Tracing steps on an empty dance floor, or, nightclubs as queer spaces

Abstract

Karangahape Road has become a contemporary site for queer convergence located on the ridgeline that frames Auckland’s CBD however communities from the LGBTQIA+ rainbow have moved around the city throughout the short history of Auckland. Though recent law changes have illustrated a political and social shift towards homosexuality through the inclusion of lesbian and gay people into the institution of marriage. These legal changes do not reflect how queer spaces currently exist within the urban fabric. Nightclubs remain one of the few built spaces for queerness to be enacted and are still sites subject to physical, cultural, and economic forms of violence. Although we might understand Karangahape Road as a queer territory it’s past is one of passing through and on, of waka from the Waikato to the Waitemata harbour, of middle class families buying goods, of migrant Pacific Islanders establishing communities on new land. As queer bodies are replaced along the ridge we might rethink the problems of queer territoriality, the encroaching of gentrification and sexual, racial, and gendered normativities and look toward our past as a way of reframing queer urban practises. This thesis examines selected queer nightclubs in Auckland’s CBD between 1970 to the current day through queer archives and fragments of queer history. During this period of time the nightclub and bar has gone through boom and bust with only two nightclubs/ bars and a couple of caberte venues left on the central city fringe. Moving from a theory of queer spaces into analysis of the urban, the nightclub, and the practice of queer ‘building’ this thesis seeks to add to the epistemology of queer intersectionality, specifically focusing on the problems, possibilities and failures of the nightclub. Instead of working within the confines of the institution or within the contemporary confines of gay territoriality in Auckland a project engaged with a form of queer building is proposed that dances around the city; light footed and off balance.