers between the binaries of sexual liberation and deviancy. The latter of which comprises of a double meaning — firstly, the “deviancy” of homosexual

acts against “family values”, and secondly, the deviancy of the private transgressing

into the public. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, at a time when the United States

Figure 5. Colonnade at Regent’s Street that was removed due to the prevalance of prostitution in that space

was battling major homophobic rhetoric arising out of the AIDS Crisis, against the

“Regent’s Street Colonnade”, IanVisits, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2012/06/07/fantasy-architecture-restore-the-regent-street-colonnade/.

prescription of definitive heterosexual-homosexual identities as a form of minoritising

categorical definition, but rather as part of an array of universally available erotic desires.

29

Secondly, conceived as a grandiose thoroughfare rivalling Haussmann’s Boulevard,

Judith Butler supports this position through deconstructing heterosexuality

and gender as both equally performative identities as homosexual and queer ones.

Intended as critiques to rethink how the gay liberation movement

31

the boundary itself forms the most seminal failure of a central urban planning project

30

in London’s history.

posits itself at a

slums were demolished (Fig. 5).

turn by exploiting the “minoritising identity” as an object of commodification, such as

Unlike space confined by definite walls and structures, place has a much more ambiguous

Although Sedgwick and Butler’s writings are very much situated in a context of strife

and permeable threshold. London’s Pride Parade is a spatial transgression of the queer

and struggle for gay rights, they are still highly relevant as positions to challenge

marriage.

32

The spatial implications of this shift in queer culture are most prominent

at Pride parades, where barricades used to mediate physical confrontations between political protest and policing, now separates the spaces of performer (i.e. the corporate-

sponsored floats) and spectator (i.e. the hundreds of thousands of locals and tourists who flock to see the parade).

27.

Junxi Qian, “Beyond heteronormativity? Gay Cruising, Closeted Experiences and SelfDiscplining Subject in People’s Park, Guangzhou”, Urban Geography 38, no. 5, 771-794.

28. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (Penguin Modern: 1964), 2-11.

29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press Berkeley: 1990).

during the Pride Parade, the usual crowd of scurrying shoppers is replaced with a carnival-

30. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (Routledge: 1993), 307-320.

like atmosphere of intoxicated camp expressions. There is special symbolic significance for the event to be held on Regent Street. Firstly, it marks a boundary between the gay

31. The general socio-political advocacy and activism arising out of the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

(and historically plebeian) enclave of Soho and the elite neighbourhoods of Mayfair.

32. Ghaziani, 2011, 99-125.

Once a year, London’s Regent Street is supposedly transformed into a queer heterotopia

Page 10

The social production of spaces, rebelling against

removed, constituting what Marc Augé termed as an “anthropological place”. 35

“LGBTQ-destinations”, and popularising of drag ball culture by RuPaul.

and neoliberal economics in Western countries following the legalisation of same-sex

34

the architectural pedagogy, remained resilient even as the historical spaces had been

corporate sponsorship and advertising during Pride Week, tourism authorities promoting

introduced to describe the assimilation of queer culture into the heterosexual patriarchy

The monumentality of John Nash’s architecture, intended to

create a “sanitary thoroughfare”, was appropriated back into brothels after the original

crucial historical moment, contemporary queer culture has taken quite the opposite

the dominant narratives of “homonormativity” and “homonationalism” — terms

33

interiority of Soho’s gay enclave, into a space of public proclamation. The sheer mass

of attendees is still a resounding proof of the event’s ability for social mobilisation — for at least the duration of the parade, heterosexuals are outnumbered on the streets. The

idea of “protest normalisation” has been proposed to describe the relationship between the de-radicalisation of Pride and its increasing participation. 36 The spatial organisation of a de-politicised 21st century Pride is remarkably different from the protest struggles

of the 20th century. Instead of a democratised march, floats slowly parade down a

33. Laurel Finn, “Social and Spatial Politics in the Construction of Regent Street”, Journal of Social History 46, no. 2 (2012), 364-360.

approved by the organisers of the event, including many transnational corporations

34. Finn, 2012, 381.

such as HSBC, Apple and Amazon.

35. Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Verso: 1995), 53.

The performativity of Pride is no longer one of active engagement or participation,

36. Abby Peterson, Mattias Wahlström, Magnus Wennerhag, “Normalised Pride? Pride Parade Participants in Six European Countries”, Sexualities 21, no. 7 (2018), 1146-1169.

protected lane along Regent Street bearing the names of organisations that have been

but one of spectatorship. Attendees fulfil the role of an audience, not as activists or

protestors. The thresholds of this queer place, originally dynamic and undefinable, Page 11

are now spatially bound by metal barricades and temporally bound by the organiser’s

specific schedule. The space of the parade, so rigidly defined, is akin to a modern theatre

stage, an elevated platform beyond the reach and scope of the audience. A political

protest, despite the absence of a dedicated spectator stand, addresses a clear external audience, be it the state or the general public. London’s Pride Parade, with its ejection

of participants to the barricaded pavements on the side, has arguably become more introverted and hierarchical (Fig. 6).

Instead of a procession in which everyone can partake in, it introduces the categorisation of those privileged enough to be selected (e.g. to be working in a corporation with a float) and given a special stage to address those jostling for a space along the pavement. The

logistical planning and liaisons corroborated between the organisers, the Metropolitan Police, and the council to minimise disruptions to the city mitigates the value of

threshold transgression. This form of Pride Parade is a mere extension of the already commodified gay enclave, where power is acquired through the ability to consume and produce. Its queerness is consequently undermined by the prescriptiveness and formality of the event’s architectural space (Fig. 7).

Epilogue Figure 6. Crowds gather behind the barricade at Regent Street, as parade floats pass by

Jonathan Brady, “Pride in London organisers fend off pinkwashing claims”, the Guardian, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/06/pride-in-londonorganisers-fend-off-pinkwashing-claims.

At the time of writing of this essay, József Szájer, a far-right Hungarian Member of the

European Parliament who spent his career campaigning for homophobic rhetoric and

legislation, is caught at a 20 person all-male sex party flouting Covid-19 distancing rules.

37

The incident has been touted as a great scandal of hypocrisy, where Szàjer’s

identity was essentially “outed” by the media, for the inconsistency between his actions and the ideas he propagates. As a result of the jarring contradiction between the very

homosexual party and the very homophobic party line, the authority of his entire

political party was called into question. As identity politics continue to shape global

rhetoric, queer spaces play an important role to challenge the integrity of hegemonic spaces. As Susan Sontag aptly describes:

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, antiserious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious”. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious” 38 Queer interiority is one that has been ignored, suppressed, and swept under the rug. Once

the closet door has been opened, and the orderly cleanliness of the room is disturbed, it will be closed again. To conceive of queer space is to constantly negotiate the relational properties between the room and the closet.

Figure 7. British athelete wears a Barclays raindow-striped t-shirt as he attends London Pride on a float sponsored by the bank in 2017 “Daley Flies High at Pride March”, the Times, Accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/news-in-brief-hj8dgl2r3.

37. Shaun Walker, “Hungary’s Rightwing Rulers Downplay MEP ‘Gay Orgy’ Scandal Amid Hypocrisy Accusations”, The Guardian, December 2, 2020, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2020/ dec/02/hungary-rightwing-rulersdownplay-mep-jozsef-szajer-gayorgy-scandal-amid-hypocrisyaccusations.

38. Sontag, 1964, 11.

Page 12

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