The 2020 Karofsky Prize winner, who specializes in the intersections of gender, sexuality, urbanism, and culture, was praised for the quality and cutting-edge nature of his scholarship as well as the impact he is already having on the field.
“Receiving this award is a vindication of the work I am doing to illuminate the lives of LGBTQ+ people,” said Greene. “The fact that scholars found my work worthy of nomination in the first place is both humbling and deeply touching.”
This is not the first time Greene has been honored by the ASA. In 2020, the organization gave him a Distinguished Article Award for a chapter he published in an academic journal called “Aberrations of Home: Gay Neighborhoods and the Experiences of Community Among GBQ Men of Color.”
Since then, he has been working on several projects, including his upcoming book, Not in MY Gayborhood! Gay Neighborhoods and the Rise of the Vicarious Citizen, due to come out later this year. He has also published the article “‘You’re Dancing on My Seat!’: Queer Subcultures and the Production of Places in Contemporary Gay Bars,” which was a finalist for the 2023 Jane Addams Best Article Award for the Community and Urban Sociology Section. “The article,” said Greene, “attends to the strategies that LGBTQ subcultures deploy to create meaningful places within the vestiges of local queer life.”
Other work Greene has pursued includes an essay called “We Will Always Remember: Reactivating Queer Places as Expressions of Grief, Solidarity, and Protest after Pulse,” published as a chapter of an edited volume. The work, said Greene, “draws on the global response to the Pulse nightclub tragedy in 2016 to introduce place reactivation—the act of temporarily reclaiming and reviving the dormant symbolic character of a neighborhood.”
Greene, who joined the Bowdoin faculty in 2015, is excited to be on sabbatical next year and to continue work on his second project, which, he said, examines queer placemaking in Portland, Maine. “This project explores the residential and institutional evolution of Portland’s LGBTQ communities, focusing on how local queer communities recreate and reclaim lost cultural and commercial anchors through ephemeral placemaking. I am particularly excited about this project,” commented Greene, “as it will include a virtual walking tour of every LGBTQ space that existed in the town.”
