One of the Titans of Greek mythology, Atlas, was punished for revolting against Zeus, the supreme God. He was made to forever carry the earth on his shoulders. In Greek architecture, his stone-carved figure becomes a column, supporting the entablature of a building. When Ayn Rand wrote her magnum opus, based on a ‘dystopian’ United States—a long, twisted tirade defending an unfettered capitalism and individualism she believed were under threat from socialist values—she called it Atlas Shrugged. So many books charting what place sits where, taking how much space, holding how many people, mining what resources, fed by which oceans and rivers, in conflict with what neighbours, occupied by which colonial powers. A typical atlas, the book of maps, often has the image of Atlas, the Titan, on its cover holding together the pages of the world by his spine. Queer Spaces, edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, is an atlas of LGBTQIA+ places and stories, un-flattened, with exuberant holographic type on its cover, held together by queer struggle and joy.

For those of us who engage with alternate cartographies, going beyond colonial borders, stories operate as ethnographic mappings of places through people. For those of us that felt isolated in our queerness, stories operate as maps that lead us to discover lives akin to ours, and back to ourselves. This atlas of queer spaces does both, surveying places through people that are historically kept out of maps and compiling a sense of self and community in the process. Charting around 100 spaces around the world, across two centuries, where queer people lived and fought to live as their authentic selves, the book features nearly 50 contributors. For parts of the world still rife with draconian homophobic laws, with repercussions as extreme as life imprisonment or death, the atlas acknowledges what and who could not be included as a measure of safety. It isn’t just the law, or the state that stifles queer lives. While institutional reform certainly formalises and validates the existence of queers, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and ‘divergent’ gender expression is no insurance against discrimination and violence.

The book is crafted with a love and reverence for the history of queer spaces, and a fierce pride in the current generation of queer persons’ occupying space. Over the years, co-editor Furman has written candidly (and eloquently) about the exploitative culture within the architecture industry and the latter’s complicity in the propagation of oppressive spaces. In its array of pastels and pops of colour Furman’s work as a designer exudes glee with a vengeance. This book is no different.

As a work of historiography, the book debunks the notions of mystery and secrecy associated with queer spaces and instead brings to light the all-pervasive nature of queerness; in the architecture of royalty, their flamboyance in style, their friendships and expressions of desire and identity. Like the Neuschwanstein Castle (that inspired the Walt Disney icon) dramatically perched on a high rocky mountain, with elements from Gothic, Byzantine, Romanesque styles featuring in its interiors, which was the fantastical ‘closet’ in which King Ludwig of Bavaria concealed and celebrated his sexuality. Then there is the Swedish manor, Mårbacka, where Nobel-prize winning author Selma Langerlöf grew up. As in her books, where rooms, houses, and landscapes pushed the boundaries of whimsy, Mårbacka too was transformed into a spectacle by the royal architect Isak Gustaf Clason, who admits to being ‘uneasy about the project’. The yellow country residence became the most famous Swedish manor house; its ‘master’ a woman who loved other women, decorated with a kitschy boldness, and refused to ‘sit nicely in her allotted place’, reading in a library full of books with golden spines, green walls, and jacquard curtains. Openness was the aesthetic and shamelessness her resounding answer to codes of honour that women were expected to live by.

The ethnographic atlas takes us across the world; introducing us to the hijra communities of South Asia (Bangladesh specifically), where mothers (or Ma) take in queer and trans children cast aside by their families; Hotel Gondolín in Argentina, a home to an alternative family, one that is chosen; Club Kali in London (named after the fierce and loving Hindu Goddess), where music and costume are an eclectic mix of Bollywood, bhangra, disco, pop, Turkish, Arabic, and reggae; Coppelia in Cuba (named after Léo Delibes’ ballet), where 26 flavours of ice cream pay homage to the Cuban Revolution, and coded expressions of sexuality, based on the flavour one ordered, have evolved into a free wi-fi zone ensuring dissident bodies continue to come in contact. Then there are ‘underground’ networks and spaces in the Arab world, which in recent times has been treated as if it was synonymous with repression and censoring of bodies and cultures. In Beirut, the ‘Haven for Artists’ runs as a network across Lebanon, building community through programmes, exhibitions, and events. This haven goes beyond making a safe space and becomes a collective that forges palpable change in wider society.

The thing about desire is that it is messy. It destabilises the heteronormative obsession with neat binaries. Desire moves through the body, craving to redesign it, caress, or shun it; moving out into a world that insists on harnessing it, defining it, and domesticating it. This book validates the glorious disorder of desire. It is an archive that speaks of queer precarity, as history and a continuous reality. It reclaims queer spectatorship from a world that insists on imposing order. In its pages is carved the parallel universe that has always existed; nurturing, celebrating, revolting and dancing in the face of the mirror that denies its existence. The book satiates a craving for lost stories, solidarity, humour, a radical rejection of shame, a space of comfort and health, the breath of life. In a realm where joy is scarce, it revels in stories of delightful resistance and finds gratitude and courage in stories of sacrifice and oppression. It fosters hope, reminding us that revolution and disruption are a continuous process, resistance a relentless endeavor, and the inheritance of resilience the fuel of change.