Abstract
‘Safe space’ is a ubiquitous term, utilised in a variety of contexts – from classrooms to LGBTQ social centres. It is also frequently a contested term, provoking conflicts over the meaning of safety and inclusion. Christina Hanhardt’s book, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, delves into some of the contradictions and dangers involved in efforts to construct and maintain socio-spatial safety, by and for certain LGBT communities. Taking inspiration from the term, Hanhardt traces the evolution of the tensions between safety, violence and policing across space and time – primarily in New York and San Francisco from the 1960s to the 2000s. In doing so, she provides a critical history of how LGBT neighbourhood activism ‘constructs the agents and victims of the violence they hope to prevent and the spaces that they aim to protect’ (p. 8). She thus argues that LGBT organising strategies aimed at producing safety are often exclusionary – regardless of their intentions; attempts to prevent violence and protect space for some LGBT people have contributed to gentrification, the increasing criminalisation of marginalised communities and activities, and the exclusion of LGBT people who are less white, wealthy and gender-conforming. Justified by her intersectional analysis and examination of alternative activist efforts, she calls for more intersectional organising and activism.
The book begins with a compelling comparison between a 2002 ‘Take Back Our Streets’ rally in Greenwich Village and the events that took place decades earlier in the same neighbourhood, at Stonewall in 1969. The ‘Take Back Our Streets’ rally, aimed at the enforcement of ‘quality of life laws’, largely targeted areas frequented by people of colour. Additionally, it promoted the adoption of strategies developed by LGBT antiviolence groups in the 1970s, including safe streets patrols and community watch groups. Where post-Stonewall gay liberation activism often sought protection from police rather than protection through police – and collaborated with other social movements along these lines – such activism nonetheless provided the seeds for the creation of exclusive, privatised spaces in places such as contemporary Greenwich Village. Most subsequent chapters provide context for how this link between the socio-spatial restructuring of urban areas and LGBT organising efforts around safety came to be, beginning in the 1960s and proceeding roughly chronologically. In doing so, Hanhardt demonstrates that two primary activist solutions to anti-LGBT violence since the 1960s – creating protected gay territories and identifying anti-LGBT violence as a criminal category – converge with global capital’s ‘spatial fixes’– gentrification and mass incarceration.
Chapter one introduces the multiple political perspectives and desires of LGBT residents in San Francisco in the 1960s. During this period, some activists called for challenging the police and working across differences to fight poverty and state violence. However, assimilationist tactics and single-issue politics came to prominence. White male homosexuality ‘increasingly became constituted as a respectable form of sexual nonnormativity’ (p. 49), unlike, for example, the trans and non-white residents of San Francisco’s Center City neighbourhood. Chapters 2 and 4 trace this development, as gay ‘safe street’ patrols arose – such as the Lavender Panthers and the Butterfly Brigade. These groups attempted to affirm and preserve gay spaces from police violence and street violence, by seeking to make such violence visible and to document it – efforts that included gathering information on signs of potential violence. Such community policing efforts contributed to ‘gay gentrification’, or the development of gay (white, middle class or wealthy) neighbourhoods such as the Castro. It also contributed to racial profiling, as seeking ‘signs’ of potential violence often promoted prejudice.
Chapter 3 does the best job of foregrounding the problems of this approach to violence. Hanhardt, for example, critiques gay developers’ use of ‘community’ as a means of speculation and gentrification rather than equitable resource distribution. She also introduces different organisations, such as the Combahee River Collective, who sought safety outside of traditional measures – through political organising rather than state policing. These organisations also prioritised anti-racism and advocated for ‘control over one’s own body and destiny rather than the establishment of separate territories’ (p. 122), thereby critiquing the exclusions within ‘gay gentrification’.
Throughout the text, Hanhardt is implicitly – and more often explicitly – critical of liberal politics and policies. In Chapters 1, 2 and 4, she points out that despite their intentions, these efforts often contributed to other inequities and violence. The fifth and final chapter maintains this critique, but turns to a contemporary alternative: a group called FIERCE, or Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment. The discussion of FIERCE entails a return to the Greenwich Village community introduced at the beginning of the book. As street patrols in Greenwich Village constructed non-residents – including LGBT youth and people of colour – as ‘outsiders’, FIERCE critiqued this distinction between the owners and users of urban spaces. They also challenged the growth of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (p. 188) and the increasing gentrification of the neighbourhood. They went to community meetings and asserted ‘[w]e don’t bring down property value, we are property value’ (p. 212). In doing so, they redefined what was meant by ‘quality of life’ in Greenwich Village – characterising it as the ability to participate in intimacy and care rather than the protection of a specific kind of resident.
As well as acting as a researcher, Hanhardt was a supporter and an ally of FIERCE, demonstrating her commitment not only to her scholarship, but also to the movement. Hanhardt’s aim to, as she puts it, ‘mix my metaphors and my methods’ is powerful. Throughout the chapters, she presents a persistently and impressively intersectional analysis – tracing the ways that actions on the basis of common sexual orientations exclude or include on the basis of race, class, gender and age. Chapters weave together LGBT activist histories with the histories of other neighbourhood groups and cultures, as well as major state initiatives. She also puts activism in conversation with major works in feminist and LGBT political theory, and sometimes critiques or praises this theory on its own terms. Because of the breadth of themes and organisations she covers, and her seamless movement from history to theoretically inspired analysis, the text is sometimes overwhelming, but the conclusion of each chapter reliably wraps up the analysis and main points.
Because of its intersectionality, a number of audiences might find the text interesting and valuable, including urban historians, urban geographers, feminist and queer scholars, social movement theorists and LGBTQ activists. Additionally, the themes in Hanhardt’s book resonate with current discussions in communities across the USA about how normative ideologies of safety and violence tend to reinforce institutionalised inequities and prejudices. Demands of Black Lives Matter movements, for example, call for safety from police and the end of policing in Black communities, because of a loss of faith in police enabling safety. Hanhardt demonstrates the complexity of relationships between safety, policing and violence, specifically in context of LGBT history but speaking beyond narrowly defined identities.