The Emergence & Loss of Trans Spaces in New York City

- Episode 01- Transcript

Georgie Williams: This is a podcast intended to shed light on marginal gender and sexuality variant histories around the world. Queer, as a transitive verb, is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “to consider or interpret something from a perspective that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality.” Thus, we could argue, that anything can be queered. Welcome to the very first episode of /Queer. You’re here with me, your host, Georgie Williams.

It is irrefutable at this time to state that New York City is a site of great significance with regards to LGBTQ+ history. One of the beating hearts of queer culture in the modern Western world and home to the infamous Stonewall Riots, NYC boasts the largest self-identifying Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in the United States. Described by author and journalist Charles Kaiser as “the gay metropolis”, the city’s rich queer history dates back as far as the turn of the 19th Century, when population numbers almost doubled between 1800 and 1820, bringing with it the emergence of what have been described as “homosexual subcultures”. However, this melting pot of queerness is not one which has avoided the narrative of LGBTQ+ marginality and struggle which has been evident across many sites of gender and sex diverse history around the world. It took until 1981 for same sex relations to be legalised in New York, approximately 30 years after the establishment of what were known as “homophile” organisations in and around the city. As with organisations around the world, LGBTQ+ groups in New York were often established in response to mistreatment or discrimination; GLAAD, formerly known as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is a non-governmental media-monitoring organisation which formed in 1985 to protest what was described as the defamatory and sensationalised coverage of the AIDS crisis by the New York Post. New York is championed as a site of progress and inclusivity, and in order to have achieved that status, it has taken resistance and direct action by LGBTQ+ community members over many, many decades. However, in reflecting upon the stories told as part of the rich tapestry of New York’s queer history, it becomes evident that some queer communities have been provided with a platform, a spotlight and a place in the history books where others, in spite of their efforts and successes, have not.

It is estimated that 50,000 of New York City’s inhabitants are transgender- not accounting for those individuals who may be closeted about their transgender or gender variant identity for a myriad of reasons, both personal and professional. Although the LGBTQ+ history of New York has been well documented over the past few decades, the role of transgender communities in the struggles for queer rights have often been overlooked and downplayed. There has, for example, been some contention surrounding the involvement of trans individuals in the Stonewall Riots. The term transgender was not widely used at the time of the riots, and in The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality by Wayne R. Dynes, Dynes writes that as the term was not generally in use during this period, it can only be applied to drag queens present at Stonewall. He goes on to state that none of the present drag queens made any major contribution to the riots and subsequent social rights movement. However, several individuals who were present at the protests, including activist Roy McCarthy, have been vocal about how individuals self-identifying with terms such as transvestite or transsexual were present and actively involved throughout. Cristan Williams of The TransAdvocate has written at length about the cis-normative focus of some Stonewall historians and what she has described as cis-washing- the erasure of trans and gender variant individuals from the queer history books.

Given the evident divisions that have existed between transgender individuals and some members of the wider LGBTQ+ community in the past, it leads us to question where, and how, trans individuals can be present and visible in a city such as New York. As queer spaces have, throughout history, emerged as a response to ostracism by the wider community, trans spaces have often emerged on the wider fringes of queer circles, even further out of sight than many cisgender, sexuality-variant communities. When we talk about space, however, we need to unpack what it is we’re describing.

Carrie Davis, in interview: So when we think about these trans spaces, I like to break them down into two general areas; physical and virtual. Virtual being areas that are internet or print based, and I would put actually research in that bucket of virtual, and I think physical we’re talking about environments where trans individuals physically frequented, we’re talking about clubs, we’re talking about public sex environments like sex work strolls, we’re talking about non-profit organisations, things of that nature.

Georgie Williams, voiceover: That’s Carrie Davis speaking. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Carrie about her perspective on the matter of trans spaces in and around New York City. Carrie left her career as an architect in the mid-1990s in order to focus on establishing herself in non-profit health and human rights. Her work over the past 22 years has included 18 years of work with The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Centre in New York City and extensive involvement with the development of legislation and policy pertaining to transgender and gender variant rights throughout the state of New York. Carrie has also worked to develop a curriculum for educating and training individuals on matters of transgender history, trans communities and the needs and rights of trans individuals- and this curriculum has been implemented in the training of over 8,500 people working in for-profit commerce and business companies, government, education, health care and non-profit organisations, as well as individual practitioners locally, regionally and nationally. In 2017, New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Carrie as a human rights commissioner for New York. As a woman with a transgender history, Carrie’s interest in trans spaces is both professional and personal. 0:6:17

Carrie Davis, in interview: So I think I’m going to start initially by locating myself in the conversation, like who am I and why am I even speaking about the topic? I’m white, at the time that we’re talking about this I was in my early middle age, I was living in the East Village in New York City in the 1990s- so I can only really speak as an expert on the issue of trans space in the kind of area or world that I was part of, which is a powerful limitation. At that time as you note in your intro I had left architecture and was working in numerous jobs, I was working as a bookkeeper, a legal secretary, a personal assistant, an outreach worker and I was also working as an escort, I was working in the sex industry and I developed and ran a NYC-focused trans website that I used to drive my escort business and that focused on transgender spaces in Manhattan.

Carrie Davis, in interview: So when we’re talking about what trans spaces in the late 1990s looked like, I think it’s really important to think about what was happening in general at that time. So first if we think about virtual spaces, the computer we were accessing the internet through AOL and really static Web.1.0. interfaces, we communicated with each other through payphones and pagers, we didn’t have cellphones and text messaging, Times Square was still a public sex environment, a porno place of porno theatres and peep shows, it hadn’t become the Disney Times Square we think of, the West Side highway and the pier were places where the queer community hung out, and now we have the Hudson River park in place of that. The meat packing district has been transformed from at least a place of industry and in the evening a public sex environment to the Highline Park and Apple Stores and things of that nature, and magazines and newspapers like The Village Voice had back-pages which catered to different kind of escorts, which shifted to the internet and places like Craigslist which even now they don’t carry that any longer. So a big moment of change for what we’re looking at, so that’s the snapshot we’re talking about is that key moment when everything was shifting.

Georgie Williams, voiceover: I was interested in what Carrie had to say about the accessibility of these spaces. As we look back on these environments and eras with an intersectional lens- that is to say, a lens that considers demographics such as age, race, socioeconomic status, disability, social class and so forth, it can sometimes appear that some environments may only benefit or be open to people aligning with some of these particular demographics. I asked Carrie about her perspective on what access to these spaces looked like at the turn of the century.

Carrie Davis, in interview: Right so we’re talking about environments that are naturally hierarchical and segregated at the same time. One of the things we might wanna step back a little bit also and think about is, when we’re talking about trans spaces, we’re maybe thinking about transgender which had just come into mainstream use at time, so another big change that was going on was the language and transgender vocabulary is very unique, it’s very distinct, it’s also coded in many ways and I think that’s an act of self-identification but also partly an act of resistance, so when we think about these trans spaces, we’re talking about people who self-identify as transgender because many of the people we’re talking about would probably not have done that, we’re talking about people at the time using words like transvestite, using words like transsexual, a lot of those words have now passed, we were pushing back against those words at that time because we felt that they had a powerful pathological connotation. We’re also talking about language that was very cultural, so you could be in a community like I was from which was having different educational and ethnic backgrounds, and we would use words that may not have been used by other communities. So it’s important to keep in mind that the vocabulary we’re talking about is both time bound, it’s culturally bound, it’s ethnicity bound and so forth. So when we think about the hierarchies in trans space, I think one of the primary things we wanna consider is the idea of access to privilege. So everyone is trying to be safe, to make enough money and to stay alive, and so what are the factors that enable that, to some extent? And in our culture, one way we would have described it is someone who looks the most real, or someone who passes or is seen in some way as non-transgender, we’re also talking about someone who is seen as more white than other people, and we’re also talking about someone who is seen as more youthful to some extent than other people. Those are not factors that are unique to the transgender community, I think that’s kind of foundation stones and problems that our culture faces today, but it’s really important to think that trans spaces would have divided down these lines. And so we see as people who were the safest, had the most access to resources were likely seen as non-transgender, at least in the day time, they were seen as white or whiter, and they were seen as I said younger in some way. And you can kind of see examples of this, if you look at the advertisements in the Village Voice, trans women of Caribbean or Central American descent would characterise themselves as Italian or Argentine or Venezuelan, trans women of African American or Afro-Caribbean descent would describe themselves as Brazilian in order to, not take on what would be seen as a pejorative identity of either Latinx or African American, very often white people would be described as having ‘all-American’ looks in these advertisements and they would probably be people who probably would be charging more money for their services. People who could work on the internet, could find clients on the internet would probably have access to a lot more privilege than people who had to work on the sex work strolls, and again we can see that defined by these hierarchies we’re talking about realness, whiteness and age. Again, we’re seeing this breaking down- many of the spaces were multi-ethnic, multi-age, multi-realness in terms of who inhabited them but then others were not. And so you really have to kind of take a step back when you’re thinking about trans spaces and realise that all of this is going on simultaneously.

Georgie Williams, voiceover: The Village Voice, the publication Carrie has been referencing, was a news and culture paper founded in 1955. It started out as a platform for the creative communities of New York City and eventually developed a reputation for its staunch support of gay rights, whilst receiving three Pulitzer prizes during their 63 years of publication. The paper faced controversy in 2012 due to a New York Times article detailing the use of The Village Voice’s backpages by sex traffickers. As of August 2017, The Village Voice ceased publication of its print edition, after which it was converted to being an exclusively digital venture.

Georgie Williams, in interview: Do you feel that these spaces developed in order to ensure the survival and well-being of trans individuals, you were talking about the privilege of being safe, are there spaces where you feel trans individuals have been able to experience forms of what I would like to describe as queer joy? because I think sometimes there’s an issue with, not just, and I use the term queer narratives, but trans narratives, with this idea of perpetual suffering, which is deeply problematic, but do you feel like spaces have developed over maybe the past few years that kind of facilitate maybe a more positive experience for trans individuals- not to say that sex work can’t be a positive experience, but that may be more about survival and getting through the day to day for some individuals more than the experience of joy.

Carrie Davis, in interview: I don’t think we saw our lives as miserable, even though things may have been difficult. So I definitely wanna walk back the narrative of the idea that trans people don’t experience joy or pleasure. The trans spaces in New York I think served a variety of functions, one was enterprise, so many of them were PSE where transgender people were trying to make a living. They were also social environments because they took pleasure in whatever they were doing with each other, and then there were support environments where people could connect to each other and give each other support through the difficulties they may or may not be having, related possibly to being transgender but also to other issues in people’s lives. And so I think one thing it’s useful to think about is benefits of proximity- why do groups cluster together? What are the reasons that bring immigrant communities together, religious communities together, what benefits do they have from that? And while there are some very physical or tangible benefits like I’m hanging out with people that eat the food that I eat or speak the language I speak or worship in the place that I worship, there’s also less tangible benefits- I’m talking to people that understand my identity and I don’t have to explain it to them. Because transgender people appear in all communities in NYC, and they’re of all ages, we don’t have the same ability to create a physical community somewhere, we create these communities at different times and different spaces around the city. And in those places we’re able to talk about what’s happened to us that day and we’re talking to someone who knows exactly what we’re talking about and we don’t have to explain in too much detail, someone is going to immediately commiserate with us and understand an incident we may have experienced, and are able to support us and also have fun with us, so when we’re thinking about these spaces, the enterprise spaces like the PSE, we’re talking about the sex work strolls or the clubs, are very social spaces, people are going there one because they’re going to make a living but they’re also hanging out with each other while they’re in those spaces. Other spaces that are enterprise related spaces are not so social and the online escorting is not a particularly social environment, you’re working to make money, the same with the chat lines that existed at the time, the phone lines, those were all designed to generate revenue from someone else and they weren’t particularly social trans spaces.

Georgie Williams, in interview: I’m relieved and pleased to hear that these spaces did form some kind of support circle for many individuals, and it’s interesting what you say about the fact that there are trans individuals all around New York City and so it’s not necessarily having one overarching community but it’s several communities kind of placed around the city both through the physical and the virtual, and I think that’s interesting because it kind of addresses the misconception of the kind of homogenized trans narrative, the idea that every trans individual’s had the same experience and falls into the same kinds of demographics and there is, what I’ve been aware of there is a multiplicity to the trans experience which is often overlooked and so there are some trans individuals that are given a particular kind of platform because they may be considered more palatable to a cisnormative or heteronormative perspective and there are others that aren’t. Is that something that you feel you’ve experienced with your engagement with some trans communities?

Carrie Davis, in interview: I was listening to you and I was thinking, why would the trans communities be any different than any other community? Why- transgender can be bit of a red herring that can take us out of what’s really going on, we put transgender in front of something and we manage to misunderstand what’s really happening. So transgender people are as diverse and complex and exist in many different ways and have extremely- thousands of years of history, so we’re not something that’s a new phenomena. We’re just talking about something that has been defined- as most things have- very differently in this time and place. One of those key moments was the 1990s when trans people started to have a voice and create words and language and culture that was meaningful to the community as opposed to inhabiting spaces created by other communities and so that I think that’s something that was very unique about that period of time and something that has continued today and so we’re seeing those narratives- we are seeing some traditional standard, transgender narratives that wouldn’t look out of place 20 or 30 years ago, but we’re also seeing people who are sharing their stories that we’ve never heard of before, never thought about before from different communities, from different cultures, and I think it’s that complexity, the layers- the ability to recognise those intersections is something that has changed a lot in the last 20 years or so and that’s probably the most powerful change that I’m aware of.

Georgie Williams, in interview: What potential do you see for the growth and emergence of trans spaces now, and I mean that of course in the physical and the virtual, from your own personal standpoint how would you like to see these spaces developing? And finally, what in your opinion makes these spaces so important and so valuable for these trans communities?

Carrie Davis, in interview: So I think one of the challenges is that trans space, like many other social spaces has been impacted by the internet, virtual worlds, so back in the 1990s we were existing in an area where both of those could exist simultaneously as one was growing, the other started to shrink. And so we see the physical trans spaces, the clubs and places of that ilk have diminished, almost to a point of negligence in areas like NYC. That doesn’t mean that transgender people don’t gather together physically and still don’t, but it does mean those opportunities have become smaller. And that goes for every community that is impacted by the fact that we can now connect with people on our phone, and so then we have to think there must be some reason why people are shifting from one to the other and the narrative that people like to propagate is that transgender spaces were closed down by an aggressive policing policy in the late 1990s led by then Mayor Giuliani and then- Police Commissioner Bratton using a “broken windows” mentality of policing. And while that certainly did happen, that wasn’t the primary reason these trans spaces became shuttered. I think the primary reason has a lot to do with capitalism and we saw the environments that transgender people were collecting in, transgender people were being priced out of those areas, the shops, the clubs, and even the sex work strolls were subject to powerful forces of development, gentrification, and so we saw Julia Roberts living where trans sex workers used to work in the evenings and that’s a big shift, and you can try to pin that on a policing policy but that’s really a cultural shift that’s occurred in NYC very significantly during that era. You can think about the west side highway and while it was a very powerful queer space at one time there are powerful benefits also to looking at what a park can be and how people can engage with wildlife, with nature and with the river in a way that it wasn’t really possible when it was largely a ruin or a boundary or a borderline of some sort, so again we’re seeing a lot of shifts that occur, physical trans spaces in NYC still occur, they occur again in those areas we think of as boundary areas or borderlands and they do happen again still around areas like sex work strolls and they’re still scattered around the city in different areas, and certainly some very significant transgender space exists in the city in areas like Jackson Heights, where we can see a lot of transgender Latino or Latinx living together and congregating and making space. But again, because we’re talking about a community that’s inherently dispersed, those areas are difficult to find and often function as they had in the past as nodes, and that means that they’re going to be very temporary. Something we didn’t really talk about is the idea that trans space, an area could be a trans space from midnight to 4am, but not be a trans space during the daytime. And so we’re talking about areas that pop up and change very quickly, they’re temporal in some sense and so they vary by day and night, some of them are 24hrs but very rarely, they close or are erased very quickly or suddenly and those are subject to forced of policing but also market and capitalism forces.

Georgie Williams, in interview: Do you think there is an opportunity for spaces to be reclaimed in the face of gentrification and capitalism or do you feel that geographically there will have to be a shift further and further out of the city?

Carrie Davis, in interview: I don’t think we’re going to be reclaiming spaces from forces of capitalism or gentrification, I don’t think the resources the trans community commands are significant enough, and I think that just like how we still deal with sexism and racism even though those are technically illegal, I do think the forces transgender people experience aren’t going away anytime soon, so I do think we will see transgender people occupying those borderlands or boundary areas, those fringe areas that keep getting pushed outwards. I do think we’re seeing a very powerful shift in the ways that transgender people are making different kinds of spaces. There are a number of transgender non-profit leaders now that are building spaces that are welcoming to transgender people, we have the Trans Latina Project, we have Destination Tomorrow, we have a number of other places and I am doing them a disservice by not naming the whole list of them, New York State has been investing in transgender people’s health, we’ve just had a transgender leadership collective retreat that brought together around 70 transgender leaders from around the state, many of them from the NYC area. And this is something we wouldn’t have seen 20-25 years ago so we’re seeing transgender people making different kinds of spaces, some of those spaces again are virtual and some of them are physical, some of them are social, some of them are supportive or non-profit focused, we’re seeing a lot of conscious attempts to make transgender space that does fit within a cultural understanding that would allow them to exist less on the borderlands and more in the mainstream because transgender people inhabit, as I said earlier, all spaces and areas of NYC, so they will need to access space in all those same places.

Georgie Williams, voiceover: As a researcher and activist I have had the fortune of learning how important it is to address my own position within the work that I do in this field- my positionality, as it is known. Just as Carrie situated herself in this conversation, I feel the need to do so myself- since all that is contained within this podcast first passes through me, as a material within this project. As someone who is queer in both sexuality and gender identity, coming to New York has felt at times like a pilgrimage but, in coming here, I have also become aware of how my own queerness is palatable and acceptable in much of the city- between my whiteness, my status as a middle-class individual and my ability to pass (somewhat) comfortably as a cisgender woman whenever is necessary, I am aware of the fact that I feel like a tourist not only in the city but in many queer spaces. I do not feel as though I am not valid enough in my queer identity to be present in these spaces, but I am aware of the fact that perhaps I do not need them as others have and continue to do so. It is through privilege that I can choose to dip my toe into these spaces and leave when I so wish to. Not everyone has the fortune of being able to leave queer spaces and, more specifically, trans-inclusive spaces, as and when they please without facing aggression and violence. Not everyone has the opportunity to find employment, find a support circle, outside of these spaces. I am grateful for how these spaces are open and available to an individual such as myself but in expressing that gratitude, I must also be honest with myself- I do not need these spaces as others have and others continue to do so.

What I had initially wanted to address in my investigation into New York’s trans spaces was that these spaces were and are a lifeline for the transgender and gender variant community. I wanted to focus on the fact that not only are these spaces a welcome refuge from the pressures of the external cisnormative and heteronormative world, but they are a space in which joy, a queer joy, can grow and thrive. Trans spaces are a response to the exclusion, derision and vitriol many trans individuals, especially trans people of colour, have been subjected to throughout much of contemporary western history. The specific needs of these individuals have so often been overlooked, falling through the gaps where race, gender and class intersect. However, this was information I was already aware of from my own reading around the subject. It wasn’t the same as being present in these spaces be they physical or virtual, being present in New York, and engaging with individuals who frequented trans-friendly environments. After all, I could not presume to understand contemporary trans experiences within New York after one conversation about trans sex work and the shifting of trans spaces at the turn of the century, no matter how informative. So I decided to go to where the history was- at least, within the physical.

After considering all that Carrie had to say about the impact of capitalism and gentrification on trans spaces, I went for a wander, starting at the aforementioned Hudson River Park, making my way down to Christopher Street and walking east. I entered the space not necessarily looking for what had changed since the era Carrie had described to me, but in search of what relics of that history could still be found. Christopher Street is, at times, very tourist-friendly. There are busy bars and well-kept storefronts. As I made my way down the street though, I was greeted by more bars and stores catering to queer communities, spaces which on some level or another, remained accessible for individuals such as myself looking to find their fellow people.

It was through a most serendipitous happenstance that I was walking past St John’s Lutheran Church that night. Hesitant to enter but beckoned by an enthusiastic clamour inside, I was fascinated to discover a collective of queer and/or trans artists dancing and lip syncing between the pews of the church.

I would love to have been able to share some recordings of the performances here but, as I was recording lip syncing and dancing, I don’t have the necessary licences to play any of the music in the videos I recorded during this evening.

The majority of attendees were people of colour, predominantly of an African American or Afro-Caribbean background. Junior LaBeija was one of the performers- LaBeija of course being the surname afforded to those belonging to the House of LaBeija, a prominent New York drag family established back in 1972. I had the honour of watching Junior sashay down up and down the aisle in opulent garbs and his Dolce & Gabbanna sunglasses, lip syncing to Why by Annie Lennox, with dignity and charm that enthralled the congregation as much as it did I. As I stood in the corner wishing I had brought more dollar notes to tip with, I was reminded of how Carrie referenced the clustering of groups as something that occurred, among other reasons, between people looking to share in worship. A place of worship had become transformed, utilised and re-purposed for the night in an act of queering, by individuals from backgrounds both religious and secular. But what struck me most in being present at this event was that this was not just a trans space or a queer space- it was an inclusive space. Aside from the trans and/or queer acts on stage, there were several individuals in the crowd with physical disabilities, individuals with developmental disabilities, several generations of performers and audience members, all congregating in the late hours of an October night to celebrate and spread joy. Carrie was right- it wasn’t just that there was one, homogeneous trans community, in one fixed space. Trans spaces existed upon the congregating of these trans individuals and other queer individuals, people from a myriad of backgrounds representing many different walks of life. I had the opportunity to chat with several of the attendees, explain my interest in the event as both a researcher and queer person, and discuss with them the cohesiveness that was evident within this group. I left the church feeling lifted- I had had the fortune to wander, completely by chance, into exactly the kind of space I needed to find.

Perhaps that is one of the most crucial aspects of trans spaces, of queer spaces- that so many of us do not know that we have been looking for a place, a collective, to make us feel welcomed and understood, until we find it. We can find these spaces in bars, in community centres, in places of worship, in forums, on social media and in a myriad of other places within the virtual and physical worlds. It is a queer joy, perhaps, to traverse a world not made for you and then experience the happiness of finding your people somewhere in the in-between. Not the margins, not the outskirts- but the places we build, claim and reclaim as our own, through the simple act of being present.

This episode of /Queer was edited with the help of Charles Makemson and scripted and presented by me, Georgie Williams. This episode was recorded on location in Brooklyn, New York. A very special thanks to Carrie Davis for her incredibly insightful contribution to this episode and also to the vivacious performers and congregation at St John’s Lutheran Church over in Manhattan’s West Village. A warm thanks also to Tarryn Williams and Luke Wallis for their contributions to content and script. Music in this episode was composed by Kevin MacLeod. If you enjoyed this episode or have any feedback, please get in touch on Instagram or Twitter at @SlashQueer, that’s @ S-L-A-S-H Queer, or email us at slashqueer@outlook.com. Until next time stay kind, stay radical and stay queer.