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Aretina Hamilton on Queer Black Atlanta Atlanta Studies

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In this clip from the roundtable "Transnational Atlanta: Exploring Diasporic Regional Geographies," recorded at the 2018 Atlanta Studies Symposium, Aretina Hamilton responds to the following question:

 

Marlon Bailey has defined black queer space “as the place-making practices that Black LGBT people undertake to affirm and support their non-normative sexual identities, embodiment, and community values.”2 Your past research has focused on African American lesbians and how they have created spaces of belonging in Atlanta. As the only formally trained geographer on the panel, could you gesture to the work that geographers are doing in theorizing race, sexuality, space, and place? And with your own research in mind, what kind of intervention does black queer geography present for Atlanta Studies?

 

See the full roundtable here: https://www.atlantastudies.org/exploring-the-black-diasporic-geographies-of-metro-atlanta/


delete Delete Are you sure?
So Katherine McKittrick talks about
these different ways of knowing, right?
The ways in which black geographies
are completely erased.
And then we have to look at the
context of being in the American South.
So my work, specifically, dealing
with black queer geographies
we’re talking about a
marginalized population
within a marginalized population
within a marginalized population.
And what I discovered in my work is
we know Atlanta is the black Mecca
We sorta see this at the late 1970s
but at the same time that
it's a a black mecca it was also
slowly but surely becoming a gay mecca
which is really kind of interesting.
When you look at the media
we get the story of New York and LA
and the spaces in between. Right?
So, the flyover states. You can't go here
it’s a whole bunch of Christians
you’re gonna go to hell. But in reality
what you actually see is part of this
richness and diversity of the city was
there were black gay folks that
were moving here at the same time
They were looking for their black mecca
because they’re gay and their sexuality
is connected to being black.
It's connected to being black.
And unlike our traditional gayborhoods
that we see on TV - the Castro, right?
you know, Greenwich Village -
its unmappable.
How do you map the unmappable?
I think in Atlanta we’ve traditionally
looked at Midtown as this kind of
gayborhood, and there were bars
but what we don’t get the story
behind that is there are several
segregation laws that were in place.
Where if you went to like Backstreets
and other gay bars they would ask you
for five pieces of IDs, right?
There’s other situations where
there were people going to clubs -
there was a situation in my research
where there were a couple people
going to this one gay white club
and they said, hey, I heard you cook
fried chicken and you like to eat greens,
Right? So these very noticeable
situations of race.
So, on one end, sure, you can come
here but this is definitely part of this
white spatial imaginary
in the words of George Lipsitz.
So I think that when we talk about
broadening - you know I’m really
interested in broadening the definition
of Atlanta, this black mecca,
it is about really bringing this
to the surface and not othering it.
Because it’s completely encapsulated
in this dream.
And then also the other thing
which is interesting, which connects to
gentrification - isn’t it ironic that
when we talk about gentrification
we talk about the first wave, right,
it's always the artists, the gays, right?
and then it’s like the
heterosexual families come in.
But what’s happened in Atlanta
is even gay people have been
gentrified out. But on top of that,
for Black LGBTQ people,
they were never there, right?
Black LGBTQ people were highly
concentrated in Cascade Heights, right?
Collier Hills, in the Westside.
Which really is an indication that
even as a black queer person
there was a desire and need to
stay within the confines of your community
Right? With black folks. Right?
Because again, it doesn’t -
yes, you’re gay, but you are rooted in
this larger community and also
its about belonging and exclusion.
To be in Atlanta, right, there's a -
I always say when I fly into
Atlanta there’s a richness in the air.
You know, as a black person
whoo! I’m free!
There’s a freedom. [audience laughter]
No, there’s a freedom that people
kind of take for granted. And again,
when you look at a population that
has been othered and marginalized here.
Right? They’re othered here.
But to be here where you see
various different representations
of blackness here. You know?
There's so many different
representations and one
of the things I talk about
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01-20-2025 00:00 - 01-20-2025 23:59