Resisting Erasure: Forging Our Own Space and Histories

The idea that queer communities, due to their marginalized state, are inherently accepting of all identities regardless of race, gender, culture, and religion is extremely flawed. Racism and discrimination based off one’s identities are commonly experienced within LGBTQ2IA+ community, placing queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, and more people of colour (QTBIPOC) in a vulnerable position forcing them to seek out and forge spaces where their identities feel welcomed and valued. This major paper and the accompanying film contributes to these discussions by exploring the spatial accounts of queer racialized people who are living, working, playing or participating in activism in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley area, also known as The Village. This major paper and film also includes an analysis looking at the impacts of planners and the field of planning on how queer racialized people experience queer space; putting forth a perspective that is absent from the practice, including the curriculum. This major paper therefore provides an argument for the need to reconstruct how spaces are formed, whilst beginning to underscore the inadequacies of the system(s) which planning and adjacent city-building professions operate under.