The first rainbow crosswalk ever in Taylor Square in Sydney by Bidgee licensed under Creative Commons.

For the vast majority of queer people, cities serve as the backdrop for the first time they find safety, community, and romance, but do we queers only flock to urban spaces for the relative acceptance they provide or does our love affair go deeper — to the unique ways cities allow us to live, move, and connect?

Anyone who’s attended an urbanist happy hour, participated in a YIMBY campaign, or dipped into the world of transit Twitter has likely noticed a large LGBTQIA+ presence. Even here at GGWash our editors, organizers, contributors, board members, writers, and correspondents form quite the impressive line up of queer folks. The litany of anecdotal evidence begs the question: why do queers love urbanism?

Why here, queer?

“Queer people hate cars,” said Matthew Sampson, a Deaf, queer activist and Commissioner of DC’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 2B01, referencing perhaps the most hilarious reason pop culture frequently cites as to why queer people lean towards big city living.

“It’s the ultimate joke with my friends that I don’t drive or am afraid of cars,” said Adam Lockett—a gay undergrad at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who founded the Student Transit Collective. “Every time a bus goes by my friends yell at me: ‘Oh my god, Adam! Someone stole your car!”

Some of our community’s relative distaste for and inability to drive is just the funniest part of what has become a familiar tale our culture tells about the gay experience. “The queer story for a very long time has been escaping the rural village for the big city; that’s a trope in western gay media whether it’s DC or Berlin,” Sampson said. “Rural gays exist and are legitimate, but the big narrative in the public mind is one of leaving rural spaces for more accepting urban spaces.”

The trope couldn’t ring truer for Randy Downs, the ANC2B Commissioner running to represent Ward 2 on the DC City Council — a race that, should he win, will make him the only openly queer member of the capital’s legislature. “Coming from rural Missouri, DC was a place where I could live my authentic life and be who I wanted to be. That’s just something I couldn’t do in Missouri. Cities are much safer for queer folks than other places.”

That safety, however, is all too often dependent upon our degree of deviation from American society’s long-held ideal: white, cisgender, straight, male, and middle class or higher. “It’s hard enough to be a Black person without adding all the other layers on top of that,” said Kristen Jeffers, founder and editor of the Black Urbanist. “As Black women we constantly have to pay attention to where we are; even in Black neighborhoods there’s no guarantee of protection for us.”

That’s why Jeffers, a queer, femme-passing Washingtonian, only came out publicly in a blog post last month. Although society is undergoing a dramatic change in attitudes toward queer people with 1 in 4 Zoomers now identifying as queer and 1 in 20 as transgender, that change isn’t coming fast enough for all of us. Of the 33 trans people murdered so far this year, the vast majority were in cities when they were killed.

Working in the Black Space Matters garden. Image from Anah Johnson.

Reflecting upon how the United States was built — on stolen land with stolen labor, the devastating disparities don’t come as much of a surprise to Anah Johnson, an Afro-Indigenous trans activist with the Richmond Indigenous Society. “Unfortunately we live in both a racist and a patriarchal system which means queer people, especially queer people of color, are disproportionally effected by our broken systems whether that be workplace protections, housing, or immigration,” she said.

Even in the drudgery of daily life that disenfranchisement can multiply into endless questions for a Black, masculine-of-center lesbian like Les Henderson—the creator of the Be A Beacon podcast and Jeffers’ partner: “Is it safe for me to ride public transportation or will I get jumped? Is this an area that’s safe for me as a woman who looks more like a man? Will I even be able to obtain a job with my authentic presentation so I can earn enough to live in a neighborhood that’s considered safe for gay people?”

Although as queer urbanists we are all marginalized, the disparities in our lived experiences of the city clearly show that we are not marginalized equally. “Within the structure of the society we live in white cis men have placed themselves at the top, and that same thing has happened within the community of queer urbanists,” Johnson said.

A prism of privilege

Too often the things that we have in common as queer urbanists — namely, our contempt for car dependency and aversion to heteronormativity — tend to distract from the ways in which systemic inequities of racism, sexism, and transphobia replicate themselves in our own niche sphere of society. Even after I made a plea to the twittersphere to connect me with a diverse array of queer urbanists for this story, the only suggestions I received were white, cisgender, gay men.

Queer urbanists are far from a malicious bunch. In fact, they often go out of their way to try and be inclusive, so why does the community still feel dominated by white, cisgender men?

For Tavarris Spinks, a Black gay candidate for Richmond City Council who — if he wins — will become the first openly queer member of that body in history, the answer is a lack of access. “If you have lived your entire life at the intersection of being Black and queer and perhaps impoverished as well, that means you may see the disparities in your day to day life in the city, but your main focus is just making it through the year and life in general,” he said. “There’s a fatigue and a despair among a lot of folks that keeps them from seeing a better future.”

Due to their greater privilege and relative resources, white, cisgender gay men are logically the most vocal and visible advocates of our community according to Dan Reed, a half-Black, half-Indian, queer urban planner and freelance writer in Montgomery County, Maryland.

“Urbanism is often aligned with advocacy, and being an advocate means speaking to power,” they said. “Often people who are white, cisgender, and male feel most comfortable speaking to power.”

That reality isn’t lost on many white gays. Early on in his time as an ANC commissioner Downs realized that the loudest and most omnipresent voices aren’t necessarily representative of the community writ large. “White cisgender men typically have more time and money to participate in activities like this,” he said, referencing his political activism and current campaign. “It’s because of the privilege I’ve been given in life that I can be so active in the community.”

For many cisgender white gays, urbanism can even be a lens through which they come to more fully understand their privilege. Advocating for more coverage and higher frequencies for the Greater Richmond Transit Company, Lockett stood out as a white rider on a bus system whose ridership is 78% Black. “Because there are so few people focusing on these issues you quickly realize that your platform, your voice, and the attention you get in the room is different from the riders of color from marginalized neighborhoods,” he said.

Until that level of awareness becomes mainstream, Black urbanists like Jeffers will wonder if our community can become both more representative and inclusive. “Until white cis gay and straight men get OK with being uncomfortable and even ask why they feel so much discomfort when there are people who aren’t like themselves in the room, nothing will change,” she said. “There’s still an emphasis on assimilation and being respectable in the industry which stifles people.”

Her partner, Henderson, agrees: “Cis white men can become the gatekeepers. There’s still a lot of prejudice against non-passing trans people that don’t fit the mold of what society thinks is acceptable.”

For Sampson, that discomfort with diversity is intrinsically tied to the artificially constructed American concept of what it means to be white. “A big aspect of whiteness is trying to control the natural craziness of cities and make them calm and quiet,” he said. “For a lot of white queer people urbanism is how to grapple with that and learn how to poke and prod those assumptions that we were taught. We as queer urbanists still have a lot of work to do to make sure Black and Brown voices are being heard as well.”

The Gay (urbanist) Agenda

Just as Black women comprise some of our nation’s most dedicated voters despite the dual discrimination they face, so too do queer people constitute an especially visible segment of America’s urbanism movement despite our continued lack of equal rights and protections—even in big cities.

Why our community’s marginalization leads us to be disproportionately engaged on urban issues makes perfect sense to Spinks: “If you see in your experience of the world that your block or city is not designed to be welcoming to you whether you are Black, disabled, or gay, that triggers a desire to make change.”

That’s why far from just installing rainbow crosswalks and promoting drag queen story hours at the local library, the queer urbanist agenda has the power to transform our cities for the better for all of us.

The focus of both Spinks’ and Downs’ campaigns on housing, transportation, and public space is not a coincidence—rather it is a natural product of their queerness. “In order for queer folks to actually be able to continue living in DC, we need to keep our urban spaces affordable,” Downs said. “That’s why I’ve been pushing for more affordable housing, especially for LGBTQ seniors, so we can keep our communities together and don’t have to move to the suburbs.”

Although Reed (and a growing cohort of queer people of color they know) have moved out of DC in order to own their homes without breaking the bank, they too see a unique anchoring of LGBTIAQ+ issues in urbanism: “Queerness is a reflection of the fact that there are a lot of different ways to live. Urbanism works similarly in that it gives people choices as to how they want to live and what they want to use for transportation,” they said.

“A lot of the conversations over the past hundred years around land use and transportation have been about centering the needs of one small slice of the population: affluent white nuclear families,” Reed said. “So much of our built environment makes assumptions about the relationships people are supposed to have and the lives people are supposed to lead, and for millennia urbanism has been the opposite of that.”

That’s likely why the most marginalized among us were never satisfied with same-sex marriage as the queer world’s billboard issue. Marriage felt too much like fighting for a seat at the table of respectability rather than doing what queer folks have done for millennia—living lives true to our own values regardless of society’s expectations. “We need more than marriage,” Jeffers said. “The agenda has to start with us centering Black queer urbanist feminist thought.”

Proud, loud, and ready to lead

Increasingly those voices are receiving more credit within the community as leaders, but that culture shift can’t come soon enough for Henderson. “We’ve seen what happens when straight people are in charge. They didn’t care if we were dying or not. That’s why we have to have a hand in all of these issues like housing, transit, and parks,” she said. “For us as queer people urbanism is a matter of life or death.”

For many queer people of color the high-stakes nature of urbanist advocacy couldn’t be clearer: “There’s so much evidence that the current way in which cities have been planned is still causing generational poverty and trauma to this day,” Johnson said. “That’s why we need to make radical changes to take the environment seriously, and we need queer people of color as the leaders.”

Thankfully LGBTQIA+ folks seem especially equipped for those roles. “We as queers value open communication, different perspectives, putting humans first, consent, and honesty,” Sampson said. “Being queer is sort of like an armor—it gives us the confidence to be unapologetically who we are and confront our neighbors on issues in order to make our cities better places to live.

Particularly as an indigenous woman, Johnson views queers’ growing cultural clout and political power as a restoration of the world’s natural order. “Up until colonization and forced Christianity queer people had always been leaders within communities,” she said. “I always think that everything is full circle, and we’re now getting to the point where queer people are finally able to step up into the roles we’ve always been in.”

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Tagged: affordable housing, demographics, equity, transit, urbanism, ward 2

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.