In the Daylight of Our Existence

“Our survival requires that we alter our environment so that we can live and so that we can hold each other’s hands and so that we can kiss each other on the streets, and in the daylight of our existence, without terror and without violent and sometimes fatal reactions from the busybodies of America.” Black feminist poet, author, activist and professor June Jordan wrote these words in 1991 for an address to the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Student Association at Stanford University. In the address, she encouraged radical alterations of the built environment as crucial to what she called “A New Politics of Sexuality.” She did not tell her listeners what this altered environment would look like, but she elicited their imagination in conceiving of a place for living, intimacy, and visibility, what that space would feel like, and what else it could make possible. Tracing the coalitional efforts of feminist, queer, and trans organizations in housing, health care, and artistic spaces, this book takes up Jordan’s theoretical premise to work against normative ideas about gender and sexuality through environmental transformation. It presents methods for crafting LGBTQIA+ histories of architecture by investigating planning, resistance, and refusal all in favor of richer communal lives in New York City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Toronto, and the Mexican borderlands. A wide range of poems, meeting notes, memos, zines, photos, artwork, and blueprints offer insight into the intersection of architectural history and gender studies.