Part of: Queer Places and Spaces
Abstract:
This paper argues that queer spatial environments operate as communicative infrastructures that shape belonging beyond verbal exchange. Focusing on the gay sauna as a spatial condition, the paper examines how atmosphere operates as non-verbal, embodied discourse. Rather than treating belonging as articulated through identity labels or verbal affirmation, the paper proposes that it is structured through affective signalling, coded material cues, negotiated proximity and the para-domestic spatial conditions that render intimacy legible without requiring declaration.
Queer communities have long relied on indirect and coded forms of communication in response to surveillance and criminalisation (Leap, 1996; Baker, 2002). Practices such as Polari functioned as covert linguistic systems that enabled recognition while maintaining discretion (Baker, 2002). Similarly, the handkerchief code transformed colour and placement into a wearable semiotic structure for signalling desire and role without explicit declaration (Halberstam, 2005). Spatial practices such as cottaging depended on architectural layout, ritualised movement, and tacit recognition rather than speech, producing what might be understood as environmental indexicality, or the capacity of space itself to signal affiliation and possibility (Chauncey, 1994).
The contemporary sauna extends this lineage. Orientation is initiated before entry, emerging through architectural signalling rather than explicit instruction. Externally, these venues often occupy architecturally discreet or repurposed sites, such as upper floors above shops, former retail units, industrial estates, or buildings accessed via side or rear entrances. Subdued façades, limited signage, and buzzer-entry systems produce a register of discretion. Such positioning operates as environmental signalling, communicating availability and opacity through architectural understatement. Recognition depends on shared spatial literacy: knowing where to look, how to approach, and how to interpret architectural marginality as invitation rather than exclusion.
Internally, explicit instruction remains minimal. Orientation occurs through gradients of light and darkness, temperature shifts, humidity, sound, circulation patterns, and thresholds of opacity. These atmospheric conditions subtly organise encounter, shaping how bodies approach, pause, signal interest, or withdraw, much like linguistic cues regulate interaction in conversation. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2006) account of orientation and Anderson’s (2009) theorisation of affective atmospheres, the paper reframes atmosphere as a medium of discourse. Belonging emerges not through propositional language but through embodied literacy and the capacity to read and respond to spatial cues.
In this context, spatial protocols operate as shared but unspoken agreements governing visibility, discretion, invitation, and refusal. The sauna becomes a site of intimate publicness (Berlant and Warner, 1998) in which community is sustained through environmental coding rather than explicit speech. It also operates as a para-domestic environment: a space of congregation, repetition, and shared presence that exceeds singular sexual encounter. Lounges, resting areas, and social rooms enable forms of collective inhabitation that blur the boundaries between public venue and domestic interior.
At a moment when queer belonging is increasingly mediated through digital taxonomies and platform categorisation, this paper reasserts the importance of non-verbal, architectural forms of communication. By positioning atmosphere as non-verbal queer discourse, it extends debates in language and community studies beyond speech, proposing spatial cues as a critical dimension of queer communicative practice.
