You have full access to this open access chapter. This chapter investigates the historical permutations of those areas that come closest to qualifying as lesbian and gay neighborhoods in Antwerp, the largest city in Flanders the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The clustering of sexual minorities in the city has been limited largely to the economic, social, and cultural business of nightlife entertainment, with lesbian and gay meeting places historically concentrating in particular neighborhoods that, moreover, have shifted over time and dissipated again.
Its tripartite structure is shaped by the specific heuristic conditions set by it. Because the larger historical context for the investigated subject remains to be written, the chapter first undertakes a substantial and panoramic survey of the emergence of gay nightlife in Antwerp during the early half of the twentieth century. Finally, the chapter zooms out again to sketch how even such a limited gay nightlife cluster in Antwerp has evaporated again in the course of the twenty-first century, leaving a landscape that is hard to map and largely virtual.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. As in several other Western European nations and many non-Western countries besides , the clustering of sexual minorities in Antwerp has been limited largely to the economic, social, and cultural business of nightlife entertainment, with lesbian and gay meeting places historically concentrating in particular neighborhoods that, moreover, have shifted over time and dissipated again. This pattern is a familiar one from the history of modern sexual identity formation.
Bars and clubs became the principal spaces for escaping from social norms and invisibility, as well as for exploring same-sex attraction and alternative gender expressions. While the emergence of the same kind of venues in Antwerp is thus characterized by social and material parameters that, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, apply to many other cities in Western Europe and, again, beyond , the more fine-grained analysis we intend to offer will inevitably reveal geographic, social, and cultural specificities for which a more detailed understanding of both the Antwerp and the Belgian contexts is necessary.
A few aspects of this culturally specific context may be worth highlighting in advance. For various historical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural reasons, the social and material granularity of Belgian cities is quite different from what is to be found in most North-American and a lot of English-speaking Commonwealth cities. Belgian urban neighborhoods tend to be more finely grained and mixed, more complex in their stratifications and less homogeneous, and as a result do not invite the same strong sense of individuality and identity as do many of the iconic neighborhoods in the English-speaking world, which are underwritten by a more outspoken logic of demarcation and differentiation.
