Queer suburbs : (sub)urban spaces and sexualities in the Global North

The majority of the population in the Global North lives not only in urban areas – to put it more accurately, they live in the suburbs surrounding these cities. In Australia, for instance, four out of five people live in the suburbs comprising the country’s sprawling metropolitan regions. Since these suburbs house the population’s majority, they reflect its social and cultural diversity. However, fairly narrow imaginaries of suburban life prevail in the Global North, perhaps particularly in settler-societies with expansive, low-density suburbs such as Australia, Canada, and the United States. The particular social norms that underpin “expected” sexual identities and relationships are prominent, with the ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family often synonymous with both imaginaries of suburban life (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Gorman-Murray, 2007) and their translation into urban planning and practice (Johnson, 2000; Howard, 2013). This chapter instead trains a lens on “other” sexualities and their relationship with suburban life, morphologies, and imaginaries. We focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and queer experiences of the suburbs in the Anglophone Global North. We consider, on the one hand, the development of neighborhoods specifically associated with LGBT and queer identities and communities, and on the other hand, the experiences of LGBT and queer people in the context of “mainstream” suburbia. The latter remains underdeveloped in extant research agendas, but given growing political and social acceptance of LGBT and queer identities and relationships, demands greater attention.