What’s the value or significance of gayborhoods to the gay community?There are many benefits that gay districts provide for LGBTQ people. Fourth, gayborhoods have a cluster of commercial spaces and nonprofit organizations - think gay bars, LGBT community centers, HIV/AIDS social service organizations, and Metropolitan Community Churches - that target the needs of sexual minorities, specifically. Everyone who lives there doesn’t self-identify as LGBTQ, of course, but many people certainly do. Third, gayborhoods are residential, meaning there’s a statistical concentration of same-sex households. These cultural markings allow LGBTQ people to feel visible and connected with one another. LGBTQ people set the tone, character or complexion of the area, which is why symbols like the rainbow flag are visible as you walk along the streets and also why ritual events like the Pride parade often take place there. Second, Gayborhoods have a unique culture. Locals and tourists can point it out on a map, usually by singling out one or two specific streets. First, it has a distinct geographic focal point. I recently spoke with Ghaziani about how the gayborhood was born during World War II, why straight allies don’t automatically have a right to claim a stake in the gayborhood and the renewed relevance of “safe spaces” in a “post-gay,” post-Orlando era.Ī gay neighborhood, or gayborhood as I like to call them, has four features. That being the case, Ghaziani says, many young people no longer feel a need to huddle amongst themselves. Younger gays and lesbians have come of age in a much different world than previous generations of LGBT people. Perhaps even more significant than gentrification is millennials’ perception of the LGBTQ struggle - or lack thereof. The infamous San Vicente Inn in West Hollywood, for example, which for many years operated as a mens-only, clothing-optional “live-and-let-live” gay motel, was purchased in 2013 by Sunset Tower owner Jeff Klein, who immediately evicted unsavory residents, eliminated the clothing-optional policy and transformed the nudist West Hollywood drug den into a fancy boutique hotel, which is now - you guessed it - a “space for everyone.” Pride Parade in West Hollywood Gentrification is certainly at play here.
Both the Times and Ghaziani investigated the same “straightening out” of America’s historically gay districts - and the implications of doing so. Or “gayborhoods” as The New York Times called them last month in a story entitled “ There Goes the Gayborhood.” It was taken from a 2014 book of the same title by Amin Ghaziani, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. To some, though, spaces “for everyone” represent the end of an era, when sanctuaries like the KOK BAR served as bastions of separatist gay culture that thrived throughout the 1970s and 1980s in historically gay neighborhoods like Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Boystown in Chicago and West Hollywood in L.A. New owner Chris Milstead cheekily refers to Driftwood as “straight-friendly” and a place to find “something for everyone.” Crew with a wooden phallus behind glass in the restroom calling to mind a kinkier past. Driftwood, its replacement, is a nautical themed watering hole reminiscent of a J. KOK BAR - previously known as The Ramrod, My Place, Cip and Chaps II - was a boy bar of the leather and chain-link fence variety.