The Death of the Gay Ghetto?

The New York Times ran a piece last week suggesting that gay enclaves face the prospect of being passé. The article starts with the cancellation of the Castro District's annual Halloween street party, and then somehow tries to make a connection (leap?) to the growing trend of gays dispersing from traditionally gay neighborhoods in cities across the US. This thought isn't new, and a similar/related concept was recently dissected by the Washington Blade. It seems that people who think they know a lot are seeing the Internet and gentrification thin out the gay neighborhoods a bit, and they're sensationalistically screaming FIRE! in the middle of our gay movie theater. But as usual, the situation is a lot more complex than that. I'll share some of my perspectives on this below the fold...

In order to understand what's happening to the gayborhoods, we need to take a look back at history. Gay neighborhoods haven't really been around that long. The Castro got gayed in the late 1960s. Chicago's Boystown, and Dupont Circle in the 1970s. But these neighborhoods weren't then what they are now. We have to look a bit further back in time to understand how this all really came about.

There were a lot of things that happened in the middle of the previous century that resulted in many city centers being abandoned: the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and its practices of Redlining (1930s), the GI Bill (1944), the creation of the US Interstate Highway System (1956), race riots throughout the 1960s.

These all combined into a "perfect storm" for the death of the urban centers and downtown neighborhoods of US cities. (How you ask? Redlining prevented investment in black or Jewish neighborhoods, shifting home loans to the suburbs; the GI Bill provided soldiers returning from the war with the resources to suburbanize and start families [baby boom sound familiar?]; the Interstate Highway System made it even easier for people to live in the suburbs and get to their jobs in cities; and the riots in the '60s scared away pretty much everyone else who had the resources to leave the inner cities.) Demographically, these events, when combined, turned our cities into doughnuts, where the empty centers were filled with crime, violence, disinvestment and hopelessness.

Just then, something started stirring. The Stonewall Riots in 1969 began the process of galvanization of homosexuals around the country which eventually resulted in the gay rights movement. Kaboom. "We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used To It!"

Now, funny thing about being gay. We gays are the only "minority group" where you aren't born to people like you. You have to first realize that you are different from your parents and the rest of your family. Then you need to act on it, go out and somehow find "your people." A large part of the gay rights movement was for people to come out of the back alleys, off the piers, out of the clubs (dance, sex or otherwise), and onto the street. With gays on the streets walking around out in the open, businesses began to cater to them. And with business and gay people around, other gay people who wanted to be closer to the action moved in above or near by those clubs, bars, cafés, restaurants and theaters. Boom. The Gay Neighborhood was born. And what better to attract all of the new gays and lesbians around the country who were recently becoming aware of their right to be themselves out in the open.

But what else do you need to have in place for this to happen? How about a lot of undervalued real estate, empty store fronts, abandoned houses and apartment buildings... shells of neighborhoods, just waiting to be spruced up a bit. And that's exactly what the gays found sitting in the middle of nearly every major city in the country. The middle-class straights had all vacated the inner cities, leaving lots of really cool spaces for the homos to move into and call their own. And why not? No one else seemed to want these spaces. The Cairo apartment building on Q St. just off the 17th St. strip is a perfect case study.

So, what's happened since then? At some point in the past 10/15 years, people were somehow reminded that that cities were cool places that would be fun to live in. Gas prices started going up and people started thinking about living closer to work or near transit. Young breeders started to reject the boring sterile suburbs for places where you could party all night and be able to take a cab home. So forth and so on. In some ways, the gay neighborhoods are the victims of their own collective success. If we hadn't moved in and made the inner cities cool places again, (and really, who else would have done it?) the straights wouldn't have caught on and started to raise our property values.

So, what's next? First, I doubt that gay neighborhoods nor gay bars will completely die. They may get thinned out a bit, but there'll always be a need for public meeting spaces. Secondly, no inner city has been fully restored to it's pre-WWII grandeur. There are plenty of underused spaces where the gays can spread into and sprinkle some fairy dust over. Finally, the collective "gay" identity is changing. The monolith that was GAY is now breaking up a bit into fragments, fragments that no one neighborhood or bar can serve. Hence our efforts here with TNG. Perhaps the one-size-fits-all gay neighborhood is passé, but it's possible that smaller more flexible mini-gayborhoods can better serve our needs.

I guess the thing to keep in mind is that no city is static. Cities are living breathing organisms that are constantly changing. The decline of 17th Street as the main gay ghetto in DC is just the opportunity for 14th street to become the next one. Or 9th street. The one thing that I know for sure is that you can't understand these types of events without understanding how things came to be. Only then can you see a clear course for what might become.