What does it mean to claim a space for queers of color in the global city of New York?1 How do queer communities of color stake out a territory beyond ghettos and enclaves and beyond demarcated moments such as Pride Days and ethnic celebrations? These questions haunt the struggles, rituals, and practices of African American, Latino, and Asian American queers as they engage with the travails of urban life today.2 Yet, despite the centrality of the city as the site of queer cultural settlement, imagination, and evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, larger economic and political forces have increasingly and vociferously shaped, fragmented, dispersed, and altered many queers of color’s dreams and desires.3 These forces can be traced to the emergence of post-Fordist capitalism and its concomitant neoliberal policies and are most palpable in cities worldwide.
