Ten Years On: Changing Perspectives on the Queer Experience in Architecture

February 2, 2024 | Reflection.018 | Ten Years On, Week 01

October 2013.

Before Bockston vs Clayton County. Before Lil Nas X dropped his first US Billboard Hot 100 or Bad Bunny received the GLAAD Vanguard award. Before Sarah McBride was running in a federal congressional election - much less elected as the first (openly) transgender person to a state senate. Before the AIA expanded gender demographics to be more inclusive of the gender identity spectrum. And long before I had met Larry Paschall, before Pride by Design and The Big Gay Architect were glimmers in anyone’s eye, Larry was sent a series of questions asking for his perspective on being queer in architecture. 

What were some of the challenges? What was his experience in being out? Did he believe the industry was changing?

If I have learned anything over the last year, I should not have been surprised when these questions bubbled to the surface and Larry sent them my way asking for my thoughts. I began to wonder what my answers were and, to Larry’s point, how much had truly changed. So much has changed for me in these last 10 years. I am a licensed architect in Georgia, have created Pride by Design, and have run out of fingers to count how many LGBTQIA+ people in architecture I now know. The community I struggled to find in the architecture and design profession 6, much less 10, years ago is one I now joyfully have the opportunity to be a part of connecting.

But how would others view these questions? Despite personally having felt change, both that which has come easy and with advancement and that which has been a challenge, what would anyone else think?

When Larry - The Big Gay Architect and who, over the last year, has become a friend and partner in shaking things up - reached out for my thoughts, I knew something was brewing and that whatever it was, I wanted to figure that out together. 

Very little data currently exists about queer identity, design, and people who are also in architecture. Some surveys, like the Equity By Design Equity in Architecture Survey, began to incorporate questions about identity. Architecture giant Gensler included data from within their offices on gender and identity for the first time in 2021. Queeries has single-handedly been holding space for the survey queer experiences in design since 2021, Designing Beyond the Binary wrapped up their first phase of research last year, and the LGBTQIA+ Alliances in Texas just received feedback from survey shared with LGBTQIA+ architects and designers in Texas. 

What was stopping us from creating our own survey and reaching out to the architects we knew as well as the ones we didn’t? And how could beginning to ask these questions and start to gather not just data but responses and experience shared be not just a baseline for our own understanding, but for advocacy and representation of, with, and for the queer architecture community? 

Over the next two months – on The Big Gay Architect and Pride by Design blogs – Larry and I will start sharing those questions and the current perspectives we’ve received. Each week we will tackle another question. Select and share answers – sometimes individually and sometimes as a collected response. And share some speculation on what that may mean for the future of the queer architecture community.

I cannot wait to not just share, but continue to discover this together. A decade seems like a long time, but before you know it, another ten years will have passed, and we’ll find ourselves wondering again how much architecture has changed.

You can read Larry’s reflections for this week at The Big Gay Architect! If you are interested in sharing your perspectives and have not yet, we welcome you to do so and will continue to keep the survey open throughout the beginning of this year.