Look What’s Happened to the Gayborhood
Reading is one of the few pastimes I indulge in on a regular basis. Frequently I have more than one book going at a time. There’s one or two on my nightstand and at least one or two near my reading chair in the living room.
Most of the books I’ve read this summer have been non-fiction, LGBTQ interest titles.
The various books I’ve read, together and combined with other knowledge and experiences, give the reader a deeper understanding of what the term “gay community” might mean; it becomes multi-dimensional. The more we know and understand about our diverse community, the stronger we become as a community.
The first of the three I’ve read most recently is Greetings from the Gayborhood: A Nostalgic Look at Gay Neighborhoods by Don F. Reuter. In addition to reading his book, I also had the pleasure of speaking to the author.
Greetings from the Gayborhood: A Nostalgic Look at Gay Neighborhoods is a small colorful book. It’s size and cover art is reminiscent of old souvenir postcard collections. In many ways, this book is a postcard from or at least a snapshot of legendary and iconic gay communities.
The book is colorfully illustrated with old photos of places and people (mostly white gay men), postcards, buttons, matchbooks, and other memorabilia and mementoes from the gay past. Some of the matchbooks from bars were 30 or 40 years old. Reuter explained how they came to be included in Greetings form the Gayborhood.
“I thought it was going to be easy to find evidence of gayborhoods to illustrate the past right up to the present but people didn’t document things. Any other [community] gathering…there’s no hesitation to photograph it…no one took pictures in gay bars.”
So, he ended up working with what people have saved and gathered into several LGBTQ archives and public libraries around the country. And some of that material was matchbooks.
“They only stuck around because people didn’t throw them out…it was an inadvertent souvenir of a night out at a gay bar…gay bars were central to the gayborhood, so everyone went there,” he said and then explained that he wanted to create the book to look like “a gay guy went around and kept these things…30 or 40 years later, they are the only evidence that they [gay establishments and neighborhoods] were ever there.”
Reuter has created snapshots of 12 classic gay neighborhoods, gayborhoods, from their earliest beginnings to their peak. Most of these communities developed organically in once neglected city neighborhoods. Many of them don’t exist any more or at least have begun to evolve into new communities under the constant and changing forces of gentrification that they themselves initiated.
Reuter is very articulate on this subject. He has a distinct perspective and a genuine passion for our recent urban history that goes beyond being purely a gay story. In Greetings from the Gayborhood, Reuter addresses broader questions like, what do gay communities bring to cities and why do they eventually disappear.
He presents the story of gayborhoods as a cultural story in context with the times and areas in which they developed. In the book, Reuter discusses three cultural features of American cities that helped give rise to gayborhoods: the adult nature of cities, middle-class (white and straight) flight to suburbia, and male privilege. He also characteristics these neighborhoods have in common that helped attract white gay men to them in the first place.
I asked Reuter what sparked his interest in chronicling gayborhoods in the first place.
“I’m a gayborhood dweller myself. I live in Hell’s Kitchen with my partner, it’s not a classic gayborhood but an up and coming one,” he said.
But his interest in writing the book began with a vacation trip to Florida. He was staying at an older gay resort in Fort Lauderdale that was screened and sheltered from public view giving guests a sense of it being an “idyllic setting, surrounded by water and trees…” As he looked around, he saw construction cranes erecting multi-storied condominiums in every direction.
“Subliminally I knew it meant that my vacation getaway was in peril…25 story condos were being built, they were going to be filled with heterosexuals. Families overlooking this all-male resort would look down and think ‘we need to get rid of that.’”
That moment led Reuter to an epiphany, “I had this realization that gay neighborhoods were under siege and in peril, and always had been, from the straight population. I knew that our neighborhoods and communities were being assimilated into the population but not by choice. When 95% of the community says ‘we want this neighborhood’ they take it.”
In fact, in 10 of the 12 cities included in his book, the gayborhoods were already gone, for the most part, when he visited them while writing the book. He told me they no longer felt like gay neighborhoods. They were, what Reuter calls, “post gay neighborhood” or, in some cases, second generation/gay friendly neighborhoods.
Reuter feels that it is important to be aware of how these neighborhoods came into being, especially the classic gayborhoods like the Castro, and what benefits came from them for the gay community. He explained that many of them still exist today but in very different ways; that the contemporary reality is different than the perception.
“You pick up a [LGBTQ] guide and it says to go to Capital Hill [an area in Seattle]…my partner and I went and couldn’t find the gayborhood. There were rainbow flags but there was no other indication that it was a gayborhood,” Reuter told me.
He continued by saying, “On a tourism level, it’s rather disingenuous to get there and realize it’s not like walking into the Castro in 1978. You’ll find a pretty neighborhood and you will fell like you can go into restaurants and businesses and be welcome but it doesn’t feel like home.”
And 1978 is important to note. This was the year Reuter selected for his cross-section of gayborhoods. In the introduction to Greetings from the Gayborhood, Reuter outlines six periods of gayborhood growth, beginning just after WWII in 1946 and continuing through to the present. What he dubbed the Golden Age begins in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots and ends in 1978. The Poster Boy era continues from there until 1988.
I asked Reuter why he chose 1978 as his ‘lens’ for viewing these 12 classic gayborhoods; what made it a pivotal year?
“Gay neighborhoods didn’t not exist and then suddenly appear. Everyone thinks gayborhoods didn’t exist prior to 1969, but they did. 1978 was a pivotal year because in 1979 things happened to reverse the direction [referring to the hippie movement, sexual freedoms, and attitudes of the late 60’s through the 70’s]; the Moral Majority was formed, it was the end of the Carter administration, the anti-disco rally, and Harvey Milk was assassinated.”
I added Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children Campaign, which began in 1977, to the list. Reuter agreed and continued to explain, “After 1978, things were different…because of opposing attitudes…and then with the advent AIDS/HIV, it became apparent we were going to have to go from the earlier sleazy behavior to something more conservative…”
Something that surprised Reuter as he did his research was that when he arrived at some of his destinations, “there was no ‘there’ there.” The gayborhoods had continued to evolve into another type of neighborhood. And as he learned the deeper reasons for these shifts in community, he was surprised again.
“I was surprised to find that the gay neighborhood change was not a gay issue but a neighborhood issue. Gay, Black Asian…they are all under siege. Inner city neighborhoods are looked at as very valuable now, it isn’t anti anything.”
It is in part, a result of the value now being placed on cities and their neighborhoods. Middle-class families are returning to the cities and according to Reuter, “Cities are giving developers free reign…now you have neighborhoods that develop overnight [instead of organically over time].”
Reuter cited some examples for me that included the Rincon Towers in San Francisco’s SoMa (South of Market) district, one of this city’s many gay enclaves. These 70-story towers are a neighborhood in their own right, not connected in any way to the surrounding neighborhood. And in Seattle, within a nine-month period, two gay bars were closed, one was torn down and a condominium building was going up.
Reuter and I talked about the future of gay neighborhoods. Reuter believes that they will continue to form but differently and for very different reasons than in the past.
One force behind changes in our neighborhoods is the Internet. A major aspect of the gay rights movement from the late 1960s into the mid-90s, was an effort to bring gays and lesbians out into the open, out of the closet, and making the statement that “gay is good.” The more people were out, the more visibility and political power the community had. The gayborhoods were safe places for that behavior to be practiced and then moved beyond those boundaries.
But now the Internet allows LGBTQ people to be underground again. With the Internet, you don’t have to leave your home, let alone your neighborhood, to find friends, books, dates, etc.
At them same time, many in the LGBTQ community have opted for some portion of the “American Dream.” They have settled down with a partner, purchased a home, and some are adding children to their families. This segment of the LGBTQ community may look for a gay friendly city to settle in without living in a specifically gay neighborhood.
Asheville is a good example of this kind of community. It is definitely gay friendly, yet doesn’t have any one neighborhood that is a gayborhood. Even the gay-owned and gay friendly businesses are scattered throughout the downtown area and throughout the entire city limits.
In the past, gayborhoods were identified with a very specific archetype, single white gay male. But the gay community has grown to encompass several archetypes and everything in between from gay to lesbian to bisexual to trans and queer.
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