A Blush in the Chest
Visit the map here.
A walking tour of the Brooklyn waterfront.
“I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions.”
-David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals
A Blush in The Chest uses a detailed Google map with photos, video and audio to map historical queer space around Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo, Brooklyn. The tour looks at queer space as a place that operates outside of surveillance and as a type of camouflage; a shadow territory.
Perhaps because of its unique position on the waterfront between ports, which produced an international population of sailors, or perhaps because of its history as a site of industry, cloaked in the shadows of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and in close proximity to Manhattan, the region between Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Brooklyn Navy Yard has been a place for radical, clandestine and creative queer activity for many decades.