Comfortable and safe spaces? Gender, sexuality and ‘race’ in night-time leisure spaces

•Comfort and safety play an important role in lesbian and gay spaces.•Intersections of sexuality, race and gender impact on these emotional experiences.•Comfort and safety produce gendered, sexualised and racialised bodies and spaces.•Certain performances of gender can be threatening in lesbian spaces.•Racialisations of sexualised spaces produce discomfort.

This article aims to contribute to the fields of emotional geographies and geographies of sexualities by exploring the relationship between emotions and gender, sexuality, and ‘race’ in sexualised night-time leisure spaces. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manchester's Gay Village, the article highlights the importance of taking into account intersections of social identities when exploring how people feel in certain spaces. It explores how relations of ‘othering’ work through emotions, in particular how people are othered through feelings of comfort and safety. Whilst these feelings are triggered by a particular reading of bodies and spaces, they also produce bodies and spaces that are gendered, sexualised, and racialised (and classed). The article offers a rethinking of comfort and safety as not just feelings individuals have but as being constitutive of sexual, gender, and racial subjectivities and spaces.