HOMO STAD to belong_boriscribio

HOMO STAD to Belong XXX

BORIS CRIBIO

HO MO STAD TO N G

BE HOMO

LO

HOMO STAD to Belong XXX

19082026

**GRADUATION COMMITTEE** JOCHEM HOMMINGA MENTOR VIBEKE GIESKES COMMITTEE MEMBER ANNA TORRES COMMITTEE MEMBER

INTRODUCTION (I)

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(1)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. See pp. 118–122.

(2)

Weisman, L. K. (2000). Women’s environmental rights: A manifesto. In J. Rendell, B. Penner, & I. Borden (Eds.), Gender space architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction (pp. 1–5). Routledge. Quoted from p. 1.

(3)

Colomina, B. (1992). The split wall: Domestic voyeurism. In B. Colomina (Ed.), Sexuality & space (pp. 73–98). Princeton Architectural Press. See pp. 73–98.

(4)

Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The end of queer space? Log, 41, 85–88. See pp. 85–86.

(5)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Ev ans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. Quoted from p. 121.

(6)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Ev ans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. See pp. 121–123.

(7)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Ev ans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. See p. 127.

INTRO

Cities are often represented through monuments, streets, and buildings, yet many histories remain invisible because they were never formally planned or permanently constructed. Amsterdam’s queer history is one of these hidden narratives. For more than a century, queer communities have continuously appropriated, adapted, and transformed the city, producing spaces that existed between legality and illegality, public and private, visibility and concealment.¹ This research accompanies a large-scale drawing that reconstructs this spatial history from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than documenting only buildings, it maps the architectural conditions, interiors, landscapes, and urban fragments through which queer life became possible. The research unfolds chronologically, tracing how political and technological conditions transformed the relationship between sexuality and the built environment. The final drawing, however, is not simply a timeline: it brings these moments together into one city. Architecture is not merely a background to everyday life; it is a force that shapes how people live and relate to one another. Space is never neutral. Throughout history, the built environment has reinforced or challenged social expectations, particularly those surrounding gender and sexuality. Architecture can naturalize social norms, but equally it can become a stage for resistance, negotiation, and transformation. Within the drawing, these conditions become design material, reorganised so that spaces from different periods can coexist. Throughout history, buildings and cities have reflected and reinforced socially constructed gender roles. Feminist architectural scholarship has shown how patriarchal values can become embedded within the organisation and use of architectural space. Leslie Kanes Weisman states that “the man-made environments which surround us reinforce conventional patriarchal definitions of women’s role in society.”² These spatial structures influence access, behaviour, and expectations about who belongs where. Beatriz Colomina similarly demonstrates that architecture organises relationships between privacy, visibility, and observation through the arrangement of rooms, windows, furniture, and thresholds.³ The organisation of space therefore reflects existing power structures, but it can also become a means through which those structures are challenged. Queer spaces have historically emerged within this tension between control and resistance. Often occupying marginal or clandestine locations, they transformed urban spaces into places of encounter, intimacy, and community. Alleys, public toilets, parks, bars, clubs, hotels, and later memorials became environments where surveillance could be negotiated and social norms temporarily suspended. Rather than defining queer space through one building type, Betsky’s work understands it through processes of appropriation and transformation, an argument he later revisited with Jaffer Kolb when discussing how queer life increasingly moved into everyday spaces.⁴ In the drawing, these typologies are no longer isolated historical examples: spaces separated by decades can occupy the same city. Architecture does not merely reflect society; it actively shapes it. Consequently, the disappearance of queer spaces represents more than the loss of buildings or businesses. It can also mean the disappearance of social practices, collective memories, and communities that those spaces made possible. As these environments disappear or change function, the histories embedded within them become difficult to recognise within the contemporary city. The drawing therefore does more than document them. By suspending historical time, it allows lost and contemporary spaces to remain present together. Amsterdam offers an exceptional urban laboratory through which to examine this relationship between architecture and sexuality. Throughout the twentieth century, queer life shifted between hidden public spaces, commercial interiors, nightlife, memorials, and digital platforms. Initially, queer encounters occupied parks, alleyways, public toilets and other spaces, where anonymity could provide possibilities for encounter. Hekma documents how public toilets, parks, streets, dark alleys, and railway stations formed part of Amsterdam’s homosexual landscape and notes that “gay life was until the 1960s part of public life.”⁵ During the second half of the twentieth century, these activities shifted towards specialised environments including bars, hotels, discos, saunas, and other commercial interiors.⁶ The Homomonument later made queer memory and political recognition permanently visible within Amsterdam’s public landscape.⁷ In the drawing, however, these stages remain simultaneously present. The result is not simply an illustration of Amsterdam’s queer past, but a city assembled from it: a designed homosexual city where different generations can coexist. 005

AUTHOR ROYALSTUDIO

QUEER

SPACE Queer space and queered space are therefore not opposites, but different spatial conditions. Queer space describes an environment in which queer identity has become embedded over time, while queered

QUEER SPACE = A SPATIAL CONDITION In this research, I use the term queer space to describe a space that has acquired a queer identity through sustained occupation, culture, desire, memory, or community. Its queerness is not necessarily produced by its original architectural design, but through the people, practices, and histories that inhabit it.

008

QUEER

QUEERED SPACE space describes the act of transforming an existing environment through queer use. A space can move between these conditions, and a queered space may eventually become recognised as queer space.

QUEERED SPACE = AN ACTION / PROCESS I use the term queered space to describe an existing space that is temporarily or repeatedly transformed through queer occupation, action, or appropriation. The space may have been designed for an entirely different purpose, but queer practices alter how it is experienced, understood, and used.

CHARMED

Author’s adaptation of Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle.

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CIRCLE

-O-

In *Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality*, Gayle Rubin argues that Western societies organise sexuality through a moral hierarchy, represented by her well-known “Charmed Circle.” At its centre are forms of sexuality considered good, natural, and normal: heterosexual, monogamous, procreative relationships, ideally within marriage. Outside this circle are sexual practices more easily regarded as abnormal, immoral, or deviant, while the boundary between accepted and marginalised sexuality can shift according to social and historical conditions.¹ Rather than judging sexuality according to conventional moral values, Rubin proposes a more democratic sexual ethics based on how people treat one another, mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the pleasure produced through the encounter.² Her argument shifts attention away from whether a sexual practice conforms to established social norms and towards the conditions in which it actually takes place. Building on Rubin’s theory, this research argues that these hierarchies are not only reflected in laws and social attitudes, but can also become embedded within the built environment. Architecture has historically been shaped by assumptions about family life, marriage, reproduction, privacy, and domesticity. Bonnevier argues that the heterosexual matrix influences how we understand and enact the built environment, particularly within domestic architecture, where the nuclear-family model is often treated as a given.³ The organisation of architecture can therefore reinforce particular ideas about how people are expected to live, form relationships, and occupy space. Within this context, queer communities were rarely considered as explicit subjects of architectural or urban planning. Spaces for queer social life, intimacy, encounter, and sexual expression therefore often emerged through the occupation and transformation of spaces originally intended for other purposes. Parks, public toilets, docks, back streets, bars, clubs, bathhouses, hotel rooms, and other marginal or overlooked environments could acquire entirely different meanings through queer use. This way of understanding architecture moves beyond the architect-designed building towards space as it is found, used, occupied, and transformed through everyday activities.⁴ Rather than viewing architecture as a neutral backdrop, this project understands it as an active participant in shaping behaviour and determining what forms of intimacy become visible, accepted, concealed, or excluded. Bonnevier similarly describes architecture as being inscribed with behaviour and connected to normative systems of sex, gender, and family. Queer communities have therefore repeatedly adapted, appropriated, and transformed spaces that were never specifically designed for them. Bonnevier’s study of Natalie Barney’s salon provides a clear example of how an existing architectural setting could become queer through occupation and appropriation rather than through new construction. By uncovering these hidden spatial histories, this research examines how Amsterdam’s queer communities have continuously rewritten the city through use, adaptation, concealment, and occupation. Queer spatial history is therefore not only a history of buildings specifically created for queer people, but also a history of how communities found ways to make space for themselves within a city that was largely not organised around them. (1)

Rubin, G. S. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. S. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality (pp. 267–319). Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 281–282.

(2)

Rubin, G. S. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. S. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality (pp. 267–319). Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 283.

(3)

Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind straight curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture. Axl Books. p. 51.

(4)

Rendell, J. (2000). Introduction: Gender, space. In J. Rendell, B. Penner, & I. Borden (Eds.), Gender space architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction (pp. 101–111). Routledge. p. 101.

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METHODOLOGY (II)

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(1)

Debord, G. (1958). Theory of the dérive (K. Knabb, Trans.). Internati nale Situationniste, 2.

(2)

Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

METHODOLOGY

The research is structured around the concept of the dérive, not only as a way of moving through the city but as the overarching methodology guiding the entire investigation. Guy Debord describes the dérive as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.”¹ Rather than following predetermined routes, the dérive involves allowing oneself to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and by the encounters found there. This research takes Debord’s principle as a starting point and deliberately expands it beyond the street into archives, exhibitions, libraries, nightlife, conversations, and other forms of research. Instead of following a fixed path, places, documents, people, and unexpected discoveries were allowed to determine the next direction of inquiry. The first form of dérive consisted of repeated walks through Amsterdam’s historic and contemporary queer landscapes, including cruising areas, parks, streets, bars, clubs, and everyday urban spaces. These walks were not simply observations of the city but opportunities to understand how queer space is produced through occupation, movement, encounter, visibility, and concealment. Participating in nightlife, visiting queer venues, and returning to these places over time became part of understanding their spatial qualities. A second form of dérive took place within archives and cultural institutions. Here, the dérive is deliberately extended beyond Debord’s original urban practice and used as a research strategy. Rather than conducting only targeted searches, the research followed associations and unexpected discoveries through collections at the Amsterdam City Archives, IHLIA at the OBA, the Stedelijk Museum archive, exhibitions, libraries, and other historical collections. Documents led to photographs, photographs to maps, maps to newspaper articles, and newspaper articles to personal stories. Each discovery opened another path, allowing the archive itself to redirect the investigation. The methodology also relied on encounters and participant observation. Throughout the three-year research process, conversations with visitors, archivists, historians, members of the queer community, and people encountered during walks and nightlife generated new leads, challenged assumptions, and revealed histories that were not always present in official records. These encounters became part of the research material itself. This approach relates to ethnographic traditions of participant observation, in which knowledge is produced through sustained presence, observation, interaction, and attention to everyday situations.² Rather than producing a single linear narrative, this continuous process of drifting generated an extensive collection of maps, photographs, archival documents, interviews, observations, drawings, and personal reflections. The final drawing is both a representation of this methodology and an invitation to repeat it. Its large scale encourages visitors to move alongside it, discovering relationships gradually through walking, pausing, returning, and making their own connections. In this way, the act of viewing becomes another dérive.

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POSITIONALITY (III)

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(1)

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

(2)

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Article 10.

(3)

Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. Holt, Rinehart and Win ston.

(4)

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.

(5)

Debord, G. (1958). Theory of the dérive (K. Knabb, Trans.). Internatio nale Situationniste, 2.

POSITIONALITY

This research is not conducted from the perspective of an external or neutral observer. As a gay man living in Amsterdam, I am also part of the community and social environments that form the subject of this investigation. My position influences what I notice, whom I encounter, and which histories become significant within the research. Rather than attempting to eliminate this subjectivity, the project acknowledges it as part of the production of knowledge. This position relates to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, which challenges the possibility of a detached, universal perspective and understands knowledge as produced from particular embodied positions.¹ This situated position is developed further through autoethnography. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner define autoethnography as an approach that systematically analyses personal experience in order to understand wider cultural experience.² They argue that personal circumstances inevitably influence decisions about what, where, when, and how a researcher investigates, and that subjectivity and the researcher’s influence should be acknowledged rather than concealed.² Within this project, personal experience is therefore not treated as evidence in isolation, but as one layer of research continuously compared with archival documents, historical sources, maps, photographs, interviews, and architectural observations. Many of the spaces examined throughout the project were already part of my everyday life before they became research sites. Parks, bars, clubs, bathhouses, cruising areas, Pride events, and other social environments were not simply visited for documentation; they were spaces in which I already participated. This relationship corresponds closely to James P. Spradley’s description of participant observation, particularly situations in which researchers study environments in which they are already participants. Spradley distinguishes the participant observer from the ordinary participant through a dual purpose: participating in the activities of a situation while simultaneously observing its people, activities, and physical environment.³ This embodied relationship with the city also informs how space is interpreted. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology connects sexual orientation to the ways bodies inhabit and move through space, asking how orientation shapes what and who becomes near, familiar, reachable, or visible.⁴ Ahmed considers sexual orientation as connected to how bodies reside in and inhabit spaces with others.⁴ This provides an important spatial dimension to my positionality: Amsterdam is not encountered only as an architectural object to be studied, but as an environment already experienced through my own body, movement, sexuality, social relationships, and familiarity with particular places. The dérive therefore became more than an occasional research technique. Beginning with Debord’s understanding of the dérive as a practice of moving through the city while remaining attentive to terrain, atmosphere, and unexpected encounters, the project transformed drifting into a continuous mode of investigation.⁵ Walking through Amsterdam, visiting queer venues, participating in nightlife, returning repeatedly to particular places, and engaging in conversations continually generated observations, stories, and connections that redirected the research. In this sense, the dérive operated alongside participant observation and autoethnography, connecting spatial investigation with everyday life. The research initially began with the broader ambition of investigating queer space. As the archival research, dérive walks, interviews, mapping, and collection of historical material developed, however, it became increasingly clear that much of the available evidence concerned the spatial history of gay men. Police records, newspapers, guidebooks, photographs, personal testimonies, bars, cruising grounds, public urinals, bathhouses, and clubs repeatedly produced a predominantly male homosexual spatial history. Rather than artificially presenting this material as representative of the entire LGBTQ+ community, the project follows the limits of its evidence. Consequently, queer theory remains the critical lens through which architecture, normativity, sexuality, and spatial difference are examined, while the empirical historical investigation concentrates primarily on Amsterdam’s gay male spatial history. Positionality is therefore neither something that can be removed from the research nor accepted uncritically as proof. The combination of situated knowledge, autoethnography, participant observation, queer phenomenology, archival investigation, and the dérive allows lived experience to become part of the research while placing it in dialogue with other forms of evidence. The resulting spatial history is deliberately situated rather than detached, acknowledging that knowledge about the city is produced through documents and buildings, but also through bodies, movement, participation, memory, and encounter. 015

AMSTERDAM’S GAYSPATIAL HISTORY (IV)

016

(1)

Hekma, 2014; author’s archival inventory and GIS mapping.

(2)

Author’s archival inventory and GIS mapping, compiled through IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, Amsterdam City Archives, COC Nederland col lections, Historypin Amsterdam, Reguliers.net, historical newspapers, guidebooks, photographs, advertisements, oral histories, and ephem era.

(3)

Hekma, 2014; Humphreys, 1970; Amsterdam Municipal Police archival material; IHLIA LGBTI Heritage.

(4)

Hekma, 2014; author’s archival inventory and GIS mapping.

(5)

Hekma, 2014; IHLIA LGBTI Heritage; Amsterdam Gay Pride archival material; Gay Games Amsterdam archival material.

(6)

Author’s archival inventory and GIS mapping; Kolb and Betsky, 2017.

HISTORY

The spatial history of Amsterdam’s gay community reveals a continuous negotiation between visibility, regulation, architecture, and social change. Rather than emerging through formal planning, gay spaces developed through the appropriation and adaptation of existing urban environments. Public parks, urinals, bars, hotels, bathhouses, discos, leather clubs, and eventually digital platforms each produced distinct spatial conditions reflecting changing relationships between sexuality, public life, and the city. Amsterdam’s gay landscape therefore developed as an interconnected urban network that continually adapted to legal, social, and cultural change.¹ To reconstruct this fragmented history, historical literature was combined with archival research and the creation of a comprehensive digital inventory of Amsterdam’s gay establishments. Material from IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, Historypin Amsterdam, historical newspapers, municipal archives, COC publications, guidebooks,photographs,advertisements,oral histories,and surviving memorabiliawas systematicallycrosschecked.² The resulting database documents hundreds of bars, cafés, hotels, bathhouses, clubs, cruising areas, sex cinemas, bookstores, associations, and temporary venues spanning more than a century. The inventory extended beyond formal establishments. Photographs, postcards, membership cards, flyers, matchbooks, advertisements, tickets, city guides, cruising maps, police reports, and personal collections were treated as fragments of a larger spatial history. Combined with archival records, these objects helped reconstruct the locations, chronology, atmosphere, and transformation of venues that have disappeared. Historical references to parks, public urinals, waterfronts, train stations, and other informal meeting places also allowed vanished cruising landscapes to be mapped alongside commercial venues.² This accumulation and cross-checking of information produced a series of maps showing the number and distribution of gay spaces across different decades. Mapping the material made it possible to identify recurring concentrations, streets, areas, and districts, while comparison across time revealed how these geographies expanded, shifted, fragmented, or disappeared. The research therefore produced both quantitative and qualitative outcomes: it documented the changing number and location of venues, but also helped identify recurring spatial typologies and trace their evolution from informal cruising grounds and discreet cafés to specialised bars, clubs, bathhouses, darkrooms, and later digitally mediated forms of encounter. These maps, typologies, and historical relationships became the backbone of the drawing, determining which spaces, architectural conditions, and moments of transformation needed to be represented.² During the early twentieth century, homosexuality occupied a largely hidden urban geography. Around the 1930s, approximately twelve cafés and bars served Amsterdam’s homosexual population, many concentrated around the Zeedijk and Red Light District.³ These establishments provided protected interiors within otherwise ordinary buildings. Controlled entrances, doormen, concealed interiors, and rules governing behaviour helped protect patrons from surveillance. Police inspections, liquor regulations, and moral policing nevertheless continually threatened these spaces.³ Homosexual encounters also extended far beyond commercial venues. Public urinals, parks, canals, harbour districts, railway stations, and dark streets formed an informal network of meeting places. These spaces were not designed for homosexual encounters, but their spatial conditions offered anonymity, fleeting contact, and possibilities for escape. Attempts to increase visibility and control in public toilets demonstrate how architecture could become an instrument of surveillance intended to discourage such encounters.³ Cruising nevertheless continued to adapt to these forms of control. Following the Second World War, Amsterdam gradually shifted from public cruising landscapes towards increasingly specialised interiors. During the 1950s and 1960s, bars, hotels, bathhouses, and private clubs accommodated activities previously associated with streets and parks. Hotel Tiemersma introduced early darkroom spaces, while Argos and the Motor Sport Club Amsterdam contributed to the development of leather and fetish culture through specialised interiors organised around privacy, controlled circulation, and sexual experimentation.⁴ Architecture increasingly moved from concealing homosexuality to facilitating encounter through spaces where visibility and privacy could be negotiated. By the 1960s and 1970s, Amsterdam’s gay landscape had developed into a dense network of interconnected establishments. Kerkstraat, Warmoesstraat, and later Reguliersdwarsstraat concentrated cafés, discos, bookstores, hotels, saunas, cruising bars, and community organisations within walking distance. 017

Rather than functioning independently, these venues produced recognisable gay districts where nightlife, commerce, social support, political activism, and sexual culture overlapped. The city itself became an infrastructure through which people moved between different spaces according to time, social identity, and sexual preference.⁴ The AIDS epidemic during the 1980s fundamentally transformed these spatial networks without bringing them to an end. Venues increasingly became places through which safer-sex information, education, health initiatives, care, and mutual support circulated.⁵ Existing spaces therefore adapted to a new social and medical reality while continuing to support community life. By the 1990s, Amsterdam had acquired an international reputation as one of Europe’s principal gay capitals. Amsterdam Gay Pride and the 1998 Gay Games reinforced the visibility of gay life within public space.⁵ Yet this period also marked another spatial transformation. The internet, online chatrooms, dating websites, and later location-based applications altered the relationship between community and place, allowing encounters to become increasingly temporary, dispersed, and digitally mediated. Rising property values, changing nightlife economies, tourism, and urban redevelopment further contributed to the closure of historic establishments. The inventory identifies more than 120 gay venues around the peak period of the scene, while only a fraction remained by the mid-2010s.⁶ The archival inventory makes these transformations visible across more than a century of Amsterdam’s urban history. By combining archival documents with the reconstruction of establishments and cruising sites, Amsterdam’s gay landscape emerges as an evolving spatial system shaped by architecture, legislation, urban development, technology, and everyday practices. The maps and typological analysis translate this historical material into a spatial framework, forming the research backbone from which the final drawing was constructed.⁶

1930

1940

1950

1950

1960

1960

1970

1970

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HISTORY

1980

30s N°4 In the 1930s, Amsterdam had few gay bars, often secretive with doormen and alarm systems, emphasizing privacy. Activities like drinking and dancing were discreet, and bars served as safe havens for expressing sexuality.

40s N°8 During

World War II, despite German occupation and stricter legislation against homosexuality, new gay bars like Café ‘t Mandje stayed resilient against oppression. The Homophilia Movement began in 1946, leading to the establishment of COC (Center of Culture and Diversion) in 1949.

50s N°9

In the 1950s, despite societal challenges, Amsterdam saw the emergence of landmark venues like Jamaica, fostering a vibrant gay culture.

60s N°23

The 1960s marked a significant shift in Amsterdam’s LGBTQ+ scene,the city experienced an explosion in the number of gay clubs and meeting points. Notable establishments like Hotel Tiemersma, in Reguliersdwarsstraat became iconic hubs. The emergence of gay saunas further diversified the city’s gay leisure culture.

70s N°51 During the 1970s, the Homophilia Movement gained momentum, leading to the establishment of COC as a prominent cultural center , a vibrant club scene. Additionally, the opening of Amsterdam’s first lesbian bar.

80s N°120 The 1980s saw Amsterdam’s LGBTQ+ scene flourish, with a surge in recreational and gathering spaces. However, the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s posed significant challenges. Venues like April played a crucial role in organizing information and prevention meetings about AIDS, demonstrating the community’s resilience.

90s N°138

By the 1990s, Amsterdam had solidified its reputation as the capital of gay activity, attracting tourists and symbolizing freedom of expression for the LGBTQ+ community. Events like Amsterdam Pride and the Gay Games.

2000s N°64

The advent of the internet in the early 21st century transformed social dynamics, leading to a decline in physical LGBTQ+ spaces. Rising costs and societal shifts prompted many to explore straight establishments, reducing the reliance on traditional gay bars.

2015 N°24

Once hailed as the epitome of gay culture, the city witnessed a drastic reduction in LGBTQ+ reference places. What was once a thriving landscape with over 120 establishments in 1983 had dwindled to a mere 24 by 2015.

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THE CONTROLLED CITY (1)

020

(1)

Hekma, G. (1992). Homoseksualiteit in Nederland van 1730 tot de moderne tijd. Utrecht: Het Spectrum.

(2)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

(3)

Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. Aldine Publishing Company; Delph, E. W. (1978). The silent community: Public homosexual encounters. Sage Publications.

(4)

Betsky, A. (1997). Queer space: Architecture and same-sex desire. William Morrow; Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: Gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, 1890–1940. Basic Books.

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

A

This drawing reconstructs the earliest formation of Amsterdam’s hidden homosexual landscape during the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather than illustrating a collection of individual events or buildings, it reveals the emergence of an alternative urban system embedded within the official city. At a time when homosexuality was heavily regulated through legislation, prevailing moral values, religious influence, and police surveillance, queer life could rarely occupy space openly. Instead, it developed within the gaps, thresholds, and overlooked spaces produced by the city’s own architecture.¹ The urban landscape is presented as an environment shaped by systems of control. Monumental civic buildings, churches, bridges, courts, public institutions, and infrastructural elements dominate the composition, expressing the authority of the state over public behaviour. Police patrol the streets, judges deliberate over morality and legislation, and the city appears organised according to clear hierarchies of visibility and order. Architecture functions not simply as a physical backdrop, but as an instrument through which social norms were enforced and everyday life was regulated.² The drawing translates these historical conditions into a single speculative architectural landscape where multiple places, events, and narratives coexist simultaneously. Rather than presenting a chronological sequence, it compresses fragments of the city into one continuous panorama, allowing documented buildings, symbolic objects, historical figures, and everyday activities to occupy the same spatial field. The composition invites the viewer to navigate the drawing gradually, discovering relationships between architecture and queer life that remain hidden at first glance. Although the reconstruction is interpretative, every scene is grounded in archival documents, historical maps, photographs, newspapers, memoirs, and other primary and secondary sources collected throughout the research process. Yet the same urban fabric that sought to regulate bodies also generated opportunities for resistance. Without constructing new buildings, queer communities gradually transformed existing architecture into a network of hidden social spaces. Bridges, public toilets, boarding houses, cafés, waterfronts, streets, and domestic interiors acquired new meanings through occupation rather than design. Their architectural characteristics, including layered thresholds, concealed interiors, limited visibility, multiple escape routes, and spatial ambiguity, enabled forms of encounter that remained largely invisible to the official city.³ What emerges is not a parallel city separated from Amsterdam, but another reading of the same urban landscape. Every bridge, doorway, curtain, staircase, corridor, waterfront, and public square possesses the potential to function simultaneously within two different spatial realities: one governed by official authority, the other by shared knowledge, coded communication, and collective memory.⁴ By reconstructing these relationships within a single architectural composition, the drawing reveals how queer space was continuously produced from within Amsterdam’s existing urban fabric. Rather than simply representing history, it visualises an invisible geography that conventional maps, archives, and architectural drawings have often overlooked, inviting viewers to rediscover the city through an alternative spatial lens.

021

A.03

A.05

A.04

A.02

A.01

022

A.06

A.08

A.07

023

A.01 Street lighting Electric street lighting did not simply illuminate Amsterdam. It reorganised visibility. Previously dark streets became exposed, pushing homosexual encounters towards bridges, parks and unlit spaces.

Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Dam Square at Night, Amsterdam, c. 1910–1925. Public domain.

A.02

The Empire

One of Amsterdam’s earliest homosexual bars, The Empire offered a dedicated interior where queer men could meet beyond the anonymity of the street. In the drawing, it marks the shift from informal public encounters towards permanent queer social spaces within the city.

Source: Unknown photographer. The Empire, Nes 17

A.03

The owl lamp

Used in Amsterdam’s early gay bars, the owl lamp warned visitors of police inspections and other threats. By signalling when it was safe to remain or necessary to leave, it became part of the spatial organisation of queer nightlife. Rather than merely representing the community, the owl actively shaped how these interiors were occupied, allowing social life to continue under conditions of surveillance.

A.04

IHLIA LGBTQ+ Heritage, The Owl in the Lamp: Warning Signals in Dutch Gay Nightlife.

Munt Tower

A prominent urban landmark overlooking one of Amsterdam’s early homosexual meeting areas. The spaces beneath and around the tower provided opportunities for discreet encounters, illustrating how familiar public infrastructure could be reinterpreted as queer space through occupation.

Nationaal Archief, Amsterdam in Photochrome, omstreeks 1900. De Munttoren gezien vanaf het Singel, Collection Photochrome, Amsterdam (PHOTOC 263). Rights-free.

024

ATLAS

A.05

Het Paleis

A symbol of civic authority and urban control, Het Paleis overlooked an area that also functioned as an informal cruising ground. The contrast reveals how queer communities occupied the spaces surrounding institutions of power, transforming the official city into a parallel landscape of hidden encounters. Rijksmuseum, Gezicht op het Koninklijk Paleis op de Dam met ervoor ‘Naatje’ en elektrische trams, attributed to Andries Jager, c. 1904–1906. Public domain.

A.06

The Judge and the Law

The judge represents the legal and moral regulation of queer life in early twentieth-century Amsterdam. Laws such as Article 248bis (1911) reinforced surveillance and discrimination, pushing many homosexual encounters into hidden and coded urban spaces.

Zedelijkheidswet van 1911 met artikel 248bis

A.07

The Water

Around 1900, Amsterdam’s waterfront formed a dynamic landscape of trade, migration, and nightlife. Sailors, dockworkers, sex workers, and local tules (a contemporary slang term for homosexual men) shared these spaces, where bridges, quays, and narrow streets enabled discreet encounters. In the drawing, the water represents both urban infrastructure and an early landscape of queer occupation.

A.08

Nationaal Archief, Amsterdam in Photochrome, omstreeks 1900. sailors in CS, Collection Photochrome, Amsterdam (PHOTOC 268). Rights-free.

Public Toilet

Public toilets were among Amsterdam’s earliest queer interiors. Their enclosed spaces, narrow entrances, and limited visibility created opportunities for anonymous encounters, while the sound of approaching footsteps provided an informal warning system. Despite repeated redesigns intended to prevent homosexual activity, they remained important cruising sites until the 1970s. Grachtenmuseum Amsterdam. (n.d.). Bridges. https://www.grachten.museum/en/bridges/

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ARCHITECTURE OF CONCEALMENT (2)

026

(1)

“The city can be queered through occupation rather than constrution. ” (Betsky, 1997, p. 18)

(2)

“Architecture organizes relations between visibility and privacy.” (Rendell, Penner, & Borden, 2000, p. 140)

(3)

“Public space is continually produced through everyday social practice.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 38)

(4)

“Space is constituted through social relations and interactions.” (Massey, 2005, p. 9)

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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The hidden spaces of the previous chapter gradually prove insufficient. Rather than relying solely on marginal landscapes, Amsterdam’s homosexual community begins occupying ordinary buildings, transforming bookstores, cafés, and cultural institutions into coded social infrastructures. This drawing represents the second stage in the formation of Amsterdam’s hidden homosexual city during the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas the previous drawing explored how queer life occupied the overlooked spaces created by systems of control, this scene illustrates the emergence of camouflage as a new architectural strategy. Rather than relying exclusively on concealed locations, homosexual life increasingly embedded itself within ordinary buildings, cultural institutions, and everyday public space. The city itself remained physically unchanged, yet its architecture acquired new meanings through occupation, coded behaviour, and shared knowledge.¹ At the centre of the composition stands a bookstore inspired by places associated with the Shakespeare Club and figures such as Niek Engelschman, whose cultural initiatives became important catalysts for the early Dutch homosexual emancipation movement. More than a place for reading, the bookstore functioned as a socially acceptable environment where literature, discussion, and education created opportunities for homosexual men to meet at a time when public visibility remained dangerous. Around this central space unfolds a wider urban network composed of reading rooms, cultural organisations, cafés, streets, and everyday public spaces, illustrating how queer life gradually became integrated into the existing city rather than separated from it.² From the street these buildings appear entirely ordinary, blending seamlessly into Amsterdam’s continuous rows of canal houses. Beyond their entrances, however, another architectural landscape emerges. Bookshelves subdivide rooms into intimate territories, curtains create layered thresholds between public and private, and carefully arranged interiors encourage conversation, observation, and prolonged occupation. Architecture becomes an instrument of discretion, allowing social interaction to develop without openly revealing its purpose. Queer space is therefore produced not through the construction of new buildings, but through the reinterpretation and occupation of existing architectural forms. The transformation extends beyond the interiors. Throughout the streets, advertising columns, newspaper displays, shopfronts, cafés, public notice boards, and street corners become part of an informal network of recognition. These ordinary urban elements provided opportunities for coded communication, where lingering beside a display, browsing a bookshop, exchanging glances, or repeatedly returning to the same location became subtle forms of social interaction. The public realm itself evolved into a landscape of encounter in which architecture, movement, and everyday behaviour operated together as a shared spatial language.³ This marks an important shift in the evolution of Amsterdam’s homosexual landscape. Earlier spaces often depended on physical concealment beneath bridges, within public toilets, or in other marginal locations separated from everyday life. In contrast, the spaces represented here remain fully embedded within the city’s ordinary architecture. Their protection depends less on isolation than on their ability to remain indistinguishable from their surroundings. Visibility and invisibility become simultaneous architectural conditions, allowing queer life to exist within the official city while remaining largely unreadable to those outside its networks. Together these scenes reveal how the homosexual city evolved from hidden places into hidden systems. Ordinary architecture became capable of supporting multiple realities simultaneously, serving its official functions while accommodating coded forms of social life beneath the surface of everyday urban experience. The city itself did not change, yet its buildings, streets, and interiors acquired entirely new meanings through collective occupation, shared knowledge, and cultural practices. This transformation establishes the foundations for the increasingly organised queer infrastructures that emerge in the following drawings, where networks of social life continue to expand while remaining embedded within Amsterdam’s existing urban fabric.⁴

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B.01 Public Urinals The metal public urinals introduced in Amsterdam at the beginning of the twentieth century were designed to regulate hygiene and prevent public indecency within the growing city. While intended as instruments of order and surveillance, these semi-hidden structures also became discreet meeting places for queer encounters. Collectie Stadsarchief Amsterdam: bouwtekeningen(opent in nieuw venster) onder nummer: 10056/518

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The Bookstore

The bookstore represents one of the first organized queer cultural spaces in Amsterdam, where homosexual men could gather under the cover of literature, and intellectual exchange. The closed windows and intimate interior created a protected atmosphere for conversation, recognition, and coded forms of dating hidden from the public street. In the drawing, the bookstore becomes an architectural camouflage where knowledge, desire, and anonymity quietly overlap.

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Boekenkraam_van_Aaron_Eliazer_van_Kollem_in_de_Oudemanhuispoort_Amsterdam_Oude_manhuispoort

The shelves

The shelves contained homosexual and homoerotic novels such as Pijpelijntjes (1904) and Pathologieën (1908) by Jacob Israël de Haan, transforming literature into a discreet medium through which queer identity, desire, and early forms of community organization could emerge within the city. This stone plaque at Plantage Kerklaan 36 in Amsterdam commemorates the historic attack on the city’s Population Registry (Bevolkingsregister) on March 27, 1943

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The lovers

The lovers embody coded intimacy within the ordinary city. Their proximity turns public space into a place of recognition, where queer desire could become visible while still remaining partially concealed.

Two-Men-Kissing-1953-Joseph-Bertrund-Belang-One-Archives-

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The policeman

He represents the enforcement of social norms, gender expectations, and public morality within the city. Through surveillance, inspections, and the monitoring of public behavior, authorities attempted to regulate expressions of sexuality and gender considered unacceptable. In the drawing, the policeman embodies the constant presence of control, forcing queer life to adapt, conceal itself, and develop coded forms of recognition and occupation within urban space.

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Agenten en paarden van de bereden politie, c. 1900. Photographer unknown. Collection: Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

Advertising Banner

Public advertising banners functioned as informal urban markers, becoming recognizable gathering points for hustlers, sailors, and queer men seeking encounters. Positioned within the flow of the street, these temporary structures created moments of pause, visibility, and coded recognition amid the anonymity of the city. In the drawing, the banners show how urban elements were appropriated into hidden social infrastructures for queer interaction.

F. G. Nordmann, Berlin’s neue Anschlag-Säulen, c. 1855. Lithograph. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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DÉRIVE | Amsterdam Krul

Entering one of Amsterdam’s remaining double-curl urinals today makes its spatial intelligence immediately understandable. From the street it appears almost completely exposed: a small curved metal object sitting directly within public space, without a door or conventional interior. Yet as I walk around the curve and enter, the relationship with the city suddenly changes. I am still outside, hearing bicycles, footsteps, conversations and traffic, but my body has disappeared behind the screen. I am simultaneously in the city and hidden from it. The curved form and metal mesh create this ambiguity. From a distance, the surface seems relatively opaque and it is difficult to understand clearly what is happening behind it. From inside, however, light, silhouettes and movement remain perceptible through the material and around the entrances. I can look outward and understand who is approaching while remaining much less visible myself. The architecture therefore does not create complete privacy. It produces something more subtle: controlled visibility. You can see the city more easily than the city can see you. This experience helps explain how an object originally designed for sanitation could become part of Amsterdam’s queer geography. The double curl enlarged the basic urinal into a small semi-enclosed interior, positioned directly within streets, parks and canal edges. Its architecture occupied an unstable boundary between public and private, open and enclosed, visibility and concealment. Bonnevier writes that “The public toilet forcefully displays the operation of heteronormativity”, demonstrating that even ordinary sanitary architecture participates in organising gender, sexuality and behaviour.¹ For cruising, precisely the same architectural characteristics acquired another meaning. The possibility of watching without directly staring, waiting without completely withdrawing, and recognising another person through a glance allowed the structure to support encounters never included within its official programme. Architectural writing on male public toilets similarly identifies the gaze as highly regulated and shows how these visual conventions can be tactically disrupted through gay cruising.² The curl therefore became not simply a container for an activity, but an instrument

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for seeing, being seen, hiding and approaching. My dérive through the structure makes this historical appropriation tangible. Standing inside to urinate today feels strangely powerful. The body performs an extremely private action while remaining surrounded by the public city. There is no sealed room, no locked door, only a few centimetres of curved metal establishing a temporary territory around the body. The city continues flowing immediately outside, but the screen changes who controls the view. The sensation is not one of total safety or isolation. It is an awareness of being protected while remaining alert to everything around you.

This ambiguity also made the urinal a space that authorities attempted to regulate. As queer life became increasingly accommodated within bars, clubs, saunas, darkrooms and private homes after the war, encounters gradually migrated from appropriated public infrastructure towards specialised interiors. The curl consequently shifted from sanitary object, to cruising architecture, to regulated infrastructure, and finally towards queer heritage.

The dérive reveals something that the plan alone cannot: the historical queer function of the double curl was already latent in its architecture. The curve conceals, the opening connects, the mesh filters vision, and the city remains present on the other side. Queer occupation did not need to construct a new building. It discovered another possibility inside an architecture that was already there.

Collectie Stadsarchief Amsterdam: bouwtekeningen(opent in nieuw venster) onder nummer: 10056/518

(1) (2)

Crout, D. (2000). [Review of The Sex of Architecture and STUD: Architectures of Masculinity]. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 17(3), 260–267. See p. 266. Crout, D. (2000). [Review of The Sex of Architecture and STUD: Architectures of Masculinity]. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 17(3), 260–267. See p. 260.

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PARK AS ROOM (3)

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(1)

Gert Hekma, Amsterdam parks and public homosexual encounter p.121

(2)

Durham Crout, coded visual behaviour and cruising p.266

(3)

Sara Ahmed, bodies inhabiting and producing spatial patterns p.58

(4)

Susana Torre, occupation produces space p.145

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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As the network of concealed interiors expands, queer life begins to extend beyond closeted interiors. The park becomes another kind of room, where vegetation, darkness, and movement replace walls, roofs, and corridors. Amsterdam’s hidden homosexual spaces and interiors transition into the landscape. Whereas the previous drawings explored concealed rooms, cultural institutions, and everyday architecture, this scene introduces the public park as one of the city’s first large-scale landscapes of queer encounter.¹ Here, architecture is no longer defined by hard transitions but by vegetation, darkness, topography, and movement. Nature itself becomes an architectural medium capable of producing privacy, intimacy, and anonymity. The transition from the city to the park represents a fundamental spatial transformation. Monumental buildings, façades, streets, and civic institutions gradually dissolve into pathways, trees, bushes, and open clearings. Formal urban order gives way to an environment governed by landscape rather than architecture, where spatial experience is shaped through changing terrain, vegetation, and the rhythm of movement. Instead of fixed interiors, the park offers a sequence of temporary spaces that continuously change with the seasons, time of day, and patterns of occupation. Within this landscape, darkness becomes an architectural material. Rather than simply reducing visibility, it constructs space by defining boundaries, concealing identities, and producing temporary environments beyond the gaze of the surrounding city. Pathways operate as routes of observation and encounter where individuals repeatedly cross paths, exchange glances, and negotiate contact through movement rather than conversation. The park develops its own coded geography, understood primarily by those familiar with its spatial language.¹² Dense vegetation generates a network of informal interiors within the public realm. Bushes, clusters of trees, clearings, and changes in terrain create spaces that function as rooms without walls, offering varying degrees of enclosure and separation from the surrounding landscape. The threshold between illuminated paths and concealed vegetation becomes a critical architectural condition, marking the transition between public visibility and private intimacy. Rather than relying on constructed boundaries, these spaces emerge through differences in light, vegetation density, sightlines, and distance from circulation routes. The drawing reveals how cruising became embedded directly within the landscape itself. Desire no longer depended on dedicated buildings or hidden interiors but unfolded through the spatial qualities of the terrain. Bodies appear only as fragments within the composition, partially concealed behind vegetation, emerging as silhouettes within the shadows, or disappearing into the density of the landscape. Architecture and nature collaborate, producing conditions for anonymity, encounter, and intimacy without permanent architectural intervention. The park itself becomes an active participant in the production of queer space.³ Rather than reconstructing a single historical location, the drawing assembles characteristic spatial conditions found across Amsterdam’s parks into one continuous architectural landscape. Documented cruising practices, historical park layouts, vegetation structures, circulation routes, and observed patterns of occupation are brought together within a speculative reconstruction that reveals relationships often absent from conventional historical narratives. Every element is informed by archival research, historical sources, contemporary observation, and fieldwork undertaken throughout the research process. This drawing also represents an important conceptual shift within the atlas. If the previous scenes demonstrated how queer communities appropriated existing architecture, the park illustrates that architecture itself is no longer required to produce queer space. Landscape becomes architecture through occupation.⁴ Trees function as walls, bushes become rooms, pathways operate as corridors, and darkness forms temporary thresholds between exposure and concealment. The distinction between architecture and nature begins to dissolve as both become capable of organising social relationships. Together these scenes reveal how the homosexual city expanded beyond the built environment into the landscape itself. The park became an invisible architecture of desire, where spatial boundaries were created through vegetation, movement, light, and collective knowledge rather than construction. It demonstrates that queer space is not defined by buildings alone, but by the continuous interaction between bodies, landscape, and the ways in which environments are collectively inhabited and reinterpreted.³⁴

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C.01 Advertising Banners Public advertising banners functioned as informal urban markers, becoming recognizable gathering points for hustlers, sailors, and queer men seeking encounters. Positioned within the flow of the street, these temporary structures created moments of pause, visibility, and coded recognition amid the anonymity of the city. In the drawing, the banners Show how urban elements were appropriated into hidden social infrastructures for queer interaction.

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F. G. Nordmann, Berlin’s neue Anschlag-Säulen, c. 1855. Lithograph. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Tearoom Culture

Originally introduced for hygiene and urban control, the public urinal was appropriated as a discreet space for queer encounters. Its semi-open structure and limited visibility created a tension between surveillance, anonymity, and pleasure, turning ordinary infrastructure into a spatial device for queer connection. Urinour in silver credits Amsterdam Archive coll. number 2345.

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Fence / Urban Threshold

The fence marks the transition between the regulated city and the park. Crossing it means entering a less controlled landscape where darkness, vegetation, and distance allow different forms of occupation.

Vondel Park entrnace credit allany.

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Pathway and Streetlights

The illuminated path guides movement through the park while creating alternating zones of visibility and shadow. Light makes circulation possible, while darker edges become spaces for lingering and encounter.

Park Photo credit unknown.

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Vegetation / Natural Rooms

Dense bushes and trees divide the landscape into informal rooms. Vegetation provides concealment, separation, and pockets of intimacy where sexual and social encounters can take place.

Cruising photo Creator unknown

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Night Light / Darkness

At night, artificial light only partially reveals the landscape. Darkness becomes an active spatial condition, reducing visibility and allowing anonymity, observation, and encounter to coexist.

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DÉRIVE | VondelPark

As part of the research methodology, I repeatedly visited the Rose Garden in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark during both the day and after dark. Rather than approaching the park solely as an observer, these visits formed part of an architectural dérive, allowing the landscape, its users, and its rhythms to guide the investigation. Returning to the same place under different conditions revealed that the Rose Garden functions as two fundamentally different environments, each organised by distinct forms of occupation, movement, and social behaviour. During the day, the Rose Garden operates as an open social landscape. Visitors occupy the lawns with blankets, food, music, and temporary furniture, transforming the park into a collective outdoor living room. Families, tourists, friends, and members of Amsterdam’s queer community share the same space, while movement is direct and highly visible. The architecture of the park encourages gathering rather than concealment, and the open lawns become places of recreation, conversation, and rest. After sunset, however, the function of the landscape gradually changes. Although its physical form remains identical, decreasing light and changing patterns of occupation transform its spatial character. The illuminated paths continue to support public circulation, while the wooded edges and rose gardens become increasingly secluded. Movement slows, routes become less direct, and observation replaces destination. The park shifts from a recreational landscape into one of Amsterdam’s most significant contemporary cruising environments, demonstrating that architecture can change through occupation without any physical alteration. During my observations, I found that the open hexagonal rose beds often functioned as transitional spaces where people could observe one another before moving into the denser vegetation. Rather than beginning in complete concealment, many encounters started within these semi-visible spaces, where silhouettes and movement remained partially legible. The landscape therefore produced a gradual transition between exposure and privacy instead of a sharp boundary between public and hidden space. Drawings from Author

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One particular moment revealed how easily this spatial condition could change. While navigating through the park, I instinctively switched on the light of my phone. The illuminated screen immediately exposed my position to people hidden within the vegetation, while simultaneously reducing my own ability to see into the darkness. This brief incident demonstrated that light itself functions as an architectural threshold, constantly redefining visibility, concealment, and the relationship between observer and observed. Rather than documenting individual encounters, the dérive focused on understanding how the landscape organises movement, visibility, and occupation. The Rose Garden demonstrates that the same architectural setting can support entirely different social programmes without changing its physical form. By day it operates as a public recreational landscape; by night it becomes an informal architecture of observation, encounter, and negotiated privacy. The transformation is produced not by construction, but by changing environmental conditions, collective occupation, and the behaviours of those who inhabit it

Drawings from Author

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DÉRIVE | Park de Oeverlanden

As part of the research methodology, Park de Oeverlanden was explored repeatedly through a series of dérives conducted at different moments of the day and night. Combined with informal conversations and observations of the site’s users, these visits sought to understand how landscape, movement, and spatial organisation produce one of Amsterdam’s most significant contemporary cruising environments. Rather than documenting individual encounters, the research focused on the relationship between architecture, landscape, and patterns of occupation. Unlike Vondelpark, where cruising is embedded within a highly public urban park, the landscape of Park de Oeverlanden is organised through a clear spatial hierarchy. Accessible by foot, bicycle, and car, visitors generally enter from the Oude Haagseweg, where parking areas provide the first point of arrival. From here, movement gradually shifts towards the area locally known as the Depot, which functions as an exploration zone. Before any interaction takes place, visitors often move through this landscape to familiarise themselves with the environment, observe the presence of others, and assess the atmosphere. As one participant explained: ”I ”I always make the rounds first to see who’s there, what’s going on, and if there are any new paths.”¹ paths.”¹ The transition from the arrival area into the woodland is defined by a sequence of increasingly enclosed spaces. Open paths gradually dissolve into narrower routes, while the density of vegetation continuously alters visibility. This progression establishes a series of architectural thresholds in which movement, observation, and privacy are carefully negotiated. Rather than relying on constructed walls or enclosed rooms, the landscape itself produces a hierarchy of spaces through changing topography, vegetation, and sightlines.² Trees play a fundamental architectural role in this spatial organisation. Their trunks define circulation routes, while their canopies reduce visibility and create a sense of enclosure. Together with dense undergrowth and low vegetation, they form natural boundaries that divide the park into a series of informal rooms. Small clearings, sloping terrain, and clusters of trees generate spaces that offer different degrees of privacy, allowing visitors to position 042

Collier Schorr’s post-documentary photography

themselves according to the level of exposure they are willing to accept. Architecture here is not built but produced through the spatial qualities of the landscape itself. Field observations revealed that movement through the park follows a recognisable spatial choreography. Initial contact rarely occurs immediately but develops through prolonged observation, repeated crossings of paths, changes in walking speed, eye contact, and subtle non-verbal gestures. Rather than functioning as random movement, these trajectories form an informal circulation system through which visitors negotiate mutual interest while maintaining anonymity. Once interest is established, movement generally shifts away from the main circulation routes towards more secluded areas where vegetation provides greater enclosure and privacy. The landscape therefore structures behaviour through a gradual transition from open to enclosed, visible to concealed, and public to semi-private space.³ The dérive demonstrated that Park de Oeverlanden functions as a continuously evolving architecture without buildings. Trees become walls, clearings become rooms, paths operate as corridors, and vegetation forms thresholds between different levels of intimacy and visibility. Unlike conventional architecture, these spatial conditions constantly change through growth, maintenance, weather, and seasonal variation, making the landscape itself an active participant in the production of queer space. Together with archival research and historical mapping, these field observations reveal how contemporary cruising environments continue many of the architectural principles identified throughout this research. Privacy is produced through layered thresholds, movement is organised through spatial sequences, and landscape becomes architecture through occupation. The dérive therefore complements the historical archive by documenting forms of spatial knowledge that can only be understood through direct experience, revealing how Amsterdam’s queer landscape continues to evolve in the present.⁴

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Anonymous participant, personal interview conducted by the author, Park de Oeverlanden, Amsterdam, 2025. Betsky, A. (1997). Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. William Morrow; Ingram, G. B., Bouthillette, A.-M., & Retter, Y. (Eds.). (1997). Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance. Bay Press. Turner, M. W. (2003). Backwards Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London. Reaktion Books; Leap, W. L. (Ed.). (1999). Public Sex/Gay Space. Columbia University Press.

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DÉRIVE | Park de Oeverlanden

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DÉRIVE | Gay beach Den Haag

Reaching the gay beach is already part of the dérive. It is not a destination that appears immediately or announces itself through signs or architecture. The route begins within the more commercial part of the coast, surrounded by beach bars, terraces, paths, and larger groups of visitors. From there, walking becomes the method through which the character of the landscape gradually changes. As the drawings register, the journey moves through different territories before reaching the gay cruising area. The commercial beach slowly gives way to the nude beach, and only after continuing further along the shoreline does the gay beach become recognisable. There is no clear architectural threshold between these zones. Instead, the transition happens through distance, changing patterns of occupation, and the people encountered along the way. The shoreline itself remains open and shared. People continue to walk along the water regardless of which section of the beach they are passing through. Because of this continuous public movement, the beach never becomes completely private. Bodies remain exposed to long views, and encounters taking place close to the shore tend to remain relatively visible. The stronger spatial transformation occurs behind the beach, inside the dunes. Moving away from the shoreline, the landscape becomes denser and more fragmented. Tall grasses, bushes, uneven ground, and changes in elevation begin to interrupt sightlines. Narrow paths formed through repeated movement disappear between the vegetation and connect one sheltered area to another. Vegetation creates boundaries without becoming a solid wall. Paths function as corridors through which people move, observe, pass one another, and choose whether to continue deeper into the landscape. Elevated dune ridges provide positions from which the surrounding area can be surveyed, while lower sandy depressions create small territories protected from direct view. Some of these depressions function almost like natural sexual cabins. They are open above, but enclosed laterally by sand, grass, and vegetation. From the public beach they may be almost invisible, yet they remain only a short distance away. The landscape 048

therefore produces privacy not through complete enclosure, but through carefully layered visibility. This distinction between the beach and the dunes became particularly clear during the dérive. The shore remains a shared landscape in which different visitors continue to pass through. Inside the dunes, occupation becomes more specifically connected to gay cruising. People rest within the vegetation, move between paths, observe one another from dune edges, and disappear into the sandy enclosures. The experience becomes a gradual movement from exposure towards concealment: commercial beach → nude beach → gay beach → dune edge → path → tall grass → sandy enclosure → encounter What interests me architecturally is that this entire spatial system exists without conventional construction. There are no designed corridors, rooms, doors, or walls, yet the landscape performs many of the same functions. Topography controls visibility. Vegetation defines boundaries. Repeated movement produces circulation routes. Sandy depressions create enclosure. Dune ridges become places of observation. Privacy therefore exists as a gradient rather than as a fixed condition. On the open beach, privacy is produced mainly through distance. At the edge of the dunes, vegetation begins to fragment views. Deeper within the landscape, sand and tall grass can conceal the body almost completely. Each step changes what can be seen and who can see whom. The dérive reveals the gay beach not as one clearly bounded place, but as a sequence of increasingly intimate spatial conditions. The architecture is produced through the interaction between landscape and occupation. The dunes are not designed for cruising, yet through repeated use they become a spatial infrastructure of movement, observation, concealment, and encounter. In this sense, the gay beach demonstrates one of the central conditions found throughout this research: queer space can emerge without the construction of a new building. Existing environments can acquire another spatial logic through the way they are occupied and understood. At the beach, that transformation occurs through sand, vegetation, topography, bodies, and movement.

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DOMESTIC INTERIORS (4)

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(1)

“The occupation of space can fundamentally transform its meaning.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 26)

(2)

“Queer space is produced through appropriation rather than construction.” (Betsky, 1997, p. 18)

(3)

“Architecture regulates the boundaries between visibility and privacy.” (Rendell, Penner, & Borden, 2000, p. 140)

(4)

“Public expressions of homosexuality remained subject to continual regulation and surveillance.” (Hekma, 2004, p. 189)

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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This drawing marks a significant moment in the evolution of Amsterdam’s homosexual city. While the previous drawings explored hidden encounters beneath bridges, within bookstores, and throughout the landscape of the park, this scene introduces one of the first permanent interiors dedicated to queer social life. Café ’t Mandje represents the transition from temporary and dispersed meeting places to a stable architectural environment where a community could gather, socialise, and develop a collective identity.¹ Housed within a traditional Amsterdam canal house, Café ’t Mandje demonstrates how ordinary domestic architecture could be adapted without fundamentally changing its physical form. Narrow rooms, timber floors, low ceilings, staircases, and interconnected spaces retain the character of the original dwelling, yet together they create an environment that functions simultaneously as café, living room, meeting place, and performance venue. Rather than constructing a new type of building, queer communities reinterpreted an existing architectural typology, allowing everyday domestic space to support new forms of occupation and belonging.² The transition between the street and the interior plays a fundamental architectural role. Entering the café meant crossing a carefully negotiated threshold between the public city and a protected social environment. Curtains screened views from outside, windows filtered visibility, and the sequence of small interconnected rooms gradually separated visitors from the surveillance of the street. These architectural elements did not isolate the building from the city but mediated the relationship between exposure and privacy, allowing the café to remain integrated within Amsterdam’s urban fabric while creating a sense of refuge for its visitors. Within these intimate spaces a remarkably diverse community emerged. Gay men, lesbians, sailors, artists, musicians, drag performers, and neighbourhood residents shared the same interior, transforming the former house into one of Amsterdam’s earliest queer social centres. Music, dancing, conversation, and performance animated the rooms, while the domestic scale of the architecture encouraged proximity and interaction. The building became more than a place of entertainment; it functioned as a space where social networks, friendships, and a shared sense of identity could gradually develop. Despite this growing visibility, freedom remained conditional. One of the unwritten rules associated with Café ’t Mandje discouraged men from openly kissing, reflecting the delicate balance between self-expression and social acceptance. Excessive visibility could threaten both the liquor licence and the continued existence of the establishment. The café therefore illustrates that early queer interiors were spaces of liberation, but also of negotiation, where safety depended upon carefully managing what could and could not be seen.³ Café ’t Mandje represents far more than the opening of a single establishment. It signals the emergence of a permanent social infrastructure embedded within the ordinary city. Queer life no longer depended exclusively on hidden landscapes or temporary encounters but began to establish lasting places of gathering that would shape Amsterdam’s homosexual city for decades to come. At the same time, the café reminds us that permanence did not eliminate vulnerability. Even within one of the city’s first recognised queer interiors, visibility remained carefully negotiated, reflecting the fragile relationship between acceptance, architecture, and everyday life.⁴

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D.01 Daylight / Interiorisation Daylight marks a shift from hidden nocturnal encounters toward more permanent queer activity inside the city’s interiors.

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Threshold

The bell, doorway and curtain of Café ’t Mandje create a controlled transition between the public street and the protected queer interior

Café ’t Mandje, c.Photographer unknownCafé t Mandje. Foto Martin Alberts.

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Lesbian Presence

The bar represents a broader queer social world, with lesbians visibly occupying and participating in the space, not only gay men.

Bet van Beeren: koningin van de Zeedijk door Bert Boelaars. O.a. Greet van Beeren, Albert Mol en kolonel Bosshardt van het Leger des Heils halen herinnneringen op aan Bet van Beeren. Uitgegeven door Tiebosch te Amsterdam (1977)

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Licensed Social Space

Alcohol, music and the bar counter establish a more formalised social environment, transforming queer gathering into a regulated and recognisable urban venue.

Bet van Beeren behind the bar at Café ’t Mandje, Amsterdam, mid-twentieth century.source https://www.cafetmandje. amsterdam/de-oude-doos/

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ATLAS

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Bet van Beeren

Bet van Beeren, owner of Café ’t Mandje, becomes a central figure within the space, shaping the bar as a meeting place and queer social interior.

Portrait of Bet van Beeren in a sailor suit, displayed at Café ’t Mandje, 1986. Tiebosch te Amsterdam (1977)

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Niche / Concealment / Occupation

The niche becomes an architecture of concealment. As the drawing moves into darkness and wartime occupation, a hidden kiss between a German officer and another man connects intimacy, secrecy and Amsterdam’s queer history.

Public domain. Anonymous employee of Polygoon. Collection: Stadsarchief Amsterdam / archive of Het Vrije Volk. Dated 1 November 1931.

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HOSPITALITY AND IDENTITY (5)

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(1)

“Space is socially produced through everyday practice.” (Lefebvre, 1991,p. 38)

(2)

“Architecture mediates relationships between visibility and privacy.” (Rendell, Penner, & Borden, 2000, p. 140)

(3)

“Queer space emerges through occupation and collective identity.” (Betsky, 1997, p. 18)

(4)

“The post-war period witnessed the rapid expansion of Amsterdam’s homosexual social infrastructure.” (Hekma, 2004, p. 214)

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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This drawing captures a decisive stage in the evolution of Amsterdam’s homosexual city. Following the years of occupation and repression, queer life gradually re-emerges within the urban fabric through the appearance of permanent establishments specifically associated with homosexual social life. Rather than relying primarily on hidden encounters or temporary occupations, the city begins to develop dedicated places where community, identity, and everyday social interaction can take place.¹ At the centre of the composition stands Hotel Tielsma, one of the most significant locations within Amsterdam’s post-war homosexual geography. More than simply a hotel, it functioned as a social infrastructure for homosexual men arriving in the city. Its bar, corridors, staircases, guest rooms, and shared facilities collectively produced an environment where hospitality, social gathering, and cruising could coexist. The building demonstrates how architecture itself became an active participant in the production of queer social life rather than merely providing a backdrop for it.² Unlike the temporary occupations explored in the previous drawings, Hotel Hotel Tiemersma reveals how an entire building could support different degrees of visibility and intimacy through its spatial organisation. The transition from the public street to the entrance, from the hotel bar into corridors, and from shared circulation spaces to private rooms establishes a sequence of thresholds through which visitors negotiated social interaction. Corridors became places of observation, staircases facilitated unexpected encounters, and guest rooms offered temporary privacy within a larger collective environment. Architecture no longer concealed queer life; it organised and supported it through circulation, proximity, and carefully layered spatial relationships. The drawing also illustrates an important cultural transformation taking place during the 1950s. Earlier homosexual networks often centred on sailors, soldiers, sex workers, and men whose encounters were largely shaped by circumstance rather than a shared public identity. During the post-war decades, a more explicit homosexual identity gradually emerged alongside increasingly organised social networks and dedicated meeting places. Buildings such as Hotel Tielsma contributed to this transition by providing stable environments in which community could develop over time.³ This transformation is reinforced through the emergence of new aesthetic languages. Leather jackets, uniforms, workwear, boots, and references to military and maritime culture increasingly became visible within homosexual spaces. These visual codes communicated identity, belonging, and desire while also influencing the atmosphere of the interiors themselves. Within this context, Argos Bar represents another important milestone. As one of Amsterdam’s earliest leather-oriented establishments, it introduced a more specialised environment characterised by darker interiors, controlled lighting, enclosed spaces, and a distinctly masculine atmosphere. Argos became an influential prototype for many of the gay bars that followed, demonstrating how architecture, interior design, and identity could become inseparable components of queer space.⁴ Together these scenes reveal a fundamental transformation within Amsterdam’s homosexual city. Queer life moves beyond strategies of survival and begins to establish permanent architectural infrastructures capable of supporting identity, community, and collective memory. Buildings no longer function only as places of concealment but become recognisable social institutions embedded within the everyday city, laying the foundations for the increasingly specialised gay neighbourhoods, bars, clubs, and commercial venues that emerge in the following decades.

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After the Occupation

The dark monumental façade at the edge of the drawing carries the previous scene of Nazi occupation into the post-war city. Moving away from it marks the beginning of a new period of homosexual organisation and social life.

Public domain. Photographer unknown, Stapf Bilderdienst. Source: Nationaal Archief. The original is dated 2 July 1941

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Shakespeare Club / COC

The narrow Amsterdam canal house represents the Shakespeare Club, founded in 1946 and soon renamed the COC. The ordinary domestic façade contains the beginning of a more organised and permanent homosexual community. Hekma identifies the Shakespeare Club/COC as central to the restart of the homosexual rights movement after the occupation. Party at the doc 1955 source collection album in amsterdam. Creator unknown.

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Hotel Rooms

Through the cut-open hotel façade, bodies are visible together inside the small bedrooms. The hotel room becomes a temporary private space where sexual encounters could move away from the exposed public city.

Herbert Tobias, Argos Hotel, Warmoestraat, Amsterdam, 1960 Berlinische Galerie / VG Bild-Kunst.

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Beginning of the Darkroom Principle

Beside the bedrooms, the drawing exposes the dark internal corridor connecting the different rooms. The sequence of corridor, threshold and enclosed room begins to anticipate the spatial principle of the later darkroom, although the hotel itself is not yet a dedicated darkroom

Extracted text from G. Hekma, G. (2014). “Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010.” In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic, p. 124.

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ATLAS

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Argos Bar / Opening to the City

The drawing cuts the bar open toward the street, exposing the counter, bottles, lighting and dark interior directly to the city. Argos represents the development of a specialised gay environment and the growing visibility of gay nightlife within Amsterdam.

Argos Bar at Heintje Hoeksteeg 15, here in 1975 Photo: Gerard Dukker/Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed

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Leather-Clad Men / New Masculinity

In front of the bar, two men appear in caps, leather, open shirts and strongly masculine poses. Their clothing represents the emergence of a new gay masculine aesthetic, using leather and working-class or military imagery as a visible language of desire, identity and belonging.

Early posters for leather bars around the world. Compilation reproduced from Cuirmale.nl, Gay Leather Bars. Cretit gay leathervibes.

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DÉRIVE | Drake’s Club Amsterdam

Drake’s Club Amsterdam presents one of the most striking spatial transitions encountered during the dérive. From the street, the building reads primarily as a boutique selling luxury goods. Nothing immediately suggests that a gay cinema and cruising space exists beyond the commercial interior. This ambiguity was what first attracted me to the place. I had discovered it while researching Amsterdam’s cruising locations and became fascinated by the coexistence of two radically different programmes within the same building. When I entered, I was initially unsure whether I had arrived at the correct address. The shop was bright, polished, and carefully arranged, with luxury objects displayed beneath focused lighting. After looking around, I asked the person behind the counter whether the cruising cinema was located there. He confirmed that it was and explained that access required a ticket. After paying, I was directed towards a small door positioned discreetly within the shop. The door became the first major architectural threshold. It remained closed until the employee activated it remotely from behind the counter. The moment it opened, the atmosphere changed completely. The bright commercial interior disappeared and was replaced by a narrow staircase with dark red walls, a dark floor, and very low lighting. Within only a few steps, I moved from an environment organised around display, consumption, and visibility into one structured around concealment, anticipation, intimacy, and sexual encounter. At the top of the staircase, the interior transformed again. Disco lights, mirrors, music, corridors, and repeated private cabins created an environment closer to an arcade than a conventional cinema. The repeated doors established a rhythm along the corridor, while the limited visibility made it difficult to understand the entire plan at once. I moved through the space gradually, opening doors and discovering the programme through movement rather than through a clear overview. Inside one of the cabins, the spatial mechanism initially confused me. A built-in seat faced a monitor showing pornography, but the position of the screen appeared uncomfortable for direct viewing. Only after entering, closing the mirrored door, and sitting down did the organisation become clear. The 064

film was intended to be watched indirectly reflected by a sequence of mirrors.

The mirrors therefore did more than just enlarge the cabin, they became part of the architecture of looking. A glory hole connected the cabin with the room beside it, while a much smaller opening at eye level created another form of visual communication. Looking through this opening, the mirrors in the neighbouring cabin fragmented and multiplied the image of the person on the other side. Body, face, screen, and sexual contact appeared through different reflected angles. Visibility was therefore neither completely open nor completely concealed. The architecture allowed recognition and anonymity to exist simultaneously. The cabin began to feel almost like a gaming station. The chair, buttons, monitor, coloured light, mirrors, and glory hole formed an interactive apparatus in which the body became part of the spatial mechanism. The sexual encounter was not simply happening inside the architecture. The architecture actively organised how looking, waiting, revealing, and contact could occur. Continuing through the building revealed another transformation. The small cabins enabled fragmented and anonymous encounters, but their dimensions limited more social forms of interaction. Further along the route, two pivoting doors opened into a larger cruising room. Suddenly the body was released from the confined scale of the cabin. Here people could circulate around one another, stop, observe, talk, and encounter each other more freely.

(1)

Betsky, A. (1997). Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. William Morrow; Ingram, G. B., Bouthillette, A.-M., & Retter, Y. (Eds.). (1997). Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance. Bay Press.

(2)

Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (3rd ed.). Wiley; Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Birkhäuser.

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DÉRIVE

| Interview: Drake’s Club Amsterdam

During my dérive through Drake’s Club, I spoke with another visitor about his experience of the venue. Having visited several gay sex cinemas elsewhere in Europe, he was able to compare Drake’s with other cruising environments. The conversation focused on how encounters begin, how visitors communicate, how the individual booths are used, and how the spatial organisation of the cinema contributes to the experience. Question: What do you think about Drake’s, and why? Interviewee: Having visited quite a number of gay sex cinemas in Europe, this one stands out as my favourite. I have been to several different places, but there is something about Drake’s that I really enjoy. Most of the guys who visit are friendly, and I have had some really hot encounters there. I particularly like the glory holes and the way the individual booths allow you to interact with the person next to you while still maintaining a certain level of anonymity. I have also had kissing encounters through the glory holes after oral sex, which makes the experience more intimate than simply remaining completely anonymous. Question: How would you describe the ease of finding willing partners at this cinema? Interviewee: It is quite easy to find willing glory-hole partners. Often there is not really a need to speak. Just through a look, we understand each other’s intentions. If there is mutual interest, we move towards the booths, enter adjacent cabins, and the encounter can begin almost immediately. Because the booths are next to each other, the transition from seeing somebody in the corridor to interacting through the partition can happen very quickly. Question: So visual communication is important? Interviewee: Yes. A lot can happen just through looking. You notice somebody, they notice you, and quite often you can understand whether there is interest without saying anything. Then you both move towards neighbouring booths. That is one of the things that makes the place easy to use. You do not necessarily need to introduce yourself or start a conversation first.

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(1)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 118

(2)

Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural environments, surrounding objects. Birkhäuser.

(3)

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others Duke University Press.

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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This drawing introduces the gay sauna as a distinct architectural typology within Amsterdam’s homosexual city.¹ The composition begins within the familiar urban environment of the previous scenes, but gradually leaves the street behind. On the left, façades, entrances, windows and figures still belong to the city. Moving across the drawing, these recognisable architectural elements begin to dissolve until the urban exterior is replaced by an interior organised around steam, water and the naked body. At the centre of the drawing, a dense cloud of steam interrupts the continuity of the street. It acts as both a physical atmosphere and an architectural threshold. Buildings and rooms remain partially visible through it, but their boundaries become uncertain. Entrances, walls and fragments of interiors appear and disappear inside the mist. Unlike the fixed threshold of a door, steam creates a gradual transition in which the city becomes increasingly difficult to read. The body becomes more prominent as this transition takes place. The large figures occupying the foreground shift the scale of the drawing away from the façade and toward bodily experience. Architecture is no longer understood principally through its exterior appearance. It is encountered through skin, temperature, humidity, proximity and movement.² This emphasis on bodily orientation also reflects Sara Ahmed’s understanding of space as something inhabited and negotiated through the position and direction of bodies.³ On the right, the street has almost completely disappeared. The drawing enters the bathing interior, where the pool, steps, columns and surrounding surfaces organise naked bodies within a shared environment. Water becomes another spatial material: it changes movement, reflects bodies and surfaces, and creates different relationships between immersion, observation and encounter. The architecture is experienced through a sequence of changing physical conditions rather than through clearly separated rooms.² The drawing therefore represents the sauna not simply as another venue but as a new kind of architecture. Its spaces are organised around changing, bathing, circulating, resting and encountering other bodies. Steam obscures visibility, water changes movement, and nudity changes the relationship between the body and its surroundings. Together these conditions produce an interior whose boundaries are more fluid than those of the bars and clubs represented previously. Zumthor’s discussion of thermal baths is particularly relevant here because he describes bathing architecture as an environment that permits wandering, lingering and movement through attraction rather than through a predetermined route.² Rather than reconstructing one particular sauna, the drawing combines these spatial qualities into a speculative representation of the typology. Its composition deliberately moves from the recognisable city on the left toward an increasingly atmospheric and bodily environment on the right. The architecture gradually disappears into steam, and the body becomes the principal measure of space.³

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Double-Door Entrance Door Guards

Together, the double-door entrance and door guards form a controlled threshold between the public city and the interior world of the club. This sequence filters access, protects privacy, and creates a gradual transition from visibility to belonging. The entrance becomes both a security device and an architectural ritual, marking the passage into a specialised queer environment. Club iT, Amsterdam, 1992, by Co de Kruijf.

F.02 Dance Hall COC Organised by the COC during the postwar decades, these dance evenings provided one of the first semi-public spaces where homosexual men and women could meet, socialise, and dance together. Operating under the framework of culture and recreation, they offered a rare environment where community formation, visibility, and collective identity could develop beyond the private sphere. Entrance of the COC at Singel, here in 1972 Photo: Rob Mieremet/Anefo

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Pleasure Fountain

A symbolic architectural element representing the increasing integration of desire, sexuality, and bodily expression within the homosexual city. It marks the moment when pleasure itself becomes a visible theme within queer architecture.

Creator unknown.

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Steam Threshold

The dense layer of steam marks the transition between the nightlife district and the gay sauna. Acting as both a visual and symbolic boundary, it separates spaces of social interaction from spaces dedicated to bodily experience, intimacy, and pleasure.

Credit: Image courtesy of Sauna Nieuwezijds, Amsterdam, official gallery, accessed 9 August 2026.

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Gay Sauna

One of the first architectural typologies specifically organised around homosexual social life. Through pools, showers, lounges, corridors, and secluded spaces, the sauna created an environment structured around encounter, visibility, and collective bodily experience.

Thermos Sauna Day & Night, subscription card, Amsterdam. IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, via Historypin. CC BY-SA

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Communal Shower

Originally designed for hygiene, the communal shower became a space of visibility, social interaction, and bodily display. Steam, water, and transparency transformed a functional space into a central element of the sauna experience.

Credit: Image courtesy of Sauna Nieuwezijds, Amsterdam, official gallery, accessed 9 August 2026.

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DÉRIVE | Sauna NZ

Unlike the previous dérives, which explored parks, streets, and buildings designed for other purposes and later appropriated by queer communities, Sauna NZ presents a different architectural condition. Its interior programme is deliberately organised around bathing, relaxation, social interaction, bodily exposure, intimacy, and sexual encounter. The sauna therefore marks a shift from the queer appropriation of existing architecture towards an environment intentionally programmed around the practices of its users. This relationship between architecture, activity, and occupation connects to Katarina Bonnevier’s understanding of architecture as produced through the interaction of people, actions, and the built environment.¹ The building is experienced not as a sequence of isolated rooms, but as a continuous field of circulation. Reception, changing rooms, showers, relaxation areas, the bar, saunas, steam baths, cabins, and darkrooms are connected through overlapping routes. During repeated visits, I observed visitors pausing, returning, changing direction, and crossing the same people several times. Movement therefore operates not merely as functional circulation, but as one of the principal social mechanisms of the building. Rather than directing visitors towards one clearly defined destination, the plan permits wandering and repetition. Routes intersect, separate, and reconnect, allowing each visitor to construct an individual journey through the interior. Some spaces encourage prolonged occupation, while others function as thresholds from which visitors observe, wait, or decide where to move next. Architecture becomes less concerned with efficient arrival than with maintaining the continuous possibility of encounter. This observation finds a particularly strong architectural parallel in Peter Zumthor’s discussion of movement through thermal baths. Zumthor describes architecture as both spatial and temporal and argues for environments that allow a sense of freedom in movement rather than simply directing their users. In his discussion of baths, he describes spaces in which people can remain, wander, turn corners, and continue moving according to attraction rather than a predetermined route.² This also resonates with the dérive, where movement develops through attraction, atmosphere, and encounter rather than a fixed destination.

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Different programmes coexist within the same spatial system. Bathing, eating, conversation, rest, wellness, cruising, and sexual activity remain closely connected, but are distinguished through atmospheric and spatial differences. Changes in lighting, temperature, humidity, acoustics, visibility, enclosure, and proximity produce gradual transitions between social conditions. A visitor can move from the bar to the sauna, from the sauna to the steam bath, and from the steam bath to the darkroom without leaving the larger architectural sequence.⁴ During one mixed-gender evening at Sauna NZ, participants covered one another with warm chocolate before washing it away beneath the steam. Although the activity was not directly related to cruising, it revealed the flexibility of the architectural programme. Without any physical alteration, the same room temporarily changed from an environment associated with anonymous encounter into one centred on collective relaxation, play, and participation. The architecture remained constant while occupation transformed its social meaning. This relationship between event and architecture recalls Bonnevier’s argument that a space is not a neutral container: actions can transform its meaning while the spatial setting simultaneously shapes what can occur within it.⁵

sound, argues that buildings possess distinct thermal qualities experienced through the body, and connects intimacy to proximity and distance. His discussion of light similarly focuses on how illumination, shadow, and surfaces alter the way space is perceived.⁴ The visits to Sauna NZ demonstrate that architecture extends beyond physical construction. Plan organisation, circulation, programme, atmosphere, and occupation work together to produce a dynamic environment capable of supporting different forms of social and bodily experience. Unlike many earlier spaces examined in this research, the sauna does not simply receive queer practices through later appropriation. Its interior is deliberately programmed and organised around them, making it one of the clearest examples in the atlas of architecture structured around queer social, sensory, and spatial rituals.

The dérive also extended into the darkrooms after periods of intensive occupation. Rather than photographing visitors, I documented the material traces that remained after they had left. Displaced towels, discarded condoms, and altered furniture indicated where occupation had concentrated and how the rooms had been used. These traces temporarily transformed the interior into an archive of bodily presence, showing how architecture continues to register occupation after its occupants have departed. Environmental conditions play a central role in structuring the experience of the building. Variations in heat, humidity, light, sound, and visibility distinguish one area from another and create gradual atmospheric transitions rather than fixed separations. Movement is therefore directed not only by walls and corridors, but also by sensory conditions that influence perception, behaviour, and patterns of occupation.⁴ Zumthor’s Atmospheres provides a useful architectural framework for understanding these observations. He treats sound, temperature, light, proximity,and material presence as fundamental components of architectural atmosphere. He describes interiors as environments that collect and transmit (1) (2) (3) (4)

1. Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind straight curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture. Axl Books. pp. 16–19. Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural environments, surrounding objects (I. Galbraith, Trans.). Birkhäuser. pp. 40–43. 3. Debord, G. (1958). Theory of the dérive (K. Knabb, Trans.). Internationale Situationniste, 2. p. 1 of the supplied PDF; Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. pp. 1–2, 23–24. Zumthor, P. (2006).Atmospheres: Architectural environments, surrounding objects (I. Galbraith,Trans.). Birkhäuser. pp. 28–33, 48–61.

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Throughout this research, privacy is rarely produced through solid walls alone. Instead, it emerges through architectural devices that regulate visibility without completely separating space. Curtains in Café ‘t Mandje, vegetation in Vondelpark and De Oeverlanden, darkness within the darkroom, and steam inside the sauna all perform a comparable spatial function. Although materially different, each operates as a permeable threshold, producing gradients of visibility rather than fixed boundaries.⁶ Among these devices, steam is the most dynamic. Unlike a wall or curtain, it has no fixed position or permanent form. Its density constantly changes as heat, humidity, air movement, and the movement of bodies reshape the atmosphere. As visitors enter or leave the steam bath, sightlines continuously expand and contract, producing shifting fields of visibility that cannot be precisely controlled. Privacy therefore emerges through environmental conditions rather than physical enclosure. Steam fundamentally alters spatial perception. It shortens visual distance, softens architectural edges, reduces contrast, and dissolves the clear distinction between foreground and background. Bodies gradually appear before disappearing again, making recognition partial and temporary rather than immediate. Architecture is experienced less through visual definition than through temperature, sound, touch, and proximity. The room is therefore organised as much by atmosphere as by its physical construction.⁴ Unlike conventional architecture, where thresholds are defined by doors or walls, the steam bath produces a moving threshold that accompanies the body. Each step through the room changes what can be seen, recognised, or anticipated. Visibility is continuously negotiated rather than simply granted or denied. The boundary between public and private is therefore not fixed but constantly reconstructed through environmental conditions. Viewed within the broader context of this atlas, steam represents the culmination of a recurring architectural strategy found throughout Amsterdam’s homosexual landscape. Curtains conceal domestic interiors while permitting observation. Vegetation fragments sightlines within parks without enclosing them. Darkness reorganises perception inside the darkroom. Steam extends this architectural language further by transforming atmosphere itself into a spatial device. Privacy is no longer produced by construction alone but by the manipulation of environmental conditions.⁶ Rather than functioning simply as a climatic phenomenon, steam becomes an architectural material. Together with temperature, humidity, acous076

tics, and light, it structures movement, influences behaviour, regulates encounter, and shapes patterns of occupation. The steam bath demonstrates that architecture can be produced not only through walls and rooms, but also through carefully controlled sensory environments. Within the trajectory of this research, it represents perhaps the clearest example of atmosphere functioning as architecture rather than merely occupying it.⁴

(5) (6)

Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind straight curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture. Axl Books. pp. 16–19, 370–371. Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind straight curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture. Axl Books. pp. 76–77; Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural environments, surrounding objects (I. Galbraith, Trans.). Birkhäuser. pp. 44–47.

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STREET AS STAGE (7)

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(1)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 126, 128.

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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This drawing represents a moment when Amsterdam’s homosexual city becomes increasingly visible and spatially interconnected. Rather than being concentrated within a single bar or club, queer nightlife begins to occupy an entire urban district. Along streets popularly associated with gay nightlife, sometimes referred to through names such as Rue de Vaseline, bars, cafés, discos, restaurants, shops, and other services gather within walking distance of one another. The result is more than a collection of individual venues: together they begin to form a continuous queer urban environment.¹ The street consequently starts to operate almost as a large shared interior. Building façades become its walls, the pavement becomes its circulation space, and the entrances of different venues function like doors between interconnected rooms. Moving through the district means constantly crossing between street and interior, from one bar to another, from café to club, from social encounter to sexual encounter. Architecture is no longer experienced as a series of isolated buildings but as a network of thresholds through which queer life spreads across the city. This transformation is visible in the centre of the drawing, where multiple interiors are compressed into a single urban façade. Each window reveals a different atmosphere, activity, or form of occupation. Rather than hiding queer life behind an anonymous exterior, the building becomes a kind of section through the homosexual city. Different spaces coexist beside and above one another, while the street connects them into a larger social system. The distinction between public and private becomes increasingly unstable: activities normally contained within interiors begin to influence the atmosphere of the street, while the street itself becomes part of the experience of nightlife. This blurring of conventional divisions between inside and outside is particularly significant for understanding architecture as a social rather than neutral framework. On the left, the older architecture of homosexual encounter remains present. The public urinal recalls an earlier city in which sexual contact often depended upon ordinary public infrastructure, anonymity, concealment, and temporary occupation. These practices have not yet disappeared, but their spatial position is beginning to change. As bars, clubs, saunas, and increasingly specialised nightlife environments develop, sexual encounter gradually moves from completely public or improvised settings toward commercial and semi-private interiors. The drawing therefore captures an overlap between two spatial systems: the older queer appropriation of public infrastructure and the emerging network of dedicated homosexual venues. Toward the right, the street opens directly onto the nightclub. The disco ball, theatrical light, and drag performer are deliberately represented almost outside the conventional limits of the building. The dance floor appears to spill into the street, transforming public space into a stage. The homosexual city is no longer organised only around finding hidden places in which to meet; it also develops spaces in which queer identity can be performed, watched, celebrated, exaggerated, and collectively experienced. The relationship between architecture and sexuality therefore shifts from concealment toward increasing visibility. The drag performer intensifies this transformation. Positioned between the nightclub and the street, the figure represents performance not as something confined to a stage but as something capable of occupying the broader urban environment. Nightlife becomes theatrical, and the street itself participates in that theatre. People move between spectator and participant, between being inside and outside, between watching and being watched. The city becomes part of the performance. Rather than reconstructing one specific street at one precise moment, the drawing compresses several spatial characteristics of Amsterdam’s expanding homosexual nightlife into one continuous architectural scene. The urinal, street, façades, multiple venues, thresholds, dance floor, theatrical lighting, and drag performance coexist as parts of the same urban system. The drawing therefore documents a shift from isolated queer interiors toward an interconnected homosexual district in which the spaces between venues become just as important as the venues themselves. The central architectural transformation is therefore not simply the growth of nightlife, but the expansion of the interior into the city. What began in protected rooms behind doors and curtains now extends across entrances, pavements, façades, and streets. The homosexual city becomes increasingly legible through movement between places, turning the street from a route between queer spaces into a queer space in its own right: a corridor, meeting place, threshold, and stage.

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Tearoom

Amsterdam’s double krul, an S-shaped two-person public urinal with opposing compartments, created a peculiar balance between enclosure and exposure. Designed as everyday sanitation infrastructure, its curved metal screens, narrow entrances and limited visibility also produced conditions of anonymity and discreet encounter, allowing the urinal to become part of the homosexual city. De dubbele krul op de hoek van de Keizersgracht en de Nieuwe Spiegelstraat werd ooit verwijderd, en na groot protest van o.a. het COC weer teruggeplaatst.

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Reguliersdwarsstraat

Street view showing the concentration of queer bars, clubs, cafés, and other nightlife establishments along Reguliersdwarsstraat. The image illustrates how queer life became increasingly visible in the urban fabric, with entrances, signs, façades, and the street itself forming a connected social and entertainment district. Geheel rechts homocafé ‘t Toplicht in de Reguliersdwarsstraat, hier in 1980

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Rue de vaseline

Leidsestraat became known in gay slang as the “Rue de Vaseline,” forming a visible queer corridor between venues such as De Schakel and DOK. The street itself became part of the nightlife network, extending social encounters beyond the interior of the bars.

Leidsestraat, c. 1960. Collection Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

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Dance Floor

The dance floor became one of the central spaces of homosexual nightlife during the 1970s and 1980s. Organised around music, light, movement, and collective participation, it transformed the club into a space of visibility, celebration, and community. Unlike earlier meeting places centred on discretion, the dance floor encouraged the public expression of identity through performance, fashion, and shared experience. 084

ATLAS

RoXY dance floor / interior, Collectie Stadsarchief Amsterdam

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Gay porn movie

Gay porn movie are used as a tool in order to reclaiming Safe SpacesHistorically, playing explicit adult films on loop was a deliberate choice to keep spaces exclusively for LGBTQ+ adults. It signaled to patrons that they were in a safe, judgment-free zone where they could express their sexuality openly, away from mainstream, heteronormative society. Creator unknown.

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Ballroom and Drag Culture

Ballrooms, cabarets, and drag performances created spaces where gender expression, performance, and creativity could flourish. These venues expanded the cultural dimension of the homosexual city beyond socialising and nightlife alone.

Cleo Campert’s RoXY archive. © Cleo Campert

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DÉRIVE | Streethearth festival

During the StreetHeart Festival, the narrow street in front of Club Church changed completely. Normally a small urban passage defined by façades, entrances, bicycles and traffic, it became an extension of the club itself. The boundary between interior and exterior seemed to dissolve. Music escaped through the entrance, people occupied the pavement and roadway, and activities normally contained within the building moved directly into the public city. Walking toward the festival, I could already hear it before entering the street. The sound gradually intensified, pulling me toward the crowd. Once inside the event, movement slowed. The narrowness of the street compressed people together, creating an atmosphere closer to an interior room than an ordinary piece of public space. Bodies, costumes, flags, temporary decorations and performances filled almost every available surface. Drag performers, dancers, artists, activists and visitors occupied the street simultaneously. Some people watched performances, others talked, danced, drank or simply moved through the crowd. Different generations and expressions of queer identity were present together. The street was no longer functioning primarily as infrastructure for circulation. It had become a place to remain, watch, perform and encounter others. What interested me most was the relationship between Club Church and the street. Usually, entering the club requires crossing a clear threshold from public space into a protected queer interior. During StreetHeart, this sequence was reversed. Instead of people disappearing behind the façade, the activity of the club expanded outward. Music, bodies, performances and visual symbols crossed the doorway and temporarily occupied the surrounding city. The architecture itself changed very little, yet its meaning changed dramatically. The façade became a backdrop, the entrance became a point of exchange rather than separation, and the street became a collective room without a roof. Temporary objects, sound equipment and the density of the crowd created boundaries that were social rather than permanent. Inside queer nightlife, visibility often exists within spaces specifically intended for queer peers. 086

Passing pedestrians, neighbours and festival visitors shared the same urban territory. Queer bodies were not hidden behind curtains, doors or dark interiors. They were occupying the street openly and collectively. This produced a very different spatial experience from the oil party inside Club Church. There, darkness, material surfaces and bodily proximity dissolved individual boundaries within an enclosed environment. StreetHeart operated in the opposite direction. Instead of creating a protected world inside architecture, queer space expanded outward and temporarily appropriated the city itself. The dérive revealed how quickly the meaning of ordinary urban space can be transformed through occupation. No permanent architectural intervention was necessary. Music changed the acoustic territory, bodies interrupted circulation, performances generated temporary centres of attention, and the crowd converted a narrow street into a place of collective presence. For me, StreetHeart demonstrated queer space as an action rather than simply a location. The street became queer because it was occupied differently. Through performance, visibility, proximity and collective use, an ordinary fragment of Amsterdam was temporarily rewritten. The club did not simply open onto the city. For a few hours, the city became part of the club.

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DESIRE BECOMES ARCHITECTURE (8)

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(1)

Hekma, G. (2014). “Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010.” In Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe Since 1945, p. 121.

(2)

de Looz, P. A. (2009). “Dark Rooms: Sex Rigorously Drafted into Archi tectural Service.” PIN–UP, 6, Spring/Summer 2009, n.p

(3)

DArkDes. (2019). Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture, n.p.

(4)

Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Femi nist Theory of Architecture, p. 36.

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

This drawing continues directly from the nightclub of the previous scene. The illuminated disco remains visible at the left edge, but it is no longer the main subject. Instead, the drawing moves behind and beyond it, into the darkroom that becomes attached to the nightlife venue. This reflects a broader historical shift in Amsterdam, where sexual encounters that had previously taken place largely in public and semi-public environments increasingly moved into “semi-public spaces, dark rooms and saunas” associated with exclusively gay bars and discos.¹ The transition from disco to darkroom is immediate but spatially dramatic. Light, colour, music, visibility, and collective social interaction give way to darkness, enclosure, reduced visibility, and physical proximity. The threshold separates two different but interconnected forms of pleasure. On one side, the body is visible, dressed, dancing, watching and being watched. On the other, visual identity becomes less dominant and the body is increasingly experienced through proximity, sound, movement, and touch. The two interiors therefore operate together: the nightclub produces visibility, while the darkroom produces partial disappearance. Inside the darkroom, architecture begins to actively organise sexual behaviour. The open dance floor fragments into corridors, partitions, cabins, corners, curtains, and smaller rooms. Pol Esteve and Marc Navarro’s Dark Rooms Atlas documents precisely this spatial vocabulary. Their measured plans record compact interiors containing cabins, lightweight partitions, slings, benches, curtains, and glory holes.² One example is described as a small room organised through “lightweight partitions” with glory holes integrated directly into its walls.² Circulation also changes. Movement is no longer direct or entirely visible. The user moves through an interior that unfolds gradually, without immediately knowing what lies ahead. Esteve describes measuring these environments in darkness as a disorienting experience in which spaces often felt much larger than they later appeared on the architectural plan.² The labyrinth is therefore not simply a visual form. Uncertainty, turning, searching, waiting and encountering become part of the programme. The Cruising Pavilion similarly identifies labyrinths, darkrooms, and devices such as glory holes as a distinct architectural intelligence produced through cruising culture.³ At the centre of the drawing, the distinction between body, furniture, and architecture begins to dissolve. Platforms, benches, slings, walls, curtains and partitions are not passive surroundings. They support positions, movements and relationships between bodies. Bonnevier describes architecture through “the interconnectedness of material container, the setting, the deeds and the actors.”⁴ In the darkroom this relationship becomes particularly explicit: architecture appears through what bodies do with walls, openings, furniture, surfaces and each other. Toward the right, the interior becomes increasingly specialised. Individual compartments create different degrees of enclosure, while perforations allow bodies to interact without requiring full visual access. The glory hole reduces this condition to its architectural minimum: one wall, one opening, two separated spaces. The partition divides and connects simultaneously. It preserves anonymity while making physical contact possible. PIN-UP’s documentation of the Dark Rooms Atlas shows glory holes repeatedly incorporated directly into lightweight walls and partitions as part of the functional organisation of these interiors.² This development marks an important change within the homosexual city. Earlier queer encounters often relied upon appropriating spaces designed for completely different purposes, including parks, public toilets and other fragments of public space. Cruising later also became institutionalised within dedicated establishments such as sex clubs, bathhouses and gay venues.³ The darkroom therefore produces its own spatial vocabulary of darkness, thresholds, labyrinths, cabins, curtains, platforms, partitions and holes. Architecture is no longer merely concealing desire from the city. It is deliberately constructing an environment for it. Rather than representing one historical darkroom literally, the drawing combines these recurring characteristics into a speculative architectural landscape informed by research. This is consistent with Esteve and Navarro’s atlas, which records fifteen different darkrooms through architectural plans and reveals repeated spatial devices despite considerable variation between individual venues.² The drawing therefore moves gradually from social pleasure toward sexual pleasure, from visibility toward anonymity, and from the open room toward the fragmented interior. The final curved wall is especially important because it continues into the next drawing. Here its glory holes represent the culmination of this architecture of pleasure. In the following scene, however, the same form is reprogrammed through the HIV/AIDS crisis and begins to signify illness, care and remembrance.

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Threshold Between Disco and Darkroom

The transition between disco and darkroom marks the passage from collective visibility to anonymous intimacy. In the drawing, a curtain and narrow opening separate the illuminated social space from the darker interior beyond. This threshold functions as both filter and invitation, showing how, in many clubs, spaces of dancing and spaces of sex became directly adjacent parts of the same queer environment.

H.02

Restraint Cross

The cross appears as a fixed apparatus within the darkroom, designed for restraint and sexual play. In the drawing it stands empty, its rigid geometry signalling a specific possible use of the space. Rather than furniture, it becomes a permanent architectural device that gives the darkroom a specialised program and erotic identity. Club Church, Amsterdam. Photo: Rebecca Camphens / VICE, 2016.

H.03

Sling / Chain Bed

Suspended from chains, the bed transforms the darkroom into a more specialised sexual interior. In the drawing, its elevated and exposed position turns it into both object and apparatus, introducing a typology associated with fetish, display, and performance. Architecturally, it shifts the space from generic darkness toward a deliberately constructed environment of erotic use. Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture, ArkDes, Stockholm, 2019. Photograph: Johan Dehlin. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

H.04

Cabins

The cabins create a sequence of enclosed micro-rooms along the edge of the darkroom. In the drawing, they form a linear wall of thresholds, each door opening onto a private space within the larger collective interior. This repetition of small compartments produces a rhythm of concealment and access, allowing the architecture to balance anonymity, retreat, and sexual encounter. Author photo

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Glory Hole

The glory hole reduces the wall to a device of mediated contact. In the drawing, it appears as a small opening inserted into the cabin partition, transforming separation itself into an erotic mechanism. Rather than simply dividing space, the wall becomes an interface through which anonymity, fantasy, and encounter are produced, making the partition an active element of queer spatial design. Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture, ArkDes, Stockholm, 2019. Photograph: Johan Dehlin. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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DÉRIVE | Darkrooms

This collection brings together a series of dark rooms and cruising interiors that I visited in different cities across Europe during the course of my research. Rather than treating them as isolated venues, I began to read them as variations of a recurring architectural language. Despite differences in scale, atmosphere and local culture, many of these spaces rely on a surprisingly limited vocabulary: corridors, partitions, cabins, curtains, benches, slings, glory holes, showers, basins, mirrors and small chambers connected through indirect circulation. While moving through these environments, I became interested in the way architecture structures encounter. Dark rooms rarely depend on large or spectacular spaces. Their intensity is produced through compression, repetition, obstruction and uncertainty. A wall interrupts vision, a curtain delays entry, a narrow corridor slows movement, a small opening connects two otherwise separated bodies. Circulation becomes less about travelling efficiently from one room to another and more about wandering, waiting, observing and repeatedly crossing the same spaces. The collection therefore does not attempt to reproduce each venue as a complete architectural survey. Instead, it isolates the spatial elements and configurations that repeatedly appeared during my visits. By comparing these plans, I started to recognise recurring typologies: linear corridors lined with cabins, central labyrinths, circular routes, clustered rooms, wet areas, lounges and sequences of increasingly enclosed spaces. The same architectural components are constantly rearranged, producing different degrees of exposure, anonymity, intimacy and choice. Objects such as the glory hole or the sling are treated here not simply as pieces of sexual equipment, but as architectural devices. A glory hole transforms a wall from a barrier into a controlled point of connection. A curtain creates privacy without producing complete enclosure. A sling fixes the body within a particular position in space, while benches, mirrors and openings generate places for waiting, watching and interaction. These small interventions demonstrate how ordinary architectural elements can acquire entirely different meanings through queer occupation. Taken together, the plans form a kind of spatial grammar of the dark room. 094

Walls, openings, thresholds and circulation routes become the syntax through which desire is organised. The collection reveals how these interiors are simultaneously highly functional and intentionally ambiguous. Their architecture does not determine exactly what should happen, but establishes conditions in which encounters can emerge unpredictably. For me, documenting these spaces became a way of understanding cruising through architecture rather than only through behaviour. Across different European cities, the dark room repeatedly appeared as an environment where conventional spatial rules are loosened: visibility is controlled, circulation becomes exploratory, privacy is fragmented, and the boundary between individual and collective space becomes unstable. The collection is therefore not simply an archive of rooms, but an atlas of architectural conditions through which queer intimacy is produced.

DARKROOM COLLECTION

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DÉRIVE | Glory hole

The glory hole is one of the most minimal forms of sexual architecture. Spatially, it requires little more than two adjacent spaces, a separating surface, and an opening. Yet this small intervention radically alters the role of the wall. Rather than functioning only as a boundary, the partition simultaneously separates and connects two bodies. Drożyński describes the glory hole as an “architectural link between spaces,” emphasising precisely this relationship between separation, proximity, and desire.¹

The spatial practice has a much longer history than its contemporary appearance in purpose-built darkrooms. A 1707 English court record concerning Thomas Vaughan and Thomas Davis describes sexual contact occurring through a hole between adjoining toilet compartments. The record documents the practice rather than the modern terminology, so it should not be presented as evidence that the expression glory hole itself was already in use.² What it demonstrates is the early transformation of an ordinary architectural partition into a device for sexual encounter.

This relationship with public toilets is architecturally significant. Toilet cubicles already produced a particular combination of proximity and separation: neighbouring occupants were physically close while remaining visually divided. The insertion of an opening changed the function of the partition without requiring the construction of an entirely new room. What had been designed to separate bodies could therefore become a mechanism through which those bodies interacted.²

Later research demonstrates that the glory hole migrated from appropriated public infrastructure into environments increasingly designed around sexual encounter. Holmes, O’Byrne, and Murray discuss glory holes in bathhouses, saunas, adult video arcades, nightclubs, bookstores, sex shops, and public toilets. They observe that “individuals on opposite sides of the wall have limited physical and visual contact with each other.”³ The glory hole can therefore be understood not simply as a sexual object, but as an architectural configuration that controls the relationship between desire, visibility, place, and bodily interaction.

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The control of visibility is fundamental to this architecture. Darkness alone reduces visibility across an entire room, while the glory-hole partition produces a much more precise condition. Two bodies may occupy almost identical positions on opposite sides of a wall while remaining partially or completely unknown to one another. Architecture determines what is visible, what remains concealed, and what is permitted to cross the boundary. Bapst’s research into glory-hole encounters identifies anonymity, intimacy, detachment, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and role-playing among the experiences associated with their use.⁴

GLORY HOLE ZOOM

LEAN BACK THRUST DEEPER

SELF PLEASURE

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Drożyński, C. (2022). Holes in architecture: A queer eye on a design method. Architecture and Culture, 10(2), 285–303. See p. 289. Norton, R. (Ed.). (2007, April 29; updated 2008, June 15). Trials of Thomas Vaughan and Thomas Davis, 1707. Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Holmes, D., O’Byrne, P., & Murray, S. J. (2010). Faceless sex: Glory holes and sexual assemblages. Nursing Philosophy, 11(4), 250–259. See p. 251. Bapst, D. (2001). Glory holes and the men who use them. Journal of Homosexuality, 41(1), 89–102.

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DÉRIVE | Oil Party

I cycled through Amsterdam in heavy rain toward Club Church. The streets were almost empty, the wet pavement reflecting streetlights and traffic signals into long fragments of colour. The journey already produced a heightened awareness of the body: cold rain against my face, wet clothes, the repetitive movement of cycling, and the anticipation of entering an environment radically different from the city outside. I arrived shortly after 1 a.m. At the entrance, a bouncer checked my pre-sale ticket and allowed me through. Crossing the first heavy door marked the beginning of a sequence of thresholds. The rain, cold air and openness of the street disappeared almost immediately. Behind the door, the temperature rose and the atmosphere became dense with the smell of sweat, olive oil and bodies. A second door intensified this separation from the outside world. Beyond it, almost every surface had been temporarily wrapped in plastic. Walls, floors and architectural elements had been covered to protect the building from the oil used during the party. The familiar architecture of the club had been concealed beneath another architecture: temporary, shiny, soft and waterproof. At the entrance balustrade, an attendant handed me a large plastic bag for my clothes and belongings. I continued toward the changing area through corridors partially covered in plastic. Around me, people were already undressed and preparing to enter the party. I removed my clothes and immediately became conscious of the floor beneath my bare feet. The usual wooden surface had disappeared beneath wet carpet, installed both as protection and to reduce the danger of slipping. Material changes were therefore not simply decorative. Plastic, carpet and bags formed a temporary technical infrastructure responding directly to the behaviour taking place inside. Through a small glazed opening I could see the main dance floor. From this distance it appeared almost fluid. Hundreds of bodies moved closely together, their skin reflecting the changing light. After leaving my bag at the wardrobe and receiving a number in return, I entered the crowd. The exchange felt strangely significant. Clothes, phone, wallet and other personal objects disappeared behind the cloakroom, while my identity was temporarily reduced to a small numbered token.

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Movement inside the dance floor was completely different from movement through an ordinary club. Because of the density of people and the oil covering their bodies, it was almost impossible to move without touching someone else. Passing through the room meant sliding, squeezing and negotiating continuously with other bodies. Personal space became unstable. The architectural dimensions of the room had not changed, yet its perceived dimensions had. Distance was no longer measured only between walls, columns or pieces of furniture, but between bodies constantly shifting position. At the centre of this crowd was a circular inflatable pool filled with oil. Its form recalled an ordinary temporary swimming pool, yet here it had acquired an entirely different function. Bodies entered and disappeared into it, producing an almost continuous moving surface of arms, legs and torsos. The distinction between individual bodies became difficult to read. Around the pool, some people talked, others watched, danced or initiated encounters. Rather than separating these activities into different rooms, the event compressed socialising, dancing, watching and sexual interaction into the same space. What struck me most was not simply nudity, but the progressive disappearance of conventional spatial boundaries. Clothing normally defines an immediate personal territory around the body. Here that layer had been removed. Oil further weakened the friction that usually separates one body from another. The crowd then completed the process. Architecture remained physically fixed, while the experience of it became unstable and fluid. I eventually moved toward another level of the club. The stairs had also been covered with carpet, turning an ordinary circulation element into part of the temporary infrastructure of the event. A mirror beside the stairs reflected my naked body together with those moving behind me, multiplying the crowd and making me simultaneously participant and observer. The bathroom continued this spatial openness. Rather than a sequence of completely enclosed individual spaces, showers, urinals and a central basin remained visually connected. Functions that are normally separated by doors, partitions and conventions of privacy were exposed to one another. The architecture produced another condition in which looking, being looked at, washing, waiting and circulating happened simultaneously.

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From there I moved toward the darkroom. The atmosphere changed again. Light levels dropped, the corridor narrowed and the smell of poppers, damp carpet, bodies and waste became stronger. The number of people made movement difficult. I had to turn sideways, stop, change direction and occasionally slide away from unwanted contact. Navigation became almost instinctive. Instead of following signs or architectural landmarks, I moved according to openings appearing momentarily between bodies. Inside the darkroom I discovered that the room itself had almost disappeared. Plastic sheeting covered its surfaces, and another pool had been constructed within the small interior. Entering it was different from entering the larger pool upstairs. The combination of limited dimensions, darkness, oil and the density of bodies made orientation almost impossible. I slipped and briefly lost control of my movement. Unable to distinguish clearly between the floor, plastic surface and surrounding bodies, I became physically entangled in the crowd. Eventually I called for help and a stranger pulled me back out. That moment revealed the spatial condition of the event most clearly. Club Church had not been redesigned architecturally, yet for one night it had become another building. Plastic, carpet, oil, darkness, heat, smell, nudity and crowd density altered the perception and use of every room. Floors became slippery surfaces, pools became social and sexual landscapes, corridors became spaces of bodily negotiation, stairs became protected routes, and the darkroom became almost formless. The dérive therefore became less about observing the architecture from a distance and more about understanding it through my own body. I could no longer separate space from touch, temperature, smell, material or movement. The body became the instrument through which the architecture was measured. For a few hours, fixed spatial boundaries gave way to an unstable environment produced collectively through bodies, materials and desire.

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(1)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp. 118–134). Bloomsbury Academic. See p. 127.

(2)

IHLIA LGBTI Heritage. (2022). House of Hiv: The stories behind 40 \ years of community initiatives.

(3)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp.118-134). Bloomsbury Academic. See p. 128.

(4)

Hekma, G. (2014). Queer Amsterdam 1945–2010. In M. Cook & J. V. Evans (Eds.), Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945 (pp.118-134). Bloomsbury Academic. See p. 128.

(5)

Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The end of queer space? Log, 41, 85–88. See p. 88.

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

I

This drawing marks a rupture in the evolution of Amsterdam’s homosexual city. The architecture of pleasure developed in the previous drawing does not simply disappear with the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Instead, its meaning begins to change. Hekma confirms that Amsterdam did not simply close its sexual spaces: “No dark rooms or saunas were closed,” while prevention information was actively distributed to gay men.¹ The crisis therefore entered spaces already shaped by nightlife and sexual encounter, adding new functions of information, prevention, care and collective responsibility. The drawing begins as a direct continuation of the previous scene. The curved glory-hole wall is carried forward and gradually becomes the wall of a healthcare institution. This transformation is architectural rather than literal: the same geometry that previously organised anonymous desire is reprogrammed to represent treatment and care. During the epidemic, Amsterdam city officials, health authorities, the COC and gay medical organisations “met and developed policies of care and prevention.”¹ IHLIA similarly describes the community response through four interconnected actions: “remembering, caring, fighting and healing.”² Buddy systems, prevention initiatives and AIDS Memorial Day emerged from within HIV-affected communities. On the left, the hospital therefore enters the drawing as a condensation of this new spatial reality. Beds, medical equipment, patients and caregivers replace the crowded interiors of nightlife. The body previously represented through pleasure and physical encounter becomes vulnerable and dependent on care. Intimacy remains, but its meaning changes. The architecture of encounter becomes an architecture of support. Towards the centre, care gives way to mourning. The large still body transforms the human figure into a landscape around which the composition reorganises itself. The candle introduces the memento mori, turning individual death into collective remembrance. This transition reflects the wider community response documented by IHLIA, where care for the living developed alongside practices of remembering those who had died.² Behind the body rises the triangular geometry of the Homomonument. The monument was conceived before the AIDS epidemic and should therefore not be represented as a direct product of AIDS. It was designed by Karin Daan and inaugurated in 1987 as a permanent memorial to LGBTQ+ people subjected to persecution and violence.³ Hekma writes that it was inaugurated “in the middle of the city” and became “the heart of queer activities.”³ Its three connected pink triangles spatialise past, present and future, transforming queer memory from something largely hidden into a permanent element of Amsterdam’s public ground. During the AIDS epidemic, the monument additionally became a place where flowers were laid for deceased friends and loved ones, connecting its broader politics of remembrance to contemporary queer loss. The drawing then opens again towards the city. Behind the monument appear domestic façades, trees and finally the stadium. After the sick and deceased body in the foreground, the upright athletic body reappears at an urban scale. This anticipates the Gay Games of 1998, which Hekma describes as promising to be “the grandest homosexual event in the city ever.”⁴ The opening and closing ceremonies took place in the Amsterdam ArenA, while approximately 15,000 participants competed in 29 sports.⁴ The stadium therefore represents a radical change of scale: from the hospital bed and individual body to thousands of queer bodies gathering visibly within one of the city’s largest public interiors. The AIDS crisis interrupted the architecture of sexual liberation, but it did not simply erase it. It generated new spatial practices of prevention, solidarity, care and remembrance. Betsky later reflected that he had expected changes in queer space partly because of “economic and social organizations and the AIDS crisis.”⁵ The queer city survives this rupture, but both its architecture and its understanding of the body are permanently altered.

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From Desire to Care

As HIV/AIDS spreads through the city, the architecture of pleasure is confronted with illness and loss. The circular wall becomes a hospital façade, symbolizing a community that transforms fear into solidarity, and desire into care.

An AIDS patient receiving care at the Flevohuis. Han Singels, 1992, Amsterdam City Archives

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AIDS Information Evening, EXIT, 1988

An AIDS information meeting held inside Amsterdam’s gay nightlife scene. Rather than separating health education from nightlife, clubs became spaces where information, discussion and collective response to the epidemic could take place. The crowded interior shows how the architecture of the club temporarily shifted from entertainment to education and community care. First AIDS information evenings at EXIT, Amsterdam, 1988. Reproduced in Gay News, 2015, p. 41. Photographer not identified in the reproduced image.

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Candlelight Memorial, Oude Kerk, 1987

In 1987, around two hundred people gathered in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk for Aids Memorial Day. Candles were lit, classical music filled the church, and participants shared memories of those who had died. The church temporarily became a collective space of mourning, transforming private loss into visible public remembrance Aids Memorial Day, Amsterdam, 30 May 1987. Photograph: Bart Molendijk / Anefo. Collection: Nationaal Archief. CC0

I.04

Homomonument, Amsterdam (1987)

Three pink granite triangles form a monument dedicated to homosexuals persecuted throughout history. During the AIDS epidemic, the monument also became a place of collective mourning, political protest, and remembrance. The triangle transforms from a symbol of oppression into a symbol of visibility, solidarity, and survival. Rob C. Croes / Anefo, First pile driven for the Homomonument at the Keizersgracht near the Westerkerk, Amsterdam, 28 April 1987. Nationaal Archief, Bestanddeelnr 933-9646. CC0 1.0.

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Gay Games Amsterdam, 1998

The figure references the visual culture surrounding the 1998 Gay Games in Amsterdam. The athletic body becomes both a sporting and queer symbol, combining physical strength, sexuality, humour, and self-expression. In the drawing, it marks the moment when queer bodies move from concealed interiors into highly visible public space, turning sport into a collective celebration of identity, pride, and urban presence.

Title: Catherine Opie for Gay Games Amsterdam 1998 Cultural Program Creator: Catherine Opie

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DÉRIVE |

The

Kaleidoscopic

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Interior

Club Church demonstrates how a queer venue can operate far beyond a single programme. The same architecture that functions at night as a dance floor, cruising space, darkroom, and setting for sex parties can also become a place for community exchange, sexual-health information, and collective discussion. Club Church describes itself as “a meeting place for all the different sub-groups in the gay community,”¹ while its sexual-health policy explicitly addresses HIV status, condoms, PrEP, HIV medication, consent, and safer behaviour.¹ Contemporary GGD Amsterdam outreach follows a similar principle, entering queer parties and fetish events to provide HIV and STI testing, vaccinations, and sexual-health information directly within nightlife environments.² This combination of pleasure, care, information, and community has deeper roots in the response to HIV/AIDS. HIV-affected communities in the Netherlands created networks of care, activism, prevention, and knowledge, including prevention projects and later PrEP workshops.³ Rather than separating sexuality from education or care, queer communities repeatedly brought these activities into the same social networks and spaces. Architecturally, this versatility is fundamental. A dance floor is not only a dance floor; depending on the hour, event, bodies, furniture, lighting, and occupation, it can become a sexual environment, a meeting room, a classroom, a political gathering, or a place of care. Bonnevier describes architecture as “a social construction that appears in the action,”⁴ suggesting that the meaning of a space emerges through what happens within it rather than through programme alone. This kaleidoscopic capacity to continuously change function is one of the key qualities of queer space: versatile, unstable, collective, and capable of becoming something unexpected.

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INFORMATION EVENING. CLUB CURCH

(1) (2) (3) (4)

BLUE MIXED-GENDER NIGHT

Club Church. (n.d.). Club Church Amsterdam; Safe sex and drugs policy. The venue identifies itself as a meeting place for different groups within the gay community and promotes condoms, PrEP, HIV medication, and knowledge of HIV status. GGD Amsterdam. (n.d.). Outreach voor seksuele gezondheid. GGD Amsterdam describes sexual-health outreach at queer parties, fetish events, and festivals, including HIV/STI testing, vaccination, and information. IHLIA. (2022). House of HIV: The stories behind 40 years of community initiatives. The exhibition documents community-led care, activism, prevention projects, and PrEP workshops within forty years of Dutch HIV/AIDS history. Bonnevier, K. (2007). Behind straight curtains: Towards a queer feminist theory of architecture. Axl Books. The passage discusses architecture as a social construction produced through action.

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REWIRED HOMO SPACE (10)

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(1)

Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The end of queer space? Log, 41, 85–88. See p. 86

(2)

Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The end of queer space? Log, 41, 85–88. See p. 88

DRAWING DESCRIPTION

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This final drawing does not represent the disappearance of Amsterdam’s homosexual city, but a change in its spatial logic. Throughout the previous drawings, queer life was repeatedly organised around recognisable locations: the urinal, park, café, hotel, bar, club, sauna, darkroom, street, and monument. In this final condition these spaces remain, but they are joined by another system. Queer space becomes increasingly temporary, distributed, and interconnected, moving from a geography structured primarily through fixed destinations towards one created through events, networks, movement, and digital connection. On the left side of the drawing, Pride temporarily takes possession of the city. Boats occupy the canals, crowds gather along the edges, and ordinary urban infrastructure becomes the setting for queer visibility. The canal is no longer simply infrastructure for movement; it becomes a stage. Bridges become viewing platforms, streets become gathering spaces, and façades become the background to a collective performance. Unlike the permanent interiors of the gay bar or sauna, this queer space exists through occupation. It appears intensely for a limited period and then returns to its everyday function. Architecture becomes event-based rather than permanently programmed. Moving across the drawing, the city begins to loosen and fragment. Buildings, streets, bodies, and objects no longer belong to a single continuous queer district. This fragmentation should not be understood simply as loss. Rather, it represents a transition towards a city in which queer social life can operate across many different spaces simultaneously. Betsky observes that “queerness has moved away from such locations and is now sited in everyday spaces.”¹ The ordinary apartment, hotel room, street, park, or temporary venue can therefore acquire a queer function without permanently identifying itself as queer. The right side of the drawing introduces Grindr and digital space. Here, screens and profiles connect bodies distributed throughout the city. The phone does not replace architecture; instead, it creates new relationships between otherwise disconnected architectures. A digital conversation can produce an address, an address produces movement, and movement leads towards a street, façade, entrance, staircase, apartment, and room. Digital space therefore becomes entangled with physical space, creating routes that may never have existed without the connection initiated on the screen. Betsky describes this contemporary condition through the “ephemerality of connection” and the creation of “pop-up sites, micro-sites.”² This is fundamental to the drawing. A bedroom can become queer space for an hour; a warehouse can become a queer party for one night; a canal can become a collective queer landscape during Pride. The programme is no longer always permanently embedded within the architecture. It arrives with the bodies, activities, and connections that temporarily occupy it. The two sides of the drawing therefore show different scales of the same transformation. Pride creates a temporary queer space at the scale of the city, while Grindr creates dispersed connections at the scale of individual bodies and interiors. One is intensely collective and public; the other can be intimate and almost invisible. Yet both move beyond the idea that queer life must be contained within a permanent, specialised location. The homosexual city consequently does not dematerialise completely. Instead, fixed queer spaces become nodes within a larger interconnected network. Bars, clubs, saunas, darkrooms, homes, temporary events, public spaces, and digital platforms coexist. Architecture remains essential, but its role changes: rather than always defining where queer life can happen, it becomes one element within a constantly shifting system of bodies, routes, events, and connections. The queer city has not disappeared. It has changed from a geography of fixed destinations into an interconnected field of possibilities: from location to network.

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Pride Amsterdam, 1996

Amsterdam Pride was first organised in 1996, with the first Canal Parade taking place on 3 August 1996. The central figure is composed as a reference to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, transforming the revolutionary figure into an image of queer visibility, emancipation, and occupation of the city. Martijn Kamphorst

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Queer Festival

Behind the parade, temporary stages, crowds, banners, and events transform ordinary public space into a temporary queer environment. Queer space is increasingly produced through events and collective occupation rather than permanent architecture.

Pride festival image. unknown creator.

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The Pride Boat

The boat has become one of Amsterdam Pride’s most recognisable spatial symbols. Moving through the canals, it temporarily transforms the city’s infrastructure into a stage for queer visibility, turning water, bridges, streets, and façades into part of the celebration.

Copyright: A.Kan, Creator: ANJO KAN

J.04

encounter retreats into the home

A person using Grindr from bed represents the migration of queer encounter from bars, clubs, cruising grounds, and other collective spaces into the domestic interior. The home becomes connected to a dispersed digital network of nearby bodies.

shutterstock men-using-mobile-on-bed

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The Grindr Grid

The Grindr interface reorganises the city through proximity rather than physical gathering places. The grid replaces the map of queer venues with a constantly changing field of profiles, transforming geographical distance into digital availability. This connects strongly to Betsky’s later discussion of digital networking and the movement of queer sexuality into everyday spacesurvival. Grindr app interface, 2019. Courtesy of Grindr. Source: Frieze Magazine.

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ART

| Pedały: The Architecture of the Encounter

Karol Radziszewski’s Pedały (2005) can be read retrospectively as an architectural anticipation of the encounter later normalised by Grindr. The exhibition occupied a friend’s apartment within an ordinary Warsaw housing block, but access did not operate like a conventional gallery. Visitors first had to establish contact, arrange a time, receive the destination, travel there, ring the intercom, enter the communal building, cross the hallway, climb the staircase, and finally arrive at the apartment. Radziszewski recalled that visitors had to arrange their visit in advance and then pass through the hall and staircase before reaching the exhibition.¹ The importance of Pedały therefore lies not only inside the apartment, but in the choreography required to reach it. Gajowy identifies these repeated gestures, beginning with “a phone call made in advance”, as a kind of rite of passage.² The communication does not merely organise the visit; it initiates a spatial transformation. A person who begins as a stranger outside is gradually given access to an otherwise inaccessible domestic interior. Read today, this sequence closely resembles the architecture of a Grindr encounter. The initial communication occurs remotely; an address is exchanged; the body begins moving through the city; a façade has to be identified; a bell is rung; permission to enter is granted; and increasingly private thresholds are crossed. Andrés Jaque describes location-based dating applications as “an alternative form of urbanism fueled by sex and love,”³ in which digital interaction produces physical encounters between strangers. The application may begin on a screen, but its spatial consequence unfolds through very ordinary architecture. The staircase is particularly important. Gajowy decribes “the staircase as a liminal space between the private and the public.”² It is neither the anonymous city nor yet the intimate destination. The visitor moves past other apartments, doors, neighbours, and domestic territories while knowing that one particular room above is the destination. The staircase therefore becomes a space of anticipation and negotiation, progressively separating the visitor from the public world while bringing two strangers physically closer. Only after this entire sequence does the apartment reveal itself as a queer interior. 116

Radziszewski transformed an otherwise standard flat through homoerotic images, video, painting, text, and a large sexual mural; visitors also remained together in the kitchen, which developed into an informal social space.¹ But architecturally, the transformation begins much earlier. The phone call, address, street, bell, intercom, hallway, staircase, and apartment door all become part of the queer space. Read through Grindr, Pedały reveals that the architecture of a sexual encounter is not simply the bedroom or room in which intimacy occurs. It is the entire sequence that allows a stranger to enter another person’s private world.

(1)

(2) (3)

Gajowy, A. (2023). It must be great being you watching us: Queer community-making in Karol Radziszewski’s Pedały (2005) and Karolina Sobel’s LEZBY (2020). In B. Hendrikx (Ed.), Queer exhibition histories (pp. 15–31). Valiz. The chapter reproduces Radziszewski’s account of using a private flat and requiring visitors to arrange access before passing through the building. Gajowy, A. (2023). Ibid., pp. 16–17. Gajowy explicitly interprets the advance phone call, intercom, hallway, and staircase as repeated gestures forming a passage between heteronormative public space and the queer interior. Jaque, A., & Office for Political Innovation. (2016). Intimate strangers. The project describes proximity-based dating ne works as “an alternative form of urbanism fueled by sex and love.”

117

DÉRIVE

| Grindr as Distributed Queer Space

The emergence of location-based dating applications marks another transformation in the relationship between queer sexuality and the city. Unlike the bar, sauna, cruising ground, or darkroom, Grindr does not occupy a stable architectural location. Andrés Jaque describes this condition directly: “Grindr is urban but it is not a city.”¹ Instead, bodies, smartphones, profiles, servers, interfaces, and geographical proximity form a constantly changing network. Jaque therefore argues that Grindr has become “a kind of urbanism in its own right.”¹ This produces a significant spatial reversal. Historically, many homosexual encounters depended upon identifiable environments such as public toilets, parks, bars, hotel rooms, saunas, and darkrooms. Digital platforms partially detach encounters from these specialised locations. A bedroom, hotel, street, or ordinary apartment can temporarily acquire a queer function when users connect through the application. The architecture itself does not necessarily change; what changes is the network of desire operating through it. This transformation resonates with Aaron Betsky’s later reflection on queer space. Looking back at the environments discussed in Queer Space, he argues that “queerness has moved away from such locations and is now sited in everyday spaces.”² Location-based applications intensify this condition. Betsky describes the temporary spaces generated by digital connections as “pop-up sites, micro-sites,”³ suggesting a queer geography that can appear and disappear without requiring a permanently designated venue. I experienced this condition directly when I first moved to Amsterdam. At the time, I did not know the city well and I was unable to host, meaning that encounters arranged through Grindr usually required me to move. I found myself travelling from one date, casual encounter, or chill to another, often crossing neighbourhoods that I otherwise had little reason to visit. Grindr unexpectedly became one of the ways through which I learned Amsterdam. The application connected me not only to people but also to places and architectures. Following an encounter meant discovering unfamiliar streets, housing blocks, apartment entrances, staircases, lifts, and domestic interiors. I entered buildings that I would otherwise have passed by. 118

Each encounter exposed another fragment of the city and another reality of how people inhabited it. These movements were also important in developing a sense of community after arriving in Amsterdam. Gradually, the city acquired another geography for me, organised not only through streets, monuments, and neighbourhoods, but through encounters, bodies, memories, and interiors. Places that had initially been anonymous became attached to specific experiences. My first understanding of Amsterdam was therefore partly constructed through desire. Seen retrospectively, these movements resemble a digitally mediated dérive. The screen provided a series of temporary points of attraction, while the route between them exposed parts of the city that had not been predetermined. Rather than wandering only according to the physical attractions of the terrain, movement was redirected through proximity, desire, and invitation. The digital and physical city continuously folded into one another. Grindr can therefore be understood as an architecture without a conventional building. Its spatial components are dispersed between the body, screen, GPS location, route, street, threshold, interior, and encounter. It does not simply remove queer life from physical space. Instead, it reorganises how queer bodies move through and temporarily activate the existing city. The screen becomes a point of departure, the city becomes the route, the doorway becomes a threshold, and the encounter becomes a temporary destination. In this sense, the queer city has not disappeared. It has changed state: from fixed destination to distributed network.

(1) (2) (3)

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Intimate Strangers, 2016. Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The End of Queer Space?, p. 86. Kolb, J., & Betsky, A. (2017). The End of Queer Space?, p. 88.

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CONCLUSION CONCLU

This research began with a relatively simple question: how does architecture influence homosexual life? After mapping more than a century of Amsterdam, walking through parks at night, entering urinals, clubs, saunas, hotel corridors, bedrooms and a considerable number of questionable doorways, the answer became less simple. The first finding is that queer architecture does not necessarily need to be designed as queer architecture. Most of the spaces encountered in this research were designed for something else. A public urinal became a cruising ground. A park became a sequence of rooms. A house became a queer café. A hotel corridor anticipated the darkroom. A warehouse became a club. A canal became a Pride stage. A bedroom became connected to hundreds of strangers through a phone. What repeatedly matters is not the building type itself, but the conditions it creates. Thresholds, visibility, circulation, proximity and concealment return throughout the entire research. A curtain, a staircase, a narrow corridor, a bush, steam, darkness, a locked door or a Grindr message can all perform surprisingly similar architectural work. They regulate who enters, who sees, who waits, who approaches and who disappears. Privacy is therefore rarely absolute. Queer spaces often operate somewhere between being visible and hidden. The Krul allows someone to remain in public while partially concealed. Vegetation creates rooms without walls. A darkroom removes visual information while intensifying bodily awareness. Grindr appears immaterial, yet eventually produces a very physical sequence: message, address, bicycle, front door, intercom, staircase, bedroom.

Sometimes that sequence produces intimacy. Sometimes friendship. Sometimes love. And occasionally, despite architectural research having prepared you for many spatial conditions, gonorrhoea from a blowjob. Architecture can organise the encounter; it cannot control the plot. Another finding is that movement itself produces space. Cruising is not simply about reaching a destination. It depends on walking, circling, looking, slowing down, returning and recognising another body. The same principle appears inside clubs, saunas and darkrooms, where corridors and repeated 120

CONCLUSION

LUSION CONCLUSION

circulation increase the possibility of encounter. Even digital cruising ultimately returns to movement through the physical city. The homosexual city is therefore not only made of places, but of routes between them. The research also demonstrates that architectural materials extend far beyond walls, floors and roofs. Darkness, vegetation, steam, sound, distance, atmosphere and bodies themselves can construct space. Trees become partitions. Paths become corridors. Steam becomes a curtain. Darkness changes the dimensions of a room. Desire makes people extraordinarily attentive to architecture. Perhaps too attentive. Few people analyse an entrance, staircase or lock with greater precision than someone arriving at a stranger’s apartment at two in the morning. The final drawing brings all these conditions together. The Amsterdam represented there never existed at one moment in time. Public urinals, Café ’t Mandje, cruising parks, Hotel Hotel Tiemersma , darkrooms, the Homomonument, Pride and Grindr occupy the same continuous landscape. Historical time is deliberately suspended so that spaces separated by decades can coexist. The result is therefore not quite Amsterdam anymore. It becomes a speculative homosexual city assembled from Amsterdam, organised through another way of reading the urban environment. Buildings that have disappeared remain standing. Landscapes from different periods overlap. Private interiors become connected to public space. Different generations occupy the city simultaneously. Perhaps that is the most important architectural finding of the project: a city always contains more cities than the one shown on its official map. Architecture is never only what somebody designed it to be. People occupy it, misuse it, desire within it, hide inside it, dance through it, fuck in it, remember through it and occasionally completely reinvent its programme. Queer people have been doing this to Amsterdam for a very long time. And architecture, whether it intended to or not, has been participating all along. 121

ARCHIVE ARCHIVE A

122

E ARCHIVE ARCHIVE

123

ARCHIVE ARCHIVE A

124

E ARCHIVE ARCHIVE

125

ARCHIVE ARCHIVE A A

QE-031 Aero Hotel 1970-1995 QE-059 Aloha Lounge 1978-NO DATE QE-225 Amstel 54 2007-NO DATE QE-022 Amstel Taveerne 1964-2007 QE-051 Amstel Tavern 1976-1985 QE-093 Amsterdam Alehouse 1982-NO DATE QE-198 Amsterdam Arcadia 1998-2018 QE-221 Amsterdam Aura 2005-NO DATE QE-088 April 1981-2010 QE-217 Arc 2002-2011 QE-024 Argos 1965-2015 QE-018 Atletic 1962-1977 B QE-060 Backstage 1978-2009 QE-075 Bar Bastion 1980-2002 QE-208 Bar Belle 2000-NO DATE QE-164 Bar Bijou 1992-NO DATE QE-141 Bar Bliss 1988-2010 QE-049 Bar Blue 1975-NO DATE QE-042 Bar Bonheur 1973-1999 QE-142 Bar Classic 1988-NO DATE QE-103 Bar Harmonia 1983-1985 QE-212 Barderij 2001-2005 QE-155 Big Willies 1990-1991 QE-178 Blitz 1994-1999 QE-239 Blue 2011-2012 QE-076 Blue Boy 1980-2000 QE-203 Boomerang 1999-2008 QE-248 Bordó 2013-2015 QE-209 BPM 2000-NO DATE QE-077 Brug 1980-1985 QE-240 Bump 2011-2013 C QE-204 Café Aurora 1999-PRESENT QE-143 Café Open 1988-1989 QE-161 Café Peter Beenser 1991-NO DATE QE-011 Café Populair 1941-1943 QE-002 Café ’t Mandje 1927-PRESENT QE-039 Casa Maria 1972-2006 QE-061 Chez Manfred 1978-1994 QE-235 Chez Rene 2010-NO DATE QE-147 Chique 1989-1991 QE-228 Church 2008-PRESENT QE-162 Clays 1991-1992 QE-040 Club 101 1972-1990 QE-125 Club Carnival 1986-2008 126

QE-062 Club CCK 1978-1979 QE-243 Club Church 2012-PRESENT QE-032 Club LL 1970-1970 QE-033 Club LL 2 1970-1991 QE-244 Club NYX 2012-PRESENT QE-213 Cock & Feathers 2001-2005 QE-133 Cockring Club 1987-2010 QE-089 Company 1981-1998 QE-025 Cosmo 1965-1999 QE-236 Cozy 2010-2012 QE-096 Cupido 1982-1998 D

QE-013 D.O.K. (De Odeon Kelder) 1952-1989 QE-114 De Club 1985-1992 QE-047 De Goede Kant 1974-1981 QE-034 De Pul 1970-1995 QE-015 De Schakel Charité 1955-1989 QE-195 De Steeg 1997-2001 QE-124 De Trut 1985-PRESENT QE-115 Dinges 1985-1990 QE-104 Dirty Dicks 1984-PRESENT QE-090 Disco Dapper 1981-1995 QE-210 Disco Delirium 2000-2010 QE-105 Dolls Place 1984-1999 QE-035 Downtown 1970-2021 QE-007 Du Merlo 1934-1934 QE-004 Dubbeltjesbar 1933-NO DATE E QE-068 Eagle 1979-PRESENT QE-229 Echo Lounge 2008-2009 QE-054 Egelantier 1977-1991 QE-116 El Dorado 1985-1989 QE-144 Elysium Bar 1988-2009 QE-001 Empire 1911-1933 QE-222 Engel Van Amsterdam 2006-2011 QE-180 Entre Nous 1994-2014 QE-241 Eve 2011-2012 QE-134 Exit 1987-PRESENT F QE-055 Favourite Tavern 1977-1991 QE-165 Fellows 1992-1992 QE-135 Femme Fatale Bar 1987-2003 QE-014 Festival 1953-2000 QE-028 Fiancé 1968-1977 QE-106 Fizz 1984-1990 QE-172 Flikkercafé Sissy 1993-1994

E ARCHIVE ARCHIVE QE-097 Floor 1982-1985 QE-063 Flore 1978-1979 QE-078 Francoise 1980-1995 QE-253 Free Willy 2023-PRESENT QE-069 Freedom Café 1979-PRESENT QE-242 Fuxxx 2011-2013

K

QE-167 Kaleidoscope Club 1992-2011 QE-107 Kings Head 1984-NO DATE QE-009 Klooster 1934-NO DATE QE-128 Komedie 1986-1988 QE-016 Krokodil 1957-2009

G L QE-173 G-Force 1993-1994 QE-174 G-Spot Café 1993-2009 QE-126 Gaiety 1986-2003 QE-117 Gay Disco Gay Life 1985-NO DATE QE-145 Gay Life 1988-1991 QE-118 Gay Life Amsterdam 1985-1991 QE-156 Gay Palace 1990-1998 QE-230 Gaylaxy 2008-2009 QE-188 Getto 1996-2019 QE-189 Glitter Club 1996-2012 QE-003 Gouden Hoof 1932-NO DATE QE-166 Gunsmoke 1992-NO DATE

QE-157 La Cage aux Folles 1990-1990 QE-108 La Monde 1984-1998 QE-019 La Ronde 1963-1973 QE-136 Labyrinth 1987-1989 QE-223 Leeuwtje Amsterdam 2006-2010 QE-196 Lellebelle 1997-2014 QE-080 Lesbiana Bar 1980-2000 QE-081 LL International 1980-1990 QE-044 Lord 1973-1988 QE-158 Lotus Bar 1990-2005 QE-137 Louver 1987-1991 QE-226 Luminous Café 2007-PRESENT

H M QE-214 Habibi Ana 2001-2013 QE-149 Havana 1989-2002 QE-119 Heartbeat Lounge 1985-PRESENT QE-036 Heaven’s Gate Bar 1970-1990 QE-050 Homolulu 1975-1997 QE-215 Hot Spot 2001-2014 QE-043 House Of Oscar Wilde 1973-1976 QE-008 Huize Volendam 1934-NO DATE QE-041 Huntsman 1972-1974 I QE-017 Incognito 1960-1988 QE-127 Incognito Gay Palace 1986-1987 QE-199 Indigo Club 1998-2008 QE-150 iT 1989-2002 QE-218 iT 2002-2004 QE-079 ITC Bar 1980-PRESENT J QE-091 Jacques 1981-1995 QE-012 Jamaica Inn 1948-1978 QE-151 John’s Place Amsterdam 1989-1991 QE-098 Joker 1982-1988 QE-152 Joyful Bar 1989-2014

QE-175 Maan 1993-1994 QE-020 Mac Donald 1963-1982 QE-205 Macho Macho 1999-2001 QE-026 Madame Arthur 1966-1967 QE-064 Madame Arthur 1978-1979 QE-070 Madame Arthur 1979-1982 QE-129 Mae West 1986-1993 QE-082 Mazzo 1980-2004 QE-168 Meia Meia 66 1992-2000 QE-183 Midnight Bar 1995-2015 QE-190 Mix Amsterdam 1996-2000 QE-191 Mix Café 1996-2010 QE-029 Modern 1968-2005 QE-138 Mokum 1987-1991 QE-233 Mon Ami 2009-2012 QE-010 Monico 1934-2001 QE-099 Montmartre 1982-NO DATE QE-083 Moon Light 1980-1995 QE-021 Moors Eldorado 1963-1983 QE-163 Music Box 1991-2015 N QE-234 Neon Nights Club 2009-PRESENT QE-176 Nieuwe Liefde 1993-1998 QE-200 Nirvana Bar 1998-2008 QE-084 Nostalgia Club 1980-1995 127

ARCHIVE ARCHIVE A O

QE-153 Obelisk 1989-1990 QE-109 Oerwoud 1984-1990 QE-027 Oportobar 1967-1979 QE-100 Orka Roos 1982-1984 QE-139 Oscar 1987-1988

QE-048 Spartacus 1974-1976 QE-067 Spijker Bar 1978-PRESENT QE-182 Stablemaster 1994-2007 QE-202 Stellar Club 1998-2007 QE-112 Steps 1984-1987 QE-227 Stereo 2007-2016 QE-130 Strada 1986-2006

P

T

QE-056 Pandje 1977-1991 QE-110 Papillon 1984-1989 QE-146 Pearl Harbour Bar 1988-1991 QE-111 Petit Poucet 1984-1990 QE-120 Players 1985-1991 QE-065 Potgiete 1978-2011 QE-224 PRIK 2006-PRESENT QE-245 Prism Café 2012-PRESENT

QE-123 Taboo 1985-2000 QE-238 Taboo 2010-PRESENT QE-030 Tabu 1969-1979 QE-113 The Cuckoo’s Nest 1984-PRESENT QE-177 The Velvet Room 1993-2004 QE-023 Thermos Sauna 1964-NO DATE QE-038 Thermos Sauna Night 1971-NO DATE QE-046 Thermos The Bar 1973-1988 QE-186 Three Musketeers 1995-NO DATE QE-058 Tiki Club 1977-1979 QE-154 Toys Bar 1989-1900 QE-102 Traffic Bar 1982-1991 QE-169 Transcend Bar 1992-2002 QE-249 Twenty Three 2014-2015

Q QE-045 Quality Street 1973-1976 QE-121 Queen’s Gambit Bar 1985-2005 QE-037 Queen’s Head 1970-1988 QE-201 Queen’s Head 1998-PRESENT QE-251 Queer 2015-2019 R QE-192 Reality 1996-2021 QE-181 Rebel Café 1994-2004 QE-159 Rendezvous Café 1990-2005 QE-101 Retro Club 1982-2010 QE-006 Rijntalder 1933-1941 QE-232 Roque 2008-2014 QE-211 Rouge 2000-2014 QE-122 Route 66 1985-1993 QE-140 Roxy 1987-1999 S QE-066 Saarein 1978-PRESENT QE-237 Same Place 2010-PRESENT QE-197 Sapphire Bar 1997-PRESENT QE-071 Sappho 1979-1980 QE-246 Sauna NZ 2012-PRESENT QE-184 Secret Bar 1995-NO DATE QE-057 Shako 1977-2004 QE-216 Show Time 2001-2002 QE-185 Sluisje 1995-2008 QE-206 Soho 1999-PRESENT

128

V QE-131 Vandenberg 1986-2003 QE-194 Velvet Club 1996-2006 QE-053 Viking Club 1976-1987 QE-187 Virgo 1995-1998 QE-085 Vive la Vie 1980-2017 W QE-132 Web 1986-PRESENT QE-073 Well Fargo 1979-1986 QE-092 Well Fargo Saloon 1981-1986 QE-160 Whirlwind Club 1990-2000 QE-247 Whore House 2012-2016 QE-086 Why Not 1980-2000 QE-170 Willems Club 1992-1998 QE-220 Wonderland Bar 2003-PRESENT Y QE-252 Yolo 2017-NO DATE QE-207 You II 1999-2007 Z QE-171 Zephyr Bar 1992-2001

E ARCHIVE ARCHIVE CRU-001 Muntplein / Munt Tower urinal Typology: Public urinal (krul) Location: Muntplein Period: 1900–1970 Surveillance: Police visibility, lighting, circulation

CRU-009 Kerkstraat bar circuit Typology: Nightlife / cruising route Location: Kerkstraat Period: 1955–1985 Surveillance: Door policies, police, neighbour complaints

CRU-002 Damrak / harbour urinals Typology: Public urinals Location: Damrak and old harbour zone Period: 1900–1950 Surveillance: Vice-police surveillance

CRU-010 Warmoesstraat leather circuit Typology: Nightlife / cruising route Location: Warmoesstraat Period: 1955–Unknown Surveillance: Licensing, raids, HIV-era health campaigns

CRU-003 Zeedijk alleys and cafés Typology: Street / nightlife cruising Location: Zeedijk Period: 1900–1970 Surveillance: Police raids, coded behaviour, curtains

CRU-011 Central Station toilets Typology: Railway-station cruising Location: Amsterdam Centraal Period: 1950–Unknown Surveillance: Railway police and toilet redesign

CRU-004 Nes / The Empire surroundings Typology: Café and street network Location: Nes Period: 1911–1938 Surveillance: Article 248bis-era policing

CRU-012 Leidseplein public toilets Typology: Public toilet / nightlife cruising Location: Leidseplein Period: 1960–Unknown Surveillance: Lighting and CCTV

CRU-005 Oosterpark Typology: Park cruising Location: Oosterpark Period: 1950–NOW Surveillance: Patrols, lighting, pruning

CRU-013 Rembrandtplein / Thorbeckeplein Typology: Nightlife cruising Location: Rembrandtplein area Period: 1970–Unknown Surveillance: CCTV, crowd control

CRU-006 Vondelpark Typology: Park cruising Location: Vondelpark Period: 1950–NOW Surveillance: Lighting, closing regimes, patrols

CRU-014 Reguliersdwarsstraat circuit Typology: Commercial gay nightlife route Location: Reguliersdwarsstraat Period: 1980–Unknown Surveillance: Commercialization and crowd management

CRU-007 Sarphatipark Typology: Park cruising Location: Sarphatipark Period: 1960–Unknown Surveillance: Patrols and visibility

CRU-015 Nieuwe Meer / De Oeverlanden Typology: Outdoor cruising / recreation Location: Oeverlanden, Nieuwe Meer Period: 1970–NOW Surveillance: Municipal management

CRU-008 Amstel river edge Typology: Waterfront cruising Location: Amstel Period: 1960–Unknown Surveillance: Public-order enforcement

129

STATEMENT STATEM

130

EMENT STATEMENT

This thesis was written with editorial support from OpenAI’s, used to improve clarity, grammar, and structure, and to discuss chapter organisation. All research — including the research questions, methodology, archival investigation, participant observation, interviews, historical analysis, mapping, and design outcomes — was conceived, conducted, and interpreted solely by the author. The spatial database and archival inventory of Amsterdam’s gay establishments and cruising sites were independently compiled through systematic cross-checking of primary and secondary sources, including IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, Historypin Amsterdam, municipal archives, historical newspapers, photographs, and guidebooks.

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Amsterdam Academy of Architecture AHK