There goes the gayborhood

[Torie]

This has been a thing for quite awhile of course. When Dan and I stayed a night in the Castro district in SF, gays seemed like an endangered species. Part of it might be that you don't need gay bars to hook up anymore. Cell phones, zoom, social media and now Covid all have changed fundamentally how people live their lives. Oh yeah, also all of those electric powered bikes and foot scooters.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/lgtbq-neighborhoods-nyc-houston.html

[ottermax]

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?

[Хahar 🤔]

This is only alluded to here, but I wonder about the impact that AIDS had on gay politics. Being a disease associated with promiscuity, I would imagine that it steered gay politics in the direction of respectability, focusing more on the replication of conventional family structures than on separatism. Obviously that would make segregated gay neighborhoods less important even without other factors like increasing cost of living in cities.

[pikachu]

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 think it’s because those are neighborhoods you’d move to if you’re a straight gentrifier also? My first postgrad apartment was in East Hollywood, and the not-rich college grads ik in Manhattan are all in Harlem or Washington Heights.

[If my soul was made of stone]

I live in a gayborhood where one of the big gay clubs was turned into a CVS about six years ago and one of the others closed during peak COVID and is getting re-developed as a luxury mixed-use gentrifier whatever. Sic transit gloria mundi.

[Sol]

This is only alluded to here, but I wonder about the impact that AIDS had on gay politics. Being a disease associated with promiscuity, I would imagine that it steered gay politics in the direction of respectability, focusing more on the replication of conventional family structures than on separatism. Obviously that would make segregated gay neighborhoods less important even without other factors like increasing cost of living in cities.

I don't have a super deep understanding of the history of gay politics, but as I recall one of the big political impacts of the HIV/AIDS crisis was politically unifying the gay and lesbian movements, which had been somewhat disconnected before the '80s for pretty predictable reasons.

[Tintrlvr]

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.

[Mr. Illini]

Boystown is still the gay bar center of Chicago. It’s not an overwhelmingly gay crowd that lives there anymore, though (still significant). I attribute it to greater acceptance. Gay folks no longer feel like the only place they won’t be harassed is the gayborhood. Along with that, as gay people have become more accepted, more straight folks have wanted to live among them (especially groups of straight women - tons of them in Boystown).