This paper explores the treatment of sexuality in urban spaces in recent novels with postcolonial settings. Starting from Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’ as including the right to occupy its spaces sexually, it analyses the ways in which recent novels explore the hidden, forbidden and open spaces of sexuality in post/colonial contexts, both historically (as in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé, 2000) and in the present-day multicultural city (as in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon, 2005). It focuses on aspects of gender, homosexuality and hybrid relationships, and the tension between freedom and the policing of bodies characteristic of Westernized urban contexts.