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Gay Ghettos Are In Transition

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 29 September 2005
3 comments

Discriminations-Minorit. USA Wayne Besen

by Wayne Besen

If only the coffee shop Big Cup had changed its name to the Luxurious Latte it might have survived. Instead, the cornerstone of New York’s gay Chelsea neighborhood closed shop earlier this month after the landlord raised the rent from $16,500 to $21,500. The downfall of the Big Cup is indicative of dramatic changes taking place in gayborhoods across America, where artists are pushed out, as art dealers move in.

From San Francisco’s Castro District to Provincetown, the hard bodied and cool are displaced in favor of cold hard cash. Gentrification is having a dramatic impact on everything from the GLBT bar scene to politics. The question is, can the GLBT Community survive and thrive without the cocoon of the traditional gay ghetto?

Sure, remnants of the gay ghetto exist, but it is fast becoming the exclusive playground of the very wealthy. As prices rise, heterosexual families are also moving in, further changing the unique character of these neighborhoods. I have nothing against these heterosexual families who are often our friends and allies. But, as the number of heterosexuals increases, the safety net grows smaller and gay people who once freely kissed, suddenly have to look over their shoulders.

For example, demographic changes may be affecting South Beach, a magnificent Miami neighborhood blessed with bountiful sunshine, gorgeous beaches, and scantily clad models. I first started club hopping in South Beach in the late eighties when it was a scary ghost town infested with prostitutes and drug dealers. The gay community opened a few nightclubs in old theatres and by the early nineties the city was booming. For the next decade, working class gay men flocked to this Mecca from all over the world. Eventually, prices skyrocketed as the gay glitterati and sybaritic straights moved in.

The loss of majority status for gay people has seemingly emboldened gay bashers. On July 4, according to the Express Gay News, Carl Zablotny, the gay publisher of Wire, a Miami Beach gay newspaper, was slugged in the mouth and knocked unconscious by two thugs who hurled anti-gay remarks. In January 2003, Earnest Robinson left a popular gay pub and was shot in the shoulder by two men who shouted anti-gay slurs. In another incident, three men attacked and beat a victim who left a gay bar dressed as a belly dancer.

And, this month Miami Heat basketball star Shaquille O’Neal called police after he witnessed gay bashers yell anti-gay slurs and throw a beer bottle at a gay couple. South Beach is still an incredible place to be openly gay. The outbreak of recent bashings is not representative of the community. However, these attacks do suggest that as our numbers decrease, so does the safety zone.

The decline of the gay ghetto also may have political implications. In the past, gay activists had a critical mass of young people who could be organized to protest abuses. It is much more difficult to convince older wealthy gay people to hit the streets chanting slogans.

Meanwhile, the younger, and often angrier, homosexuals can’t be mobilized because they are dispersed in isolated, lower income neighborhoods. Perhaps, this dynamic helps explain the tepid response in California this month following Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announcement that he would veto legislation allowing gay couples to marry. When Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed pro-gay legislation in the early 90’s, there were riots throughout the state, particularly in areas with high concentrations of gay people.

As the ghetto becomes more exclusive, regular gay and lesbian Americans are forced to search for new neighborhoods that are inclusive. For gays who enjoyed living in the traditional gayborhood, moving dramatically changes their quality of life. Instead of living in vibrant areas where one can walk to the grocery store and the gay bar, many gay people today must live in rundown neighborhoods that are quite far from centers of gay culture and the convenience of upscale urban life. For some, this represents a degraded standard of living and a diminished sense of community.

Those looking for solutions to this conundrum may be out of luck. History suggests that neighborhoods are in constant flux and there is little that can be done to reverse changing market and social forces. For example, New York’s Lower East Side used to be predominantly Jewish, but that is no longer the case. Before gay people claimed The Castro in the early 1970’s, it was primarily a neighborhood of Irish Catholic families.

Gay neighborhoods throughout America are in transition, however, as old communities disappear, new ones are born. In Brooklyn, the areas of Williamsburg and Park Slope have gone from hideous to hip. Back in Manhattan, the once rundown Hells Kitchen is looking more like heaven each day for young gay people. Meanwhile, in Washington, working class GLBT people have moved out of prohibitively pricey DuPont Circle and have rebuilt their lives in nearby Logan Circle, which was not too long ago a place one would not walk at night.

Nothing in life is static. Even as we mourn the blooms falling off the old roses, we can celebrate the flowering of new GLBT-friendly communities.

http://www.waynebesen.com/columns/2...

Forum posts

  • This phenomenon does not only threaten the gay communities. It is threatening any powerless and poor American.

    Your can here it murmur in the cities: gouge, gouge, greed, greed

  • Kind of reminds you of when young white liberals went to black clubs at night, smoked dope, and listented to jazz, then got up in the morning, put on their cardigan and joined mom and dad at the all white country club for lunch. Or the co-opy types who go to a "sweat" one weekend and an Atlanta Braves game the following weekend.

    Everytime an identity begins to emerge from the detritis of US junk culture, a throng of soulless, vapid, sychophantic capitalist gouls in SUVs comes along and appropriates it. Whatever poetic soul found in spaces occupied by real humans is chewed up and regurgitated as corporate dung. The result is endless glass and green granite GAPs and Starbucks.

    If you need an example look no further than New Orleans. Guaranteed that wonderfully gritty city will become a pale, sanitized version of Disneyland, with white kids bussed in from the burbs to don white gloves and act out fake funerals.

    It is oh so cool to be queer now, as long as Chip can go back home to Babs and they can announce their heterosexuality as they live the epitome of suburban conformity. Jeesh.

    Manhattan is ready for a new Stonewall. Let’s toss a few wrought iron chairs from Starbucks through the Urban Outfitters cynical windows.

  • Just remember that many of the "Gayborhoods" that we now think of as our own were once someone elses. Many gay men in the late seventies and early eighties moved into Chelsea as the west village got too expensive. And slowly but surely, all the African-Americans and Latinos who had been in Chelsea for years found themselves looking to leave. Suddenly Chelsea began to sparkle with a new humor and outrageousness. And suddenly, those renovated brownstones, lowered crime rates and yuppie conveniences were irresistible to young heteros. And now we are experiencing the same displacement that we have foisted onto those before us. And soon we will displace new neighborhoods, and then we will be again displaced, and landlords can’t wait. Just look at Brooklyn neighborhoods like Red Hook and Williamsburg. Or look above Chelsea at Hell’s Kitchen. I assure you in forty years we will be in Harlem. (Although, I must say that "Sex in the City" only served to speed the interloping process.) Face it. White hetero culture can be a bit dull. There is a reason for all the appropriation and co-opting of the lifestyles and experiences of others. Straight people must want to live somewhere where something is going on. The upper east side, long a bastion of straight white yuppiedom is positively starved for color. How many lousy chain restaurants with sidewalk seating can you cram into one neighborhood? It has to gget tired. But here’s the catch. As the neighborhoods become heteroized- they become absolutely flavorless. HEE-HEE.