My local bar in east Brooklyn happens to be fabulous. It’s skate-rink themed, with bisexual lighting, a disco ball, and some of the best Mexican street food in town. It’s also a stop on the borough’s drag show circuit. Any given weeknight after 9 pm you might see, for example, an eighty-year-old woman strip off a kerchief and lab coat, toss aside her cane, and do yoga on the floor to an instrumental version of “Sleigh Ride.” A flag over the stage reads BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER.

Lately – I won’t call it a climate of fear, but there’s an undercurrent of urgency to the fact that there, if not everywhere, you can safely be yourself. For a pre-Valentine’s Day show, a young performer named Coco the Pup, wearing angel wings and clearly not neutered, stapled pink paper hearts to their thighs and face. A veteran queen, Veronica ConstantLay, sang a lonely showtune while stripping off a Statue of Liberty costume, revealing a Canadian flag. Whether poignant, raw, sexy, hilarious, or a burlesque of all of the above, I’ve noticed more numbers ending with testimonies to how spaces like this, queer spaces, accepting spaces, keep people alive.

The MAGA offensive against transgender people is infuriating on so many levels – above all, its naked cruelty. But it’s not just cruel, or stupid, or political red meat, to attack a vulnerable minority. It’s psychic gentrification.

Reading Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) recently, I was struck by how much her description of the 1980s AIDS crisis, which she fought against as part of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), resonates with today’s ostrich-headed discourse around sex. Schulman observes that gentrification isn’t just expensive new businesses and spiking rents; it’s a systemic process to supersede a dynamic, diverse population with a homogenous one, then reframe the settlers as the victims. “Gentrification replaces most people’s experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality,” writes Schulman. Privilege means not having to acknowledge that other people exist.

This framing helps explain the special attention to suppressing queerness, especially transgender personhood, amid Trump’s shitstorm campaign to “eliminate” diversity, equity, and inclusion. You can write a million laws declaring the “fact” of two discrete biological, biblical sexes, but life just isn’t that precise. Politics won’t change the reality of the spectral nonbinary possibilities of human form. But the goal is to gentrify identity – to make the concept of sex comfortable for normative, conservative, godfearing folks who feel threatened by the uncertainty of a nonbinary world. They’re terrified that people enjoy that uncertainty. First they came for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Then they came for Peace Love Unity Respect.

These language games pose severe dangers for transgender people seeing doctors or renewing passports. But for ahistorical spite, you can’t do much worse than the National Park Service website for the Stonewall Inn bar changing LGBTQ+ to LGB and deleting the word “transgender.” Ironic: Stonewall was where the gay rights movement kicked off in 1969 with a famous riot, in which drag queens threw some of the first Molotov cocktails. What’s Stonewall without trans people? Gentrified. Just as surely as the surrounding Greenwich Village.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE, 2023, video game, installation. Installation view, “Group Hug,” Water Street Projects, New York, 2024. Photo: Zachary Schulman

Still from Tale of Tales (Aureia Harvey and Michaël Samyn), The Endless Forest, 2005–, online multiplayer game

Schulman presents numbers correlating deaths from AIDS in different Manhattan neighborhoods with rising rent. Today, the Whitney Museum squats squarely on the ghost of the Meatpacking District, once a hotbed of gay nightlife; overlooking the reconstituted Chelsea piers where Alvin Baltrop and Peter Hujar photographed the cruising scene, a block from the former site of the Mineshaft leather club and less than a mile from Stonewall. The latest Whitney Biennial, in 2024, included not one but two pieces paying tribute to Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen who fought cops at Stonewall and became a leading gay rights activist, despite her marginalization by the movement. Tourmaline’s 2022 video Pollinator incorporates footage of Johnson’s funeral procession to the Hudson River, and Kiyan Williams’s chromed Statue of Freedom (Marsha P. Johnson) depicts the activist with cigarette and placard. These artworks both pledge a continuity with a previous generation of LGBTQ+ activists. They do so in the mode of memorials, rather than continuing their activism. Schulman argues that gentrification isn’t the artists’ fault – the yuppies follow the money, and the policy – but museums, for the time being, have been deradicalized.

I find Schulman sharp and cogent, but a little hard on young queer people, and young people in general, who don’t share her political clarity. She doesn’t see why same-sex couples would want to marry, or have children, or assimilate into the culture that, especially during the first decade of AIDS, tried to murder them by neglect. Her book concludes in 2009, during the Obama years, predicting that the sort of 50s-esque social complacency and safety of gay liberation – qua the Catholic centrist pundit Andrew Sullivan – will explode as it did in the 60s. Again, people are trying to work through generational trauma in ways that power finds acceptable. If her analogy holds, we should be nearing the explosion.

Some of the most disorienting artworks I’ve seen lately have been homebrewed video games – digital artworks that resemble ungentrified cyberspace or emulate apocalyptic raves. A trio of multiplayer games were installed last fall at New York’s Water Street Projects in the show “Group Hug,” organized by tech incubator Onassis ONX. Feral Metaverse by Theo Triantafyllidis (2023) is an unfinished survival game with a mutant steampunk aesthetic in which players collectively escape a junked desert. The classic Endless Forest, by artist duo Tale of Tales, is a polished open-ended communication adventure where you’re a magic deer. Both games require experience, and experiment. The wildest of the three by far was Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE (2023), where players try to rescue or collect glowing angels, moving through a dark, high-contrast forest of lights and spires. You do this with multiple people stepping on several pads spread around the floor, and speaking into microphones. It was hard to tell who was doing what, or if you were doing anything – if it was glitching, and/or if it was glitching by design.

In the ungentrified psyche, and its art, you can still find an honest reflection of the core psychedelia of experience. This isn’t to claim queerness as the antidote to blasé, bourgeoise heteronormativity. But it is, maybe, an argument about subculture. Or realculture. A culture that reflects the irreducible ambivalence of life on this planet, and decides not to pacify, sanitize, gentrify it.