Government agencies have begun to acknowledge the considerable contributions of gay and lesbian residents to urban areas. Some cities, such as, for example, New Orleans, have launched campaigns to attract gay and lesbian residents as a means of revitalizing urban areas. Others have recognized that sites of commerce, socializing, and political life have cultural and historical significance.

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Thus, the main street in Chicago's New Town is now lined with rainbow topped pylons. In New York, the site of the 1969 Stonewall riots has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Books such as Martinac's The Queerest Places and Higgs's Queer Sites help document places of particular significance for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people.

The practice of marking sites of gay and lesbian significance is sometimes controversial, however. Arguments develop about how to interpret the queer past and build a queer future. The question of what makes a space queer or queer-friendly can be contentious. The conflicting agendas of "assimilationists" campaigning for human rights and "resistors" opposing sexual hegemony complicate our thinking about public space.

Still, there is no denying that the concept of queer space, a conscious and activist recognition of the role sexual difference plays in architectural projects and places, is an important one. At its most basic, the phrase describes the physical location where queer people conduct their lives.

While it is very difficult for anyone to act outside the of most public and private space, queer space offers the promise of a place where members of sexual minorities can act freely and independently, a place where mainstream values that determine "appropriate" conduct can be resisted and restructured. Architecture and space are such crucial elements to human relationships that it is not surprising that the connections between sexuality, identity, and place-making have recently become an important topic of queer studies.

Circuit Parties refer to an ongoing series of gay-themed events that take place in major metropolitan areas throughout the year.

Glbtq people have been in the vanguard of gentrification, a process of renewing neighborhoods that has both positive and negative effects.

Over the past 25 years, the academic discipline of Geography, especially its social scientific and humanistic branch, has been attuned to glbtq people, places, and natures.

Extremely wealthy and connected to the aristocracy, British author and connoisseur William Beckford was ostracized by English society for the last sixty years of his life because of his homosexuality.

James Ogilvy, the 7th Earl of Findlater and 4th Earl of Seafield, was an accomplished amateur landscape architect and philanthropist; after his death, scandal erupted when he was outed by his own relatives in Scotland.

There has been renewed interest in the life and work of American adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton at least in part because of his homosexuality.

A dominating force in American architecture, Philip C. Johnson had a chameleon-like career in which he often reinvented himself.

Writer Paula Martinac's career has been devoted to exploring and documenting the place that lesbians occupy in society, history, and the family.

Pioneering California architect Julia Morgan designed more than 700 buildings, including many commissioned by women's groups, but she is most remembered as the architect of San Simeon.

Lionel H. Pries was a noted architect and artist, now primarily remembered for his teaching career at the University of Washington, which was cut short when he was arrested in a vice sting in the late 1950s.

Modernist architect Paul Rudolph was one of the most esteemed American architects of the 1960s.

Although Andy Warhol is generally remembered either for a single film--Sleep (1963)--or for works that he did not actually direct, his contribution to gay cinema is incalculable.

American lesbian Elsie de Wolfe helped create the profession of interior decorating; she was also one of the central figures of an elite New York "Amazon enclave" during the early years of the twentieth century.