INTRODUCTION
It takes about an hour for me to drive from what is known as the South Bay region of Los Angeles County to arrive in West Hollywood, a city seen as a mecca for a recently out teenager growing up in the greater L.A. area. The pavements of the Pacific Coast Highway, the 405 Freeway, La Cienega Boulevard, and San Vicente Boulevard that bring me to the rainbow crosswalks of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, colloquially known as “WeHo,” reveal the spatialized character of queer identity in Los Angeles. The streets drawing people into this “gay city,” as well as its decorated sidewalks and crosswalks, offer a legitimized narrative of queer identity that is divisive in its simultaneous inclusionary and exclusionary designs and symbols. As an insider of the queer community living outside the West Hollywood area, I write this essay in the city which I analyze in order to best connect with the inherent geographical imminence of West Hollywood and expand the spatial studies of sexuality and queer identity. Building on the foundational work in queer geography of Forest, Knopp, and Valentine, I seek to detail a focused, queer right to the city.
The word queer itself is broad and somewhat vague. While queer identity formulation and practices are central to the aims of this paper, I come at this topic from a white, cisgender, gay, male perspective. I do not seek to holistically address the many queer identities that exist, though I aim to include several. As Benjamin Forest points out, geographies and public expressions differ for gay men and lesbians in West Hollywood, no matter their similarly equal importance in the incorporation campaign.[i] While my focus is on the visual and spatial aspects of West Hollywood’s decorated pavements, it is important to note that this region was previously known as “boys town,” and incorporation efforts for the city included attempts to redefine gay male identity.[ii] In acknowledging this aspect of the City’s history, I want to clarify that this work does not aim to generalize for queer identities. Other works in sexual geography, unlike my discussion of movement toward gay metropolitan space, note the significance of separatist communities produced by a lesbian rejection to the “perceived masculinity of the urban built environment.”[iii] My research generally focuses on more normative queer identities. The fact that, as a recently out teenager, I was attracted to visiting and researching West Hollywood demonstrates my point that the aesthetic design of the City post-incorporation, as seen visually manifested on its pavements, creates a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive space for queer identities.
[i] Benjamin Forest, "West Hollywood as symbol: the significance of place in the construction of a gay identity," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 2 (1995): 135.
[ii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 135.
[iii] Jon Binnie and Gill Valentine, “Geographies of Sexuality – a review of progress,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 2 (1999): 178.
It takes about an hour for me to drive from what is known as the South Bay region of Los Angeles County to arrive in West Hollywood, a city seen as a mecca for a recently out teenager growing up in the greater L.A. area. The pavements of the Pacific Coast Highway, the 405 Freeway, La Cienega Boulevard, and San Vicente Boulevard that bring me to the rainbow crosswalks of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, colloquially known as “WeHo,” reveal the spatialized character of queer identity in Los Angeles. The streets drawing people into this “gay city,” as well as its decorated sidewalks and crosswalks, offer a legitimized narrative of queer identity that is divisive in its simultaneous inclusionary and exclusionary designs and symbols. As an insider of the queer community living outside the West Hollywood area, I write this essay in the city which I analyze in order to best connect with the inherent geographical imminence of West Hollywood and expand the spatial studies of sexuality and queer identity. Building on the foundational work in queer geography of Forest, Knopp, and Valentine, I seek to detail a focused, queer right to the city.
The word queer itself is broad and somewhat vague. While queer identity formulation and practices are central to the aims of this paper, I come at this topic from a white, cisgender, gay, male perspective. I do not seek to holistically address the many queer identities that exist, though I aim to include several. As Benjamin Forest points out, geographies and public expressions differ for gay men and lesbians in West Hollywood, no matter their similarly equal importance in the incorporation campaign.[i] While my focus is on the visual and spatial aspects of West Hollywood’s decorated pavements, it is important to note that this region was previously known as “boys town,” and incorporation efforts for the city included attempts to redefine gay male identity.[ii] In acknowledging this aspect of the City’s history, I want to clarify that this work does not aim to generalize for queer identities. Other works in sexual geography, unlike my discussion of movement toward gay metropolitan space, note the significance of separatist communities produced by a lesbian rejection to the “perceived masculinity of the urban built environment.”[iii] My research generally focuses on more normative queer identities. The fact that, as a recently out teenager, I was attracted to visiting and researching West Hollywood demonstrates my point that the aesthetic design of the City post-incorporation, as seen visually manifested on its pavements, creates a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive space for queer identities.
[i] Benjamin Forest, "West Hollywood as symbol: the significance of place in the construction of a gay identity," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 2 (1995): 135.
[ii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 135.
[iii] Jon Binnie and Gill Valentine, “Geographies of Sexuality – a review of progress,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 2 (1999): 178.
HISTORY OF WEST HOLLYWOOD
Incorporated in 1984, West Hollywood became America’s first gay city, as claimed by The Gay Decades, when a large-scale and very public effort made this area nestled between Beverly Hills and the City of Los Angeles a self-governing municipality.[i] As explained by Forest in “West Hollywood as Symbol,” the gay press played a major role in publicly calling for its incorporation as a move to recognize and legitimize gay identity in American society, not so much as a radically progressive project. With a significant population of gays and lesbians, in addition to its diverse mix of Jews and senior citizens, the pre-incorporation district became “defined by its connection with gays” and underwent a deeply symbolic struggle in the incorporation process.[ii] This effort enabled the gay press to construct a positive identity by establishing certain, now stereotypical, characteristics of gay identity, including creativity and aesthetic sensibility.[iii] As Forest notes, the strong tie between gay identity and gay territories created an opportunity to redefine the area legally and symbolically, therefore allowing a connected redefinition of gay identity. The association of a moral geography with West Hollywood was crucial to its incorporation. In the decades following, maintaining an image of a high-design, visually appealing city remained central to the management of public space and architecture. A marketing campaign beginning in the mid-1980s aimed to brand West Hollywood as a “creative city;” starting in 1997, another initiative began to upgrade Santa Monica Boulevard.[iv] In 2012, the City Council permanently installed rainbow-colored crosswalks at the intersection of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards in an effort to designate West Hollywood as a “sanctuary” where, in Councilman John Duran’s words, “the LGBT community is celebrated.”[v]
[i] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 133.
[ii] Ibid., 140.
[iii] Ibid., 140.
[iv] Renia Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design in West Hollywood, California,” Journal of Urban Design 18, no. 1 (2013): 67.
[v] “West Hollywood’s Rainbow-Colored Crosswalks to Stay,” Last modified August 27th, 2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/west-hollywoods-rainbow-colored-crosswalks-to-stay.html.
Incorporated in 1984, West Hollywood became America’s first gay city, as claimed by The Gay Decades, when a large-scale and very public effort made this area nestled between Beverly Hills and the City of Los Angeles a self-governing municipality.[i] As explained by Forest in “West Hollywood as Symbol,” the gay press played a major role in publicly calling for its incorporation as a move to recognize and legitimize gay identity in American society, not so much as a radically progressive project. With a significant population of gays and lesbians, in addition to its diverse mix of Jews and senior citizens, the pre-incorporation district became “defined by its connection with gays” and underwent a deeply symbolic struggle in the incorporation process.[ii] This effort enabled the gay press to construct a positive identity by establishing certain, now stereotypical, characteristics of gay identity, including creativity and aesthetic sensibility.[iii] As Forest notes, the strong tie between gay identity and gay territories created an opportunity to redefine the area legally and symbolically, therefore allowing a connected redefinition of gay identity. The association of a moral geography with West Hollywood was crucial to its incorporation. In the decades following, maintaining an image of a high-design, visually appealing city remained central to the management of public space and architecture. A marketing campaign beginning in the mid-1980s aimed to brand West Hollywood as a “creative city;” starting in 1997, another initiative began to upgrade Santa Monica Boulevard.[iv] In 2012, the City Council permanently installed rainbow-colored crosswalks at the intersection of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards in an effort to designate West Hollywood as a “sanctuary” where, in Councilman John Duran’s words, “the LGBT community is celebrated.”[v]
[i] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 133.
[ii] Ibid., 140.
[iii] Ibid., 140.
[iv] Renia Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design in West Hollywood, California,” Journal of Urban Design 18, no. 1 (2013): 67.
[v] “West Hollywood’s Rainbow-Colored Crosswalks to Stay,” Last modified August 27th, 2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/west-hollywoods-rainbow-colored-crosswalks-to-stay.html.
PAVEMENTS AS PLACES OF MOVEMENT
While said crosswalks are critical to understandings of queer identity, the pavements stretching distances beyond those symbolically painted are queer just as well. Queer pavements reach from West Hollywood, and other centers of queer community more generally, to the locations of queer people searching for a sense of community and visibility in areas where this minority identity is less established. In a metropolitan area in which cars and driving are critical to everyday life and culture, the unadorned streets bringing one to West Hollywood are as significant as those seemingly yelling “we’re here, we’re queer” on Santa Monica Boulevard. The journey bringing one to an ostensible mecca of gay life, as I had seen it previously, is exciting, empowering, and drawn out. The car becomes a place of reflection. Movements, as Knopp finds, produce reflective and re-inventive practices that are “as ontologically significant themselves as the sites they connect.”[i] While often moving slowly through traffic on La Cienega Boulevard, one experiences a sense of movement ingrained with hope for future feelings of comfort and safety amongst other queers. In providing a discussion of much of the literature surrounding lesbian and gay geographies, Binnie and Valentine find the experience of migrating, as a means for escaping prejudice and defining ones’ identity, is shared among lesbians and gay migrants.[ii] Movement plays a transformational role in the lives of lesbians and gay men not born in major metropolitan areas.
The well-travelled streets of Los Angeles themselves embody the migratory practices taking place on them. The often necessity for negotiating “multiple expectations, contradictions, and oppressions” for queer people, Knopp emphasizes, involves a particularly large amount of “peripatetic exploration.”[iii] Navigating both accepting and non-accepting spaces produces a significant geographical element of queer identity.
In “Ontologies of Place,” Knopp furthers the migratory idea discussed in his earlier work, “Queer Diffusions,” by introducing quests for identity. He defines this as personal “journeys through space and time . . . that are constructed internally as being about the search for an integrated wholeness as individual humans living in some kind of community.”[iv] While the symbolic importance of these identity quests frame an aspect of queer identity, the specific way it usually takes shape in Los Angeles operates on the level of the street. With a lacking subway system yet many packed freeways, the paved boulevards and concrete freeways of Los Angeles’s transportation network serve as the foundation for queer migration. Reinforcing the centrality of the act of getting from place to place, Knopp highlights the “attachment that many queer people—especially gay men—feel to movement itself.”[v] The quest itself, he claims, is not only a source of pleasure, but also becomes “a source of ontological and emotional security as well.”[vi] I argue that as much the journey provides emotional security, the sense of safety can be focused to the level of the concrete necessary for transportation. An underlying expectation of travel relies on the very strength and security offered by the pavements that support a sometimes fragile queer identity searching for the many benefits of West Hollywood. Indeed, Knopp finds that the relevant actors in the process of coming out are as likely to be “seemingly random objects,” such as pavement, as individuals themselves.[vii]
[i] Larry Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement: queer quests for identity and their impacts on contemporary geographic thought,” Gender, Place & Culture 11, no. 1 (2004): 131.
[ii] Binnie and Valentine, “Geographies of Sexuality,” 179.
[iii] Larry Knopp and Michael Brown, "Queer diffusions," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 4 (2003): 420.
[iv] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 122-123.
[v] Ibid., 124.
[vi] Ibid., 124.
[vii] Ibid., 125.
While said crosswalks are critical to understandings of queer identity, the pavements stretching distances beyond those symbolically painted are queer just as well. Queer pavements reach from West Hollywood, and other centers of queer community more generally, to the locations of queer people searching for a sense of community and visibility in areas where this minority identity is less established. In a metropolitan area in which cars and driving are critical to everyday life and culture, the unadorned streets bringing one to West Hollywood are as significant as those seemingly yelling “we’re here, we’re queer” on Santa Monica Boulevard. The journey bringing one to an ostensible mecca of gay life, as I had seen it previously, is exciting, empowering, and drawn out. The car becomes a place of reflection. Movements, as Knopp finds, produce reflective and re-inventive practices that are “as ontologically significant themselves as the sites they connect.”[i] While often moving slowly through traffic on La Cienega Boulevard, one experiences a sense of movement ingrained with hope for future feelings of comfort and safety amongst other queers. In providing a discussion of much of the literature surrounding lesbian and gay geographies, Binnie and Valentine find the experience of migrating, as a means for escaping prejudice and defining ones’ identity, is shared among lesbians and gay migrants.[ii] Movement plays a transformational role in the lives of lesbians and gay men not born in major metropolitan areas.
The well-travelled streets of Los Angeles themselves embody the migratory practices taking place on them. The often necessity for negotiating “multiple expectations, contradictions, and oppressions” for queer people, Knopp emphasizes, involves a particularly large amount of “peripatetic exploration.”[iii] Navigating both accepting and non-accepting spaces produces a significant geographical element of queer identity.
In “Ontologies of Place,” Knopp furthers the migratory idea discussed in his earlier work, “Queer Diffusions,” by introducing quests for identity. He defines this as personal “journeys through space and time . . . that are constructed internally as being about the search for an integrated wholeness as individual humans living in some kind of community.”[iv] While the symbolic importance of these identity quests frame an aspect of queer identity, the specific way it usually takes shape in Los Angeles operates on the level of the street. With a lacking subway system yet many packed freeways, the paved boulevards and concrete freeways of Los Angeles’s transportation network serve as the foundation for queer migration. Reinforcing the centrality of the act of getting from place to place, Knopp highlights the “attachment that many queer people—especially gay men—feel to movement itself.”[v] The quest itself, he claims, is not only a source of pleasure, but also becomes “a source of ontological and emotional security as well.”[vi] I argue that as much the journey provides emotional security, the sense of safety can be focused to the level of the concrete necessary for transportation. An underlying expectation of travel relies on the very strength and security offered by the pavements that support a sometimes fragile queer identity searching for the many benefits of West Hollywood. Indeed, Knopp finds that the relevant actors in the process of coming out are as likely to be “seemingly random objects,” such as pavement, as individuals themselves.[vii]
[i] Larry Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement: queer quests for identity and their impacts on contemporary geographic thought,” Gender, Place & Culture 11, no. 1 (2004): 131.
[ii] Binnie and Valentine, “Geographies of Sexuality,” 179.
[iii] Larry Knopp and Michael Brown, "Queer diffusions," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 4 (2003): 420.
[iv] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 122-123.
[v] Ibid., 124.
[vi] Ibid., 124.
[vii] Ibid., 125.
PAVEMENTS AS VISUAL AESTHETICS
As previously mentioned, an aesthetic image—one dating to the gay press’ intent on constructing a creative and design-oriented characteristic of gay men—greatly concerns the City of West Hollywood. From the onset of the Santa Monica Boulevard renovation project in 1998, the city reinforced its dedication to visual appeal by successfully transforming this street to create more open spaces serving pedestrians, public gatherings, and gay residents and visitors in a way that reified what the gay press imagined years before.[i] Efforts to create “visual coherency” and attract a queer population resulted in manifestations of queer identity built into public spaces, such as the rainbow flags along Santa Monica Boulevard seen today.[ii] The 2012 installation of rainbow crosswalks brought the visual appeal of the city to the level of its pavement. In expanding on Forest’s work on West Hollywood, I explore how the “symbols around which gay identity is based” are expressed visually today, as well as what they accomplish in terms of identity creation and inclusion.[iii]
Fitting the high density of public advertisements in Los Angeles, West Hollywood’s use of visuals is both expected and unique in its ability to serve an ostensibly inclusionary purpose. What is it about visual signs of inclusion for the queer community that make the West Hollywood more inviting to a queer non-resident than places with longer queer histories, like Silver Lake? The City has effectively branded itself as a place of gay identity, and in my experience, people in greater Los Angeles are aware of this. Thus, from the perspective of a West Hollywood outsider and queer insider, the visuals the City has used produce the image of being a mecca of queer life, especially due to the hoards of people driving to the intersection of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards for the annual L.A. Pride celebration and parade. There is a feeling of coming home to an unknown place when one interacting with these visuals. Knopp documents the mobility practices of gay men, for example, and asserts that rural to urban migrations are “particularly common . . . as well as a general embracing of cosmopolitanism.”[iv] For someone entering the queer community from an outsider perspective (meaning have just come out or not living in Los Angeles proper), visual markers of supposed inclusion draw one to that space. In Visual Methodologies, Rose argues that the effect of images always intersects with the “social context of its viewing and the visualities its spectators bring to their viewing.”[v] West Hollywood produces a visual aesthetic that publicizes itself as a queer space in the larger social context of Los Angeles. At the same time, the tourism and migration practices that this inherently promotes reinforces its image of inclusion.
Knowledge of the less outwardly visible queer scene in Los Angeles is unknowable to someone in the greater L.A. area. Considering Knopp’s point on the recurrent narrative of queer people distancing themselves from places of origin, a visual sign to mark the place to which one can escape creates a more inviting appeal. A gay club, Rage, on the northwestern corner of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards—with rainbow crosswalks immediately in front of it and pride flags lining its exterior—reads “queers are here” more powerfully than the Black Cat Tavern’s longer history as a gay bar simply because of the visual impact. The visual appeal of West Hollywood certainly proclaims a sense of destination. As Councilman Duran pointed out in 2012, “The rainbow flags on Santa Monica Boulevard and now the rainbow crosswalks are really critical to . . . the tourists, the young gay and lesbian people . . . who are passing through from Iowa or Montana or Kansas and they cannot believe . . . the rainbow colors are displayed all year long.”[vi] The “calling” effect the City constructs visually ultimately makes use of the “movement” aspect Knopp associates with queer identity. Further, this effect reinforces the importance of pavements in bringing in queers from wide reaching spaces to take the streets of Los Angeles to Santa Monica Boulevard.
In a visually expressive city like Los Angeles, where the entertainment industry dominates, moral geographies present themselves visually. Visual identities are built into public gathering spaces in West Hollywood as a means to create community; further, the city specifically targets the gay male eye in its utilization of sidewalks as means for public safety announcements. While serving a legitimate purpose to prevent accidents, this image also demonstrates an active knowledge and perpetuation on behalf of the City of its significant gay male population.
The visual elements of West Hollywood express not only inclusion, but also security in potentially insecure queer identities searching for what West Hollywood apparently offers in terms of community and safety. Forest maintains that place has a “capacity to concretize an idea or culture, and its holistic quality . . . make it a particularly effective means to create social identities.”[vii] To further his point, I argue that in Los Angeles it is concrete itself that has the ability to concretize an idea or culture. The security of queer identities—knowledge from far outside of L.A. proper that there are roads to visually queer places with rainbows painted on the street—is physically manifested in the actual pavement. Movement and a place of destination, abstractly, have thus far been reviewed in various literature on sexual geography as critical to queer identity (see Knopp, Forest, and Valentine). In Los Angeles, movement and a place of destination are spatially grounded in pavement (a word I use broadly to encompass concrete and paved streets as well as crosswalks and sidewalks). Yet, do visual aesthetics written on the streets produce inclusion?
[i] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 67-68.
[ii] Ibid., 70.
[iii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 137.
[iv] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 123.
[v] Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 15.
[vi] “West Hollywood’s Rainbow-Colored Crosswalks.”
[vii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 134.
As previously mentioned, an aesthetic image—one dating to the gay press’ intent on constructing a creative and design-oriented characteristic of gay men—greatly concerns the City of West Hollywood. From the onset of the Santa Monica Boulevard renovation project in 1998, the city reinforced its dedication to visual appeal by successfully transforming this street to create more open spaces serving pedestrians, public gatherings, and gay residents and visitors in a way that reified what the gay press imagined years before.[i] Efforts to create “visual coherency” and attract a queer population resulted in manifestations of queer identity built into public spaces, such as the rainbow flags along Santa Monica Boulevard seen today.[ii] The 2012 installation of rainbow crosswalks brought the visual appeal of the city to the level of its pavement. In expanding on Forest’s work on West Hollywood, I explore how the “symbols around which gay identity is based” are expressed visually today, as well as what they accomplish in terms of identity creation and inclusion.[iii]
Fitting the high density of public advertisements in Los Angeles, West Hollywood’s use of visuals is both expected and unique in its ability to serve an ostensibly inclusionary purpose. What is it about visual signs of inclusion for the queer community that make the West Hollywood more inviting to a queer non-resident than places with longer queer histories, like Silver Lake? The City has effectively branded itself as a place of gay identity, and in my experience, people in greater Los Angeles are aware of this. Thus, from the perspective of a West Hollywood outsider and queer insider, the visuals the City has used produce the image of being a mecca of queer life, especially due to the hoards of people driving to the intersection of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards for the annual L.A. Pride celebration and parade. There is a feeling of coming home to an unknown place when one interacting with these visuals. Knopp documents the mobility practices of gay men, for example, and asserts that rural to urban migrations are “particularly common . . . as well as a general embracing of cosmopolitanism.”[iv] For someone entering the queer community from an outsider perspective (meaning have just come out or not living in Los Angeles proper), visual markers of supposed inclusion draw one to that space. In Visual Methodologies, Rose argues that the effect of images always intersects with the “social context of its viewing and the visualities its spectators bring to their viewing.”[v] West Hollywood produces a visual aesthetic that publicizes itself as a queer space in the larger social context of Los Angeles. At the same time, the tourism and migration practices that this inherently promotes reinforces its image of inclusion.
Knowledge of the less outwardly visible queer scene in Los Angeles is unknowable to someone in the greater L.A. area. Considering Knopp’s point on the recurrent narrative of queer people distancing themselves from places of origin, a visual sign to mark the place to which one can escape creates a more inviting appeal. A gay club, Rage, on the northwestern corner of Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards—with rainbow crosswalks immediately in front of it and pride flags lining its exterior—reads “queers are here” more powerfully than the Black Cat Tavern’s longer history as a gay bar simply because of the visual impact. The visual appeal of West Hollywood certainly proclaims a sense of destination. As Councilman Duran pointed out in 2012, “The rainbow flags on Santa Monica Boulevard and now the rainbow crosswalks are really critical to . . . the tourists, the young gay and lesbian people . . . who are passing through from Iowa or Montana or Kansas and they cannot believe . . . the rainbow colors are displayed all year long.”[vi] The “calling” effect the City constructs visually ultimately makes use of the “movement” aspect Knopp associates with queer identity. Further, this effect reinforces the importance of pavements in bringing in queers from wide reaching spaces to take the streets of Los Angeles to Santa Monica Boulevard.
In a visually expressive city like Los Angeles, where the entertainment industry dominates, moral geographies present themselves visually. Visual identities are built into public gathering spaces in West Hollywood as a means to create community; further, the city specifically targets the gay male eye in its utilization of sidewalks as means for public safety announcements. While serving a legitimate purpose to prevent accidents, this image also demonstrates an active knowledge and perpetuation on behalf of the City of its significant gay male population.
The visual elements of West Hollywood express not only inclusion, but also security in potentially insecure queer identities searching for what West Hollywood apparently offers in terms of community and safety. Forest maintains that place has a “capacity to concretize an idea or culture, and its holistic quality . . . make it a particularly effective means to create social identities.”[vii] To further his point, I argue that in Los Angeles it is concrete itself that has the ability to concretize an idea or culture. The security of queer identities—knowledge from far outside of L.A. proper that there are roads to visually queer places with rainbows painted on the street—is physically manifested in the actual pavement. Movement and a place of destination, abstractly, have thus far been reviewed in various literature on sexual geography as critical to queer identity (see Knopp, Forest, and Valentine). In Los Angeles, movement and a place of destination are spatially grounded in pavement (a word I use broadly to encompass concrete and paved streets as well as crosswalks and sidewalks). Yet, do visual aesthetics written on the streets produce inclusion?
[i] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 67-68.
[ii] Ibid., 70.
[iii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 137.
[iv] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 123.
[v] Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 15.
[vi] “West Hollywood’s Rainbow-Colored Crosswalks.”
[vii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 134.
PLACE, IDENTITY, AND NONCONFORMITY
The reflexive relationship between place and identity, in that place constructs identity while simultaneously identity constructs place, brings me to questions of how minority identity is impacted and visual aesthetics produce or destroy inclusion. As places are constantly shaped and reshaped by humans, they generate meaning and become causal forces for human life at the same time.[i] While a city’s largely queer population informs the its urban and visual design decisions, the reflexive impact is demonstrated by quotation Reed refers to in “Imminent Domain:” “Brighton constructed my lesbian identity.”[ii] Thus, what effect does the close tying of identity to place in West Hollywood have on minority identity?
The visual elements of West Hollywood create a co-existing inclusive/exclusive effect because a sense of conformity was necessarily established through both incorporation and the City’s intentional urban design for public places. While the space advertises itself as welcoming to minority identity, especially since minority identities were at the forefront of the City’s incorporation and visual aesthetic, West Hollywood also essentializes queer identity and excludes non-conformers. Visual symbols of inclusion indicate a mecca typically for those more privileged individuals who are more easily able to assimilate into mainstream culture, therefore following the non-radical, legitimization goals Forest refers to when discussing the City’s original incorporation campaign.[iii] Within the larger spectrum of queer identity, however, the queer pavements of Los Angeles force some away.
Who belongs in this place? While West Hollywood has become a space for the strengthening of my own queer identity, it does not remain a place for nonconforming people. The political incorporation produced a distinction between conformers and non-conformers, and the visual aesthetics of the City recursively intensify it. Ehrenfeucht’s essay on “Nonconformity and Street Design in West Hollywood” sets forth this idea in asserting that improvements to public spaces can “harden boundaries” between those for whom a space is or is not intended.[iv] Gay neighborhoods uniquely demonstrate the changing parameters of conformity and nonconformity throughout their histories.[v] Reed concludes that renovation, in its relation to taking place and engaging with the past, is a spatial manifestation of queer identity.[vi] Renovations to Santa Monica Boulevard can indeed be interpreted as way in which queer people have claimed this space with pride flags. Yet, this redesign also marks gentrification and exclusion. Ehrenfeucht refers to the gay residents as early gentrifiers and finds that the “increased visibility of queer communities,” a phenomenon clearly read on the rainbow crosswalks of West Hollywood, brought “tensions over appropriate forms of sexual identity and appropriate individuals within an identified group.”[vii] Redesigned public space lead to the displacement of many transgender women of color engaged in sex work, a notable group of queer-identified non-conformers, to more dangerous areas east of the City.[viii]
Furthermore, the sidewalks of West Hollywood today suggest a specific user group, gay men, are intended as pedestrians on these pavements. While certainly welcoming to a portion of the range of queer identities, the images of topless men and signs advertising specifically to different sexual categories of gay men (top, bottom, and versatile) do not seem to suggest that identities like trans women were in mind when installing signs on these sidewalks. While these words could possibly be used to describe sexual identities for other genders, the images of a banana, a cub (a term for a specific type of gay man), and a masculine arm clarify who the Los Angeles LGBT Center addressed these advertisements toward. Queer pavements become gay male pavements. While I see West Hollywood as a welcoming place for me, if not a city financially aimed at attracting me, Ehrenfeucht justly claims that “urban design elements that make spaces legible, comfortable and coherent, simultaneously can make some people out of place.”[ix]
[i] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 129.
[ii] Christopher Reed, "Imminent domain: Queer space in the built environment," Art Journal 55, no. 4 (1996): 67.
[iii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 133.
[iv] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 71.
[v] Ibid., 71.
[vi] Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 67.
[vii] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 62.
[viii] Ibid., 73.
[ix] Ibid., 74.
The reflexive relationship between place and identity, in that place constructs identity while simultaneously identity constructs place, brings me to questions of how minority identity is impacted and visual aesthetics produce or destroy inclusion. As places are constantly shaped and reshaped by humans, they generate meaning and become causal forces for human life at the same time.[i] While a city’s largely queer population informs the its urban and visual design decisions, the reflexive impact is demonstrated by quotation Reed refers to in “Imminent Domain:” “Brighton constructed my lesbian identity.”[ii] Thus, what effect does the close tying of identity to place in West Hollywood have on minority identity?
The visual elements of West Hollywood create a co-existing inclusive/exclusive effect because a sense of conformity was necessarily established through both incorporation and the City’s intentional urban design for public places. While the space advertises itself as welcoming to minority identity, especially since minority identities were at the forefront of the City’s incorporation and visual aesthetic, West Hollywood also essentializes queer identity and excludes non-conformers. Visual symbols of inclusion indicate a mecca typically for those more privileged individuals who are more easily able to assimilate into mainstream culture, therefore following the non-radical, legitimization goals Forest refers to when discussing the City’s original incorporation campaign.[iii] Within the larger spectrum of queer identity, however, the queer pavements of Los Angeles force some away.
Who belongs in this place? While West Hollywood has become a space for the strengthening of my own queer identity, it does not remain a place for nonconforming people. The political incorporation produced a distinction between conformers and non-conformers, and the visual aesthetics of the City recursively intensify it. Ehrenfeucht’s essay on “Nonconformity and Street Design in West Hollywood” sets forth this idea in asserting that improvements to public spaces can “harden boundaries” between those for whom a space is or is not intended.[iv] Gay neighborhoods uniquely demonstrate the changing parameters of conformity and nonconformity throughout their histories.[v] Reed concludes that renovation, in its relation to taking place and engaging with the past, is a spatial manifestation of queer identity.[vi] Renovations to Santa Monica Boulevard can indeed be interpreted as way in which queer people have claimed this space with pride flags. Yet, this redesign also marks gentrification and exclusion. Ehrenfeucht refers to the gay residents as early gentrifiers and finds that the “increased visibility of queer communities,” a phenomenon clearly read on the rainbow crosswalks of West Hollywood, brought “tensions over appropriate forms of sexual identity and appropriate individuals within an identified group.”[vii] Redesigned public space lead to the displacement of many transgender women of color engaged in sex work, a notable group of queer-identified non-conformers, to more dangerous areas east of the City.[viii]
Furthermore, the sidewalks of West Hollywood today suggest a specific user group, gay men, are intended as pedestrians on these pavements. While certainly welcoming to a portion of the range of queer identities, the images of topless men and signs advertising specifically to different sexual categories of gay men (top, bottom, and versatile) do not seem to suggest that identities like trans women were in mind when installing signs on these sidewalks. While these words could possibly be used to describe sexual identities for other genders, the images of a banana, a cub (a term for a specific type of gay man), and a masculine arm clarify who the Los Angeles LGBT Center addressed these advertisements toward. Queer pavements become gay male pavements. While I see West Hollywood as a welcoming place for me, if not a city financially aimed at attracting me, Ehrenfeucht justly claims that “urban design elements that make spaces legible, comfortable and coherent, simultaneously can make some people out of place.”[ix]
[i] Knopp, “Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement,” 129.
[ii] Christopher Reed, "Imminent domain: Queer space in the built environment," Art Journal 55, no. 4 (1996): 67.
[iii] Forest, “West Hollywood as symbol,” 133.
[iv] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 71.
[v] Ibid., 71.
[vi] Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 67.
[vii] Ehrenfeucht, “Noncomformity and Street Design,” 62.
[viii] Ibid., 73.
[ix] Ibid., 74.
CONCLUSION
The pavements of Los Angeles, ranging from the freeways connecting distant communities to the rainbow crosswalks lining Santa Monica Boulevard, play a critical role in demonstrating the unique connection between queer identity and the built environment. More broadly, movement and visual aesthetics generate a queer Los Angeles identity that simultaneously finds freedom and reflection in driving, benefits from the symbolic and physical security of streets and visual symbols, and negotiates inclusive and exclusive urban designs. Through incorporation and public renovation, West Hollywood has engendered a spatial and visual assimilation of gay identity that distinguishes queer identities into conformers and non-conformers.
At the same time, West Hollywood acts as a gateway community to non-normative identities. Though renovations and regulations enacted on the space have made the City less accessible to non-conforming identities, non-residents still come in search of liberated, open, and queer space. The aggressively inclusionary politics seen in the city’s public installations can serve as a gateway to a broader, less commercialized queer population existing throughout Los Angeles. West Hollywood draws in queer identities from the geographically distant places and leads one to see the complex mosaic of queer communities inhabiting Los Angeles.
The pavements of Los Angeles, ranging from the freeways connecting distant communities to the rainbow crosswalks lining Santa Monica Boulevard, play a critical role in demonstrating the unique connection between queer identity and the built environment. More broadly, movement and visual aesthetics generate a queer Los Angeles identity that simultaneously finds freedom and reflection in driving, benefits from the symbolic and physical security of streets and visual symbols, and negotiates inclusive and exclusive urban designs. Through incorporation and public renovation, West Hollywood has engendered a spatial and visual assimilation of gay identity that distinguishes queer identities into conformers and non-conformers.
At the same time, West Hollywood acts as a gateway community to non-normative identities. Though renovations and regulations enacted on the space have made the City less accessible to non-conforming identities, non-residents still come in search of liberated, open, and queer space. The aggressively inclusionary politics seen in the city’s public installations can serve as a gateway to a broader, less commercialized queer population existing throughout Los Angeles. West Hollywood draws in queer identities from the geographically distant places and leads one to see the complex mosaic of queer communities inhabiting Los Angeles.