Queer Urban Space Beyond the Gayborhood

This dissertation examines the relationship between queer geography and gentrification in Atlanta, Georgia. This relationship is intrinsically tied to issues of urban land valuation, sexuality, race, and the material reality of a sprawling urban area. Using data from thirty-five participant interviews, I examine the transformation of the former gayborhood of Midtown, and its relationships to the broader queer geographies of Atlanta. I begin by tracing the historical context of Midtown, from the post-war period and beyond. First, I examine how suburbanization, white flight, and narratives of good and bad families influenced valuation of the inner-city. In Midtown, the denigration of urban Black families and subsequent devaluation of urban land allowed for a return to the city of those queer persons who did not fit the suburban, family-oriented ideal. Next, I discuss how a reinvestment in the city in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century triggered processes of gentrification, revaluing Midtown. This revaluation simultaneously gentrified out many poorer queers while also helping to further a rich, white gay homonorm. I document how developers marketing Midtown commodified a privileged gay identity, leading to the dispersal of those LGBTQ community members that did not fit within a particular cis white male gay norm and lacked the financial means to pay the rapidly escalating rents in the neighborhood. Instead, they became a dispersed population that would need to contend with a new material reality, one that lacked long-term physical locations for community gathering. Finally, using the lens of mobilities, I trace how these dispersed Atlanta queers make place for themselves, often in temporary and ephemeral ways.