What does it mean to be geographically part of a community and experience place-based belonging? What do we do to make us feel like we belong within a place? How can queer belonging be performed in places where queer spaces are disappearing?
Performing queer belonging means finding a sense of community. It is difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to perform belonging on one’s own. Belonging and community exist hand in hand– it is hard to have one without the other.
If you were to google the definition of community, there are two differing ways of understanding the term. Firstly, the sharing of a particular characteristic, attitude, or interest can create a community. For the queer community, it’s easy to see how experiencing love, attraction, or identity as something beyond the binary categories of a heteronormative society can be that common characteristic that creates a community. Other common shared experiences, from experiencing prejudice to shared political attitudes to common identity expression, can also build that sense of community.
The other way to understand community is simply a group of people living in the same area. Here, geography is the shared characteristic that defines a community. Understanding community as geographically dependent opens up new questions on how queer people perform belonging.
These two definitions can work in tandem. Place-based belonging can facilitate a sense of belonging built through a shared characteristic, such as queerness. Sharing a space can lay the groundwork for community, but rituals of belonging must still be performed to create understanding, empathy, and respect. For example, offering to take in your neighbour’s parcels or joining a local book club are actions that begin to build a community grounded in place. If we look more specifically at performing rituals of queer belonging, we might see how sharing experiences, such as attending local protests, going to a queer club night, or engaging in queer history, begin to cement connections that began through existing within a shared space.
However, what happens to such belonging if queer spaces disappear? Queer community hubs, such as gay bars, cafes, performance venues, and bookshops, are being rapidly lost due to gentrification, rising living costs, and the growth of online communities. Six in ten London LGBTQ+ venues have shut since 2006.[1] How does connection with those geographically around you falter and fail when there is no safe space to meet and connect?
Richard Scott explores that very question in their poem ‘Oh My Soho!’, from their 2018 collection Soho, which explores Soho through its diminishing queer scene. The queer spaces of Soho, that facilitated the formation of queer community through offering a shared space, are being lost through gentrification:
Within the shared geography of Soho, resistance and revolt is one ritual that can be actively performed to promote connection and belonging. Here, Scott emphasises how the dual ways of understanding community operate, not as opposing modes of understanding, but as complementary ones: community is defined by both a shared characteristic (in this case, queerness and political action) and by place.
Yet, as the queer landscape of Soho disappears, so does the drive for queer activism. With the gentrification of Soho, the ability for queer bodies to unite as one group becomes increasingly harder as there are fewer places where queer people feel like they belong and can gather and perform these rituals of belonging, such as planning political action. Consequently, when we lose place-based community, it can be harder to perform other, different rituals of belonging.
One of these other rituals of belonging that is lost is the accessing of queer history. Relating to an experience or person from the past creates a belonging that transcends temporal bounds, allowing for a deeper understanding of queerness as a whole as well as yourself and, potentially, others within your community. However, when queer spaces disappear, their queer lineage and history disappear along with them, which Scott explores as happening in Soho:
As Soho is gentrified and queer places are being lost, the history inherent within those places are also being lost, and consequently, the queer community is being ‘robbed of/ ancestors’. Losing this connection to the past inhibits a sense of trans-temporal belonging and prevents an understanding of queer lineage and cultural memories that may encourage a larger sense of belonging and community within the present. Current queer communities are being ‘penned in’ as Soho transforms from a place of queer experimentation, belonging, and joy to a gentrified, ‘prime’ location of real estate. No longer can queer communities build bonds that extend across space and time, but they are kept restricted to a singular linear time and a singular small, and heteronormative, location.
Despite this, Scott insists upon community and belonging, even as queer spaces are disappearing. Scott becomes a ‘homo-historian’, tracking the history of queerness in Soho, from the Spartans to Edward II to the AIDS epidemic (Scott, ‘Oh my Soho’, p.69). Whilst these histories Scott traces are being destroyed by gentrification, Scott’s presentation of them brings them back to the centre of a queer community:
Soho becomes a place where the ‘true lineage’ of queerness can be found, if one knows where to look for it. In tracing the familiar streets of Soho through the lens of queerness, Scott reframes the place. Queerness offers an alternative map of a place, existing as a shadow world that underlies any heteronormative understanding of a place. In seeing the queer lineage of a place, queerness becomes harder to erase. In the same way, Scott’s own poem is a memorial, or ‘museum’; it simultaneously honours spaces where queer connection could be found, and itself becoming a space for queer connection. The clubs and the pubs and other queer locations may be gone but queerness is embedded into the ground rock of Soho, and so place-based belonging may always be accessible if one actively seeks it out and performs it.
Scott insists upon this active performance of queerness, even in the heart of a newly heteronormative Soho. As Scott writes,
Even in this gentrified Soho, queerness and queer spaces still exist, if one simply slants their perspective. Scott demands the presence of queerness, and it is through that insistence that community and belonging can be performed. Taking ‘my body into dungeons, cubicles, alleyways’ performs rituals of queer belonging that once defined the Soho queer community, but are rituals that were lost with the gentrification, and the consequent centring of heteronormativity, of Soho. Scott insists upon the performance of these rituals, actively revitalising the queer communities.
Scott is queering, or perhaps ‘re-queering’, place to find belonging and community within it. Making ‘queer’ a verb rather than a noun creates a shift from a passive watching of the decay in queer place to an active reclamation of it. Any space can become a place of queer community through the actions of those who seek belonging there.
>PART 4 – Performing Belonging – Queerplatonic Love Poems
[1] BBC News, ‘Six in 10 London LGBTQ+ venues shut since 2006 – GLA’, BBC News, 9 February 2024 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68226196> [accessed 19th December 2025].
[2] Richard Scott, ‘Oh my Soho!’, in Soho (Faber & Faber, 2018), pp.69-78 (p.75). All subsequent references will be in parentheses.
