Growing Up Gay in the Suburbs: A Constructed Mental Landscape
The practice of Urban Planning has never existed as solely a physical endeavor, the social and cultural implications of Planning choices remain in a feedback loop that reproduces ideologies and entrenches them in physical space. As a result, conservative and religious opinions on gender and sexuality materialize in the built environment and live on in urban policy creating tangible and intangible cycles of exclusion and marginalization. Manifesting across the nation in the form of Suburban Sprawl, these spaces perpetuate conservative moral constructions. This thesis lands in an argument that the American Suburb is rooted in oppression of queerness and other minorities. Part of the way that this will be understood is through photography and how social-landscape documentation records and subverts suburban culture. Through interviews and original photographic documentation, this thesis highlights one queer narrative within the canon of suburban critique.