The Queer Home
Henry Ding
→B.ARCH 2026
Queer Home /kwir/ /hom/: Where living and loving joyfully, passionately, and honestly is an act of resistance in itself.
Lloyd Wong in Orientations, 1984. Courtesy of Richard Fung.In the summer of 2023, I worked at The ArQuives, one of the largest LGBTQ+ archives in the world, based in my hometown of Toronto. Funded by the RISD Maharam Fellowship, I served as a research intern specializing in queer architecture. My main focus was writing a book called The Queer Home—a term that I was only able to define for myself by the end of my summer.
By the end of my sophomore year, I had just been through what felt like the hardest semester of my life. I had come to college with goals to become a better artist, to finally date, and to figure out how to navigate adulthood in America—goals that felt both hollow and unfulfilled. I had thus lost faith in many things—my work, architecture, and my sense of self. My frustration was bodily, where I felt unsettled in my own being. At the beginning of the summer, I had spent time backpacking, attempting to reach some grand realization. However, upon my return, when greeted at the Toronto airport by my mother—tugging at my dirty clothes and rubbing my worn belly—I realized that I had made no such epiphanies.
“We were standing there and I wasn’t wearing a shirt … and he just started pinching my nipples. Like, what is this guy doing?”
I watched multi-coloured waves of grain wash down my computer screen as an Asian man in his mid-twenties, sporting a worn, loose tank top, sat lazily in a garden chair. He was answering questions about his life as a gay man in Toronto. It was from a VHS tape from the eighties I had uncovered in the stacks of The ArQuives. I made a note in my sketchbook that his name was Lloyd Wong. He settled in his chair confidently, his eyes drifting in a way that I found beautiful.
Such seemed to be my new job, working from a little desk situated in the video archives room—surrounded by what turns out to be one of the largest queer porn collections in the world. Taking the subway home, feeling out of depth and sweat-stained, I felt a similar bodily discomfort to how I had felt at school. What was I doing here? Why did I think that I could do this job? What did I know about queer architecture? I had never seriously studied it before and I didn’t think I had lived it either. Someone like Lloyd, that was someone who lived queer architecture.
The following are excerpts from my book and curated exhibit, which can be in full at: digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/exhibits/show/the-queer-home--madeleine-buil. (Materials and support courtesy of The ArQuives.)
Queerness & Architecture are often interconnected—politically, socially, even psychologically (i.e., “coming out of the closet”). Queer architecture has historically taken place within fault lines. Creating space was often the same as reclaiming, redefining, and liberating. Creating home and community in the face of societal oppression and alienation, queer people have become innovative wielders of space.
1. From the 1980s to the ’90s, at the intersection of Church Street and Wellesley Street, the steps leading up to the local Second Cup coffee shop accidentally became one of Toronto’s first queer gathering spaces. This informal yet famous public fixture became a visual claimant of spatial ownership, belonging, and community for queer Torontonians (p. 17).
Shawn, 2017: A parade ground of sorts: permanent bleachers from which to watch an endless line of humans, mostly men, though not exclusively, many of whom would make numerous passes … We’re here, we’re queer, and the sidewalk is ours (p. 18).
2. In 1970s–’90s queer Toronto, a fascinating shift was beginning. Hostility increased from the state and queer people began carving out their own spaces to live, to support each other, and to organize for action. Queer Torontonians began to unilaterally reject societal definitions of domesticity defined by the nuclear family, home defined by the patriarchy, and family as defined by monogamous heteronormativity. This is the era of Toronto’s Queer Collective Homes (p. 23).
Richard, 2023: We ate communally, we bought all our food together, went on a shopping expedition every weekend, and there was a chore wheel to ensure fairness. It was a very productive intellectual and political milieu. In that era people were still thinking of new ways of living and there was still that sense of utopianism, this idea of living collectively and sharing was a lot more in the air … making a utopia on the ground in the moment (p. 23).
3. There was often a sense of isolation in both the queer community and the ethno-racial communities within queer Toronto. If you were to dive into Toronto from the ’70s to the ’90s and peer into the small fault line that the queer community inhabited, within this space an even smaller fault line could be found—holding the stories of countless, often forgotten, communities (p. 33).
Wayne, 1983: You go to a bar, you meet someone nice, I would say blond, 6' 2'', blue eyes, the perfect Adonis … You have this urge to go up and talk to him. I’m afraid he’ll probably say no, because number one I’m not 6' 2'', I am not blond, I don’t have blue eyes. I might be 5' 11'', dark hair, brown eyes, but I’m Chinese. When I go up to him, he’s probably going to say, “Oh, no thank you, I’m not into Chinese food” (p. 35).
Three years ago, I was terrified of coming to RISD. While at this point in my life I had come to terms with being gay, I was determined to be “different.” Palatable and discreet with my queerness—passing. Art school seemed like the antithesis of this goal—brash, loud, and unabashedly so. Traversing the freshman quad and eating at the Met was a rude awakening. I had never been around so many queer people. More distinctly, I had never been around so many queer people where queerness was not a differentiating factor, but rather a sign of belonging. I wonder if this is a practice of domesticity. To meditate on what it means to live an identity so intrinsic that it shows itself daily, ritualistically, and communally.
I often wonder if queer architecture holds hands with the body itself. Afterall, queerness has so much to do with the physical being—its desirability, its discomfort, its betrayal. Many queer people also grow up under the eye of violence and prejudice. I wonder how we consume and internalize this upbringing. How do we live—bones, tissues, and soul—as a result of the environments we’re born into? Coming to RISD, it took me months, maybe years, to shed the feeling that I was being watched. To step out and live the magic of this campus: that no one cares.
In Providence, it fascinates me that a historic part of such a colonial city has turned so queer. The RISD Beach lawn, grassy knolls undulating around campus, the steps to Memorial Hall—there is constant reinvention of history around us. In all intents and purposes we live in the very same communal homes I studied. Where generations of queer families rented and redefined old Victorian homes in Toronto, students together at RISD do the same. Centuries-old buildings are now where queerness gathers, celebrates, and rests. Agency and reclamation live directly in our hands. I am of the belief that land experiences time in a nonlinear fashion. That it can experience the lives of those who have, are, and will step across it. Oftentimes in Providence I try to sink my feet into the ground. Who’s place am I taking? Who will take mine?
I would be remiss to forget what RISD also is—a private, historic institution that upholds as many hierarchies as it dismantles. As with many classed institutions in America, there is intersectionality to unpack. To be cis, straight-passing, male, white, or wealthy is to live a vastly different queer experience at a much higher level of belonging. I fear that sometimes inclusivity at RISD is seen in the same way as inclusivity in America, Canada, and the West. That in the world, these are the Western bastions of progress, the safe space the marginalized will flock to because of prejudice back home. This sentiment exists despite the fact that the queer community in North America has often been crafted by and for white, gay North Americans. I had learned of a term used in Toronto’s gay village: rice queen—a gay man who prefers relations with East Asian men. While such a label was considered unfashionable, they were often many Asian men’s only reliable dating prospects. I learned that when European hetero-normativity sets the norm, to be anything else becomes an extra burden to carry—to be loved because or despite of. To be beautiful because or despite of.
A distinct portion of my work at The ArQuives led me from scrounging in the stacks to meeting real individuals face to face. I met with many of the men whose interviews and transcripts I read from the ’80s and ’90s, then young men on the streets of Toronto. Meeting up with these men, now in their sixties and seventies, was revelatory. One was a doctor working for HIV awareness in the Toronto Asian community, one operated a communal home specializing in queer immigrant experiences, and one was a prominent director and professor who filmed the tape of Lloyd I found months prior. The director, Richard, chatted with me in his backyard while I ate toasted almonds served by his partner. Sometimes RISD is painful because it feels like safety with an expiration date. Experiences like this taught me that this was far from the truth.
Towards the end of the summer, as I finalized my writing and began the design process of the book, I decided to transcribe the last few VHS tapes that I had collected. The first was a tape attributed to Lloyd that I hadn’t seen yet. I had seen him in several more videos and books at this point. Richard had even mentioned him in passing during our interview.
As the screen flickered on, I caught a glimpse of him with a sort of respiratory device. Pausing the tape immediately, I ran out of the office. Running into one of the senior archivists in the hallway, she confirmed what I already knew. Lloyd Wong died of AIDS in the mid-’90s. There was no older version of Lloyd sporting white hair and worn smile lines to find on the streets of Toronto. No Lloyd to interview, where he’d reminisce on his early life between playful glances with his husband in the kitchen. Though I would never meet him, I wondered in what way I could ever honor him. How could I speak his name into the world? How could I live with his spirit embodied?
After I got back to Providence, I sat on the bed of my new apartment and wondered why I had been so convinced that escaping RISD is what would solve all my problems. Lloyd, alongside found siblings, built a life for himself. Despite the futility of time, government crackdowns, police hostility, and healthcare indifference during the AIDS crisis. Despite hate and ignorance from the outside and within, Lloyd and his community lived some of the most colorful lives I’ve ever witnessed. With their family. Their home.
But how did I know that RISD was home? Perhaps it is something you build with loved ones you find along the way. Perhaps there truly is something about queer architecture that is bodily, where you simply feel it in your being. Perhaps, sometimes, I do embody that feeling.
I feel it squared away in hillside apartment dinner parties drinking dizzying amounts of wine. I feel it walking down Benefit’s cobblestoned steps to class. I feel it, sometimes, when working in studio. I feel it when I lie down with a friend, hand in hand, on the RISD Beach. The sun battering my eyes, the soil’s moisture seeping through my pants, I’ll be stretching my arms and yawning, drifting off to the chatter of freshmen making their way up the hill. I feel it when my friend shakes me awake and asks: “Where to now?”
Henry Ding is attempting the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich.