'Does it matter?' : relocating fragments of queer heritage in post-earthquake Christchurch

The aim of this chapter is to relocate fragments of queer heritage in post-earthquake Christchurch and to explore LGBT and mainstream responses to the loss of queer heritage. Christchurch is a compelling site for this work: a city steeped in particular notions of heritage, where people and authorities must make decisions about rebuilding and recovering heritage in a post-disaster context (Bowring and Swaffield 2013). Where does queer heritage figure in the deliberations? Our data are from a project on LGBT experiences of disasters in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in which Christchurch is a key case study and include surveys, interviews with LGBT residents, and analysis of media and policy discourse. In this chapter, we analyse the data through five thematic frames. Displacement, by which respondents indicated their awareness of lost or changing social spaces, practices and everyday geographies, and four responses to displacement: ambivalence (does queer heritage matter?), invisibility (of queer heritage in Christchurch's heritage recovery programme); reminding (of queer presence and history by transient appropriation of urban ruins); and remembering (through which some seek to recover the memories, if not the sites, of queer heritage). We begin with some framing on queer heritage and the Christchurch context.