Community, Cooperation and Connectivity: The Symbolic Importance of Queer Safe Spaces and Why We Must Protect Them
By Izzie Hingston
When I started taking notice of how viscerally different I feel depending on the room I am in, I realised how complex the relationship between queerness and space truly is. As queer people, we cannot yet guarantee our safety within spaces. This is particularly insidious for marginalised bodies such as trans people, queers of colour and disabled members of the community.
There is a rich lineage of queer and spatial theory, some of which is partially contradictory, but it is important to insert ourselves into the discourse. Of course, it wouldn’t be right to have a designated section of the bus or a separate grocery store for queer people, but to exist as a marginalised identity and to survive inside a body that is continuously exposed to threat and denied by systems is tiring. Defiance and fearlessness cannot be asked of all queer people all the time.
Queer safe spaces feel like a distant fantasy. To even imagine the joy that exists beyond the current configurations requires energy, let alone testing those limits. To exist authentically is to succumb to discomfort. However, I fear that when we idealise safe spaces, we are at risk of ghettoising ourselves. Even the term queer serves to blur the lines itself; it is complicated to map and label. Do we need universal definitions and understandings of safety and solidarity?
I have experienced fear as a feature of my queer relationships. I remember walking through a more dangerous part of a city with a girlfriend at night, and without ever having discussed it we knew exactly when to switch into ‘friend mode’. That said, even with intentional queer safe spaces comes exclusion. Gay clubs still have strict codes of existence, binaries, rules for aesthetics and policing of who can and can’t enter.
When our environments feel this dangerous and there is gatekeeping from within the community, we can begin on quests for our inner safety. The gender-sexuality matrix is an internal and continuous labyrinth that we must navigate. The paradox of coming to terms with how we feel inside and then authentically presenting it in our everyday requires energy.
We can lean on each other. Houses can definitely become havens, as can bookshops or events. Testing the limits of what has been decided as our structures, organisation and culture has its own fractious, disruptive force and it feels exhilarating to reject.
Spaces are produced by people. They are fundamentally social, therefore we must suffer the usual enemies and by-products: ownership, access, participation and regulation. Maybe this is why we really do need space to breathe.
Art is a safe space; it is a form of world-making. There is energy in reading, writing, painting and creating as an extension of how and what you want to exist in the world. Words themselves hold influence and are actually miniature utopias. Think slut, queer, dyke. Changing language changes discourse, and this gives us control and ultimately, power. As Audre Lorde tells us: ‘we have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition.’
We must begin to dismantle this social conditioning. There is no quick fix for this, but I can advocate for art also having the feature of dodging laws and governance, both of which only create invisibility and fear – we are in a time of being legislated into non-existence. We can all partake in our individual acts of defiance.
I have been moved by the idea of ‘queer constellations’ and the story of a queer woman that, after being kicked out of her mother’s house, always lived with girlfriends and wore all her keys on show to remind herself and the world of physical spaces she has been accepted in and felt safe. Having a personal symbol representing security could be the first step to empowerment.
Queer spaces, when done right, really are a site of joy. They are a testament to community, cooperation and love. We can celebrate and protect what we have and live in hope for more. Rooms that have been purposely curated with specific identities in mind make for undefined factors of connectivity. To entirely juxtapose the fear felt in certain spaces, queer safe spaces feel as though they are speaking to shared and in-built memories. They create an emotional aura that is nothing but disruptive and hold the power to heal all the times we were not accepted.
Queer safe spaces should foster knowing and connectivity, but without an intersectional approach we will fall into the traps of the past – of the same people creating the knowledge. There may be nightlife but at this moment, not even the doctor’s office promises safety.
There is a close relationship between space, power and discourse. We can look to the Brown Boi Project: they are considering how we connect to the world and are highlighting the impact of violence on trans people and people of colour. If we do not protect land and spaces, we do not protect people, and in that case, we are not protecting society.
Izzie Hingston (she/her) is in her final year of studying Liberal Arts with a queer focus. She writes creatively, including poetry, essays and reviews. She wants to use art to better understand the world and combat social injustice. Audre Lorde is a primary inspiration in that ‘poetry is not a luxury’.