Something missing in this article is how gayborhoods have simply moved to more affordable areas of cities and might not feel as prominent because they are just generally fewer gay-centered establishments in general.
I remember when I moved to Manhattan that there was a much larger gay population in West Harlem and Washington Heights at that point than the more traditional areas like Greenwich Village and Chelsea (unless you were rich) because that's where gay men could afford something while still accessing Broadway theater and other jobs. In LA I've noticed the same thing with new neighborhoods like East Hollywood with a huge gay scene that nobody seems to notice. Part of this is that younger gay men are much more non-white and so maybe this just doesn't make it to the mainstream media?
I did think it was super-weird that emerging gayborhoods in NYC like Bushwick or Astoria didn't get mentioned at all. But also Chelsea and Hells Kitchen are still super gay, and not any less gay now than they were 12 years ago when I first moved into NYC, so I'm a little skeptical that there is actually that much changing demographically *now* in NYC (although obviously the West Village in particular changed a lot in the past, though those changes were a while ago in the 1990s through around 2005, and it hasn't changed much since the early 2000s).
I also think people remember a lot more gay people living in Greenwich Village in the 1970s than actually lived there because the mere presence of gay people *at all* back then was really striking. Realistically it was just a string of bars along Christopher Street, and there are still a bunch of gay bars there (including some that have strikingly young crowds for the neighborhood - at 30 you could be the oldest person at Playhouse, e.g.).
This is only talking about NYC, and I do think SF has had a different experience, in part because of how SF's rent control works but also because SF is super uncool nowadays generally unless you're in tech and the sort of non-tech people (gay or otherwise) who used to move there now move to Portland or wherever, so unlike in NYC there isn't a significant infusion of young gay people moving to SF regularly, which means the gay presence in a lot of neighborhoods is aging and declining.
