ABSTRACT
For over two decades, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has positioned itself as a vibrant city offering a range of LGBTQ-friendly public spaces. By contrast, the nearby, more suburban city of Surrey has only recently achieved (and lost) its first queer space for adults (a local bar next to a strip club). As scholars have noted, the size of a region does not necessarily translate to the warmth of a city’s embrace of LGBTQ bodies, and the presence of LGBTQ-friendly amenities does not guarantee that these sites will be welcoming to all LGBTQ people. However, spaces accessible to LGBTQ youth are more commonly associated with cities that have an existing array of LGBTQ-friendly services. At the same time, Gill Valentine argues that youth are positioned in the private rather than the public sphere, and Rae Rosenberg describes how some LGBTQ youth are deliberately excluded from the ‘gaybourhood’ in Chicago. Both of these phenomena act to exclude youth from queer spaces.
