Queer Space

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A San Francisco-based architectural journalist and sometime guest professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Betsky Building Sex offers a look at the way gay architects create what he calls queer space. This is, he says, "useless, amoral, and sensual space that lives only in and for experience. It is a space of spectacle, consumption, dance and obscenity. It is a misuse or deformation of a place." That's the theory, but Betsky's rather superficial book fails to make a convincing case. He lumps the diverse architects Louis Sullivan and Ralph Adams Cram and the decorator Cecil Beaton together because they liked to sleep with men. He fails to explain how, if gay architects Bruce Goff and Philip Johnson created "queer space," the queerest and most campy spaces in modern architectureMorris Lapidus's Miami hotelswere produced by a heterosexual architect. The queer-space approach is also unconvincing when applied to the few lesbian architects of note, and it is insufficient to call Philip Johnson's skyscrapers "phallic," as what architect's skyscrapers are not? Betsky unfortunately relies on big, misleading pronouncements: gay love was "honored or merely assumed in most civilizations"; Christians "did not care for the body at all"a statement disproven by the example of Saint Sebastian he includes. He also makes smaller errors such as calling the repository of obscene literature at the Bibliothque Nationale "The Heavens" when in fact it is called "Hell." This is an exciting, thought-provoking subject that deserves more careful and considered treatment. Apr.

Library Journal

In this follow-up to Building Sex Morrow, 1995, Betsky, curator of art and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, attempts to reveal a historical interrelationship among a gay sensibility, design, and culture. Offering no real definition of the word queer, which he incessantly uses as noun, verb, and adjective, Betsky fails to differentiate it from his use of homosexual and gay as he focuses predominantly on spaces associated with the sexual activities of white, middle-class gay males. Disappointingly, his fatuous prose and unsubstantiated generalizations undermine his sincere attempts to explore this complex and fascinating topic: "Cruising through the city or cyberspace, the queer privateers move from their operatic colonies to the dirty delights of sex clubs, opening up the tightly packed, floating communal oval of a ship, a queer ark always looking for a port. I hope it remains always afloat." Recommended only for architecture collections in academic libraries and larger gay studies collections.Jim Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.