Queer New York

Jen Jack Gieseking is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and editor of The People, Place, and Space Reader.

"Jen Jack locates and studies hard-to-find, and still harder to maintain, lesbian and queer spaces and places that were built and also lost over several decades in New York City … Jen Jack works within groups of lesbians who made the places of queer New York: thinking together about how assimilation, gentrification, gay, queer, and trans identities, racism and sexism, and ultimately capital shaped our cities, and the lives we make in them." (Lambda Literary) "In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking offers a stunningly trenchant and much needed study of lesbian-queer spaces in the city. He deftly demonstrates how place and belonging can be mapped into lesbian-queer generational shifts. With light, elegant, and sometimes humorous prose combined with an incisive analytical approach, Gieseking showcases the processes of urban emplacement and displacement of lesbian-queer lives and bodies from Greenwich Village to Crown Heights to Park Slope. A fabulous geographical portrait of an-other Big Apple." - Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora "Plaiting personal testimony, with group interviews and with archival research, A Queer New York is an exemplary study. May its emulators come soon. Yet, although this multimethod approach might prove a paradigm, the clarity and wit of Gieseking's prose will be more difficult to match. A Queer New York is not only a lodestar for queer geographies but radiates for urban geography more broadly as a brilliant excursus on the lived realities of neoliberal urbanization." (The AAG Review of Books) "The histories and geographies of sexually and gender diverse New York, especially the ones that travel outside of the city, are often told from the limited and limiting perspective of cis white gay men. A Queer New York offers a timely and needed historical geography of the city (1980-2010) that displaces the centrality of these experiences and highlights the role played by lesbians and queers in producing space in the city." (Gender, Place & Culture) "[W]hat Gieseking offers his readers is a layered historical mapping, one that reveals the significance of Otherness to the creation of alternative urban spatialities. With little doubt, this book will act as a beacon to all those academics, activists, and queers who wish to explore for themselves the lights of the queer city, in all their different colors." - Cyd Sturgess, Universiteit Utrecht (Historical Geography)