Not Looking for Langston: Queer Spatialization of the Public Realm in Working-Class Harlem

This walk cuts through space to make queer life and experience known in working-class Harlem. We exploit sites that are no longer a part of the public realm to think beyond those hoary environments through which queer folks found safety, community, and belonging. We don’t lament the erasure; we use their disappearance to affirm that queer space is the perpetual social alignment with change; change; that power to shapeshift and move between worlds to refine and enhance the skills necessary to gestate and conceive worlds anew. The tour is a clarion call to preserve the rich cultural heritage, where those who sought refuge attempted to fulfill their prophetic birth as the radical nexus of the global counter-culture, to provide a cutting-edge social critique that has been sucked and drained dry by assimilation.