Libidinal Landscapes

Exercising Sexuality as Queer World-Making in 1970s and 1980s New York

Abstract

This essay explores how New York’s post-industrial landscape—particularly the abandoned piers along the Hudson River—emerged as a vital site for the formation of queer communal life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Until their demolition at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, these piers served as liminal spaces where gay men, trans individuals, and sex workers enacted forms of sexuality that were deliberately “non-conforming,” contesting and reconfiguring the heteronormative frameworks imposed by broader society. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia,” this essay interrogates the subversive power of this libidinal terrain through a close reading of homoerotic imagery created at the piers by artists such as Alvin Baltrop, Leonard Fink, and Frank Hallam—figures who were both integrated members of the community and its silent, intimate chroniclers.