Queer Sources from Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community, 1870s-2020s, by Moira Armstrong

This exhibit follows up on the recent book Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2024), which covers themes, figures, and events from the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Each section of the exhibit focuses on a different chapter, presenting an overview of the chapter's argument and two primary sources used to provide insight into Newark queer life.

At Home in the Hood: Black Queer Women Resisting Narratives of Violence and Plotting Life at the G Corner, by LeiLani Dowell

The G corner—at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets—in the age of gentrification (2017). Photo by Erin Santana, courtesy Queer Newark Oral History Project.

Chapter 7, “At Home in the Hood: Black Queer Women Resisting Narratives of Violence and Plotting Life at the G Corner” by LeiLani Dowell, uses the Queer Newark Oral History Project archives to show how Black queer people, especially women, have resisted the trope of Newark as a racialized ghetto and a revitalized, gentrified city by reclaiming public spaces in the city, including the corner of Broad and Market Streets, known as the G corner—a space of queer community, gentrification, and the murder of Sakia Gunn in 2003.

Dowell quotes interviews with Renata Hill and Venice Brown, who note that they associate the G corner with the LGBTQ community in Newark. Dowell describes this as a space of fugitivity within enclosure, where queer people gathered and could build social connections, despite its reputation for violence after Gunn’s murder.

RENATA HILL: The G corner was on Broad and Market and that’s where you would go and see like, especially after school hours, all gay people would be down there. It would just be like flooded, like you would think it’s a march going on or something. Like everybody gravitate towards that corner and just be out there talking to each other, chilling, hanging out whatever.

Queer Newark Oral History Project interview with Renata Hill

VENICE BROWN: It used to be hundreds of young Black, white, Spanish, like it didn’t matter—if you were gay, you used to be on the corner after school every single day like clockwork, Monday through Friday. That same corner that Sakia got killed on. Across from there.

Queer Newark Oral History Project interview with Venice Brown

Dowell notes the difference between the G corner described in Hill and Brown’s interviews and the G corner today, when it no longer serves as a queer community-building space in the same way. Gentrification has had this effect throughout the city, while being celebrated by the city government.