Gay Pride Month takes place annually in June and traces its origins from the Stonewall riots of June-July 1969 in the United States, where gay Americans protested against their political and social oppression. In 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton officially declared June to be Gay Pride Month, and each year represents a time of reflection on how far society has come towards accepting gay individuals as well as a time of celebration and public displays from and in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

Professor Audrey Yue (NUS Department of Communications and New Media) and Professor Helen Leung (Simon Fraser University, Canada) consider the different theoretical approaches by which to understand homosexuality in Asia in ‘Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong’ (Urban Studies, 2017).

Singapore, which still considers homosexuality a criminal offence, is conceptualised as a contested space for gay practices and the queer scene. The acute tension that exists in the country is highlighted by the example of an urban city-scape that can both tolerate the ‘Pink Dot’ celebration in 2014 (with over 1,000 attendees as well as international corporate sponsors such as Google, BP, and Goldman Sachs) in the same month that three children’s books with the themes of same-sex family were banned from all its public libraries.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, is described in more political terms, with recent LGBTQ+ campaigns mirroring the other passionate and publicly visible social and political protests that have taken place on the island. Prof Yue and Prof Leung note the instance of inter-Asian referencing where the ‘Pink Dot’ event in Hong Kong was modelled after its predecessor in Singapore rather than any Western LGBTQ+ example, signalling a shift to a more distinctly Asian expression of queer spaces and community.

The dominant methods of doing research on these topics remain oral history and ethnography (a systematic study of culture from the point of view of the subject), but are shown to be expanding to more postmodern areas such as ‘transgender architecture’ and the study of ‘linguistic landscapes’, where research on gay spaces goes beyond simply focusing on the people to deconstructing their environment.

The article concludes with two significant proposals on the future of queer urban studies; firstly, the concept of a ‘disjunctive queer modernity’ (a disconnected form of queer modernity) in Asia that can be used as a new starting point for non-Western gay cities, and secondly, the new methods identified such as network theory, queer sound, and cultural policy that have the potential to widen the frames of reference for those curious about the politics of queer urban spaces.

Read the full article here.